The title of Christoph Ransmayr’s novel, “The Last World,” fits the discovery of Franz Josef Land 150 years ago. An archipelago of some 200 islands, Franz Josef Land was discovered in the Arctic late in the summer of 1873.¹

Its discoverers were the men of a multinational Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition. When they set sail north from Bremerhaven in the summer of 1872, most of the world’s regions were already known, the oceans navigated, and their coasts charted. The imperialist era of taking possession of the completely unknown under international law was as good as over.

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But Franz Josef Land had yet to be sighted, its mountains surveyed, and its capes marked on the maps of polar explorers: take, for example, the northernmost point of Eurasia, Cape Fligely.

The multinational crew of the “Admiral Tegetthoff” had not dared hope even for such a discovery. Their polar voyage had been marked by defeat and disappointment throughout. Their story has been recounted often, but never as impressively as by Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr in his first novel:

“Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis” (“The Terrors of Ice and Darkness,” ‘TID’) was published in a small edition in 1984² and only became known to a larger audience when Ransmayr celebrated his breakthrough with “The Last World” in 1988. An English version of TID, translated by John E. Woods, was published in 1991 by George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd and also by Grove Press New York (the following references to TID are to this American edition of the English translation).

As a young author, Ransmayr had approached the subject matter through reportage and travel. In these, he found a very unique tone and an idiosyncratic perspective. “Des Kaisers kalte Länder” (“The Emperor’s Cold Lands”), published in 1982 as a two-part reportage, was a first approach to that breathtaking story of discovery by the North Pole Expedition of 1872-1874. This story will be particularly remembered in Vienna in the summer of 2023, given that the voyage’s climax—the discovery of Franz Josef Land—occured exactly 150 years ago. The Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) commemorated it from May 24 to July 14, 2023, in a small exhibition on its premises under the baroque ceiling fresco by Anton Hertzog: “Land, Land, endlich Land!” (“Land, Land, Land at Last!”). It too has its most impressive moments where the failures and coincidences become vivid; they have epic grandeur. It is no coincidence that Ransmayr already wrote of “a drama at the end of the world” (TID 16).

The expedition’s ship ran into ice fields much earlier than expected on its voyage to the Arctic. They first surrounded it as early as the end of July 1872. Then, in late August, the Tegethoff permanently froze stuck. The ice ruined any hope of reaching even higher latitudes: the ship, commanded by Carl Weyprecht as commander-at-sea, remained forever unable to maneuver. The mission of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition was to explore a northeast passage, but was also driven by the popular but fatal 19th-century Open Polar Sea theory. According to this theory, free waters could be found beyond the first ice fields further north, and there was the possibility of not only discovering new islands there, but also possibly reaching the pole by ship. Mercator visualized this notion on his 1595 map: ice-free waters and a magnetic mountain in the middle.

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The expedition payed for this mistaken belief; wintering on their sailing ship enclosed by pack ice and experienced the next great disappointment in the spring of 1873: because the ice drift had taken them further north, no clear sea opened up for them even as temperatures rose in the Arctic midsummer. In this bleak situation, the sudden appearance of a mountain range on the horizon on a fog-free afternoon of August 30, 1873, gave an unexpected sense of purpose. These peaks and lands were nowhere to be found on maps, and so the expedition was able to perform rituals of colonial ownership one last time and long after the age of great discoveries.

Of Creative Narratives and Legal Instruments

The history of international law in Franz Josef Land does not seem to have been told yet. Nor does it fit easily into the usual colonial histories. On the contrary, colleagues such as Rachael Lorna Johnstone, a lawyer working in Iceland³ and Greenland, have made it clear with their research that quite different narratives and instruments are at work here. While “plantation and possession” were usually at the center of legal theory legitimizing colonial seizure, other categories had to be used for the Arctic and Antarctic.
The emperor’s cold lands, such as Rudolf Island in Franz Josef Land, lie under an ice cap:

Franz Josef Land is 85% glaciated, a record among Arctic countries. Just as in Antarctica, there was no plan for permanent settlement and use at the moment of discovery. However, in both cases there was no indigenous population to compete with for ownership. Who should own the lands? And should they belong to anyone at all?

