The Invention of Nature

22

Art, Ecology and Nature

Ernst Haeckel and Humboldt

THE DAY HE heard about Alexander von Humboldt’s death, twenty-five-year-old German zoologist Ernst Haeckel felt miserable. ‘Two souls, alas, live in my chest,’ Haeckel wrote to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, using a well-known image from Goethe’s Faust to explain his feelings. Where Faust is torn between his love for the earthly world and the longing to soar to higher realms, Haeckel was torn between art and science, between feeling nature with his heart or investigating the natural world like a zoologist. The news that Humboldt was dead – the man whose books had inspired Haeckel’s love for nature, science, explorations and painting since early childhood – had triggered this crisis.

At the time Haeckel was in Naples in Italy where he hoped to make some zoological discoveries that would kick-start his academic career in Germany. So far the scientific part of the trip had turned out to be completely unsuccessful. He had come to study the anatomy of sea urchins, sea-cucumbers and starfish but it had been impossible to find enough living specimens in the Gulf of Naples. Instead of a rich sea harvest, it was the Italian landscape that offered what he called ‘beckoning temptations’. How was he supposed to be a scientist in a discipline that felt claustrophobically cramped when nature laid out its tantalizing wares as if in an oriental bazaar? It was so bad, Haeckel wrote to Anna, that he could hear ‘Mephistopheles’ scornful laughter’.

In this one letter, Haeckel filtered his doubts through the lens of Humboldt’s vision of nature. How was he to reconcile taking the detailed observations that his scientific work required with his urge to ‘understand nature as a whole’? How was he to align his artistic appreciation for nature with scientific truth? In Cosmos Humboldt had written about the bond that united knowledge, science, poetry and artistic feeling, but Haeckel was unsure how to apply this to his zoological work. Flora and fauna invited him to unlock their secrets, teasing and luring him, but he didn’t know if he should use a paintbrush or a microscope. How could he be sure?

Humboldt’s death set in motion a phase of uncertainty in Haeckel’s life during which he searched for his true vocation. It marked the beginning of a career that was shaped partly by anger, crisis and grief. Death would become a channelling force in Haeckel’s life – but instead of leading towards stasis or stagnation, it made him work harder, more ferociously and with no concern for his future reputation. It also made Haeckel one of the most controversial and remarkable scientists of his time¹ – a man who influenced artists and scientists alike, and one who moved Humboldt’s concept of nature into the twentieth century.

Humboldt had always loomed large in Haeckel’s life. Born in Potsdam in 1834 – the same year that Humboldt had begun Cosmos – Haeckel had read his books as a boy. His father worked for the Prussian government but was also interested in science and the Haeckel family spent many evenings reading scientific publications aloud to each other. Though he had never met Humboldt, Haeckel had been immersed in his ideas of nature from childhood. He so adored Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics that he too dreamed of being an explorer, but Haeckel’s father had envisaged a more traditional career for him.

Following his father’s wishes, the eighteen-year-old had therefore enrolled in 1852 at the medical school in Würzburg in Bavaria to become a doctor. Haeckel was homesick and lonely in Würzburg. After long days at school, he withdrew to his room, desperate to read Cosmos. Every evening when he opened the well-thumbed pages, Haeckel disappeared into Humboldt’s glorious world. When not reading, he hiked through the forests, seeking solitude and a connection to the natural world. Tall, slender, handsome and with piercing blue eyes, Haeckel ran and swam every day and was as athletic as Humboldt had been as a young man.

‘I cannot tell you how much joy the pleasure of nature gives me,’ Haeckel wrote to his parents from Würzburg; ‘all my worries disappear at once.’ He wrote of the gentle song of birds and of the wind combing through the leaves. He admired double rainbows and mountain slopes dappled in the fleeting shadows of the clouds. Sometimes Haeckel returned from his long walks loaded with ivy with which he made wreaths that he hung across Humboldt’s portrait in his room. How he longed to live in Berlin, closer to his hero. He wanted to attend the annual dinner at the Geographical Society in Berlin where Humboldt would be, he wrote to his parents in May 1853, a few months after his arrival in Würzburg. Seeing Humboldt – even from a distance – was his ‘most ardent desire’.

