Art, Nature, Ghosts, and Ice Cream: Transcultural Assemblages of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871) and Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee

Freya Schwachenwald

Introduction

Walking through Cottbus, Brandenburg, Germany, it is almost impossible to miss the visual presence one of its most famous local personas: from billboards at the train station to an eponymous bus line, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871) seems omnipresent as a local historical figure and as a welcome vehicle for tourism marketing. When visitors direct their steps through his former park in Branitz at the outskirts of Cottbus, they will most likely come across an unexpected sight: two earthen pyramids. One of them is located in the middle of a artificial lake. Primary and historiographical sources tell us that this pyramid was built by Pückler in the 1850s and that it encases his remains, as envisioned by him while commissioning the construction.[1] The pyramid was finished in 1856, fifteen years before Pückler’s death.[2] No plaque commemorates him on the pyramid. Pückler and his wife Lucie von Hardenberg (1776–1854) are only commemorated by a stone with a cross, erected posthumously on another small island of the lake. Today, the pyramid, as well as the surrounding park and its castle are maintained by the Stiftung Fürst Pückler Museum Schloss und Park Branitz (Prince Pückler Castle Museum and Branitz Park Foundation). The foundation describes its namesake and the former owner of the castle and park as “one of the greatest European landscape artists, a dandy, ladies’ man, ingenious socialite, connoisseur of exquisite food and namesake to an ice-cream.”[3] During his lifetime, Pückler not only published a successful guide on landscape planning, Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei (Hints on landscape gardening, 1834),[4] but he also wrote nine travelogues about his journeys through Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Various ice-cream recipes à la Pückler were already circulating during his lifetime. Today, “Fürst-Pückler-Eis” (Prince Pückler ice-cream) is a common product in the freezers of German supermarkets.

The historian Ulf Jacob tentatively traces Pückler’s historiographical adaptation by National Socialist scholars, architects, and landscape planners from the 1920s to the 1940s, to his mobilization as a representative of “humanistic cultural heritage” and of environmental awareness since the 1980s.[5] However, as Jacob rightly obverses, no comprehensive analysis of Pückler’s mobilization in the narration of German national history has been conducted.

Throughout the abundance of previous scholarship and popular writing, Pückler has been deployed at different historical moments as a figure of “Germanness” and—more broadly speaking—a desirable way of living, an ideal of human life. Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s subjectivity, as it is constructed through diverse materials and discourses produced by himself and his contemporaries, as well as by later historians, is far from stable, unified, or univocal. Nevertheless, previous historiography has mostly privileged a biographical reading of Pückler’s life and work.[6] By controlling which letters were to be preserved, and by commissioning a biography and a nine-volume publication of his letters, it was Pückler himself that began drawing together and curating the extensive archival material that has formed the basis for the majority of previous research on him. Building on these materials, in most instances the majority of research seems stuck in the perpetuation of his historical significance as an individual.[7] There are two problems with such an approach, which are not acknowledged in previous research. First, the emphasis on Pückler’s historical importance constitutes an act of legitimization by the scholar. Arguing for the importance of Pückler is simultaneously an argument for the legitimacy of the research invested into him, without questioning the asymmetric power relations underlying the definition of historical and artistic values. Second, the research seems trapped within the institutional framework of publishing opportunities: most of the scholarship on Pückler is published through the support of the foundations in Branitz and its equivalent in Bad Muskau, the Stiftung Fürst-Pückler-Park Bad Muskau (Prince Pückler Park Bad Muskau Foundation). It is in their interest to maintain a positive image of Pückler in order to preserve the castles and parks as cultural heritage and profitable tourist sites.[8] A critical questioning of concepts of historical subject formation, of cultural heritage, and aesthetics seems highly unlikely in the institutional and financial context of most of the research published on Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.

There has been, at the same time, a recent push within the scholarship on Hermann von Pückler-Muskau to “recover” previously silenced narratives around him. Most notably, here, are the efforts to reconstruct the life of a young black woman associated with Pückler. In 1840, this—probably under the age of sixteen—woman passed away in Muskau Castle, Saxony, after supposedly suffering from tuberculosis.[9] This castle was Pückler’s residence until he sold it due to financial difficulties in the spring of 1845. The woman is called Machbuba in some sources and Ajiamé or Bilillee in others. The spelling of the names also varies between sources.[10] Pückler brought her along when returning from his travels through North Africa and the Middle East from 1834 to 1840, presumably having bought her on a slave market in Cairo or Khartoum.[11] Her place of birth, which is speculated to have been in the former Kingdom of Gumma, Ethiopia, is equally undetermined. After her death, she was buried in the cemetery of the Protestant church in the village Bad Muskau. The grave can still be visited today, and was recently supplemented by an informative sign on the assumed biography of the young woman resting under the gravestone. Under the name Machbuba, the young black woman has been described in contradictory attributes in primary and secondary sources. She has been described as Pückler’s “child of nature,” “loyal friend and travel companion,” “exotic toy,” “lover,” or “foster child.”[12] In these dissonant, contradicting historical narratives on Machbuba, we witness the emergence of a subject from material sources—the miraculous coalescence of multiple, unaccounted enslaved women into the individual Machbuba. There are (at least) three different Machbubas: the literary figure of Pückler’s travelogues, the archival figure that emerges from the analysis of historical sources, and the Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee whose experiences of personhood are excluded from the assumptions of subjectivity and (self-)representation in the archives.

Putting Machbuba into italics to refer to the subjectivity constructed through historical sources, or naming the potentialities of diverging personhoods Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee is not meant to negate the experiences, sufferings, joys, and social interactions of the young woman who rests in a grave in Bad Muskau, or to further dehumanize her. Rather, it is meant to question the very definitions of “human” and “other-than-human” that have rendered her an object of research, to remind ourselves of the limits of academic tools in the restoration of justice. By that, it is an acknowledgement of the complexity and contradictions of her experiences, which might be impossible to recover through the notions of truth and subjectivity put forward in academic historical research. Recovering Machbuba’s subjectivity through the very sources that have rendered her as “Other” can easily lead to either her victimization or heroinization. This is problematic because, as Avery Gordon reminds us, “even those who live in the direst circumstances possess a complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims or, on the other hand, as superhuman agents.” She proposes that we should think in terms of “complex personhoods” to avoid the self-consolidating recourse to subjectivity and agency, reminding us of the contradictions and transformations bound up in human experiences of the self.[13]

An analysis of the historiography on Machbuba, as will be carried out on these pages, reveals that the autonomous subject is a highly contextual, temporally, and culturally entangled concept. On the one hand, the concept depends on the existence of physical archival material.[14] On the other hand, it depends on imaginaries and immaterial concepts of aesthetics, emotions, and nature, entangled with those of gender, sexuality, and race.[15] In the existing archival and historiographical materials, Machbuba is constituted as the black, female, unfree, not-quite-human Other to Pückler’s subjectivity. Both in historical research and in accounts of their lifetimes, Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee have been received in a complex system of simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility. Analyzing the dynamics of invisibility and hypervisibility in the context of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau and Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee—whose existences emerge as inextricably entangled from the archival sources—allows us to critically reflect on the previous historiography while incorporating the central questions of nationalism, race, and gender.

