Please join us for a free public lecture by this year's next Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s 2025 William E. and Mary B. Ritter Memorial Fellowship recipient, Katrin Kleemann from the German Maritime Museum - Leibniz Institute for Maritime History.
Kleemann’s lecture, titled, “Logbooks, Messages in a Bottle, and Research Expeditions: The Emergence of the German Maritime Observatory in 1875,” will take place on Monday, April 21, 2025 at 3 p.m. at the Scripps Seaside Forum. A reception with light refreshments will follow.
Lecture Description:
In the mid-19th century, maritime institutes were founded in the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Australia, all with a mission to make shipping safer and faster by producing sailing recommendations for ships. Internationally, the emergence of these institutions is closely tied to Matthew Fontaine Maury. In Germany, Georg Neumayer and Wilhelm von Freeden made efforts to establish a similar institution as early as the 1850s. The political patchwork that was Germany and the reality of the wars of unification before 1871 made the endeavor challenging and it was not until the mid-1870s that a state-funded institution that recommended sailing routes, gathered data to improve shipping safety and efficiency, and promoted maritime knowledge came to be. The data came from taking part in maritime research expeditions, commissioning observations aboard ships, and even messages found in bottles. This presentation will analyze the emergence of the German Maritime Observatory (Deutsche Seewarte), which was founded in Hamburg in 1875 and existed until 1945. Today, some of the Observatory’s tasks are carried out by its successor institutions, such as the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency of Germany, located just across the street from the former German Maritime Observatory, which was destroyed in an air raid in 1945.
Learn more about the Ritter Memorial Fellowship.
Please contact Director of Institutional Events and Venues Donna Shabkie if you have any questions.