Friedrich Pettrich had an unpleasant stay in Washington, D.C., back in the 1840s. The German-born artist had traveled there from his adopted home of Philadelphia because President Tyler had given him a plum job: a commission to design four sculptures to adorn the base of the Washington Monument. While Congress was deciding whether to appropriate the funds for the project, an Italian rival tried to kill Pettrich. He was shot, but he survived. When he recovered from his wounds, he found that Congress had canceled his project.
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It remained there, largely forgotten until Rolf Achilles got his hands on it a few years ago. He was searching the library for materials to use in an exhibition to be entitled “Organizing the Unknown: German Science and the American West.” “There was this little box that said ‘Pettrich,’” says Achilles, “and I thought, ‘That sounds German,’ so I looked at it.”
The exhibition that Achilles ended up curating–with the help of John Aubrey, curator of the Newberry’s Ayer Collection of books on the expanding west–covers the century from the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 to the closing of the frontier. Consisting of reproductions of maps and illustrations from the Newberry’s collection, it includes everything from the travel journals of the learned Alexander von Humboldt to popular German novels like Frederick Gerstacker’s picaresque The Pirates of the Mississippi.
Achilles is unsure why so many Germans were scientists and explorers–and produced art that publicized both–though he notes that the German university system tended to promote a liberal breadth of education. “And the political structure in German-speaking areas was such a disaster,” he says, that many men who might otherwise have become statesmen and civil servants went into other fields. But there was also, he says, a quest for knowledge. “The Germans had a curiosity about the world,” he says. “The English wanted to do business. The French wanted to control land. The Germans wanted to control knowledge. . . . The New World offered them knowledge.”