In the Austro-Hungarian history of discovery, nationality and internationality are closely intertwined. This was a multinational expedition, with men from Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Italy, present-day Croatia and South Tyrol, but above all from present-day Austria. According to their self-image, they worked for the universal cause of science, and to this day, the international spirit of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition is emphasized again and again— having initiated, for example, the “International Polar Year” as a research tradition.

At the same time, the North Pole Expedition was integrated into national patriotic and imperial contexts. When the men first set foot on the newly discovered land on November 1, 1873, after months of waiting—for at first the weather did not permit a hike to the mountains on the horizon—they performed classic rituals of seizure. They surveyed the new islands and named the topography after their Austro-Hungarian homeland. From then on the archipelago was called Franz-Josef-Land, there is a cape Wiener Neustadt, the island Klagenfurt near Wilczek Land, a cape Grillparzer, an Austria-Sund, Crown Prince Rudolf Land, etc. An Austro-Hungarian flag was also planted.

Franz Josef Land is 85% glaciated, a record among Arctic countries. Just as in Antarctica, there was no plan for permanent settlement and use at the moment of discovery. However, in both cases there was no indigenous population to compete with for ownership. Who should own the lands? And should they belong to anyone at all?
In the Austro-Hungarian history of discovery, nationality and internationality are closely intertwined. This was a multinational expedition, with men from Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Italy, present-day Croatia and South Tyrol, but above all from present-day Austria. According to their self-image, they worked for the universal cause of science, and to this day, the international spirit of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition is emphasized again and again— having initiated, for example, the “International Polar Year” as a research tradition.
At the same time, the North Pole Expedition was integrated into national patriotic and imperial contexts. When the men first set foot on the newly discovered land on November 1, 1873, after months of waiting—for at first the weather did not permit a hike to the mountains on the horizon—they performed classic rituals of seizure.
They surveyed the new islands and named the topography after their Austro-Hungarian homeland. From then on the archipelago was called Franz-Josef-Land, there is a cape Wiener Neustadt, the island Klagenfurt near Wilczek Land, a cape Grillparzer, an Austria-Sund, Crown Prince Rudolf Land, etc. An Austro-Hungarian flag was also planted.

1. Michael Bernays: Zur Lehre von den Citaten und Noten. In: Michael Bernays: Schriften zur Kritik und Litteraturgeschichte. Band 4: Zur neueren und neuesten Litteraturgeschichte. II. Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben von Georg Witkowski. Behr, Berlin 1899, S. 253–347 ↩︎
2. Evelyn Eckstein: Fußnoten. Anmerkungen zu Poesie und Wissenschaft (= Anmerkungen: Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Marginalistik. Band 1). Lit, Münster u. a. 2001, ISBN 3-8258-5112-5 (Zugleich: Stuttgart, Universität, Dissertation, 1999) ↩︎
3. Anthony Grafton: Die tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote (= dtv. 30668). Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, München 1998, ISBN 3-423-30668-8 (Nachdruck der Ausgabe: Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1995
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4. Evelyn Eckstein: Fußnoten. Anmerkungen zu Poesie und Wissenschaft (= Anmerkungen: Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Marginalistik. Band 1). Lit, Münster u. a. 2001, ISBN 3-8258-5112-5 (Zugleich: Stuttgart, Universität, Dissertation, 1999) ↩︎
5. Michael Bernays: Zur Lehre von den Citaten und Noten. In: Michael Bernays: Schriften zur Kritik und Litteraturgeschichte. Band 4: Zur neueren und neuesten Litteraturgeschichte. II. Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben von Georg Witkowski. Behr, Berlin 1899, S. 253–347 ↩︎