Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 4

 4.

A German names America

It was 1507 and Columbus had been dead for a year. The great explorer had believed that he had reached India by the westward route. He bitterly opposed the emerging suspicion that the islands and coasts he had discovered did not belong to Asia. This suspicion, however, became stronger and stronger, and before the great Genoese died, it was already almost certain that the newly discovered lands were neither India nor Cipangu, but a completely new world that lay beyond the Atlantic, fabulous, alluring and - nameless.

What is a name? Is it just smoke and mirrors? Is it indifferent whether a man, a country, a thing carries this or that name? Or does it rather form a part of its being? Does the name have an effect on its bearer?

I once became very thoughtful about this question. It was on Yule Island. This is a small, paradisiacal, beautiful island on the south coast of New Guinea. It is quite remote; only once a month does a small coastal steamer call. It is actually a criminal colony. The cannibals from the mountainous interior of New Guinea, who came too close to the governor's domain on their manhunts, are held here as prisoners for a year or two. Then they are let go again.

"What do you want?" says the district commissioner to me, "the governor is of the opinion that people must not be punished for what they consider their right, indeed their duty. On the coast, of course, he would have to hang a headhunter; after all, where Europeans live, there must be order. But in the interior? As long as we do not actually have that, we best let the tribes live as they are accustomed to and as they see fit. There must, of course, be a certain neutral zone. Whoever is guilty of murder in that one, we'll catch him and hold him on Yule Island for a while."

We were sitting on the porch of the District building. It was on a kind of cliff on the beach, surrounded by hibiscus and bougainvillea red and purple. Over the coconut palms, which bent like humble slaves to the rolling waves, one looked out to sea. One could not tell whether it was blue or green; for it was an almost aching glow. On the beach stood a couple of "murderers." Naked, gloomy and closed they looked over the water.

Thoughtfully, I let my gaze wander from them back to my host. "You said duty to murder! Why duty?"

The official took a sip of whiskey and leaned back comfortably in the deck chair, "God, there are many reasons, cultic, social, erotic, finally not least of all the need to acquire a name."

"And that can only be done by killing a human being?"

"In the eyes of primitives, yes. For them the name is a part of the living being, a part of its power. If you take away its name, you seize its life forces. But since no one gives it up voluntarily, you have to beat it to death. Before a Papuan kills an enemy completely, he tries to extort his name from him. What the enemy stammers out in the agony, the victor then appropriates as a name."

This conversation in the distant South Seas came back to me as I investigated the strange circumstances under which the New World received its name. As much as we have been talking about the naivete of savages and their name superstitions, there is some truth in it. If someone should suddenly take my name and walk around as Colin Ross, while I would call myself Karl Schulz, I think that would not remain completely without mental and spiritual effect on both.

It is similar with countries. The naming of a new country is more than just a meaningless coincidence. And it is more than a meaningless coincidence that it was a German who coined the name for the newly discovered world. At the very least, it shows that the Germans of that time were intellectually and mentally engaged with the newly discovered lands to a great extent, perhaps more so than those peoples who conquered them and derived the immediate benefit from them.

The cosmographers of the time of discovery were to a large extent Germans. They were the forerunners of geographers, and they took their name from the cosmos, because for people of that time the earth still represented the universe in a completely different way than it does for us today.

One of these cosmographers was Martin Waldseemüller from Radolfzell, whose real name was Waltzemüller. He had studied at the University of Freiburg and was then appointed by the Duke Rene II of Lorraine, who was a great friend of science, called him to Saint-Diä. There, in his quiet scholarly room, he brooded over the difficult task of drawing a new map of the world, which in recent years had expanded in such a fantastic and improbable way beyond all concepts and imaginations. He had before him the letters that the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci had written about his travels in the New World to Soderini in Florence and to Lorenzo Pietro Francesco de Medici.

After these letters it seemed to the German scholar no doubt at all that this Amerigo Vespucci was the real discoverer of the "Terra firma", the mainland behind the islands found by Columbus. As he sat there in front of his world map, on which the first outlines of the new, still nameless part of the world were mysteriously emerging, the thought occurred to him whether it was not only just and fair to name the new part of the world after the man whom he considered to be its discoverer. Thus he wrote in his "Cosmographiae Introductio":

"I do not see why anyone could forbid calling the new land after its discoverer Americus (as a humanist, of course, he immediately Latinized the name Amerigo in his Latin-written cosmography) Amerigen, that is, the land of Americus or America."

Satisfied, he put down his pen and pondered for a while, then he continued: "...after all Europe as well as Asia both received their names after a woman." - Quite right, why should not a continent finally be named after a man, especially since its discovery and conquest were a purely male affair. So Martin Waldseemüller wrote with a firm hand in the so far only hinted outlines of the New World the name: "America."

Waldseemüller's map was published in 1507, and from it the name America was adopted quite generally. The Baden scholar, of course, had intended it to mean only the southern part of the New World, especially since, apart from Cabot's discoveries, virtually nothing was known about the northern part. When another German cosmographer, Mercator, whose real name was Gerhard Kremer, was commissioned by Emperor Charles V to design a globe and a celestial sphere and in 1569 created his epoch-making world map for use by seafarers, he named the two Americas with the term coined by Waldseemüller.

It was we Germans, then, who gave the inhabitants of the United States the name from which they later derived a right to the entire continent, which actually consists of two continents; for the umbilical cord of Panama does not, of course, mean that North and South America form a single unit any more than the isthmus of Suez makes Asia and Africa one continent.

That a German gave the name to the New World does not, of course, create a German claim to it, but it does remind us how false is its usual division into an Anglo-Saxon and a Latin half. North America is not merely a creation of the Anglo-Saxons, or South America one of the Spaniards and Portuguese, but both together are the work of Europe, a daughter continent of our entire continent.

The German share in the development and shaping of the northern half of America is not so much smaller than the English. But that it could be pushed so completely into the background, even in our own consciousness, so that even we Germans speak of the United States as an Anglo-Saxon country, has its reason in a special circumstance. In the same year 1507, in which Martin Waldseemüller entered the name America on his new world map, a German miner's son received the priestly ordination in the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. This laid the foundation for the later religious doubts in the mind of the monk Martin Luther, which subsequently led to the Reformation, the Peasants' War, the Schmalkaldic War, the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. Thus the German Empire, which under the German Emperor Charles V had once again become a world power, was at that very moment prevented by internal struggles over religious disputes from securing its share of the new fairy world on the other side of the Atlantic. In spite of all the misery and suffering, in spite of the curse of religious disunity, which the deed of the Augustinian monk conjured up on our country, it subsequently brought not only evangelical freedom to the new world, but also its spiritual and mental foundations to the New World, to which we gave the name. This, however, is our second share in America.