This paper proposes a starting point for the critical reflection on the historiography on Pückler, and its connections to national and art history. It builds on the critique of knowledge production as it is put forward in recent transcultural approaches. A transcultural perspective provides a means of critically reflecting on disciplinary boundaries and power structures.[16] This paper uses the attention to relationalities and local particularities of cultural concepts proposed by scholars adopting a transcultural perspective, and extends it to the concepts of “art,” “nature,” and the “human subject.” In an attempt to put transculturation into practice, this also means to question the legitimacy of objects of research. It demands reflectîon on the assumed dissonances of juxtaposing questions of enslavement and subjectivity alongside ice-cream, nature, and art within one analysis. That one might perceive these entities as dissonant, separate, even inappropriate objects of juxtaposition speaks to the persistence of exclusionary power relations within the production of knowledge.[17] From these larger conceptual concerns, the following questions are posed in this paper: How has Pückler survived as a historical subject through being employed in such diverging narratives? In what way does this—a durability of his valorization as a male individual, artistic connoisseur, bon vivant, and consumer of pleasure—subsume forms of historical narrations, possible subjectivities, and temporalities? How does it simultaneously depend on those registers, the emergence of which is suppressed, and which haunt the construction of subjects and historical narratives? And how do we, as researchers, talk about these durabilities, these structuring forces, without buying into the fictions of subjectivity and stability that they promote?

I argue first that Pückler carefully crafted a self-representation of his male, white, German subjectivity through his writing and landscape planning, proposing definitions of a proper life, society, and world order. The claims to subject-positions and worldly order are made available in Pückler’s landscape planning and travel writing on examination of his Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei (1834) and of his travelogues, Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich (1844, “From Mehemed Ali’s empire”).[18] Investigating the definitions of spatial, geographical, and cultural distance in his landscape theory and in his travelogues, it becomes clear that the local particularities of North Africa and of his parks in Lusatia are deeply embedded in his argumentation. Similar ideas of transformation, progress, and universality are woven into his writings on the two geographically distant, differently scaled places. His writings are connected through the creation of blank spaces—geographical, physical, visual, and imaginary—that could be filled with totalizing and/or universalizing meaning. However, this paper remains mindful of Ann Laura Stoler’s radical claim that “there really is no imperial order of things.” Instead, she demands that historians attend to the “partial, distorted, and piecemeal qualities” and instabilities that underlie any claim to hegemonic knowledge.[19] Thus, this paper does not attempt to introduce Pückler into colonial, imperial or orientalist canons, but rather follows Stoler’s and Gordon’s perspectives of “haunting”: to acknowledge intangibilities, transformations, and incommensurability in the writing of history and to pay attention to exactly those material and immaterial interconnections that lie beyond the conventions of names and categories.[20]

In a second step, I argue that it is precisely the ambiguity and instability of meaning in Pückler’s work that have permitted the varying, at times contradicting, interpretations of his historical value for German history. Pückler’s name has appeared in bourgeois cookbooks and ice-cream recipes during the era of German imperialism, in the propagation of an essentially German nature under the Nazi regime, and in contemporary discourses on cultural heritage, tourism, and consumption. These shifting narratives are all held together by a claim to the world, by a moral evaluation of how to live a successful life and by ontologies of nature, art, and beauty. They are what Stoler terms “imperial formations”: categories, vocabularies, and concepts that have been mobilized within different contexts, possessing shifting potentialities.[21] These formations recur, but they are neither continuous nor stable: they “are marked less by abrupt rupture or by continuity and not by repetition of the same […]. Rather, they are processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations.”[22] Thus, this paper does not trace the stabilities of any order of things in Pückler’s work, but the moments in which stability of meaning has been claimed. In other words, the paper aims to examine why historical formations on Pückler have proven the potential for being adapted in very different political and social contexts throughout the past 150 years. Equally crucial, then, is the question in which ways the diverging possibilities of personhood of Machbuba/Ajimé/Bililee have been rendered into supporting vessels of Pückler’s subjectivity. They have submitted under what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as “the epistemic violence that constituted/effaced a subject that was obliged to cathect (occupy in response to a desire) the space of the Imperialists’ self-consolidating other.”[23] The final part of this paper will thus focus on the presences and hauntings of Machbuba within the historical narrations on Pückler.

Art–nature: Pückler’s Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei (1834)

Pückler wrote Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei as a guidebook for wealthy landowners in similar social and financial positions to himself. Most of his suggestions are conceptual rather than practical, and the later, actual transformation of Muskau Park significantly differed from the plans that had been announced in the book.[24]

A large number of art and architectural historians have written on Andeutungen, focusing mainly on the differences between Pückler’s written visions and the transformation he, his wife Lucie von Hardenberg, and his gardener Jacob Heinrich Rehder (1790–1852) actually commissioned, or on the relationship of Pückler’s landscape planning with the landscape descriptions in his travelogues.[25] They are accompanied by—and sometimes indistinguishable from—various lavishly illustrated large-size monographs on the parks and on Pückler’s life.[26] Combining biographical research with unquestioned concepts of art, nature, and subjectivity, most scholars working on Pückler have iterated one version or another of a biographical reading of the gardens through Pückler’s staging of the self. While the following paragraphs will contextualize the Andeutungen within its particular social, political, and cultural context, they will also critically examine the interconnected concepts of “art,” “nature,” the “self,” and “other.”

An analysis of the previous scholarship on Pückler’s landscape planning reveals that “nature” is predominantly defined through its absence of the human, and thus the absence of meaning. For instance, according to Ina Mittelstädt, nature functions as the principal element of Pückler’s gardens. However, she proceeds to argue that nature cannot carry any meaning and thus breaks with the previous tradition of aristocratic garden planning. She concludes that “nothing is represented” in Muskau Park.[27] Mittelstädt’s linear interpretation of the semiotics of landscape planning does not go far enough. It is exactly the entanglement of nature and art in Pückler’s landscape planning that effects the production of meaning through the powerful conceptual detachment of nature from the human through an aestheticized landscape. I argue that this dissociation is part of a set of larger epistemological shifts at work at the time. According to William Adams, already in the eighteenth century “‘nature’ came to be defined in terms of the absence of human impact, especially European human impact.”[28] In the context of Pückler’s landscape planning, the potential “emptiness” of nature is indeed crucial. It contributes to the definition of nature as dissociated from the human, while simultaneously being readily available for human-driven transformation. In Pückler’s case, nature’s fundamental lack of meaning is transformed into art for the universal benefit of a society that is constituted of individuals possessing the sensibilities and the knowledge to experience its beauty.

In Pückler’s work and the historiographies on him, notions of nature, beauty, and art are used systemically to both mark value and legitimate knowledge. These notions are constructed through a process of dissociation. As Timothy Morton writes, “the aesthetic is […] a product of distance: of human beings from nature, of subjects from objects, of mind from matter.”[29] In the illustrations that Pückler commissioned for the Andeutungen, we find this categorization expressed in a variety of ways. The illustrations are forty-four hand-colored lithographs that portray panoramic and picturesque landscapes, as well as more schematic depictions of an ideal version of Muskau Park. The illustrations also include four maps of the park before and after the envisioned transformation through Pückler. Pückler commissioned the landscape painter Wilhelm Schirmer (1802–1865) to produce the drawings on which the later lithographs were based.[30]