The following spring Haeckel was allowed to study for a term in Berlin – and although he failed to glimpse Humboldt, he did find someone else to admire. Haeckel took some classes on comparative anatomy with the most famous German zoologist of the time, Johannes Müller, who was working on fish and marine invertebrates. Enthralled by Müller’s lively stories of seashore collecting, Haeckel spent a summer in Heligoland, a small island off the coast of Germany in the North Sea. He spent his days outside, swimming and catching sea creatures. Haeckel admired the jellyfish they caught – their transparent bodies were veined with streaks of colour and their long tentacles moved elegantly through the water. When he netted a particularly magnificent one, Haeckel had found his favourite animal and a scientific discipline to pursue: zoology.

Ernst Haeckel with his fishing equipment (Illustration Credit 22.1)

Though Haeckel obeyed his father’s wishes and continued his medical studies, he never intended to practise as a doctor. He enjoyed botany and comparative anatomy, marine invertebrates and microscopes, mountain climbing and swimming, painting and drawing, but loathed medicine. His appetite for Humboldt’s work increased the more he read. When he visited his parents, he took Views of Nature with him and asked his mother to buy him a copy of Personal Narrative because, he said, he was ‘obsessed’ with it. From the university’s library in Würzburg he borrowed dozens of Humboldt’s books, ranging from the botanical volumes to the large folio edition of Vues des Cordillères with its spectacular engravings of Latin American landscapes and monuments – ‘preciously sumptuous editions’, as he called them. He also asked his parents to send him as a Christmas present the atlas that had been published to accompany Cosmos. It was easier for him, he explained, to understand and memorize through images rather than words.

During a visit to Berlin, Haeckel made a pilgrimage to the Humboldt family estate, Tegel. It was a glorious summer’s day even if Humboldt was nowhere to be seen. Haeckel bathed in the lake where his hero had once swum and sat at the water’s edge until the moon cast a silver veil across the surface. This was the closest he had ever come to Humboldt.

He wanted to follow Humboldt’s footsteps and see South America. This would be the only way to reconcile the two conflicting souls in his chest: the ‘man of reason’ and the artist ruled by ‘feeling and poetry’. The only profession that combined science with emotions and adventure was that of an explorer-naturalist, Haeckel was certain. He dreamed ‘day and night’ of a great voyage and began to make plans. First he would take his medical degree and then find a position as a ship’s surgeon. Once he had reached the tropics, he would leave the ship and begin his ‘Robinsonian project’. The advantage of this scheme was, Haeckel told his increasingly worried parents, that it would force him to finish his studies in Würzburg. He would do anything as long as it meant going ‘far, far into the world’.

Haeckel’s parents, though, had different ideas and insisted that their son work as a doctor in Berlin. Initially Haeckel did as he was asked, but quietly tried to sabotage their plans. When he set up his practice in Berlin, he introduced rather eccentric opening hours. Patients could only see him for consultations between five and six o’clock in the morning. Unsurprisingly, he had just half a dozen patients during his year as a doctor – although, as he proudly announced, none died in his care.

In the end it was Haeckel’s love for his fiancée Anna that made him consider a more conventional career. Haeckel called her his ‘truly German forest child’. Instead of material things – clothes, furniture or fine jewellery – Anna enjoyed the simple joys of life such as a walk in the countryside or lying in a meadow among wildflowers. She was, as Haeckel said, ‘completely unspoiled and pure’. Serendipity had it that she shared her birthday with Humboldt – 14 September – which was also the date that the couple announced their engagement. Haeckel decided to become a zoology professor. It was a respectable profession, and he wouldn’t have to deal with his ‘insurmountable revulsion’ at the ‘diseased body’. To make his mark in the scientific world, he simply needed to decide on a research project.

Early in February 1859 Haeckel arrived in Italy where he hoped to find new marine invertebrates. Anything would do, from jellyfish to tiny single-celled organisms, as long as a discovery launched his new career. After some weeks of sightseeing in Florence and Rome, Haeckel travelled to Naples to start working in earnest but nothing went to plan. The fishermen refused to assist him. The city was dirty and noisy. The streets were full of crooks and swindlers – and he was paying inflated prices for everything. It was hot and dusty. There were not enough sea urchins and jellyfish.

