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Blumenbach

Picture: „Fighting racism in biology- in Göttingen and everywhere„

Black Lives Matter meets Blumenbach

It is the summer of 2020, and people around the world are protesting in the wake of the death of the African American George Floyd, who had been killed by police violence. Black Lives Matter is moving the USA, Europe, and also Göttingen, shocked by this violent death. It is the starting point for many activists to search for traces of racism and colonial continuities in their places of residence and study. One of these traces is monuments in public spaces, which for a long time have been an unquestioned part of its appearance but remain unbroken reminders of the colonial era or racist personalities upon closer inspection. In Göttingen, students laid the busts of Blumenbach and Haeckel and their pedestals horizontally on the ground as a symbolic act in July 2020. The figure of Blumenbach, after which the institute in front of which you now stand is named, was the subject of a controversial debate. In the meantime, Blumenbach’s bust is back in the foyer (feel free to look at it), but the debate lives on.

But who was Blumenbach and what is it that makes him so controversial? 

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was born in Gotha in the mid-18th century and moved to Göttingen in the course of his medical studies. He wrote his dissertation and spent the rest of his life as a professor in the then still young but already well-known university town. After he died in 1840, he was buried in the Albani Cemetery, where his grave can still be seen today. 

Blumenbach’s research focused on the field of comparative anatomy. He is considered a pioneer in the scientific disciplines of anthropology and zoology. Today, both disciplines are located under one roof at the Blumenbach Institute in Göttingen. The main object of his research was human skulls, which he measured and examined for „natural differences in the human race,“ as the title of his dissertation paper states. Unlike some of his academic contemporaries and following generations of researchers (which for example included Ernst Haeckel) he did not want to prove different origins of humankind, but on the contrary, assumed a common origin of all human beings. Many still credit him with this today and argue that Blumenbach was once an advocate of scientific anti-racism. 

The problem with the clearly positive assessment of Blumenbach is that he nevertheless subjected the skulls to an examination. In his classification of the various human groups, the skull of a Georgian woman was placed centrally and thus at the most important point in his classification. He assigned it the category Caucasian. This refers to white people from Europe and Central Asia. To this day, Caucasian is still used as a synonym for white people, especially in the USA, and in some (right-wing) circles the term is sometimes associated with superiority. 

A further complication in the judgement of Blumenbach is his scientific practice. In the course of his life, he collected almost 250 skulls for his research, thus establishing the oldest preserved collection of skulls in the world to this day. He had skulls sent to him from all over the world via his extensive scientific network, which included such important contemporaries as Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Research has since shown that many of these skulls were stolen. The scholar Nell Painter therefore places Blumenbach and his anthropological research in the context of 18th century European colonialism, in which ambitions for global imperialism and science often went hand in hand. Conquerors, traders and explorers had brought Blumenbach’s skulls to Europe and in doing so provided the empirical material for his research. Blumenbach’s skull collection, which is still part of the scientific collections of the University of Göttingen, is now classified as sensitive. A separate research project is examining the exact origin stories of the skulls, as this is also part of the imperial and racist order of knowledge: Although we know many of the names of the collectors and senders to Blumenbach, the deceased people and their life stories have only rarely been handed down. 

Furthermore, the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century – and thus precisely Blumenbach’s lifetime – are fundamentally not an easy time for the evaluation and assessment of racism. Ultimately, it was precisely during this period that scientific racial thinking developed significantly, and the creation of skull collections to establish and test these racial ideologies gained momentum. Characteristic of this period is that terms like „race“ only gradually became dominant and many parallel concepts still existed. The term “variety”, which Blumenbach used, is also part of this conceptual nebula, as he did not use the word “race” in his authoritative writings.

What image of Blumenbach emerges here? What seems essential to you in the evaluation of his person? What can be credited to him, but what perhaps not? Does it make sense to topple his busts? 

Blumenbach’s figure is, that much is clear, not a person who can be evaluated without ambiguity. Some supporters of his person want to make that out of him by labeling him as an immaculate „anti-racist“. In doing so, they deliberately overlook his research practices, which are entangled in colonial orders. This seems to us to be a symptomatic way of dealing with racism to this day. Because racists in our society, according to a common opinion, are always only the others and never ourselves, but Nazis and the right wing in general. Unfortunately, the fact that our society has been profoundly shaped by racism since Blumenbach’s lifetime at the latest and that we still live in a structurally racist* society today is often overlooked. This insight also makes it clear that the debate about Blumenbach can only be a starting point and must ultimately go beyond the person of Blumenbach, and point to the larger question of structural racism in Göttingen and its university. And if we then go one step further, the discussion about Blumenbach also encourages us to reflect on our own racist imprints. The students have openly invited us to do so with their careful overthrow of Blumenbach’s statue! 

What are your wishes for such a debate and reflection? What should be discussed? Please contact us if you are interested in organizing such debates! We are looking forward to it! 

Further Information:

  • Student page: https://bioantira.blackblogs.org/ (German)

*At this station we used the phrase structural racism: By this, we mean that racism is not just the wrongdoing of individuals, but is embedded in the foundations of our society: in the access to our educational institutions, in the knowledge that is taught there, in the labor market and, for example, in health care. Read more: https://mediendienst-integration.de/artikel/was-ist-struktureller-rassismus.html (German)

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