Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum

In 1679, Frederick William I, Elector of Brandenburg, had a crop garden planted in the village of Schöneberg, which was then on the road to Potsdam and is now a Berlin district. In the middle of the 18th century, under the direction of Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch, this developed into a botanical garden in the narrower sense (Urban 1881).

The garden thus became a node in a transnational botanical network whose interest was directed towards the inventory and study of global plant diversity, and which developed and unfolded hand in hand with European colonial expansion (Brockway 1979, Schiebinger & Swan 2005, Dauser et al. 2008, Baber 2016).

The colonial expansion was accompanied by botanists and often prepared and supported by their research trips. Colonization enabled access to global plant diversity and the botanical network ensured the transnational exchange of plants and plant knowledge from all over the world. This included the exchange of seeds between the gardens, whose turnover at the Berlin Botanical Garden amounted to an average of 16,000 seed portions per year in the 1810s (Urban 1881: 33).

Around 1819, the garden was supplemented by its own herbarium, the basis of which was the personal herbarium of Carl Ludwig Willdenow. In the course of the 19th century, the garden was expanded several times, and in 1879 a separate building was erected on Grunewaldstraße for the temporary collections and library, which had grown considerably in the meantime, the Botanical Museum (Urban 1881; Böttcher & Ohlendorf 2022) and today's "Haus am Kleistpark".

Even before the German nation-state, founded in 1871, itself became a colonial power, the Berlin Botanical Garden was able to become one of the largest institutions of its kind in Europe thanks to the botanical network and not least through the explorers who collected for it, from Alexander von Humboldt to Friedrich Sellow to Georg Schweinfurth. By 1846, the number of species cultivated in the Berlin Botanical Garden had already risen to over 14,000 (Urban 1881: 42).

From the very beginning, botanical gardens functioned as hubs for the research and transfer of plant resources, including indigenous plant knowledge from the colonised territories, especially for commercial use. This applies not only to crops – examples are given by Büttner & Trautmann (2020), but also to a rapidly growing number of ornamental plants in the 19th century.

As biologists, botanists helped to shape a racist image of humanity that ideologically underpinned European colonial expansion, and they transported it – individually different – in their work. Carl von Linnaeus was not only the founder of modern biological nomenclature, but also a pioneer of the classification of people into biological races, to whom evaluative characteristics are ascribed (Linnaeus 1766: 29 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/42946225).

A racist view of humanity and the attitude of acting as representatives of a superior civilization often enough determine the actions and thoughts of researchers in their dealings with indigenous cultures, were reflected in their knowledge production and in a widespread ignorance of indigenous knowledge systems (Mills 2007, Schiebinger 2021).

Five years after the Berlin Conference in 1884, at which the European colonial powers negotiated the division of Africa among themselves and as a result of which Germany became a colonial power with the third largest colonised territory, a Federal Council resolution of 21 February 1889 assured the Botanical Garden, together with the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Ethnology, the first set of the natural science and ethnographic collections of all expeditions sent out at the imperial expense (Kaiser 2021).

The efforts of the management of the Berlin Botanical Garden to obtain state support for research into the flora in the areas colonized by Germany yielded results after several years of negotiations between the Foreign Office of the German Empire, the Prussian Ministry of Culture and the management of the Berlin Botanical Garden. On March 31, 1891, the "Botanical Central Office for the German Colonies" was founded at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin (Kaiser 2021).

The Central Office had three areas of responsibility (Zepernick 2002, Kaiser 2021):

a) Procurement of suitable species of tropical crops; Shipment of seeds and live plants, especially to the agricultural research gardens in the German colonies, in support of the colonial plantation economy.

b) Research into plant diversity in the colonies with a view to their commercial usability

c) Training of gardeners for the colonial service; Advising authorities, plantations and other companies, mission stations; Instructing gardeners, colonial officials, merchants, missionaries, plantation owners and others (at that time almost without exception men) who stayed in the colonies for a short or longer period of time to collect for the Botanical Garden and the Botanical Museum

In addition, the Botanical Garden and the Botanical Museum Berlin, together with the Central Office, imparted knowledge about plants in the colonies (especially crops) and their products to a wide audience through their exhibitions in order to strengthen the interest of the population in the German colonies.

