INTRODUCTION

When a member of a scientific institution lamented the lack of financial support for the study of nature in nineteenth-century Frankfurt, the fault was first and foremost laid at the door of the wealthy compatriots, whose meagre monetary contribution revealed their reluctance to fulfil their duty to the community. Few assumed that this duty devolved, at least partly, on the municipal government and its coffers. Thus Wilhelm Kobelt, a malacologist and an ambitious member of a scientific association in Frankfurt, grumbled in his diary on 3 May 1870 that the old Frankfurters who still had money to spare for scientific purposes are becoming ever rarer.1 The Senckenberg Society for the Study of Nature (Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft),2 the institution that meant so much to him, was a voluntary association that maintained its facilities, including an extensive natural history museum, solely on the basis of contributions from its members and fellow citizens. Matters of culture and learning followed a tacit and simple rule in nineteenth-century Frankfurt: the residents should tend to it. The institutions and individuals in the public domain were solely responsible for fostering and cultivating the kind of arts and sciences that the dwellers of the city needed. The participation of the government was kept to a minimum, as was its intervention. The Senckenberg Society, founded in 1817, was the first and most prestigious of many scientific associations (Naturvereine) that residents of Frankfurt founded to pursue the knowledge of nature. Devoted citizens ran its museum and organized lectures to improve the knowledge of the physicians, teachers and children of Frankfurt, and the citys wealthy and powerful, albeit sometimes grudgingly, financed the whole enterprise out of their pockets. Kobelt, in fact, belonged to the last generation of Frankfurters who would voice their discontent in the manner he did. About two decades after his journal entry Franz Adickes, Frankfurts most ambitious mayor, orchestrated a comprehensive reorganization of the citys intellectual and public life. The municipal government, now eager to display initiative, rallied the citys sponsors and institutions for the foundation of a university. Not every association answered the mayors call willingly, but many yielded to his persuasion, and so did the Senckenberg Society. It became a new fund, a new premise and a new role as a key institution for the new

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university. The founding of the University of Frankfurt in 1914 thus marked a watershed in the citys cultural politics as the end of the long reign of civic voluntary associations (Vereine). To be sure, the associations retained a high profile in Frankfurts intellectual and cultural life, but the part of the power they had relinquished was now in the hands of the municipal government. This book is a study of Frankfurts scientific associations from the foundation of the Senckenberg Society shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the inauguration of the university on the eve of the First World War. Almost for a century, science belonged to the public institutions and private scholars in Frankfurt, and the municipal authority kept a polite distance from the voluntary associations. Yet the seemingly neat line drawn between culture and politics was, as ever so often appearances are, deceptive. In Frankfurt, the two were rarely pursued in separate spheres. Issues of culture and politics entwined inevitably in the web of personal connections and institutional contacts woven across the compact city. Intellectual pursuits in the public domain were conducted with an eye alert to larger socio-political and economic developments. Frankfurts institutions for science catered not only to the needs of those interested in the natural world. What was learned, discovered or fostered in these associations rendered silent services to the city and its residents, advancing propositions for a better Frankfurt. Numerous scientific societies emerged to challenge the Senckenberg Society, and some established themselves successfully in the public life of a city that transformed itself from a small mercantile republic into a bustling centre of finance and industry. Each society founded for the sake of science addressed a changing urban community, and promulgated practices it saw fit for the new Frankfurt it envisaged. Every one of these institutions was a collective enterprise to give the city a novel and improved facet, or to salvage what the actors saw as its proud tradition. Science, this book argues, was often instrumental in introducing tacit yet fundamental changes to the citys socio-political and cultural life. This volume will explore Frankfurts scientific associations as cradles of new norms and practices that wrought its urban identity. What an innovation or improvement entailed was certainly contested. One quality, however, remained unaltered in the citys public life. Throughout the period covered in this book, Frankfurt remained prolific in men (and to a lesser extent, women) who would align for the sake of their community. Most were actively involved in the Senckenberg Society, the pivot and platform of local intellectual contacts, or if not, they championed initiatives that disputed its preeminence. This book will trace their endeavours, from the small circle of men who founded the citys first natural history society in Restoration Frankfurt to Kobelts contemporaries, who, as the last generation of private scholars, sought to enhance the citys intellectual renown through the reorganization of its associational life.

