December 2025: “Eine Verfassung nach isländischem Muster”: Greenland, the Kaiser Franz Joseph Fjord and the second German Northpole expedition 1870–1871

You have heard of isländischer Freistaat, Þjóðveldi or the Icelandic commonwealth period – but what about a grönländischer Freistaat?

As Lucia Santercole analyzed in her Find of the Month April 2025, ideas of a Danicized Greenland surged with the recolonization of the island in the 18th century. The interest in Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) intensified in the 19thcentury, as polar expeditions multiplied. Failed ventures such as the British Franklin expedition (1845–48), whose entire crew disappeared and died or the US-American Polaris expedition (1871–1873), that ended in a shipwreck and a murder investigation or the Franklin expedition, only fueled fascination with what appeared, at least to Western, non-indigenous observers, to be an unexplored land.

The cartographer August Petermann urged German participation in this race for the North Pole as a means of asserting power. First plans to make this an Austro-Prussian venture were ultimately deterred when the Austro-Prussian war for domination over the German states started in 1866. The first German expedition ship, Grönland, which sailed North in 1868, was funded by an anonymous donation as well and planned by Petermann himself. However, the Grönland never made it beyond Svalbard. A second expedition in 1869–1870 ended up being funded through various donations, many coming from Austria, but also by the Prussian king Wilhelm I. This voyage proved more successful: the zweite deutsche Nordpolar-Expedition sent two ships, Hansa and Germania, to map Greenland’s eastern coast. And while the Hansa soon became trapped in pack ice and sank, the Germania reached northeastern Greenland. Here its crew charted a network of fjords, naming it after the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I (1830–1916). When the Germania returned in 1870, preparations began for the official publication of the results, including a historical overview of Greenland’s ‘discovery’: Die zweite Deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in den Jahren 1869 und 1870, unter Führung des Kapitän Karl Koldewey (2 volumes, 1873–1874).

A letter preserved in Þjóðskjalasafn, the National Archives of Iceland in Reykjavík, sheds light on how this historical framing was constructed. In 1870, H. A. Schumacher, serving on the board of Verein für die Deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, contacted Jón Sigurðsson (1811–1879) to inquire about “ältere nordische Geschichtsquellen” (‘older Nordic historical sources’) describing regions corresponding to those explored by the Germania. The importance of consulting such material was emphasized in a short paper attached to the letter, which Schumacher asked Jón to review: a paper authored by none other than Konrad Maurer (1823–1902). While the version sent to Jón seems to be a handwritten copy by Schumacher himself, the paper corresponds to an article by Maurer in the German Newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung in October 1870. In it, Maurer sought to compare “die Nordfahrten der Gegenwart mit denen der Vergangenheit” (‘the voyages north of the present with those of the past’), referring to the settlers coming from Iceland to Greenland as “germanische Bevölkerung” (‘Germanic peoples’) and aligning contemporary German polar ambitions with what he regarded those of the medieval Icelandic past.

Two years later, the first volume of Zweite Deutsche Nordpolarfahrt was published and included an expanded version of Maurer’s paper titled Geschichte der Entdeckung Ostgrönlands. Now spanning more than eighty pages (pp. 203–288), it gave an overview of Greenland in the Middle Ages, focusing on the history of Scandinavian settlement on the island, as well as later European ‘rediscovery’.

The colonial undertones of all these aspects – the Western ‘discovery’ of the north pole, a German ship called Germania pushing its way through the pack ice to assert power – also become visible in Maurer’s attempt to link Icelandic medieval settlement of Greenland with German polar explorations. In the expanded paper he also frequently employed the term skrælingar for Inuit and drew parallels between Old Norse depictions of them and contemporary descriptions of Inuit that bear clear traces of 19th century race theory.

It is also in this second version of the paper where the term grönländischer Freistaat appears: Maurer describes as having developed its own constitution “ganz und gar nach isländischem Muster” (‘entirely based on the Icelandic model’), after being settled from iceland. He was not, however, the first to use this terminology; in Grønlands historiske mindesmærker (1830–45), C. C. Rafn (1795–1864) and Finnur Magnússon (1781–1847) already characterized early medieval Greenland as “en egen lille Fristat” (‘its own little Fristat’) under the law preserved in Grágás. Maurer cited this work early on and employs similar sources to support the existence of a grönländischer Freistaat, for example Skáldhelga rímur and Fostbræðra saga. Yet despite occasional later reappearances, for example in Berlin’s Danmarks Ret til Grønland (1932) or the Norwegian Wikipedia entry on Eirik Raudes kolonisering av Grønland, the term never seemed to establish itself as a paradigm in the way that terms like isländischer Freistaat, islandske Fristat and Þjóðveldi did.