Behavioral Knowledge. Scenes of writing and observing behavior at the Zoological Institute of the Humboldt University in Berlin (1948–1968)

Since the end of the 19th century, ‘behaviour’ has become an almost self-evident topos in the anthropological discourses of almost any discipline, from philosophy, biology and sociology to ethnology and economics. Concepts of behavior often serve as tools for predicting the future and preventing danger. However, an analysis of the respective historical conditions for this knowledge of behavior, one that serves as a descriptive category and definition of the living has yet to be written.

This first investigation of the history of knowledge and cultural history of behavior is concerned with the discourse on behavior in the 1950s and 1960s. The PhD project focuses on a paradigmatic ‘scene of writing and observing’ behavior, in which the disciplinary potential of knowledge about behavior, its socio-political implications, and how it was conditioned through material cultures and media procedures intertwine. In particular, it explores the scientific legacy of the East German behavioral biologist Günter Tembrock (1918–2011), who conducted behavioral studies on red foxes between 1948 and 1968 in the working spaces and outdoor enclosures of the Zoological Institute on the site of today’s Natural History Museum in Berlin.

With perspectives from media studies and cultural history, the material culture of experimenting on zoo animals as well as animals found in the institute's workspaces are analyzed. Beyond the institute's confines, the explosive scientific-political context of behavioral science in the GDR and the anthropological consequences of Tembrock’s theses are read against the background of more broad socio-political debates in the SED dictatorship and the Cold War. In addition, the study addresses to the difficulty of writing—between perception and text and between politics and biology—which in Tembrock’s case was at times reflected in fictional texts.

The doctoral project used literature from biology, psychology, cultural studies, history of literature, media and knowledge. In addition, it essentially processed sources (written material, photographs, films and audio documents) from the as yet untapped estate of Günter Tembrock, kept in the archive of the Natural History Museum Berlin.