The majority of the illustrations feature the central attributes of picturesque landscape traditions. The discussion of what constituted a “picturesque landscape” was an aesthetical and art-historical discourse that had prominently been led by the British aestheticians Uvedale Price (1747–1829) and William Gilpin (1724–1804), among others. The outcome of this discussion was a conventionalization of the aesthetic appreciation of landscape painting and experienced landscape. At the same time, the definition of the picturesque was—and remains—an object of constant renegotiation.[31] The allusions of picturesque landscape traditions are particularly evident in Plate 37, Blick vom Belvedere des Lucknitzer Hügels auf die Stadt und das Schloss (Fig. 1, “View from the Belvedere of Lucknitz Hill on the town and the castle”).[32] Here, the landscape is constructed from a singular viewpoint that clearly divides between a foreground, a background, and a middle ground. This view is framed by repoussoir trees and a path that directly leads the eye through the image. Plants, buildings, and objects are arranged within a visual order. Through the commissioned illustrations, Pückler directly interacts with popular discourses of the picturesque. For example, he references one of the most canonical artists of earlier landscape traditions, Claude Lorrain (1600–1682).[33] However, as Ann Bermingham writes, by the nineteenth century, the word “picturesque” had been so widely used that it had been emptied of any actual meaning. As a popular device of visual conventions, it combined both the experience of individuality and conformity.[34]

Therefore, by the time Pückler made his contribution to the picturesque, the concept had already become a reproducible, commodified visual order. It is thus not surprising that many of the ideal landscapes in the Andeutungen look like variations of picturesque landscape paintings. As the Andeutungen volume was intended to be a handbook for wealthy landowners, its readership was most likely familiar with the visual conventions of picturesque landscape painting.[35] As a set of conventions, variations of the picturesque were thus not only already well established, but, in their normative patterns, permitted a flexible reproduction and adaptation to other contexts and localities—an ideal prerequisite for the economic success of the Andeutungen.[36] The mobilization of the picturesque in the Andeutungen also reinforces the position of a seeing, singular subject to whom the landscape is made visually available. Pückler emphasizes the importance of frames and boundaries for the “proper” experience of landscape. But, he argues, even these must appear natural and barely visible, as if they had not been erected by human hands. Strikingly, Pückler compares his landscape planning with the framed paintings of an art gallery.[37] The experience of movement through the topographical landscape and of the contemplation of a representation of the landscape thereby collapse into each other. The only difference to other forms of art, according to Pückler, is the eternally unfinished, changing character of “nature painting”: nature is “alive[;] always becoming and not being, meaning never fully fixed […]. For this reason, a guiding, skillful hand is continuously necessary in these kinds of works.”[38] He thus argues for the legitimacy and continuation of visual and material order over time and through shifting contexts. Exactly because nature is governed from an invisible center of power, it can be adapted to shifting contexts without losing its power. However, centralized vision and order in Pückler’s Andeutungen, the fiction of spatial and ontological control, could do nothing but fail in the actual transformation of Muskau Park. There, the material circumstances of the land, Pückler’s politically and financially insecure position, and the independent interventions of his wife Lucie von Hardenberg and his gardener Rehder, destabilized and transformed any attempt to directly implement Pückler’s theories into practice.[39]

Although previous analyses of Pückler’s landscape planning have focused on its insertion into art historical canons and its establishment as a form of art, none of the previous research has paid any attention to a lengthy passage in Pückler’s Andeutungen on the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841).[40] Pückler introduces Schinkel—who was already well known by the time the Andeutungen were written—as his “genius friend.”[41] The architect contributed several plans for new buildings in Muskau Park to the Andeutungen, for example a new, unrealized castle (Fig. 2) and a ramp (Fig. 3).[42] Pückler introduces the plans for the new castle along with a short description of his family history. The historicizing elements of the castle, its medievalist battlements, and tower (Fig. 2), in combination with his family history function as a genealogical justification of Pückler’s noble status and rule.

Pückler then proceeds to quote an art critical essay on Schinkel’s murals at the Altes Museum in Berlin over several pages.[43] He does not name the author of the essay, but presents “him” as “an educated spirit, a more competent judge than I am,” and as an “ingenious author.”[44] This ostensible modesty, like his previous appraisal of Schinkel, supports the image of Pückler as a connoisseur who is able to recognize artistic genius and taste. He claims that this aesthetic understanding is rooted beyond his own judgement—and is thus objective and universal. The murals were not yet finished in the recently opened museum at the time the essay quoted by Pückler was published. What is today known as the Altes Museum was the first public museum in Berlin, and hosted the royal collections of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. It is important to consider the essay in its context within a book on landscape planning, because it reveals both the educational and the social ambitions inherent in Pückler’s writings.

Schinkel decided in 1823 that the mural should depict “the educational history of humanity” through allegorical figures that were adapted from Greek and Roman mythology.[45] Jörg Trempler relates the centrality of the museum project as a national, moral, and educational endeavor with the murals. According to Trempler, Schinkel’s murals represent art “as the educator of the nation.”[46] Both the museum and its murals were a topic of public and intellectual debate of the time.[47] Through commenting on them, Pückler marks the legitimacy of his landscape planning within wider political efforts of reform, of education, and of the making of national subjects and citizenship.

Towards the end of the quoted essay, the anonymous author defines the ideal state of art as one that represents “beautiful, simple nature […].”[48] This ideal complements Pückler’s own understanding of the relation of art and nature in the Andeutungen. The beautification of the landscape—“nature idealized through art”—is, to Pückler, a totalizing process that includes “the palaces and gardens of the great [and] the humble dwellings of the poor tenant” within a “harmonious whole.”[49] This also becomes evident in the illustrations of the Andeutungen. For instance, plate XXI depicts the smoke of an alum factory in the distance (Fig. 4). Industrial sites, such as the alum factories adjacent to Muskau Park, are not excluded from Pückler’s holistic, all-encompassing concept. They become an integral part of the visual and material order, which Pückler even presents as an attraction for visitors to the park. In the text, he praises the spectacle of a small natural volcano, a lignite “mine fire [with] continuous smoke and occasionally sparkling small flames.”[50] In addition, Pückler proposes plans for so-called “worker colonies” as habitations for the miners and the workers of the park (Fig. 5). His ordering vision thus permeates the lives of his (former) subjects who, at the time, were being transformed into Prussian citizens and workers through the Prussian constitutional, administrative, social, and economic reforms of the early nineteenth century, as well as through the spatial order of their existence, their movements, and their bodies.[51]

In this definition, nature is a resource available for the betterment of the individual human and the entire society. It is possible to transform and reproduce this nature, a process that Pückler describes as “nature-painting (if I can call the evocation of an image like this, not through colors, but with real forests, mountains, meadows and rivers, and introduce it to the area of art).”[52] This claim to painting is in part strategic, as it allows Pückler to position himself as an artist whose role is to transform untouched nature into an art form. To the author, art is of central utility for the governance of a society.[53]

Home–travel: Pückler’s Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich (1844)