It was in Naples that Haeckel received the letter in which his father reported the news of Humboldt’s death and which made him think not only about art and science, but also about his own future. In the noisy narrow Neapolitan streets that snaked like a labyrinth below the imposing shape of Vesuvius, Haeckel once again felt the battle of the two souls in his chest. On 17 June, three weeks after he heard about his hero’s death, Haeckel couldn’t face Naples any more. Instead, he went to Ischia, a small island just a short boat ride away in the Gulf of Naples.

On Ischia Haeckel became acquainted with a German poet and painter, Hermann Allmers. For a week the two men wandered across the island, sketching, hiking, swimming and talking. They enjoyed each other’s company so much that they decided to travel together for a while. When they returned to Naples, they climbed Vesuvius and then sailed to Capri, another small island in the Bay of Naples where Haeckel hoped to see nature as an ‘interconnected whole’.

Haeckel packed an easel and watercolours and for good measure also his instruments and notebooks, but within a week of arriving in Capri he had embraced a new bohemian lifestyle. He was living his dreams, he admitted to Anna who was patiently waiting for her fiancé in Berlin. The microscope stayed in its box. Instead Haeckel was painting. He didn’t want to be a ‘microscoping worm’, he told Anna – how could he when nature in all its glory was calling him: ‘Outside! Outside!’ Only an ‘ossified scholar’ would be able to resist. Ever since Haeckel had read Humboldt’s Views of Nature as a boy, he had dreamed of this kind of ‘half wild life in nature’. Here on Capri, he was finally seeing the ‘delightful glory of the macro-cosmos’, he wrote to Anna. All he needed was a ‘faithful paintbrush’. He wanted to dedicate his life to this poetic world of light and colours. The crisis that Humboldt’s death had triggered was turning into a fully-fledged transformation.

His parents received similar letters, although with less emphasis on the wild aspects of his new life. Instead Haeckel told them about his possible future as an artist. He reminded them that Humboldt had written about the bond between art and science. With his artistic talent – to which, he assured his parents, other painters in Capri attested – and his botanical knowledge he believed that he was in a unique position to take up the gauntlet that Humboldt had thrown down. After all, landscape painting had been one of ‘Humboldt’s favourite interests’. Haeckel now announced that he wanted to be a painter who ‘strode with his paintbrush through all zones from the Arctic Ocean to the Equator’.

Back in Berlin, Haeckel’s father was not too pleased about these developments and dispatched a stern letter. For years he had watched his son’s fluctuating plans. He was not a rich man, he now reminded Haeckel, and ‘can’t have you travelling all over the world for years’. Why did his son always have to take everything to extremes – working, swimming, climbing, but also dreaming, hoping and doubting? ‘You must now cultivate your real job,’ Haeckel senior continued, not leaving any doubt where he saw his son’s future.

It was again Haeckel’s love for Anna that made him realize that his dream would have to remain a dream. In order to marry her, he would become a ‘tame’ professor instead of exploring the world with a paintbrush. In mid-September, a little more than four months after Humboldt’s death, Haeckel packed his bags and instruments to travel to Messina in Sicily to concentrate on his scientific work – but the weeks in Capri had changed him for ever. When the Sicilian fishermen brought buckets filled with seawater and alive with thousands of minute organisms, Haeckel saw them as a zoologist and as an artist. As he carefully placed drops of water under his microscope, new marvels revealed themselves. These tiny marine invertebrates looked like ‘delicate works of art’, he thought, made of colourful cut glass or gems. Instead of dreading the days behind the microscope, he was gripped by these ‘sea wonders’.

Every day he swam at dawn, when the sun lacquered the water surface red and nature glowed in its ‘most exquisite brilliance’, he wrote home. After the swim, he went to the fish market to pick up his daily seawater delivery but by 8 a.m. he was in his room where he worked until 5 p.m. After a quick meal followed by a brisk walk along the beach, he was back at his desk at 7.30 p.m. writing notes until midnight. The hard work paid off. By December, three months after his arrival in Sicily, Haeckel was certain that he had found the scientific project that would make his career: they were called radiolarians.