With the support of the plantation owners and agricultural research gardens of Victoria (Cameroon), Amani (German East Africa, now Tanzania), Misahöhe and Sokodé (Togoland, now Togo) as well as in Rabaul (German New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea), the Berlin Botanical Garden helped to enforce the plantation economy in the colonies. This largely led to the destruction of indigenous economies, expropriation and land expulsion of the local inhabitants, forced labor and ultimately brutal military suppression of uprisings (Conrad 2019).

In order to organize and finance applied research on colonial agriculture and forestry, colonial entrepreneurs founded the "Colonial Economic Committee (KWK)" on October 25, 1897, which also published its own journal, the "Tropenpflanzer". The committee financed studies and expeditions in which botanists from the Berlin Botanical Garden also took part (Zepernick 1990).

The lack of possibilities for expanding the living and museum collections and the emission pollution of the plants from the countless coal stoves in the neighbourhood in the now inner-city Schöneberg led to plans for a relocation of the garden at the same time under the direction of Adolf Engler as director and Ignatz Urban as sub-director (Urban 1916).

Between 1895 and 1910, for example, the garden and museum in Dahlem near Berlin were generously recreated as a newly emerging science location. The new location reflects the imperial size and wealth of the colonial power striving for hegemony with the concept "The World in a Garden" developed by director Adolf Engler.

A little later, the outcome of the First World War had significantly changed the political and economic conditions. State funding of the "Botanical Central Office for the German Colonies" was discontinued after the cession of the German colonies sealed in the Treaty of Versailles in 1920 and dissolved (Zepernick 2002, Kaiser 2021).

With the help of the "Central Office" and the support of the "Colonial Economic Committee", the Berlin Botanical Garden was able to significantly increase its collections from the colonies between 1891 and 1920. The end of the German colonies, however, did not mean the end of the plantations operated by German entrepreneurs or the botanical research and collection irons of German botanists (Timler & Zepernick 1987). For example, the Berlin Botanical Garden received one of the largest plant collections (several 10,000 specimens) from present-day Tanzania, which Gustav Albert Peter had assembled in 1925–1926 (Peter 1927, Polhill & Polhill 2015).

The Central Office for the Colonies experienced a brief revival between 1939 and 1943. By order of the Nazi Reich Ministry of Economics, the "Group of German Colonial Economic Enterprises" ("DeKo Group") was founded in 1936 as the sole representative of German companies active in the colonial economy in the broader sense. Kurt Weigelt, a member of the board of Deutsche Bank since 1922, a supporting member of the SS, head of the economics department in the Colonial Political Office of the NSDAP (KPA) and the strategic head of "the entire Nazi colonial planning in the economic field" was appointed its head (Linne 2006: 144–145, 150–151). In 1937, the Berlin Botanical Garden was initially commissioned by the DeKo to examine "the study of a possible use of applied scientific work at the invitation of some [German] plantations located in the English part of the Cameroon mandate" (Anonymous 1939: 393). For this purpose, Walter Domke, who had been a scientist on temporary positions at the Berlin Botanical Garden since 1928, was sent to Cameroon from January to June 1938. On 1 August 1939, the "Botanical Central Office for the Colonies", as its new name was called, began its activities (Anonymous 1940: 280, 559) – just one month before the German invasion of Poland, which began the Second World War; on 18 September 1941, the Central Office was officially recognised by the Ministry of Science, Education and National Education (Anonymous 1942: 652, Linne 2006). The Central Office was financed by the DeKo, which included the position of Domke, who was granted leave of absence from the Botanical Garden to head the Central Office (Anonymous 1940: 559, Linne 2006: 154). After the course of the war had made further travel impossible, Domke and his staff worked on two panel works on tropical crops and "plants poisonous or harmful to livestock in Africa" (Gerloff et al. 1989: 5). They provided various colonial political actors, including members of the Wehrmacht and SS, with lectures, courses and expert opinions, primarily on African plants, and "in the interest of colonial economic interests, they planted extensive crops of numerous oil palm selections in warm houses in the garden" (Anonymous 1941: 559f.; Anonymous 1942: 652f.).