Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments

Eric Ames

• $35.00 paperback (9780295988337) Add to Cart
• hardcover not available

• Published: January 2009
• Subject Listing: Visual Culture, Cultural Studies, History, Cinema
• Bibliographic information: 376 pp., 85 illus., 14 in color, notes, bibliog., index, 8.5 x 10 in.
• Series: A McLellan Book
• Contents

The name of Carl Hagenbeck is as evocative in Europe as that of P. T. Barnum or Walt Disney in North America. Hagenbeck was the nineteenth century's foremost animal trader and ethnographic showman, known for his enormously popular displays of people, animals, and artifacts gathered from all corners of the globe. The culmination of Hagenbeck's commercial ventures was the opening of his Tierpark near Hamburg in 1907, a dazzling assemblage of constructed exotic environments inhabited by humans and animals.

Eric Ames shows that Hagenbeck's various enterprises illustrate a significant evolution in popular culture. Earlier display forms that relied on the collection and presentation of "authentic" artifacts and living beings - the panorama, the zoological garden, the ethnographic collection - gave rise to the self-consciously synthetic forms of entertainment that we now associate with theme parks and films. This shift took place in the context of Hagenbeck's exhibitions, which were simultaneously the apotheosis of the collecting impulse and the germinating source for the creation of fictional spaces that rely for their effect on the spectator's imaginative engagement and interaction with the spectacle.

Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments locates Hagenbeck's myriad enterprises in the context of colonialism and nascent globalization; ethnography and anthropology; zoological gardens and international expositions; museum culture and visual spectacle; and consumerism and immersive entertainments. By tracing out the divergent lineages of themed environments, Ames offers a vivid reconstruction of the impulses and contradictions that lay behind the visual and display culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - a culture that forms the foundation of contemporary themed environments.

Written in an accessible style with many wonderful images, this book draws on meticulous archival research and a wealth of primary sources not available in English. It is an original and entertaining interdisciplinary study that will appeal to readers interested in visual culture, popular culture, nineteenth-century German history, and film studies, as well as anyone intrigued by the history of such popular entertainments as zoos, museums, panoramas, world's fairs, cinema, theme parks, anthropological exhibitions, and Wild West Shows.

Eric Ames is assistant professor of German at the University of Washington.

"Combining meticulous archival research with sophisticated theoretical approaches, Eric Ames provides an in-depth case study that will impact a broad spectrum of disciplines, including Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Performance Studies, and Film Studies." - Gerd Gemunden, Dartmouth College

"A splendid study of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Impeccably researched, this book analyzes Hagenbeck's innovations in creating live animal environments and performances and places them within a larger history of themed displays and virtual reality. Beautifully written, this book is an important addition to a growing literature on the history of exhibition." -Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Display

Acknowledgments
Color Plates
Introduction: Under the Sign of Hagenbeck

1. The Business of Collecting
Vertical Integration
The Context of the Wild Animal Trade
The Task of the Traveler
Selection, Negotiation, and Professionalization
Cultural Displacement

2. The Living Habitat
"Anthropological-Zoological Exhibitions"
The Art of the Habitat
The Boundaries of Display
Sex, Race, and Colonial Authority

3. Hagenbeck's Turn to Fiction
The Wild West in Germany
"Carl Hagenbeck's India"
Enter the Realm of Fantasy

4. The Art of Hagenbeck's Zoo
"The New Panorama"
Labor, Landscape, and Sculpture
The Park as "Panorama"
The Treatment of Place
The Amusement Park Sublime
The Alterity of the Tierpark

5. The Park and the Cinema
The Image as Shared Space
The Set as Collection
The Park as Film Studio

Conclusion: The Future of Nineteenth-Century Theme Space
Notes
Works Cited
Index