These minuscule single-celled marine organisms were about 1/1,000 of an inch and visible only under the microscope. Once magnified, the radiolarians revealed their stunning structure. Their exquisite mineral skeletons exhibited a complex pattern of symmetry, often with ray-like projections that gave them a floating appearance. Week after week, Haeckel identified new species and even new families. By early February he had discovered over sixty previously unknown species. Then, on 10 February 1860, the morning catch alone brought twelve new ones. He fell on his knees in front of his microscope, he wrote to Anna, and bowed to the benevolent sea gods and nymphs to thank them for their generous gifts.

This work was ‘made for me’, Haeckel now declared. It brought together his love for physical exercise, nature, science and art – from the joy of the early morning catch which he was now doing himself to the last pencil stroke of his drawings. The radiolarian revealed a new world to Haeckel, a world of order but also wonder – so ‘poetic and delightful’, he told Anna. By the end of March 1860, he had discovered more than one hundred new species and was ready to go home to work them up into a book.

Haeckel illustrated his zoological work with his own drawings of perfect scientific accuracy but also of remarkable beauty. It helped that he could look with one eye into his microscope while the other focused on his drawing board – a talent so unusual that his former professors said they had never seen someone capable of it. For Haeckel the act of drawing was the best method of understanding nature. With pencil and paintbrush, he said, he ‘penetrated deeper into the secret of her beauty’ than ever before; they were his tools of seeing and learning. The two souls in his breast had finally been united.

The radiolarians were so beautiful, Haeckel wrote to his old travel companion Allmers on his return to Germany, that he wondered if Allmers wanted to use them to decorate his studio – or even ‘create a new “style”!!’.² He worked frantically on his drawings, and two years later, in 1862, he published a magnificent two-volume book: Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda Radiaria). As a result he was made an associate professor at the University of Jena, the small town where Humboldt had met Goethe more than half a century previously. In August 1862 Haeckel married Anna. He was blissfully happy. Without her, he said, he would have died like a plant without ‘life-giving sunlight’.

While Haeckel worked on Die Radiolarien, he had read a book that would change his life yet again: Darwin’s Origin of Species. Haeckel was struck by Darwin’s theory on evolution – it was ‘a completely crazy book’, he later recounted. In one great sweep the Origin of Species gave Haeckel the answers to how organisms had developed. Darwin’s book, Haeckel said, did ‘open a new world’. It provided a solution ‘to all problems, however knotty’, Haeckel wrote in a long and admiring letter to Darwin. With Origin of Species, Darwin replaced the belief of God’s divine creation of animals, plants and humans with the concept that they were products of natural processes – a revolutionary idea that shook religious doctrine to its core.

Origin of Species sent the scientific world into uproar. Many accused Darwin of heresy. Taken to its full conclusion, Darwin’s theory meant that humans were part of the same tree of life as all other organisms. A few months after the publication in England, it had come to a big public showdown in Oxford between the bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Darwin’s fiery supporter, the biologist and later president of the Royal Society, Thomas Huxley. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Wilberforce had provocatively asked Huxley if he was related to an ape on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s side. Huxley had answered that he preferred to be descended from an ape rather than a bishop. The debates were controversial, exciting and radical.

The Origin of Species fell on fertile ground when Haeckel read it because he had been shaped since childhood by Humboldt’s concept of nature – and Cosmos already included many ‘pre-Darwinian sentiments’. Over the next decades Haeckel would become Darwin’s most ardent supporter in Germany.³ He was, as Anna said, ‘her German Darwin-man’, while Hermann Allmers teased Haeckel playfully about his ‘life filled with happy love and Darwinism’.

Then tragedy struck. On 16 February 1864, on Haeckel’s thirtieth birthday and the day he received a prestigious scientific prize for his radiolarian book, Anna died after a short illness which might have been appendicitis. They had been married for less than two years. Haeckel fell into a deep depression. ‘I am dead on the inside,’ he told Allmers, crushed by ‘bitter grief’. Anna’s death had destroyed all prospects of happiness, Haeckel declared. To escape, he threw himself into work. ‘I intend to dedicate my entire life’ to evolutionary theory, he wrote to Darwin.

He lived like a hermit, Haeckel told Darwin, and the only thing that occupied him was evolution. He was ready to take on the entire scientific world because Anna’s death had made him ‘immune to praise and blame’. To forget his pain, Haeckel worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for a whole year.