As demonstrated above, nature and art are two concepts that are closely entangled and at times contradictory in Pückler’s Andeutungen. The aestheticization of an independently existing nature enables an appropriation of the land and its transformation into a utility, a consumable object. This conceptualization of nature also allows for an engagement with particular forms of ontologies of the Self and the Other. As Timothy Morton writes: “[e]nvironmental writing is a way of registering the feeling of being surrounded by others, or more abstractly, by an otherness, something that is not the self.”[54] In the Andeutungen, and also in Pückler’s travelogues, the Self and the Other, center and periphery, foreign and local are defined through an anthropocentric, never-stabilized process of othering nature.[55] To understand this dissociation, it is necessary to look at the spatial interactions between landscape planning and travel writing. This will indicate that Pückler’s definitions of “home” and “abroad,” “Europe” and the “Orient,” are intertwined and interdependent. The assemblages—humans, objects, plants, and other forms of beings—that he defines as distanced Other are indeed deeply intimate.[56] As Morton argues, “[d]istance and proximity are aestheticized terms. They imply a perceiving subject and a perceived object.”[57] In this negotiation of distance and proximity, it is necessary to contextualize Pückler with emerging academic disciplines of Western knowledge production. In the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany, these were just entering processes of specialization and professionalization, and thus promoted the creation of epistemological categories and typologies.[58] It is crucial to set Pückler in relation to the colonial endeavors of his time, exactly because he engaged with these discourses, and extensively commented on (international) politics. This does not mean that he should be defined as a colonial or proto-colonial actor. Instead, it allows us to question the prevalent assertion that German colonialism was an exception to other European expansionist movements with a clearly demarcated timeframe from the 1880s to 1919.[59] This is not to say that all colonial projects were the same. However, it should be recognized that the period when formal colonial possessions were held by the German Empire is deeply embedded within a larger network of discourses and temporalities of “close interactions and shared vocabularies” with other European powers. None of these expansionist endeavors were as totalizing, stable, and unified as suggested by colonial rhetoric and certain scholars of (post-)colonialism.[60] It is thus helpful to follow Stoler’s suggestion to make the “messy, troubled spaces of ambiguous colonial lineages” the central objects of analysis: “[R]ather than dismiss these sites as exceptional, marginal, or quasi-imperial space,” she suggests to understand them “as key points of access to imperial logics that depend on […] the racialized distinctions in which they are cast.”[61]

Therefore, juxtaposing Pückler’s archives with critical analyses of colonialisms—rather than one monolithic German colonialism—is not simply a revisionist condemnation of his character, writings, or actions. Rather, I argue that a plurality of colonial projections and hegemonic ideas of appropriation are woven into a variety of materials of Europeans speaking and writing on culture, art, and traveling. These Europeans thereby participated in manifold ways in processes of hegemonic knowledge production on the world. Prince Herrmann von Pückler-Muskau engaged in these practices, too. For this reason, it is inevitable that his engagement with the local and global processes of his time be critically contextualized.

Out of the variety of travelogues that Pückler published during his lifetime, Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich is most relevant in the context of this analysis. The author not only merges landscape descriptions and political commentary, but he also describes his first encounter with Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee, thus connecting his discussion of the aesthetic and the political with notions of gender, race, and sexuality. Because Pückler’s landscape descriptions constitute an important link between his engagement with Orientalist discourses and discourses on “German landscape,” I will first focus on these. In a second step, I will link them to Pückler’s extensive commentary on the political situation of Egypt in Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich.

Mary Louise Pratt has worked on the close relations between travel writing and the evocation of aesthetic vocabulary. In the context of nineteenth-century British explorers, she observes three conventional tools used to create both qualitative and quantitative value in the description of their discoveries. The first tool is an aestheticized landscape that is described and ordered like a painting with a foreground, middle ground, background, and framing, one which is measured by its ability to arouse aesthetic pleasure. The second tool is a density of meaning through which the described landscape is represented in reference to the metropolitan “home.” The third tool is the mastery of the seer over the seen, which Pratt calls a “monarch-of-all-I-survey” scene.[62] These conventions are also present in Pückler’s writing. He mobilizes vocabulary and imagery associated with “exploring” North Africa. However, Daniela Richter argues that “[t]he uniqueness of Pückler’s travelogue lies […] not in providing new impressions of Egypt, but in reinforcing preexisting European imagery of the Orient.”[63]

In Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich, Pückler’s described movements and experiences are highly regulated and restrained. He maintains his distance from the places he visits and the people whom he encounters, not undergoing any personal transformation. His preferred mode of traveling, he writes, is by boat on the River Nile. This allowed him to comfortably observe the landscape from a distance, framed and structured like a picturesque painting.[64] The landscape that Pückler constructs is measured along his own viewing habits and those of the anticipated reader. As Simon Ryan argues, in European landscape descriptions of the time, “[t]he landscape itself is deferred; it exists only insofar as it reminds one of a European exemplum. […] This precludes the possibility of another […] aesthetic appreciation [.]”[65] For instance, Pückler compares a road from Cairo to Shubra El Kheima to painted dioramas of Egypt in Vienna and Berlin.[66] Pückler not only references the dioramas, but also repeatedly describes panoramic visions. As two of the central features of nineteenth-century visual and representative entertainment spectacles,[67] both the diorama and the panorama are forms of visual arrangement and spectacle that are implicated into the claim of European visual dominance, as Tony Bennett argues.[68] Through descriptions of panoramic and dioramic visions, the discourse of the picturesque is woven into his travelogues. As scholars of the mutations of the “imperial picturesque” by British artists visualizing the British Empire have shown, the adaptation of visual conventions—such as the picturesque—were significant both for the production of knowledge and for the appropriation of the “new” or “foreign” land. Romita Ray implores us “[t]o think of the picturesque as a historicizing process, as a way of contextualizing colonial selfhood instead of limiting it to an aesthetic engagement or visual inscription.”[69] Pückler’s resort to circulating European conventions thus speaks much of his engagement with the particular localities of his travels. The contextualization of “colonial selfhood” becomes even more evident in the moments in which Pückler fails to construct the Orient as a picture, in moments of boredom, or disappointment.

Pückler repeatedly describes his disappointment while visiting archaeological and historical sites, especially those that he describes as well known, such as the pyramids of Giza. To Pückler, the pyramids are disappointing when seen from nearby, and are not as emotionally moving as the cathedral in Strasbourg.[70] This aesthetic judgement not only emphasizes once again the importance of distance in Pückler’s viewing habits, but also indicates his continuous reference to European contexts.[71] Pratt understands disappointment as one of the central aspects of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope.[72] Disappointment leads to suggestions of improvement and is thus part of appropriative visual practices, an aspect that Pückler’s travelogues share with those of imperial and colonial travelers of his time.[73]

Pückler’s suggestions of landscape improvement are enmeshed with his commentary on the political and social situation of North Africa. Strikingly, his dense political arguments in Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich have thus far been neglected by scholarly analysis, despite their prominent length and frequency. He repeatedly criticizes English, French, Spanish, and Austrian foreign politics in Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich.[74] Additionally, Pückler advocates for independent local government reforms through a male, quasi-absolute, monarchic ruler, and sees the Viceroy Muhammad Ali Pascha (1770–1849) as a role model. Thus, while he argues against the colonial possession of land and European foreign rule in North Africa, he nonetheless demands the cultural, social, and political reforms to follow European examples. He also denies the coevality of Europe and non-Europe, comparing contemporary North Africa to the European Middle Ages. He proceeds to ask his European readers to understand that the peoples of North Africa are just “naturally behind” in their state of civilization.[75]

Part of the reforms that Pückler suggests or praises are linked to the disciplining of the behavior and bodies of people, especially those of women.[76] In his travelogue, gender roles and sexuality are both treated in visually and descriptively highly codified ways. For example, three passages of the third volume are printed upside-down, introduced by the cautionary headlines “Not for ladies,” “Not for ladies, and only for natural scientists,” and “Ladies are kindly asked to also skip the following, even if they can read Greek” (Figs. 6–7).[77] The last passage is a German text written in Greek letters. Like the political passages in Aus Mehemed Ali’s Reich, all three passages have found little to no consideration in previous research. They contain explicitly erotic scenes that Pückler allegedly observed during his travels. Again, he maintains a position of distance: He never describes his active participation in any form of sexual encounter and maintains his role of the disengaged, even scientific voyeur. On these pages, Pückler distinguishes between the anticipated female European reader and the described non-European women. While the former is desexualized and asked to skip the explicit descriptions of sexuality, the latter only exists through her description as an object of male pleasure and scientific vision. Although the female reader might very well have ignored Pückler’s instruction to skip the explicit passages, the othering of female sexuality is not only textual, but also visual and spatial. Because the passages are printed upside-down, they are highly distinctive from the rest of the book. They call for attention and for rotating the book to read comfortably. Gender roles are thereby used as another concept of dissociation and othering. Pückler clearly assigns different positions to European and non-European women. While defined as geographically, culturally, and racially different, they are subsumed under similar structures involving the intimate control of sentiments.[78] As Stoler writes, the intimate is a central domain of colonial control to define difference and subjectivities through the “requisition of bodies” and the “distribution of sentiments and desires.”[79]

