Scientific Facts and Alternative Facts: The Detzner Affair and Fieldwork after Empire

In 1928, the Berlin Geographical Society launched an investigation into whether Hermann Detzner (1882–1970), a former colonial surveyor, had misrepresented his New Guinean expedition in his book, Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen (1920). The investigation stretched on for four years and drew in a who’s who of New Guinean research and politics at the time from Germany, Australia, and the United States. The investigators’ task was made all the more difficult because Detzner wrote his expedition reports from memory after Australian soldiers had destroyed his fieldnotes during World War I. In 1932, Hermann Detzner eventually admitted that his book was ‘a factual scientific report only in part’ and contained an ‘alternative depiction of […] facts’—in large part to protect the identity of those who shielded him from Australian troops. Consequently, historians today typically dismiss Detzner as an amusing anecdote—yet another August Engelhardt, consumed with coconuts and sun. Drawing on the investigation notes and other original archival sources, this paper seeks instead to recuperate the Detzner affair as a serious object of study for historians of science for two reasons. Firstly, the loss of Detzner’s notes brings into even sharper focus—for us, as for the investigators at the time—the status of notebooks as witnessing devices within the field sciences. And secondly, Detzner’s calculated efforts to disseminate genuine ‘facts’ within a fictional telling of his expeditionary activities raises interesting questions about the role of context in justifying the validity of scientific data.