Präparierte Zeit. Wallace, Martin, Raabe und die moderne Magie ‚ausgestopfter‘ Tiere
Preserved animal bodies have been produced, traded, collected, and taxonomically defined in ever-growing numbers since the eighteenth century. They belong to those quasi-objects that, according to Bruno Latour, are spawned by so-called modernity with its extensive attempts to classify and purify. They are hybrids whose factitious factuality both constitutes and subverts the distinction between biofact and artefact, nature and culture. By showing what isn’t there anymore – the animal, whose death is the condition of every preserved specimen – their history tells about the efficacy of non-/dead things in the moment of their afterlife – and therefore especially about the temporal spectrality of so-called modernity. Starting with Alfred Russel Wallace, the article investigates the history of knowledge and trade exhibited in the physical preservation of animal bodies. Moving on to Philipp Leopold Martin, one of the pioneers of modern taxidermy, it examines the history of their manufacture and display. Finally, the article surveys the poetic knowledge of stuffed and mounted animals as it is (re-)presented in Wilhelm Raabe’s novel Der Lar (1898).
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