Both become evident in the codified, upside-down passages: women “here” and women “there” are assigned with different emotional and bodily roles and capacities—the former removed from any form of sexuality and the latter charged as an object of sexual desire. According to Foucault, nineteenth-century sexuality was “a result and an instrument of power’s designs.”[80] Stoler, who criticizes Foucault’s “short-circuiting [of] empire,” adds that “[d]iscourses of sexuality do more than define the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic, they have mapped the moral parameters of European nations.”[81] While Pückler himself was a member of the nobility, his readership—educated and financially equipped to make his travelogues bestsellers—was predominantly bourgeois.[82] Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that he engages in these discourses on sexuality, national identity, and race. Pückler’s strategies of distance are “discourses on self-mastery [that] were productive of racial distinctions of clarified notions of whiteness and what it meant to be truly European.”[83]

This racial classification underlies most of Pückler’s writing, both in his engagement with nature, art, and non-European societies. In nineteenth-century Germany, notions of beauty and ugliness were, as Peter Martin argues, as much a part of aesthetic discourses as they were a part of emerging anthropological discourses.[84] Racism and colonialism as classificatory systems are relevant in the context of Prince Pückler. The analysis of these two entangled concepts allows for a critical deconstruction of the inherent violence of the worldviews and structures that are put forward through, with, and by him. Despite his inner contradictions, Pückler claims a unique, central position of vision and power in his writings. This claim always remains an ambivalent fiction, not only because Pückler was never fully recognized as participating in the formation of disciplined academic knowledge, in the production of artworks, or in political action. As imperial formations, however, they continued to haunt the discourses on Pückler beyond his lifetime.

Taking the example of ice-cream recipes from the German Empire, and combining it with the historiography on Pückler in the 1920s to 1940s and contemporary engagements with Muskau Park as UNESCO World Heritage, the second part of this paper argues that these imperial formations are by no means a thing of the past, but have haunted and continue to haunt the production of histories of Pückler, and, more recently, Machbuba. In shifting contexts and meanings, these formations are put forward to define livable lives, and claim diverging orders of human and non-human relationships.

Ice-cream and national consumptions of pleasure

Browsing through the freezers of any major supermarket in Germany today, one is very likely to come across ice-cream labelled Fürst Pückler Art (Prince Pückler Style) or Fürst Pückler Schnitte (Prince Pückler Sandwich). The ice-cream is a variation of what is known as Neapolitan ice-cream in English—a combination of vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate flavored ice cream, sometimes placed between two wafers. There is a variety of publications that try to trace back the etymology of the ice-cream. According to Bernd-Ingo Friedrich, “[t]he prince did not invent it, everything else about its obscure origin is polemic.”[85] While no clear genealogy of the “Fürst Pückler” ice-cream can be written, the Pückler Museum Branitz keeps detailed kitchen records—so-called “Tafelbücher”—of what Pückler ate and served his guests between 1854 and 1871. They support the image of Pückler as an aristocratic bon vivant who cherished the luxury of sugary desserts and ice-cream.[86] Making use of this image, bourgeois and courtly cookbooks published recipes “à la Fürst Pückler” already during his lifetime.[87] I argue that the ice-cream—as a sweet transformed from aristocratic luxury to bourgeois consumer product—has been associated with Pückler because his subjectivity allows the imaginary identification of pleasure and taste. [88]

From a transcultural perspective, dietary habits, the circulation of recipes, and the consumption of particular kinds of food in certain historical and social contexts are far from anecdotal. Rather, the analysis of their social, political, and cultural movements enables an understanding of the role of food in the construction of difference of social class and nationality.[89] A transcultural perspective thereby brings into focus the mobility of people and goods necessary for the consumption of ice-cream in Europe. The historical presence of vanilla, chocolate, and sugar—essential ingredients for what is today understood as ice-cream “à la Fürst Pückler”—is inseparable from the slave trade and sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the colonial exploitation of land and people. These relations seem barely visible today. They haunt our understanding of what constitutes a legitimate object of study and an analyzable relationality in art history (ice-cream might be excluded from both). As Sidney Mintz argues in the case of sugar, the conditions of production through the division of labor over space and time were obscured and mystified in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and continue to be to the present.[90] Thus, the connections between colonialism, consumption, and nation building have undergone a practical and ideological process of dissociation. “Fürst Pückler” ice-cream underwent several social, political, and material transformations linked to the “profound changes in dietary and consumption patterns in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe” outlined by Mintz.[91] Accordingly, Ralph Austen, and Woodruff Smith emphasize the close entanglement of the slave and sugar trades until the late nineteenth century, because the majority of the sugar consumed in Europe was imported from the slave plantations of the Caribbean.[92] Making no exception, Germany heavily depended on imports of cane sugar from the Caribbean for the increasing production of ice-cream in the first half of the nineteenth century.[93]

The spread of ice-cream recipes “à la Fürst Pückler” is connected with the rise of literacy and the spread of affordable sugar. It is additionally linked to the direct reform efforts by the Prussian government between 1871 and 1918 to form their subjects into imperial, distinctly German citizens.[94] The titles of the cookbooks featuring Pückler-themed ice-cream speak of the consolidation of “national cuisine.” Books published before Pückler’s death in 1871—the year of the foundation of the German Empire—demonstrate the transition of ice-cream, sugar, and cookbooks from aristocratic luxury to bourgeois commodity. For example, an 1867 cookbook by Johann Rottenhöfer emphasizes the linkage of aristocratic and bourgeois cuisine.[95] The 1903 seventh edition of a cookbook by Carl Krackhart includes an illustration of its “Fürst Pückler Ice-Cream.” It is strikingly juxtaposed with that of a “Kaiser Wilhelm Bombe” (Fig. 8).[96]

Historically, the term “ice bomb” had previously been used to describe this kind of frozen dessert. In the particular historical context of the militarization of the German Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, in which this illustration was produced, however, the ice-cream gained an aggressively militaristic connotation.[97] The ice “bomb” is topped with a crown, a flagpole, and a flag in the black, white, and red stripes of the Prussian Empire. The shape of the “Fürst Pückler Ice-Cream” might at best be described as the body of an antique column, decorated at its bottom and top with some unidentifiable greens. The layers of the depicted ice cream are brown, red, and white, from bottom to top. They thereby resonate with the color scheme of the Prussian imperial flag on the “Kaiser Wilhelm Bombe.” Here, Pückler is represented as an integral part of the militaristic imperial order, an order that penetrates both the public and domestic lives. At the same time, Pückler is turned into a consumable product. In this illustration, pleasure, consumption, empire, and national identity collapse into each other. The materiality of the ice-cream, its ingredients, and the possibility of its availability to “every housewife” are decontextualized and naturalized in the schematic blank spaces that frame the dessert.