Introduction

What consistently guided the intellectual initiatives of the residents of Frankfurt was the firm belief that it was their duty to preserve or remake the city according to the demands of their time. At the hands of its scientific practitioners and institutions, nineteenth-century Frankfurt made its gradual departure from a traditional system of governance, outgrowing its separatist order based on distinctions of religion, estates or fortune. With its endorsement of a new order based on liberal politics, the invisible wall that guarded the vested rights of the privileged members of the community was levelled to welcome most of the newcomers to the city. In refashioning the world Frankfurts townsfolk felt as their own, science often played a pivotal role. By the close of the century, that world entailed a broad expanse of land stretching well beyond the lines that used to divide the city-state from foreign soil, and Frankfurters were those who were at home in it. This is a book about a citys reinvention, told as a story of its scientific associations as the leading protagonists in its transformation into a modern and dynamic community.

Associational Science
Frankfurt was one of the four Imperial Cities to survive the Napoleonic Wars with its sovereignty intact. The Free City of Frankfurt, where merchants ruled instead of a monarch, was a small but outstandingly wealthy city-republic with its own army and diplomats, and autonomy dating back to the fourteenth century.3 In the age of nation-building, however, city-republics were vulnerable anachronisms bound to follow the path of the forty-seven Imperial Cities that vanished in 1816.4 Frankfurt, as well as the remaining three city-states, relinquished their sovereignty in the process of German national unification. Prussia annexed Frankfurt in 1866 and relegated it to a Kreisstadt (district town), while Bremen, Lbeck and Hamburg joined the North German Confederation in the same year.5 The mercantile republics quaint world of great merchants and traders, made famous by Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks, are unexplored lodes for cultural and intellectual historians, and particularly for historians of science. The general historiography shrugs these cities off as obsolete remnants of the ancien regime.6 Yet a few scholars have taken to the investigation of these communities, attracted by the peculiar socio-political orders nurtured in their long and prosperous histories.7 Cultural and intellectual matters were public concerns in a mercantile republic. The cities sustained a strong tradition of civic patronage supported by a large number of wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs. The fact that Hamburg owed almost all of its cultural life to private initiative convinced Richard Evans of its merchants pragmatism towards intellectual and cultural pursuits.8 Allegedly, the city art gallery, the opera house, the concert hall and Carl Hagenbecks famous Tierpark, all built by commercial enterprise, were for profit and not for

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prestige. The present study, however, sees a flourishing culture of sponsorship where Evans found philistinism. Heavy state funding may not have been the norm in these republics, but Hamburgs thriving civic institutions attest to its citizens active engagement with arts and sciences. In fact, nineteenth-century Hamburg sustained two zoos, Hagenbecks Tierpark and the Hamburg Zoological Garden, in addition to an ethnographic museum and a prestigious natural history museum, all without much support from the municipal authorities.9 Alongside Frankfurt, it was also the first city in the German Reich to found a municipal university largely funded by private donations.10 The strong tradition of civic patronage, prescribing it a noblesse oblige of leading citizens to sponsor enterprises for the public good, ensured financial support for cunning cultural entrepreneurs.11 These mercantile communities, therefore, are ideal for exploring civic associational culture. Civic voluntary associations, particularly those active in the socio-political and cultural domains, have long captured the attention of general historians.12 The Vereine were voluntary associations organized by a number of men, and to a much lesser extent, women, to achieve a common goal. Associational culture is a growing field of investigation for the scholars of German sciences.13 In the last two decades, the study of science has broadened its scope beyond universities and industrial laboratories to explore institutions and practices in the public sphere, challenging and enriching the traditional narrative of modern German sciences dominated by the state and industry.14 An increasing number of studies featuring print culture, public exhibitions, popular lectures and voluntary associations, revealing how practitioners and institutions of the public sphere forged views about nature and the world, has added a new depth to the historical picture of science at the university research institutes, technical colleges and industrial laboratories. To this rising interest, the understanding of the Vereine is essential, as they provided the social sphere where the interests and pursuits of private scholars and collectors were viable, relatively independent of state concern or industrial applicability. As a sovereign Free City ruled by wealthy merchants, Frankfurt had, unlike Prussia or Baden, neither a university nor a centralized government to direct the promotion of science. Instead, a flourishing associational culture, funded by private patronage, dominated the citys intellectual and cultural life. The civic voluntary associations, such as the Senckenberg Society, led scientific investigations and discussions. Men who worked as physicians, teachers and shopkeepers during the day set up these institutions so that they could spend their free evenings and weekends discussing, collecting and classifying. The societies catered primarily to the local inhabitants, yet several achieved international renown, and so turned Frankfurt into an important centre for the study of nature. By the mid-1830s, the Senckenberg Society owned one of the top five natural history collections in