The result of his despair was the two-volume Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms) which was published in 1866 – 1,000 pages about evolution and morphology, the study of the structure and shape of organisms.⁴ Darwin described the book as the ‘most magnificent eulogium’ that the Origin of Species had ever received. It was an angry book in which Haeckel attacked those who refused to accept Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Haeckel reeled off a barrage of insults: Darwin’s critics wrote thick but ‘empty’ books; they were in a ‘scientific half sleep’ and lived a ‘life of dreams that was impoverished of thoughts’. Even Thomas Huxley – a man who called himself ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ – thought that Haeckel would have to tone it down a little if he wanted to produce an English edition. Haeckel, however, was not budging.

Radical reform of the sciences could not be done gently, Haeckel told Huxley. They would have to get their hands dirty and use ‘pitchforks’. Haeckel had written Generelle Morphologie at a moment of deep personal crisis, as he explained to Darwin, his bitterness about the world and about his life was woven into every sentence. Since Anna’s death Haeckel didn’t worry about his own reputation any more, he told Darwin: ‘long may my many enemies attack my work strongly’. They could maul him as much as they wanted, he couldn’t have cared less.

Generelle Morphologie was not only a rallying call for the new theory of evolution but also the book in which Haeckel first named Humboldt’s discipline: Oecologie, or ‘ecology’. Haeckel took the Greek word for household – oikos – and applied it to the natural world. All the earth’s organisms belonged together like a family occupying a dwelling; and like the members of a household they could conflict with, or assist, one another. Organic and inorganic nature made a ‘system of active forces’, he wrote in Generelle Morphologie, using Humboldt’s exact words. Haeckel took Humboldt’s idea of nature as a unified whole made up of complex interrelationships and gave it a name. Ecology, Haeckel said, was the ‘science of the relationships of an organism with its environment’.⁵

In the same year that Haeckel invented the word ‘ecology’, he also finally followed Humboldt and Darwin to distant shores. In October 1866, more than two years after Anna’s death, he travelled to Tenerife, the island that had taken on an almost mystical dimension for scientists ever since Humboldt had described it so seductively in Personal Narrative. It was time to fulfil what Haeckel called his ‘oldest and most favourite travel dream’. Almost seventy years after Humboldt had set sail and more than thirty years after Darwin had boarded the Beagle, Haeckel began his own voyage. Though three generations apart, they had all believed that science was more than a cerebral activity. Their science implied strenuous physical exertion because they were looking at flora and fauna – be they palms, lichens, barnacles, birds or marine invertebrates – within their natural habitats. Understanding ecology meant exploring new worlds teeming with life.

On his way to Tenerife, Haeckel stopped in England where he arranged to see Darwin at home at Down House in Kent, a short train ride from London. Haeckel had never met Humboldt, but now he had the opportunity to meet his other hero. On Sunday, 21 October, at 11.30 a.m. Darwin’s coachman picked up Haeckel at Bromley, the local train station, and drove him to an ivy-clad country house where the fifty-seven-year-old Darwin was waiting at the front door. Haeckel was so nervous that he forgot the little English he knew. He and Darwin shook hands for a long time, with Darwin saying repeatedly how glad he was to see him. Haeckel was, as Darwin’s daughter Henrietta recounted, stunned into a ‘dead silence’. As they strolled through the garden along the Sandwalk where Darwin did so much of his thinking, Haeckel slowly recovered and began to talk. He spoke English with a strong German accent, stumbling a little but in a clear enough manner for the two scientists to enjoy a long conversation about evolution and foreign travels.

Darwin was exactly as Haeckel had envisaged him. Older, softly spoken and kind, Darwin exuded an aura of wisdom, Haeckel thought, much as he imagined Socrates or Aristotle. The whole Darwin family welcomed him so warmly that it had felt like coming home, he told friends in Jena. That visit, Haeckel later said, was one of the most ‘unforgettable’ moments of his life. When he left the next day, he was more than ever convinced that nature could only be seen as ‘one unified whole – a completely interrelated “kingdom of life” ’.

