Botanical Central Office for the German Colonies

A century ago, today's Schöneberg "Haus am Kleistpark" – the site of the municipal galleries and the music school – housed a botanical museum and the Botanical Central Office for the German Colonies. Adjacent to the house was a botanical garden founded in 1679 by the Brandenburg Elector Friedrich Wilhelm. This garden had been constantly expanded, so that at the end of the 19th century, in addition to the gardens and greenhouses, there was also a herbarium (collection of dried plants), a library and the aforementioned botanical museum. With the acquisition of the first German colonies in the 1880s, the flora there was also to be researched more intensively and made usable for plantation farming and trade. In this way, the German Empire also joined common imperial and colonial practices, which were based on the idea that Europe could use other countries primarily as a resource chamber for its own purposes. Botanical gardens and the associated institutions often functioned as hubs for colonial agricultural knowledge. This was especially true of the Botanical Museum in Schöneberg. In 1889, together with the Berlin Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Ethnology, it became the official collection site for objects from imperial expeditions. The research and analysis of the collection objects was hoped to provide practical knowledge on the penetration, control and exploitation of the colonial territories, among other things.

In 1891, the then director of the Botanical Garden, Adolf Engler, set up the Botanical Central Office for the German Colonies. From then on, tropical crops were analysed, bred and shipped in Schöneberg for cultivation in the colonies. In addition, the Botanical Central Office provided information on colonial agriculture. Crops such as coffee, cocoa, rubber and vanilla were grown in a "Colonial House". Due to the sensitivity of the seedlings and young plants, the "Colonial House" was not open to the public. The situation was different with the Palm House, which was used to present tropical crops in a popular way: Here, the population of Berlin was able to view and get to know tropical plants such as a coffee tree, oil palms and date palms. The Central Botanical Office conducted various research on plants of interest to the colonial economy, such as sisal agave, whose findings were to be useful for the export-oriented plantation economy in the colonies. In addition, it trained gardeners for use in the colonies, because the colonial order stipulated that local cultivation should be supervised by white people.

The Botanical Central Office quickly developed into a globally active institution that circulated botanical knowledge, seeds and plants worldwide. In 1902, more than 1000 live plants were sent in mobile greenhouses from Schöneberg to the Amani Organic Agricultural Institute in German East Africa (now Tanzania) alone. This institute was founded in 1902 mainly in response to problems on German coffee plantations. The institute in Amani then researched the cultivation, harvest, diseases and pests of coffee plants in more detail – colonial science and business were therefore closely related here. Later, the institute specialised in the cultivation of medicinal plants such as cinchona bark, camphor and eucalyptus trees. In addition, the Botanical Centre was in close contact with the Botanical Garden in Victoria (now Limbe, Cameroon). A variety of crops and fruits such as coffee, pepper, oil palms, cocoa, ginger, pineapple, bananas, mangoes, guavas, citrus fruits and avocados were planted on the experimental plantation there. The division of labour on this plantation was strictly hierarchical: the directors and gardeners came from Germany, the Arbeiter_innen came from Cameroon.

However, plants also circulated in the global network back to Schöneberg. As head of the Botanical Garden, Engler undertook trips to Africa from 1900 onwards, from which he brought back various plants, for example in dried form, as herbarium specimens for research and collection purposes. It is noteworthy that Engler had already researched and worked on the flora of the colonies before 1900, because the extensive colonial botanical collection enabled him to do so for a long time from a distance and without travelling.

The area in Schöneberg soon proved to be too small for the purposes of the Botanical Garden and the Botanical Central Office for the German colonies, and contemporary politicians also imagined a larger science location based on the British model. A new botanical garden was built in Dahlem, where the Botanical Central Office also moved in 1902.

This text is the revised version of a chapter from the exhibition "Research Workshop: Colonial History in Tempelhof and Schöneberg", which the Schöneberg Museum showed from 19.5. to 29.10.2017.