Introduction

Europe, in 1858, the second oldest German zoo opened its gates and, in 1914, the city launched the first privately funded university in the German lands. Two aspects of science in German associational culture particularly await scrutiny. The first is how it related itself to academic science. Findings are being accumulated on the knowledge and practices cultivated in the societies and clubs. Daums precursory work, canvassing the sheer diversity of public institutions for science, has opened up the field for close-up studies.15 The uncovered offers a vivid contrast to the already known. Unlike the consistent and disciplined pursuits of the increasingly professionalizing research laboratories, the works of the weekend scholars and private collectors are spontaneous, their world comprehensive and heterogeneous. Studies have discovered an alternative sphere where practices that had strayed off from the mainstream of the academia were viable, and where men unable to follow the steep path of a professional scientist found a second chance. So unlike in their rationale, the wall that separated the two milieux, however, was hardly impenetrable. The traffic of ideas and individuals was at times lively enough to bring a novel discipline into life, as Nyhart demonstrates in her investigation of environmental thought.16 Hence, more needs to be learned about how scientific practices brought forth in the sphere of the associations affected the debates and interests in the academia, and vice versa. The second aspect concerns a certain set of issues that has eluded historians of scientific institutions. While an increasing number of studies are exploring the functions and operations of numerous societies, questions as to why certain enterprises succeeded while others foundered, or how individual institutions related to each other, are left unanswered. The problem is a methodological one. The focus on institutions, so apt in capturing internal dealings and developments, has obliterated the obvious: no institution in the public sphere existed in isolation. People frequently moved from one place to another, bringing connections they had into the institutions they joined. Institutional programmes were drafted with a side glance to potential competitors, and the competitions, rivalry and alliances in which the institutions were involved affected the amount of financial and human resources available to an association as well as its symbolic capital. This study leans on Harold Mah and his criticism of the historians approach to the concept of the public sphere and its institutions. Mah warns historians of the consequences of literally spatialising the notion of the public sphere. By imagining the public sphere as an open stage where various actors could enter and vie for the limelight, and treating it as if it were a social reality, Mah argues, historians have missed the central point of Habermass argument. To offer a stage, in fact, is only the preliminary condition of the logic of the public sphere. The ideal aim of the public sphere, he emphasizes, is to turn the persons on that stage into a public, a collective subject with a unified opinion.17 His advice is indeed valuable, as it reminds us of a plain yet important aspect of the concept