Nature and National Socialism

Thirteen years after the publication of the seventh edition of Krackhart’s cookbook, Georg Mletzko submitted his dissertation to the University of Greifswald with the title Die deutsche Landschaft bei dem Fürsten Pückler-Muskau (The German landscape of Prince Pückler-Muskau) in 1914. Mletzko presents Pückler and his landscape planning in combination with the landscape descriptions in his travelogues as a project of “overcoming the French taste.”[98] With Pückler’s appreciation of “the greatest variation on the surface of the world” in which “the eye must first find boundaries while surveying the surface,” Mletzko interprets the Prince as a distinctly German figure. Despite “foreign influences,” the author defines Pückler as “the founder of the German landscape garden.”[99]

In Mletzko’s writing, we find the central motifs that also haunt later writings on Pückler: the centrality of vision and boundaries in the description of the landscape, the emphasis on art and aesthetics, as well as a distinct understanding of nature that is bound to a national identity. All these notions are legitimized by the claim to an objective truth. According to Mletzko, Pückler “does not freely create his landscape images or artistically combine them, but describes them purely objectively, as he finds them.” The strongly nationalist language of Mletzko’s writing, the intertwinement of anti-French sentiment and a distinct German nature as a source of beauty and truth, if structured by the male, German gaze and hand, do not surprise in the context of the publication of the dissertation on the brink of the First World War.

As Timothy Morton reminds us, “[t]he nation all too often depends upon the very same list that evokes the idea of nature. Nature and nation are very closely intertwined.”[100] Thus, it also does not come as a surprise that the idea of a distinct German understanding of nature, as promoted by Pückler, was picked up in the 1920s and 1930s by a group of landscape planners and architects. These figures actively worked on the restructuring of Lusatia, where Pückler’s gardens and castles are located, to develop the region economically. Jacob describes the resulting development plans as efforts to socially and politically align the region with National Socialist ideas in an “all-encompassing reorganization of society and environment.”[101] Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau was mobilized as a central figure in the historical justification of the reforms. The reforms with Pückler as their figurehead were articulated both in institutional reconfigurations and in the writings of different landscape writers and architects of the time.

For instance, the landscape planner Hinrich Meyer-Jungclaussen enforced the National Socialist conformation of the Fürst-Pückler-Gesellschaft (Fürst Pückler Society) in 1933. This organization had only been founded three years earlier. Meyer-Jungclaussen pushed forward its merging into the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gartenkultur (German Society for Garden Culture) that associated with the Reichsbund für Volkstum und Heimat (Imperial Union for Folklore and Homeland) and the Reichsfachamt für Heimatschutz (Imperial Department for the Protection of the Homeland).[102]

In 1927, Franz Hallbaum declared Pückler’s landscape planning as the “final stage of all gardens” thanks to Pückler’s “will for the natural, a passionate effort for a new imagination of nature and the natural law.”[103] Hallbaum linked the reorganization of the land to an individual who is able to recognize the truth as a fundamental law that is beyond human control or influence. Hallbaum’s contemporary, Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, published a short biography of Pückler in his anthology Die grossen Deutschen (The great Germans) in 1937. Similar to Hallbaum’s understanding, the landscape garden was to Wiepking-Jürgendmann an artistic representation of nature and reality. He argued it represented a “healthy, happy way of life, a biological necessity for human life.”[104] These references, not only to environmental protection but also to the urgency of biological survival, were also expressed in other contexts of National Socialist ideologies of the time.[105]

Wiepking-Jürgensmann emphasized the potential of Pückler’s landscape planning for the totalitarian restructuring of “German nature.” He presented Pückler as a visionary who pushed forward the “fight for German renewal.”[106] The author attested Pückler as having had a particularly German aesthetic sensibility of nature through which the prince achieved a “detachment of the Germanic German feeling for nature from the strict rules of the Italian-French architecture garden. […] The German garden, which developed from Midgard, has always carried a truly spiritual notion of ownership and shelter.”[107] The vocabulary of these descriptions does not differ much from Mletzko’s analysis of two decades earlier. National Socialist landscape architects picked up already circulating ideas on individual, “true” sensibilities and the external struggle of survival of the German people. These ideas were legitimized through the claims to historical continuity and temporal linearity through the reference to Germanic mythology and to the more recent past of Pückler’s landscape planning. Wiepking-Jürgensmann particularly underscored the ability of Pückler to artfully order and control the ever-changing, unstable character of nature without ever fully appropriating it.[108] In his understanding, the full appropriation was neither necessary nor required, because nature carried in itself the “higher laws of the universe.”[109] Wiepking-Jürgensmann argued that in Pückler’s “subconscious, primary instincts of Germanic-German landscape sentiments broke free that he, through full subordination of his individuality, integrated” into these cosmic laws.[110] In this sense, landscape planning offered the model for an ideally structured society that conforms to National Socialist ideologies, based on a radical and violent process of exclusion and distancing. This process is justified and obscured through a claim to a reality that resides in nature, beyond human control. These relations were defined as universally true and globally applicable. Similarly, a later publication from 1941 by Paul Ortwin Rave portrayed Pückler as a prophet of German world dominance.[111]

Meyer-Jungclaussen and Wiepking-Jürgensmann were both successful landscape architects under the National Socialist regime. According to Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, the latter “significantly supported the National Socialist expulsion and extermination of Polish and Russian people.”[112] The authors critically remark that the problematizing of the role of landscape planning in the theoretical support of National Socialist crimes has been neglected almost until today. For example, the Deutsche Gartenbau Gesellschaft (German Horticultural Society) continued to award the Wiepking Award to landscape architects until1995.[113] As of today, the society’s history on its website entirely skips the years 1910 to 1955.[114]

Cultural heritage, cosmopolitanism, and consumption

The conservationist and nationalist ideas of a German character of nature and the individual ability to sense, apprehend, and ameliorate this nature still haunt contemporary representations of Pückler. Historians and tourism marketing professionals seem complicit in putting forward Pückler’s individuality and the betterment of self and society through the experience of nature.[115] They consequently align with a dissociated, dialectic idea of nature that we have previously encountered in the material of the first half of the twentieth century. Once more, the appraisal of Pückler’s parks and his ideas on art and beauty are treated as universal cultural and social values that ultimately lead to a desirable world order. However, as Michael Falser cautions, “culture comprises values—and the quality label of (national to universal) cultural heritage is a normative projection in the name of authenticity, purity, and originality.”[116]

Muskau Park has been inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2004. The application process started shortly after the German reunification in 1990. As a part of the park lies in Polish territory since the end of the Second World War, the application was a joint effort of the German Stiftung Fürst-Pückler-Park Bad Muskau and the Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa (National Heritage Board of Poland). Cross-border cooperation was strongly emphasized by UNESCO in their justification of their inscription of the site on the World Heritage List.[117] This is particularly significant in the context of the 1990s and early 2000s—a time in which “[t]he events of 1989 and their aftermath brought forth a flurry of terms announcing a post-ideological, post-ethnic, post-historical, even post-political condition.”[118] These terms are, as Juneja reminds us, highly problematic if pronounced universally and globally without the consideration of diverging positionalities and epistemologies.[119] Falser and Juneja emphasize that the “process of debordering” generates “new boundaries that are drawn across national and cultural entities and new conflicts.”[120] Additionally, they continue, contemporary definitions of cultural heritage imply “a consensus on the museum-like and identity-generating function of cultural heritage and the autonomy of the modern art work.”[121] But, as Falser and Juneja caution, this consensus is highly elitist and exclusive.