Then it was time to leave. Haeckel had arranged to meet the three assistants whom he had hired to help with his research (one scientist from Bonn and two of his students from Jena) in Lisbon from where they sailed to the Canary Islands. Once the four men landed in Tenerife, Haeckel rushed to see the sights that Humboldt had described. And of course he had to follow Humboldt’s footsteps up to the summit of Pico del Teide. As Haeckel climbed through snow and icy winds, he fainted from altitude sickness, and his descent was half stumbling, half falling. But he had made it, he proudly wrote home. That he had seen what Humboldt had seen was ‘highly satisfying’. From Tenerife, he and his three assistants then sailed to the volcanic island of Lanzarote, where they spent three months working on their various zoological projects. Haeckel concentrated on radiolarians and medusae, while his assistants investigated fish, sponges, worms and molluscs. Though the landscape was barren, the sea here was alive, Haeckel said, it was ‘a great animal soup’.

When Haeckel returned to Jena, in April 1867, he was calmer and at peace. Anna would remain the love of his life and even many years later, after he had remarried, the anniversary of her death always made him mournful. ‘On this sad day,’ he wrote thirty-five years later, ‘I am lost.’ But he had learned to accept and live with Anna’s death.

Over the next few decades Haeckel travelled a great deal – mainly within Europe but also to Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Java and Sumatra. He still taught students at Jena, but he was happiest when travelling. His passion for adventure never disappeared. In 1900, aged sixty-six, he went on an expedition to Java, the mere prospect of which, his friends commented, ‘rejuvenated’ him. During these explorations, he collected specimens but also sketched. Like Humboldt, Haeckel thought that the tropics were the best place to understand the fundamentals of ecology.

A single tree in Java’s rainforest, Haeckel wrote, illustrated the relationships of animals and plants with each other and with their environment in the most striking way: with epiphyte orchids that clung with their roots to the tree’s branches and insects that had become perfectly adapted pollinators or climbers that had won the race for light in the tree’s crown – they were all proof of a diverse ecosystem. Here in the tropics, Haeckel said, the ‘struggle of survival’ was so intense that the weapons that flora and fauna had developed were ‘exceptionally rich’ and varied. This was the place to see how plants and animals lived together with ‘friends and enemies, their symbionts and parasites’, Haeckel wrote. It was Humboldt’s web of life.

During the years in Jena, Haeckel also co-founded a scientific magazine in honour of Humboldt and Darwin. Dedicated to evolutionary theory and ecological ideas, it was called Kosmos. He also wrote and published lavish monographs about sea creatures such as calcareous sponges, jellyfish and more on radiolarians, as well as travel accounts and several books that further popularized Darwin’s theories. Many of Haeckel’s books included his sumptuous illustrations, mostly presented as a series rather than as individual images. For Haeckel these depictions showed the narrative of nature – his compelling way of making evolution ‘visible’. Art had become a tool through which Haeckel conveyed scientific knowledge.

At the turn of the century, Haeckel published a series of booklets called Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) – taken together it was a collection of one hundred exquisite illustrations that would shape the stylistic language of Art Nouveau. For more than fifty years, Haeckel told a friend, he had followed Humboldt’s ideas but Art Forms in Nature pushed them even further by introducing scientific subjects to artists and designers. Most of Haeckel’s illustrations revealed the spectacular beauty of tiny organisms that were only visible through the microscope – ‘hidden treasures’, as he wrote. In Art Forms in Nature, Haeckel instructed craftsmen, artists and architects how to use these new ‘beautiful motifs’ correctly by adding an epilogue with tables in which he graded the different organisms according to their aesthetic importance, adding comments such as: ‘extremely rich’, ‘very diverse and meaningful’ or ‘of ornamental design’.

Published between 1899 and 1904, Art Forms in Nature became hugely influential. At a time when urbanization, industrialization and technological advance distanced people from the land, Haeckel’s drawings provided a palette of natural forms and motifs that became a vocabulary for those artists, architects and craftsmen who tried to reunite man and nature through art.

By the turn of the century, Europe had entered the so-called Machine Age. Factories were powered by electric engines and mass production was driving economies in Europe and the United States. Germany had long lagged behind Britain, but after the creation of the German Reich in 1871 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and with the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, as the German emperor, the country had caught up at a dizzying speed. By the time Haeckel published the first issue of Art Forms in Nature in 1899, Germany had joined Britain and the United States as an economic world leader.