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of the public sphere: though it may never attain a single voice as a unified object, it exists indeed as a collective, first and foremost constituted of the numerous networks of people spawned throughout and beyond the community. Similarly, the scientific associations investigated here were not only institutions in the public sphere, they were significant nodes in the networks that constituted the public domain itself. The associations, in other words, are conceptualized here as platforms embedded within the fine mesh of personal and institutional ties, functioning as places where certain sets of sociability and knowledge could be cultivated over a prolonged period of time. Deeply rooted within the local networks, the scientific practices and sociability they nurtured were not only inextricably linked to the socio-political and economical issues the city faced, they were powerful enough to recast the norms governing the citys public life. The book diverges from conventional institutional histories in both scope and focus. It will offer a diachronic account of the long-term transformations in associational culture. Particular attention will be paid to the groups of actors who were behind the key institutions and their endeavours to establish new norm and practices. Instead of addressing individual institutions, the book will follow their path of action, often crossing institutional thresholds. As the most prominent and prolific of Frankfurts scientific associations, the Senckenberg Society will claim more attention than any other institution. Throughout the period investigated here, the society remained a focal point of the citys associational life, recurrently bringing forth new collective endeavours. Chiefly due to the focus on the Senckenberg Society, natural history will feature here more than other areas of the natural sciences. Changes and continuities, however, will be tracked across the borders of disciplines. The study will probe practices that would fall beyond the standard scope of what science entailed, such as the professional identity nurtured among physicians in the first half of the century or the social practices established with the foundation of the zoo in the suburbs. The science discussed in this book, however, will sustain the idiosyncrasy so as to document the course contemporaries took among the institutional and disciplinary alternatives. To provide a comprehensive and consistent account of what scientific practice entailed in nineteenth-century Frankfurt is not what this book intends to do. The question asked here approaches the matter from a somewhat unusual angle for a study in history of science: it asks what the contemporaries enabled through their engagement with science. For those involved in Frankfurts associational culture, science presented a valuable resource, instrumental in translating some dry and lofty political agendas into compelling institutional programmes. Congenial gatherings of professional peers turned a struggle against religious discrimination into an agreeable daily practice. The pleasures of an exhibition visit or a collecting trip was much better at altering the Lebenswelt of a person than a map recast according to the

Introduction

official announcement. In short, this book will show how associational science enabled the contemporaries to address sensitive political issues without inviting unwanted politicizations and frictions.

Practitioners
Studies of scientific practice in the public sphere are uncovering the ideological and socio-political diversity of the practitioners of natural knowledge. The institutional and disciplinary development of the German sciences has long been a story of enlightened government officials, university professors and industrial entrepreneurs.18 Their neohumanistic ideas, their support of the kleindeutsch German Reich and their optimistic faith in the progress of the nation through science and industry guided heavy state involvement, the inauguration of university research institutes and the establishment of industrial plants. Now historians are uncovering other groups of scientific practitioners beyond the laboratories. A crucial issue for this endeavour is the identity of the scientific public. A vexing question for scholars of modern German sciences is the efficacy of the category Brger (bourgeois or middle class) as an analytical tool or, in other words, the lack of its conceptual alternatives. I do not mean to imply here that the social profile of the scientific practitioners in the public domain converge with those of the middle class. A clarification of the category, however, may be a necessary precaution. The reassessment of the category is long overdue, as the historical community disagrees on its usage.19 Yet historians of German sciences have been using the term without clarifying its ambiguity, consequently bracketing the question of identity. Often, their characterization of the nineteenth-century scientific public is tautological in that the authors argue that the practitioners were Brger because they displayed brgerlich socio-political and cultural traits.20 In any event, the city-states heterogeneous scientific public, particularly characterized by the active role of the merchants both as sponsors and producers of knowledge, resists the straightforward application of the term Brger. It sits uncomfortably with the complex negotiations between different social groups, the driving force behind the mercantile communities dynamic public life. While Evans acknowledges the heterogeneity of Hamburgs political public, he fails to do the same for its cultural and intellectual public, dismissing Hamburg merchants cultural initiatives as philistinism.21 He may have been in thrall to the powerful stereotypes perpetuated in literary representations that have delayed the acknowledgement of the mercantile communities flourishing public culture by intellectual and cultural historians. Frankfurt, for instance, has its own satirist, the poet Clemens Brentano (17781842), who had a character in his novel, a successful Frankfurt merchant, say:

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Science and Societies in Frankfurt am Main so I will make myself a peer, become commercial councillor, build a greenhouse, marry you [his daughter] to a great lord, have myself portrayed in copper, read a book on immortality of the soul, replace my white horse with an English one, in short, I will show that I am not without sensitivity.22

