Film: Measuring the World

Their childhoods couldn’t have been more different: Alexander von Humboldt, born into a noble family, had the best private tutors in Berlin, a wealthy and prestigious family home and the protection of the powerful. Carl Friedrich Gauß grew up in poverty, was beaten by his classmates and teachers and then, once his mathematical talents could no longer be overlooked, he received a scholarship from the Duke of Brunswick. Despite of the different personal development during their childhood and puberty the both scientists do have one  doubtless similarity: the curiosity. The film doesn’t focus on the definition of both men’s scientific achievements, but rather on the different methods they use to satisfy their curiosity and creativity. At least Alexander von Humboldt has a travel companion accompanying him; the Frenchman Aimé Bonpland, who debates on the subject of joie de vivre with the German, and once angrily asks him the question: “Why do you have to be so German?”

Just as in the original, the film describes the life and ventures of the two men in parallel sequences. The story becomes even more tangible through the visual rendition (filming took place in Görlitz, Vienna and Ecuador) – and the humour, which appears rather sublime in the novel, is more direct, and sometimes even bawdy, in the film. In that regard, the director and his prominent cameraman managed to present the images of the German province at the beginning of the 19th century in an equally intensive way as the exotic scenes of the Ecuadorian jungle, or those of Humboldt’s legendary ascent up Chimborazo. The story does not end with the glorification of the ‘great Germans’, which is how they’ve been portrayed in numerous German films for decades: a feeling of melancholy prevails in the end. Gauß has become an old man and didn’t gain as much as he had hoped for from his encounter with the much-admired, but now senile Immanuel Kant, and Alexander von Humboldt is travelling once again, trying to reach Asia through Russia, where he is falsely labelled as a miracle healer. “What’s left?” he asks in the end. He provides the answer himself: “Curiosity!”

Detlev Buck, Germany, 2011/12, 119 min.