Heribert Raus Alexander von Humboldt (1860)—der erste Humboldt-Roman [Heribert Rau’s Alexander von Humboldt (1860)—the first Humboldt novel]

Abstract

Already during his lifetime, Alexander von Humboldt enjoyed considerable media attention. He had hardly passed away on May 6, 1859 when the focus on his life intensified, leading by 1860 to a series of publications that included Heribert Rau’s Alexander von Humboldt. Culturhistorisch-biographischer Roman [Alexander von Humboldt. Cultural-Historical-Biographical Novel]. With 2161 pages in seven parts, this voluminous work assumed a unique place within the flood of publications about Humboldt and represented the first attempt to write a novel about his person. After a short excursion into Rau’s life, the following article takes a look at both the negative and positive reception of the work, brings in the theoretical approach of biofiction to more clearly define what Rau is undertaking in his text, and asks whether the biography is still worth reading today in cultural-historical and literary respects. Problems of plagiarism and of the novel’s translation into Spanish are also considered.