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Science and City

Brentano, heir to a great mercantile house turned prodigal son, could not help censuring the snobbish Frankfurt merchants. Alongside titles, mansions and English thoroughbreds, connoisseurship of the arts and sciences was only a part of an ostentatious lifestyle merchants purchased after their pecuniary concerns were settled. The same men, however, sustained a lively institutional tradition in cooperation, or sometimes in contest, with various social groups such as physicians, teachers and bank clerks in the scientific associations, accumulated nationally renowned collections of fine arts as in Cologne23 or turned a city into a sanctuary for intellectual practices challenging orthodox scholarship, such as in Basel.24 The present study will use the category Brger too, but in order to propose an alternative approach. It will treat the term as a discursive reality, that is, rather than identifying a given social group of actors as Brger, this book will employ the category as a frame to capture the social relations generated by contemporaries usage of the term. Unlike their colleagues, German historians have been more cautious towards the linguistic turn.25 By treating social categories as products of socio-political and cultural discourse about relations, the British scholarship on class, for instance, has provided fruitful insight into the complex relationships forged along the lines of social demarcation.26 Though many scholars do acknowledge the heterogeneity of the German middle class, and recognize the importance of linguistic and cultural practices in forging a social identity,27 the area awaits further scrutiny, particularly of the actual usage of the term by the contemporaries. Thus the study will focus on the contemporaries negotiations to forge the meaning of the word Brger. In other words, this book will investigate how social groups used the term to construct their identities. The heterogeneity of the scientific public was an essential element in the construction of social categories, as identities were forged in negotiations and encounters between different social groups to distinguish themselves from others. By focusing on the usage of the term Brger, this study will be able to capture the social groups involved in the negotiations and define them by their endeavours to forge or transform the meanings of the term.

The close correspondence between the development of the community and intellectual enterprise is not unique to city-states,28 but pronounced and conspicuous in these communities. Cities were not only important units in the inhabitants geographical perception, but also a crucial entity in their sense of identity, par-

Introduction

ticularly in city-states where the city, the state and in most cases, the inhabitants Lebenswelt converge. Therefore, the present study intersects with the recent historical interest in cities as the settings of science. Investigations of the effect of the immediate spatial surroundings on the production of knowledge have constituted a particularly active field of research.29 Inspired by works on the role of science in the public domain, an increasing number of scholars have extended their scope to the urban sphere as the most important spatial unit of investigation.30 Cities have provided a productive common ground for scholars both of science in the public domain and of the situatedness of scientific practice. Numerous studies on cities like London and Berlin have linked the changing intellectual life with the growth and transformation of the urban sphere.31 This book extends the scope further into the realm of the urban inhabitants sense of identity. Norton Wise, Sven Dierig and Andrew Zimmerman, for instance, have already presented a much richer picture of urban intellectual life by understanding Berlin not simply as a physical setting, but as an extended personal network enabling contact between different intellectual and cultural milieux.32 The present study will push a step forward and capture a city not only as a physical presence enveloping practitioners and institutions of science, but also as a community to which these practitioners felt a sense of allegiance. It will show Frankfurt as partially created by the scientific practices they nurtured in their associations. The scientific societies institutionalized and propagated their visions of the community and visions of scientific practice as an inseparable whole. Frankfurts associational sphere became the battleground where contradictory views about the city and the role of science contended with each other. Because the social sphere created and sustained by the associations was urban public life, debates about who should participate in science were inseparable from discussions about who was entitled to be a member of the community. Thus scientific practices advocated in each institution addressed the concerns and interests of a distinct social group, presenting a view of what Frankfurt should become and what science should do for the city. This study will claim that the scientific associations were an important force pushing Frankfurts transformation from a mercantile city-republic to a centre of finance and industry in Imperial Germany. It will show that the vision of the community was forged in competitions and negotiations between various stakeholders divergent views about who and what should count in the city. Only those collective endeavours that succeeded in producing knowledge and practice that the Frankfurters needed, enjoyed a commensurate status in the citys ever-changing associational landscape.

