| Summary: | Department Head: Diane Claire Margolf. 2010 Spring. Includes bibliographical references (pages 117-125). This thesis examines how Germans invested the polar environment with both metaphorical and scientific meaning between 1865 and 1914. It argues that German nationalists put the Northern environment to use toward the process of German nation-building in the nineteenth century and maintains that German polar protagonists promoted travel to the Far South for primarily imperial purposes in the early twentieth century. During these years Germans used narratives of travel, science, and industry in various ways to support both the Arctic and Antarctic project. Further, this research contends that doing environmental history of the German exploration of the Polar Regions can reveal wider social, economic, and political priorities pressurizing the German state. By tracing, then, the German construction and representation of polar nature across the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth-century's turn, this thesis insists that German priorities shifted over time as domestic and international circumstances changed. In investigating how the polar environment became increasingly subject to nationalist motivations and imperial ambitions, this thesis hopes to exhibit the earth's Poles as regions where several national destines run alongside one another. To this end, it forwards the Polar Regions as particularly useful sites for examining the intersection of nation-building, empire, and the environment.
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