According to the UNESCO Committee, the Muskau Park possesses “Outstanding Universal Value” because it “exemplifies and epitomises the European landscape park tradition of incorporating and ‘improving’ nature within dramatic natural landscapes.”[122] According to Falser, the “Outstanding Universal Values” of UNESCO are an “exclusive classification system of elitist criteria” that reproduce a global “civilizing mission and commodification” of what constitutes material and immaterial heritage and under which criteria it has to be maintained and preserved.[123] The idea of universal cultural heritage, as authoritatively put forward by UNESCO, thus uncritically builds on ideas of identity and the nation. It furthermore assumes a linear temporal progression. These assumptions reach back to “civilizing” European Enlightenment discourses that were adapted in processes of imperialism and nation building.[124] According to Carey Watt, the idea that certain cultural values could be universal and spread globally for the better of the entire human kind through civilizing missions was used in the nineteenth and twentieth century “to justify and legitimize the establishment and continuation of overseas colonies, both to subject peoples and to citizens or subjects in the homeland.”[125]

In UNESCO’s justification for its recognition of Muskau Park as cultural heritage, nature exists independently from the human, but is available to be “improved” by the human. In the park, the argument goes, nature is transformed into an ideal by human intervention. This ideal state of nature could be universally appreciated by its visitors. UNESCO’s justification thereby reiterates landscape as an object of possessive nostalgia. According to W. J. T. Mitchell, this nostalgia reflects “a time when metropolitan cultures could imagine their destiny in an unbounded ‘prospect’ of endless appropriation and conquest.”[126] UNESCO’s justification further praises Muskau Park as “a masterpiece of human creative genius” with “high aesthetic quality.”[127] In this way, the portrayal of Muskau Park as cultural heritage is not only dependent on its autonomy as a work of art, but also on Pückler’s autonomy as an individual subject, as the artist and creator of the park. Pückler is used to exemplify human creativity, while promoting arguments of individual uniqueness in the creation of an artwork, the park.

The UNESCO justification additionally praises Pückler’s “exotic and extravagant lifestyle [and] his cosmopolitan intellect.”[128] The problem with the allusions to a benevolent worldview and cosmopolitanism in Pückler’s character and work is that it completely ignores the apparent reductionism and essentialism that has been analyzed above in Pückler’s travelogues and letters. Additionally, Juneja reminds us,

to advocate cosmopolitanism as normative practice without questioning the understanding of culture it is premised on risks a decline into a de-historicized multiculturalism that liberal societies today put forward as a political imperative and a managerial mode to deal with diversity.[129]

Additionally, the assumption that a specific character trait (in Pückler’s case, being “cosmopolitan”) can directly translate itself into a landscape and the subjective experience of that landscape is also problematic, because it implies a unidirectional transfer of Pückler’s ideas and subjectivity into the transformation of the landscape. However, one has to keep in mind that the labor of physical transformation was not executed by Pückler, nor did it end with Pückler’s death. It is thus illusionary to claim that the park could represent the worldview or ideal of a singular individual. Rather, the park is in constant transformation with a variety of human and other-than-human agents.

The permanent exhibition at the Neues Schloss in Bad Muskau Pückler? Pückler! Einfach nicht zu fassen! (Pückler? Pückler! Simply not graspable!) fills 800m2 of the castle’s floorspace. It was opened in 2008 and cost around 1.35 million euro, provided by the state of Saxony and the European Regional Development Fund, a body of the European Union.[130] The title of the exhibition alludes to Pückler as an individual subject and his alleged eccentricity. The poster of the exhibition depicts Pückler in a turban (Fig. 9). This representation positions a signifier of the Orient as a visualization of Pückler’s many fads, rendering the Orient irreconcilably Other and appropriable at the same time. Most objects within the exhibition are replicas. Various interactive exhibits use audio-visual technologies and light effects in order to illustrate Pückler’s life and work. The exhibition even features an interactive indoor carnival ride. Seated in a plush “carriage,” the visitor rides through a theatrical set-up of Pückler’s Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei, with large, stylized book pages and the enlarged illustrations of the Andeutungen (Fig. 10). A voice-over reads aloud passages of the book, accompanied by a sound and light show. The exhibition thus clearly aims at the entertainment of the visitor and at creating an interactive, visually and sensually stimulating experience to engage with Pückler. Here, Pückler is contemporary, eccentric, versatile, and European: while the political context has changed, Pückler has survived several epistemological ruptures and paradigm shifts.

Haunted historiographies

All accounts and historiographies assembled here are partial and full of intentional blank spaces. Where Wiepking-Jürgensmann dismisses Pückler’s traveling and his interest in “non-German culture” as “bizarre,” most recent accounts praise Pückler’s travels and allusions to cultural difference as inclusionary cosmopolitanism.[131] Throughout all these narratives, individual sentiments—the abilities to enjoy nature and art, and the ability to pleasurably consume—are emphasized in conjunction with the perceived Germanness of Pückler’s work. This does not come as a surprise: Pückler himself, while not necessarily arguing for a unified German nation, repeatedly set apart what he saw as “German” culture and characteristics from those of other European and non-European cultures.[132]

Detaching undesirable aspects of this nationalist mobilization of Pückler—such as the imperialist militarism of the German Empire or the destructive ideology of the National Socialist regime—does not in any form erase the cultural and racial assumptions that underlie the idea of a distinct national identity. Quite on the contrary, declaring something as “of the past” or as “having been overcome” carries deep political implications and brushes over the close entanglements between German nationalism and racism. Ulrike Hamann understands the “overcoming of racism” as one of “the foundational myths of the Federal Republic [of Germany],” leaving the foundational structure of racism in the definition of German national identity undiscussed.[133] Moreover, as Trouillot argues, past and present are interdependent: “the past is only past because there is a present.” For this reason, “pastness”—that which is defined as of the past—is not a distant, autonomously existing reality but a position.[134] Thus, the lack of reflection on racial power structures contributes to the continuation of their inherent constituent violence that permeates the above-analyzed definitions of subjectivity, taste, nature, and art.

Multiple personhoods: Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee

The lack of reflection on racial power structures becomes particularly evident in the way in which historians, scholars, and marketing professionals—that today seem to be closely interacting in the context of the production of knowledge on cultural heritage—interpret the archival material on Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee. In his travelogues, Pückler retrospectively crafts the experiences of different enslaved women into his narrative of Machbuba.[135] Archival sources, such as the letters of Pückler and of his wider network, suggest that several enslaved women were traveling with him.[136] While the experiences of personhood of these women are barely visible in the archival sources, Machbuba—the servant, confidant, and lover—is also put forward as a vehicle to narrate variations of a reductionist, sensationalist romance between the prince and the enslaved woman in both popular literature and research.[137] As elaborated above, most recent research has mainly focused on the reconstruction of Machbuba within a revisionist agenda. These efforts of revision do not question their own parameters, nor do they examine the political and social contexts of inquiry. In contemporary research on Machbuba, a corrective, hypervisible version of her is mobilized in the service of cosmopolitan, multicultural museum and exhibition strategies, and the promotion of cultural heritage.[138] These efforts speak to the extensive body of scholarship that has emerged in recent decades, dedicated to the recovery of silences and the restoration of agency and subjectivity in the subaltern, silent, or blank spaces of knowledge production.[139] These terms, as I argue, are charged with assumptions on space, time, and subjectivity, and are entangled with their very own contexts of knowledge production.

The question of Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee’s personhood(s) comes down to what constitutes human beings on the most intimate level, drafting boundaries between lives worth living, lives barely lived, and not-living through dislocation and transformation. The human being who rests under the gravestone in Bad Muskau under the name Machbuba was forced into a particular subject position in the service of sexually and racially charged fantasies. In their very specific forms of unfreedom, which might not even formally fall under the definitions of slavery, Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee were subsumed under imperial formations that “create new subjects that must be relocated to be productive and exploitable, dispossessed to be modern, disciplined to be independent, converted to be human, stripped of old cultural bearings to be citizens, coerced to be free.”[140]

Even in her death, Machbuba has been mobilized to signify hypervisible Otherness. In the historical sources and later historiographies, her death is used to constitute the meaning of her life as an individual tragedy, as a particular, even romanticized self-abandonment. This death is recognized as grief-worthy, but her early death becomes the most prominent and visible interpretation of her life in later representations.