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Science and Societies in Frankfurt am Main

Structure and Sources

The present study will offer a consistent historical picture of the development of Frankfurts public life. For such a well-investigated city, its historiography is surprisingly incoherent. While works on the citys republican period emphasize the uniqueness of its socio-political tradition,33 investigations of the city as the seat of the 1848 National Assembly34 and of Frankfurt as the bastion of liberal communal politics in the German Reich,35 remain to a large extent unconnected to the citys history as a mercantile republic. Many of these studies acknowledge the citys peculiarity, but the multifarious associational life that opened up to the delegates to the Paulskirche, or its residents staunch support of the liberal political parties in the German Reich,36 remain unexplained postulates although they play a crucial part in their narratives. The present study is not intended as an exhaustive account of the citys socio-political and cultural development. The five chapters, organized in roughly chronological order, present crucial moments of transition. They throw a light on the key actors who brought about the transformation of scientific practice and the reorganization of the citys associational and political landscape. They will suggest a way to piece together the different stories told about Frankfurts public life. The resulting account will be of interest not only to the historians of the city, as it shows the various ways in which answers to local problems were fashioned into concerns of national and international audiences in the hands of Frankfurts scientific institutions. In other words, this study is an attempt to understand the effect of what has been set aside as too negligible, too particularist or too local from the historiography of German sciences in both the local milieu and what constituted German sciences at the national level. The first chapter covers the three decades from the close of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the eve of the 1848/9 Revolution, showing how the societys establishment was brought about by cultural patronage based on the principle of division of labour between the different estates. It offers an account of a group of naturalists who enabled the meteoric rise of the Senckenberg Society for the Study of Nature in Restoration Frankfurt. In less than a decade from its opening, the museum of the society had become one of the leading European natural-historical collections. It also reassesses the roles of scientific associations in an estate society. The Senckenberg Society became a focal point for cooperation of the merchant and learned estates, united by the upsurge of patriotism in the wake of the restoration of republican sovereignty. Productive affinities developed between the conservative patriotism embodied in the Senckenberg Societys zoological practice, and the increasing cultural commitment of the mercantile estate, which came politically to the fore in the post-war reorganization of the republics constitution. The institutions success was sustained by a decidedly

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Introduction

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localist scientific practice, defined by scepticism towards contemporary scientific commitments to social-reformative and nationalist causes. The second chapter features a crucial transformation of public life in Frankfurt, initiated by liberal physicians in the Vormrz and precipitated in the 1848/9 Revolution. Bound together by a powerful professional solidarity previously unobserved among the citys learned men, the physicians embraced the opportunity to break up the Restoration status quo based on segregation by wealth, religion and estate. Committed to sober political pragmatism, they aimed to avoid both revolution and repression. Their foundation of the Citizens Club marked the communitys departure from the Restoration codes of conduct. For the first time, an association opened its doors to the whole citizenry, establishing an egalitarian and civic reinterpretation of civil identity. Its success as the focal point of Frankfurts social life in the next decades epitomized the demise of separatism as the citys associational norm, a factor underlined by the decline of associations based on distinctions of religion, wealth, occupation or estate, including the Senckenberg Society. The third chapter will probe the link between the development of the suburbs in 1850s Frankfurt, the establishment of the Zoological Garden and the liberals ascent in the German Reich. It will argue that in contrast to the Senckenberg Society, which was deeply anchored in Frankfurts republican traditions both ideologically and economically, the zoo institutionalized a self-consciously middle-class and anti-traditionalist community in the Westend, the suburban residential district for well-to-do Frankfurters that developed in this period. The residents of Westend founded the zoo as the districts own centre of social life, structuring the institution around the practice of Spazieren, the ritualized strolling of the middle class. The zoo enabled the integration of the appreciation of natural objects into the residents everyday routines. The gradual accumulation of shared values, practices and daily routines observed among the suburban residents, I will show, manifested the establishment of an alternative set of values that challenged the norms upheld by the traditional elites, and was the decisive factor in the creation of a liberal political milieu. The fourth chapter investigates the emergence of scientific practitioners who openly questioned the republican tradition amid the major socio-political and economic reorganization of the city from the late 1850s to the 1860s. The chapter will feature two contrasting endeavours to establish an alternative vision of the community, both loosely connected to the Senckenberg Society. The first section investigates the group of immigrant intellectuals around Otto Volger (182297), a radical democrat who initiated the German Independent Academy. The academys open endorsement of the nationalist cause provoked the suspicions and even hostility of the citys elite and existing associations, especially the Senckenberg Society. The academy, however, succeeded in recruiting