By then the first automobiles were driving along German roads and a web of railways connected the industrial centres at the Ruhr with the large port cities such as Hamburg and Bremen. Coal and steel were produced in ever growing quantities and cities were mushrooming around the industrial hubs. The first electric power station had opened in Berlin in 1887. Germany’s chemical industry had become the most important and advanced in the world, producing synthetic dyes, pharmaceuticals and fertilizers. Unlike Britain, Germany had polytechnics and factory research laboratories which nurtured a generation of new scientists and engineers. These were institutions that focused on the practical application of science rather than on academic discovery.

Many of the growing numbers of city-dwellers, Haeckel wrote, were desperate to get away from the ‘restless hustle and bustle’ and from the ‘factories’ murky clouds of smoke’. They escaped to the seaside, to shaded forests and to rugged mountain slopes in the hope of finding themselves in nature. The Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the century tried to reconcile the disturbed relationship between man and nature by taking aesthetic inspiration from the natural world. They ‘now learned from nature’ and not from their teachers, one German designer commented. The introduction of these nature motifs into interiors and architecture became a redemptive step that brought the organic into the increasingly mechanical world.

The famous French glass artist Émile Gallé, for example, owned Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature and insisted that the ‘marine harvest’ from the oceans had turned scientific laboratories into studios for the decorative arts. The ‘crystalline jellyfish’, Gallé said in May 1900, brought new ‘nuances and curves into glass’. The new stylistic language of Art Nouveau infused everything with elements borrowed from nature: from skyscrapers to jewellery, from posters to candlesticks and from furniture to textiles. Sinuous ornaments twisted in tendrilled floral lines on etched glass doors and furniture makers crafted table legs and armrests in branch-like curves.

These organic movements and lines gave Art Nouveau its particular style. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí magnified Haeckel’s marine organisms into banisters and arches. Giant sea urchins decorated his stained-glass windows, and the huge ceiling lamps that he designed looked like nautilus shells. Enormous clumps of seaweed intertwined with algae and marine invertebrates gave shape to Gaudí’s rooms, staircases and windows. Across the Atlantic, in the United States, Louis Sullivan, the so-called ‘father of skyscrapers’, also turned to nature for inspiration. Sullivan owned several of Haeckel’s books and believed that art created a union between the artist’s soul and that of nature. The façades of his buildings were decorated with stylized motifs from flora and fauna. American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany was also influenced by Haeckel. The almost ethereal diaphanous qualities of algae and jellyfish made them perfect for his glass objects. Ornamental medusae were slung around Tiffany vases, and his design studio even produced a gold and platinum ‘seaweed’ necklace.

Binet’s Porte Monumentale at the Paris World Fair in 1900 (Illustration Credit 22.2)

Haeckel’s radiolarians that inspired Binet’s gate – in particular, those in the middle row (Illustration Credit 22.3)

In late August 1900, when Haeckel travelled from Jena to Java, he stopped briefly in Paris to visit the World Fair where he walked through one of his radiolarians. The French architect René Binet had used Haeckel’s images of the microscopic sea creatures as an inspiration for the Porte Monumentale, the huge metal entrance gate that he had designed for the fair. In the previous year Binet had written to Haeckel that ‘everything about it’ – from the smallest detail to the general design – ‘has been inspired by your studies.’ The fair made Art Nouveau famous across the world, and almost 50 million visitors walked through Haeckel’s magnified radiolarian.

Binet himself later published a book called Esquisses Décoratives (Decorative Sketches) which showed how Haeckel’s illustrations could be translated into interior decoration. Tropical jellyfish became lamps, single-celled organisms transmuted into light switches and microscopic views of cell tissues turned into wallpaper patterns. Architects and designers, Binet urged, should ‘turn to the great laboratory of Nature’.

Corals, jellyfish and algae moved into the home, and Haeckel’s half-joking suggestion to Allmers, four decades previously, about using his radiolarian sketches from Italy to invent a new style had become true. In Jena, Haeckel had named his house Villa Medusa⁶ after his beloved jellyfish and decorated it accordingly. The ceiling rosette in the dining room, for example, was based on his own drawing of a medusa that he had discovered in Sri Lanka.

