Associations of Politics and Nature: Cuban Corals in East‐Berlin, 1964–1974. The concept of association is centre stage in ecological studies on coral reefs. It describes the specific composition of diverse coral species in a given reef section that depends, among other factors, on the type of surf and the form of the seabed. ‘Association’ is also an important concept in Bruno Latour's plea for transcending the division between humans and objects in sociological analysis. Drawing on the idea of association, the (...) article explores the history of the corals that were moved from the northern Cuban coast to East‐Berlin in the late 1960s and worked into a coral reef diorama exhibited in East Berlin's Natural History Museum in 1974. By focusing on the mobilisation of the corals between Cuba and the GDR as well as within the museum, I will show that far from being sharply defined objects of nature, the corals collected in Cuba and displayed in East‐Berlin must be understood as parts of constantly changing heterogeneous associations of organisms, non‐organic material, national politics, postcolonial economies and institutional politics. (shrink)

The paper states that since 1884 German naturalists and scientific expeditions intensified the exploration of the natural history of the African colonies of Germany. During the relatively short period of thirty years they have collected a lot of natural objects, of descriptions and pictures of animals in the landscape as well as of the living conditions in the natural environment. But we can find also several forerunners of the early nineteenth century. Therefore the paper is comparing the scientific results of (...) earlier expeditions with the yield of the natural history travels during the colonial period, in order to state the development and change of the aim of the natural history researches at Africa. Several types of sources were consulted, mainly individual travel descriptions, reports of expeditions in special periodicals like Deutsches Kolonialblatt, Amtsblatt für die Schutzgebiete, Mittheilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten, etc., and furthermore publications of the scientific results. Especially the results of zoology and natural history, which were neglected by historians of science, will be analysed by representative examples. The emergence of scientific research in German African colonies with regard to qualitative and quantitative aspects and their change by the impact of the German colonial movement from 1884 to 1914 will be discussed. (shrink)