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from the expanding milieu of immigrant intellectuals, testifying to the diversification of Frankfurts scientific public brought about by demographic and topographic changes. Even within the elites, republicans were gradually outnumbered by liberals, who welcomed and encouraged the citys demographic and socio-economic transformation. The leading figure was the politician, physician and initiator of Frankfurts public health reform, Georg Varrentrapp (180986). The remaining sections of the chapter will go on to discuss the role of this health reform in the ascent of the liberals and democrats in the city government, and will show that Frankfurts political and sanitary reforms addressed Frankfurters changing sense of community. Varrentrapps public health reform embodied the liberals acknowledgement of the socio-political problems that republican Frankfurt had ignored, from insufficient sanitary infrastructure to the outdated social welfare system that failed to keep pace with the citys demographic and spatial growth. It presented Frankfurt as a modern, dynamic community whose flourishing commerce and industry relied as much on immigrants as on longstanding residents. The four decades from the late 1860s to the turn of the century saw a fundamental transformation in the Senckenberg Societys institutional identity. By the 1890s, the institution was enjoying an intellectual revival, having at last managed to emerge from its mid-century lethargy. The fifth chapter will show how the arrival of an ambitious and productive generation of naturalists set a comprehensive reassessment of the institutions programme in motion. The key figures are the malacologists Wilhelm Kobelt (18401916) and David Friedrich Heynemann (18291904), who represent the last generation of naturalists who worked in the Senckenberg Museum as private, part-time scholars. They sought to restore the institution first as a national centre of zoological research, and then as a regional centre for public biological education. Their practice of natural history, promoted through the foundation of the German Malacozoological Society and the establishment of a local fauna collection, was characterized by a strong attachment to the nature of Frankfurts surrounding countryside nurtured through their experience as immigrants from this region. The local fauna collection was particularly groundbreaking, since it presented the citys economic and cultural hinterland as an essential component of the Frankfurter Heimat. For the first time in Frankfurt, hitherto conceived as a compact Father City (Vaterstadt) distinguished from the neighbouring communities by its peculiar socio-political tradition, was portrayed as an integral part of the spatial expanse encompassing the valley of the rivers Rhine and Main. A short assessment of the municipal reform carried out under the mayor Adickes will precede the conclusion. The introduction of an interventionist cultural policy by the new mayor eventually led to the foundation of the University

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of Frankfurt and the demise of the voluntary associations as the chief actors in the citys cultural life. The rich and to a large extent unexploited archive of the Senckenberg Society (Senckenberg Gesellschaft fr Naturforschung), now in the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum (Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum), provided the bulk of the unpublished manuscript sources used in this study. The archives of the various Frankfurt societies, such as the Polytechnic Society, the Dr Senckenberg Foundation (Dr. Senckenbergische Stiftung)37 and the Society for Natural-Scientific Conversation, now deposited in the Institute for Municipal History (Institut fr Stadtgeschichte) in Frankfurt, hardly consulted before by other historians, proved to be an abundant source of information. As for printed sources, the comprehensive collection of contemporary periodicals, magazines and newspapers at the University Library of the University of Frankfurt am Main (Universittsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg) turned out to be particularly useful. The archive of the German Independent Academy, housed in the Goethehaus, provided the bulk of the manuscript and printed sources used in chapter 4: its archive, hitherto primarily used by historians of literature, is also a fruitful source for historians of science.

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