As humankind dismantled the natural world into ever smaller parts – down to cells, molecules, atoms and then electrons – Haeckel believed that this fragmented world had to be reconciled. Humboldt had always talked about the unity of nature, but Haeckel took this idea a step further. He became an ardent proponent of ‘monism’ – the idea that there was no division between the organic and the inorganic world. Monism turned explicitly against the concept of a dualism between mind and matter. This idea of unity replaced God, and with this, monism became the most important ersatz religion at the turn of the twentieth century.

Binet’s designs for electric light switches which borrowed heavily from Haeckel’s drawings (Illustration Credit 22.4)

Haeckel’s drawing of the medusa that was painted on the ceiling at Villa Medusa (Illustration Credit 22.5)

Haeckel explained the philosophical foundation of this view of the world in his book Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe) which was published in 1899, the same year as the first issue of his Art Forms in Nature. It became a huge international bestseller, with 450,000 copies sold in Germany alone. Welträthsel was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Sanskrit, Chinese and Hebrew and became the most influential popular science book at the turn of the century. In Welträthsel Haeckel wrote about the soul, the body and the unity of nature; about knowledge and faith; and about science and religion. It became the bible of monism.

Haeckel wrote that the goddess of truth lived in the ‘temple of nature’. The soaring columns of the monistic ‘church’ were slender palms and tropical trees embraced by lianas, he said, and instead of altars they would have aquaria filled with delicate corals and colourful fish. From the ‘womb of our Mother Nature’, Haeckel declared, flows a stream of ‘eternal beauties’ that never runs dry.

He also believed that the unity in nature could be expressed through aesthetics. To Haeckel’s mind, this nature-infused art evoked a new world. As Humboldt had already said in his ‘brilliant Kosmos’, Haeckel wrote, art was one of the most important educational tools as it nurtured the love for nature. What Humboldt had called the ‘scientific and aesthetic contemplation’ of the natural world, Haeckel now insisted, was essential for the understanding of the universe, and it was this appreciation that became a ‘natural religion’.

As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need for priests and cathedrals.

¹ Haeckel’s reputation received the harshest blows in the second half of the twentieth century when historians blamed him for providing the Nazis with the intellectual foundation for their racial programmes. In his biography The Tragic Sense of Life, Robert Richards argued that Haeckel, who died more than a decade before the Nazis came to power, was not an anti-Semite. In fact Haeckel had placed Jews next to Caucasians on his controversial ‘stem-trees’. Though not acceptable today, Haeckel’s racial theories of a progressive path from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’ races were shared by Darwin and many other nineteenth-century scientists.

² Allmers replied to Haeckel that his cousin had appropriated one of the radiolarian drawings as a ‘crochet pattern’.

³ Haeckel’s books on Darwin’s evolutionary theory were translated into more than a dozen languages and sold a greater number of copies than Darwin’s book itself. More people learned about evolutionary theory from Haeckel than from any other source.

⁴ Generelle Morphologie also provided a general scientific overview to counterbalance the hardening divisions between the disciplines. Scientists, Haeckel wrote, had lost the understanding of the whole – the huge number of specialists had thrown the sciences into ‘Babylonian confusion’. Botanists and zoologists might be collecting individual building blocks but they had lost sight of the blueprint of the whole. It was one great ‘chaotic pile of rubble’ and no one had a clue any more – except for Darwin … and Haeckel, of course.

⁵ Haeckel had long been steeped in ecological thinking. In early 1854, as a young student in Würzburg reading Humboldt, he had already thought of the environmental consequences of deforestation. Ten years before George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, Haeckel wrote that the ancients had felled the forests in the Middle East which in turn had changed the climate there. Civilization and the destruction of forests came ‘hand in hand’, he said. Over time it would be the same in Europe, Haeckel predicted. Barren soils, climate change and starvation would eventually lead to a mass exodus from Europe to more fertile lands. ‘Europe and its hyper-civilisation will soon be over,’ he said.

⁶ Haeckel built his villa exactly on the spot from where Goethe had sketched Friedrich Schiller’s Garden House in 1810. From his window, Haeckel could see across the small River Leutra to Schiller’s old house – the place where the Humboldt brothers, Goethe and Schiller had spent many evenings in the early summer of 1797.