Animals in Transit: Archival Traces of Agency in the Deutsche Indien Expedition 1955-58
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Abstract
This paper examines the Deutsche Indien Expedition (1955–1958) as a case study of how animal mobility shaped the reconstruction of scientific collections and the formation of scientific networks in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany. In the aftermath of the Second World War, West German institutions sought to rebuild their depleted zoological and ethnographic collections and corresponding institutions like the Wuppertal Zoo. The expedition, which collected and transported living and preserved specimens from India to Germany, played a momentous role in this process. By tracing the trajectories of these animals, from capture and transport in postcolonial India to their arrival and exhibition in German museums and zoos, the paper argues that animals were not passive specimens but crucial participants in transnational networks of knowledge, diplomacy, and exchange. Their movements embodied both scientific ambition and political symbolism, linking the rebuilding of German science to emerging Indo-German diplomatic relations. Drawing on archival correspondence and field reports, the article situates these “specimens” within a broader history of animal agency and postcolonial scientific mobility, revealing how the logistics of care, transport, and display negotiated human–animal dependencies and shaped public understandings of science, nature, and global interconnection. In doing so, it highlights animals as historical and cultural agents whose trajectories illuminate the intertwined reconstruction of institutions, identities, and material knowledge in a world remade by war and decolonization.
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