Material and visual engagements with her death not only include the spectacle of the funeral, a funeral attended by a large part of the population of Bad Muskau. But also, Machbuba was commemorated by the production of a plaster cast of her hand and head, a portrait drawn on her deathbed, and a posthumous portrait by an unknown artist.[141] As Christian Friedrich and Simone Neuhäuser point out, the portrait in which Machbuba is dressed in a Mamluk costume and positioned in front of a desert landscape with pyramids is less a realist representation of her than a visual manifestation of Orientalist fantasies (Fig. 11).[142] As such, it resembles a portrait of Angelo Soliman (floruit 1721–1796) by Johann Nepomuk Steiner (1725–1793) from around 1760 (Fig. 12). Soliman was an Ethiopian who was brought to Europe as a young boy. During his lifetime, he became a prominent and respected member of society in Vienna. However, after his decease, his remains were dissected and then stuffed, dressed in an Orientalist costume, and exhibited in the Viennese imperial natural history collection.[143]

The visual resemblance of the two portraits reveals the circulation of representative, formulaic tropes of the black body in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The portraits were less the representation of an individual, than they were representative of diffuse ideas on visual Otherness that forced black bodies into positions of high vulnerability and visibility in their lives and deaths. Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee and Soliman each experienced varying forms of alienation and unfreedom. Saidiya Hartman cautions that “[n]o solace can be found in the death of the slave, no higher ground can be located, no perspective can be found from which death serves a greater good or becomes anything other than what it is.”[144] However, in the case of Machbuba, the death of one of Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee is turned into a meaningful visual spectacle in favor of the very same processes of individualization in the service of distinct subjectivities. At the same time, the deaths of the others pass unmentioned and unmourned in the historical sources and narratives.

Representations of Machbuba’s body in conjunction with her early death have continued to circulate up to today. Contemporary representations of her continue these fictions of subjectivity and their underlying assumptions of sexuality, race, life, and death in favor of a consumption-oriented commodification. For instance, in 2011, a souvenir shop in Branitz sold beer with the label “Machbuba. Prince and Slave. The Beer of a Great Love” with a naked woman juxtaposed in front of Pückler’s pyramid.[145]

Similarly, the exhibition area on Machbuba in Branitz Castle underlines specific visualities that take up Orientalist tropes. It is located in the Carpet Room of the so-called “Oriental Rooms” on the second floor of the castle. These rooms, which were partly representative and partly private during Pückler’s lifetime, feature richly ornamented wallpapers with Arabic calligraphy.[146] Today, they hold parts of Pückler’s collection of objects from Northern Africa, the Middle East, India, and China, some of which he bought during his travels. In the Carpet Room, on the wall above a showcase with Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee’s death mask, hand plaster cast, and the memorial drawing hangs the posthumous portrait from 1840. The arrangement of objects is completed by the bronze statue Machbuba by the artist Hans Scheib from 1998. The body of the represented woman is entirely exposed, except for a large turban on her head and a cloth in her hands. This representation not only recreates Pückler’s first description of Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee on the slave market in Cairo as “the truest copy of a Venus by Titian, only in black manner.”[147] The headwear also emphasizes the association of Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee with Oriental fantasies, a “European gaze on the female Oriental, the male voyeurism and the perception of the colonized woman as an object of sexual desire […].”[148]

Through its set-up as an exhibition, this arrangement of objects makes a claim to represent Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee as a unified, “real” subject. As the objects are placed in the Oriental Rooms of the castle, their arrangement is dominated by the interpretative framework of the figure of Pückler.[149] It is impossible to separate Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee from this framework as long as the materiality of the historical sources available limits the thinkable and the sayable. In the exhibition space, Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee haunt the processes of Pückler’s self-representation exactly because there is no ultimate meaning that can be found in their lives and deaths. They expose the discontinuities in the historical narratives on Pückler and thus the potentialities of acknowledging them, instead of replacing them with definite meaning.

As Gordon writes, haunting is exactly “that moment (of however long duration) […] when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving […].”[150] Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee are not alone haunting the historical narrations on Pückler. There are other complex personhoods, other humans and other-than-humans, other cosmologies. As ghosts, they are undeniably present, disruptive to the establishment of common sense. They are, among others, the nameless prisoners who Pückler hired for the massive transformation of the park in Branitz, the activities of his wife and their gardeners undermining his authoritative landscape planning, the decay of his pyramids that were built for eternity and the endless contradictions of binary oppositions of art and nature. They are stones and grasses, letters and sketches that tell other stories, other possibilities, and potentialities.[151]

Conclusion

A few fundamental questions, ruptures of rationality, and uncertainties haunt this paper. How should assemblages be read and written about without falling into the trap of benevolent, inclusionary addition? How should histories of the inherent epistemic violence of ontological and cosmological knowledge be written without feeding into conceptual master narratives, such as colonialism or Orientalism? How should the role of the visual and the aesthetic be grappled with, if these concepts are complicit with previous forms of knowledge production?

Transculturation proposes thinking about the dynamics of culture, rather than understanding it as a state of being. This article, acknowledging its own processes of transculturation in its writing, is not to be understood as a definitive proposition of truth, but an open invitation for further reflections and practices.

It thus departed from the idea that a “better historiography” could emerge from attending to silenced narratives, such as those of Machbuba/Ajiamé/Bilillee, with the same tools and methods that have rendered them silenced. The article, however, does not represent a departure from writing and narration as practices of engagement. Understanding the writing of history as an engagement, as a creative practice of positional assemblage might, in the best case, constitute a contribution to the efforts put forward by scholars of transcultural studies. Through a critical engagement with the practices of academic writing, it might offer new grounds for transcultural studies’ continuing effort of social, spatial, and conceptual contextualization, and its shift in perspective from states of being to states of becoming.

This article can thus only serve to emphasize the discontinuities and ruptures of its terms and narratives. It has attempted to allow the silences, irrationalities, and fictions to enter the process of writing, to acknowledge its own incompleteness and instabilities. Through the assemblage of a multiplicity of materials that allow contradictory readings, my hope is that this article has shed some light on the potentialities of historical narrations—with all their problems and deficiencies that demand further attention and care.[152]

As of today, Pückler is not the only “pre-imperial,” exclusively male historical subject who is mobilized in historical narratives of cosmopolitanism in the context of German cultural heritage.[153] Similarly, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and the brothers Wilhelm (1767–1832) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) have been put forward as German contributors to contemporary post-ethnic, post-colonial, and universalist understandings of “world cultures.”[154] Paradoxically, these narratives strikingly skip the roughly 150 years in which Germany existed as a modern nation-state while simultaneously constructing a national history. The painful, violent contexts of these 150 years, of colonialism, imperialism, and the two world wars, are put aside in favor of a positive discourse on benevolent cosmopolitanism. In the blending of nationalism, marketing and research, as currently occurs at the Humboldt University and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, more critical inquiries are necessary to trace larger processes of revisionist, nationalist historiography. These bear the potential to connect the analyzed historiography on Pückler with that on other favored protagonists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.[155] Such an approach would enable the critical deconstruction of unquestioned categorizations and continuations of nationalism and racism.