Alexander Von Humboldt: A Metabiography - Tapa dura

Alexander von Humboldt is one of the most celebrated figures of late-modern science. In Germany, his renown has generated continuous biographical interest from late-Prussian times through the Empire Period, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the divided Germany of 1949 to 1990, to the reunified Germany of today. In this first metabiography of Humboldt, the author leads us through the twists and turns of German political history, stopping to point out the Humboldt identity that was created to match the moment, ultimately showing us not one Humboldt but many. As he makes clear, these diverse Humbolds tell us as much about the biographers as about Humbolt himself. One need only look behind a given Humboldt representation to identify the institutional and socio-political interests that engendered the Humboldt of any one epoch. Provoked by the post-modernist challenge to the practice and writing of history, Nicolaas A. Rupke examines how the partisan and polemical moments of Humboldt biography shed light on issues that command our attention in today's world.

Nicolaas A. Rupke is Lower Saxony Research Professor of the History of Science at Gottingen University. With a doctorate from Princeton, he held research positions at Oxford and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. His monographs Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (2008) and Richard Owen. Biology without Darwin (2009) were recently reissued. Rupke is a fellow of Germany's National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Gottingen Academy of Sciences.