The Papalagi

 

In 1930 a German man named Erich Scheurmann published a strange little book titled The Papalagi. The 117-page travelogue, written as a series of 11 speeches supposedly by a Samoan chief named Tuiavii, described the European way of life in a simple, childlike manner. Tuiavii called shoes a “kind of canoe,” and had names for everything from clothes (“skins”) and houses (“stone boxes”) to newspapers (“machines for thoughts”), cities (“stone islands”), hot water (“sun water”), and doorbells (a “nipple, which has to be pushed until it screams”).
 
The Papalagi questioned the Western concepts of time and labor, and “the serious sickness of thinking” that “makes people old and ugly in little time.” It aimed its critique at a society whose obsession with money had created social inequalities, abysmal working conditions, pollution, and consumerism.
 
According to the book’s preface, Tuiavii wrote his speeches after he visited Europe as a member of a performance group. The book was a warning to his fellow Samoans that the papalagi (Samoan for “white man”) wanted to drag them “into his darkness.”
 

Though Scheurmann’s name figured prominently in The Papalagi, he claimed to be only a translator of Tuiavii’s speeches. He did admit, however, that he had published them without the chief’s approval, hoping they would help Europeans “find out how a man who is still closely bound to nature sees us and our culture.”
 
The idea of a noble, wise indigenous person commenting on Western civilization was a trope of the time—one that today is recognized as simplistic, insulting, or racist. And there was something about where Tuiavii was said to come from. As Gunter Senft, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute, writes, the idea of natives “imagined to be unspoiled by all negative aspects of European civilization—by its rules, its regulations, its powers, its repressions, and last but not least by its moral standards—seems to be most popular when it deals with peoples from the South Seas.”
 
In the following years, the book would take on a life of its own, translated and illustrated, a favorite of the counterculture and anarchists alike. The true authorship of the book—which should be clear by now—turns out to have been a manifestation of the very Western, colonialist culture the book was intended to criticize.
 
Scheurmann was born in Hamburg in 1878. He was an adventurer, a painter, a writer, a puppeteer, and—as one critic put it—“a raconteur of fairy tales, who meddled with psychological fringe areas.” Throughout his life he was a staunch supporter of the so-called Lebensreform (German for “life reform”)—a social movement in late-19th- and early-20th-century Germany and Switzerland that promoted a back-to-nature lifestyle and emphasized organic food, nudism, sexual liberation, and abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.
 
In 1904, Scheurmann met and married his first wife, Susanne. The couple settled down at Lake Constance, on the German-Swiss border. But the premature loss of their three children, all of whom died in infancy, left them devastated. To distract themselves, the Scheurmanns decided to travel to the German colony of Western Samoa, after Erich had secured an advance from a Berlin publisher to write a book about the island country. But Susanne fell ill, so in April 1914, Erich (ironically) headed south alone.
 
Scheurmann arrived in Samoa in June, on the eve of World War I. Two months later, New Zealand occupied Samoa, and he became a prisoner of war. In October 1915, Scheurmann somehow convinced the military administrator of Samoa, Robert Logan, to give him permission to leave on a gunboat for the United States, where he worked as a journalist and an advertising speaker for the Red Cross. While in America, Scheurmann prepared The Papalagi manuscript. He returned to Germany shortly before the war’s end.
 
The Papalagi was published in 1920, to mixed reviews. Critics called it everything from “amusing” to “boring” to “silly.” But as the young Weimar Republic struggled with dire postwar poverty and rapid industrialization, the book’s back-to-nature ethos caught on with the public. The book stayed in print for years and was translated into more than 15 languages, including Japanese and Esperanto. Eventually it became a bestseller.
 
Throughout his life Scheurmann wrote a number of other books—and both joined the Nazi party and espoused Nazi ideology—but none matched the popularity of The Papalagi. He died in 1957, at the age of 78.
 
As the years passed, The Papalagi was largely forgotten. But it was rediscovered in 1971, when students from Marburg, Germany, published a pirate version of it. In 1975 the Real Free Press—an Amsterdam-based publishing house that ran on money made in the marijuana trade—released the first English edition, with illustrations by legendary Dutch comic artist Joost Swarte.

 
In 1977, The Papalagi was published in West Germany, and over the next decade was issued in more than 10 editions, becoming a cult favorite. The Papalagi became so popular, in fact, that in 1978 the German newspaper Die Zeit called it a “green Bible.” In 1980 it was even included in German high-school curricula.
 
Peter Cavelti, author of the 1997 English translation, says the source of its popularity was generational.
 
“In the 1960s, an entire generation questioned the way things were done,” he says. “We felt disillusioned, and … [o]ut of that disillusionment … came the alternative vision the hippies developed—in retrospect not a realistic way forward, but nevertheless one that recognized the shortcomings of the system into which they were born. Tuiavii’s explanations of how the papalagi’s ways were flawed deeply resonated with many young people during the hippie era.”
 
Though it wasn’t officially debunked until 1987—by a German ethnologist named Horst Cain—some early critics had noted the book’s similarity to another “travelogue” that had claimed, falsely, to be written by an outsider. The Journey of Lukanga Mukara Into the Innermost of Germany, by German explorer Hans Paasche, consisted of nine letters supposedly written by a person from German East Africa (today’s Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi) to his fellow countrymen. Scheurmann, who must have been aware of Paasche’s book, not only copied its idea, he covered almost all of the same topics. Unsurprisingly, in the late 1970s he was accused of plagiarism by Paasche’s family.

 
The character of Tuiavii is probably an invention of Scheurmann’s. In his 1927 illustrated book, Samoa, Scheurmann published a photo of a Samoan couple in front of their house, which he captioned “The chief Tuiavii from Tiavea with his wife.” But the man in the photo hardly fits Tuiavii’s description in The Papalagi. According to Scheurmann’s great-granddaughter Jessica Rottschäffer, who’s working on a doctoral thesis about her ancestor, Tuiavii is most likely a composite character.
“While in Samoa, Scheurmann met the high chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi I, and some other lower chiefs,” says Rottschäfer. “So Tuiavii seems to be based on a couple of different people.”

 
But it took Cain, a specialist in Samoan language, to fully crack the code. After carefully analyzing the book’s language, he compared it with the speeches supposedly written by Tuiavii, and found many discrepancies. His conclusion: Scheurmann had written The Papalagi himself, as a veiled commentary on German society.
 
(It certainly hadn’t been written for a Samoan readership. When Grant McCall, a professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney, held lectures about The Papalagi for Samoans in the late 1990s, his attendees said they “were puzzled” by the book.)
 
Despite having been debunked as a literary hoax, The Papalagi is still popular today. In the past decade it’s been published in many new languages—Turkish, Catalan, Hungarian, Italian, and Chinese, among others—and inspired at least two spin-offs.
 
Cavelti thinks that the book’s enduring appeal lies in its message. “There are countless books of lasting literary and historical importance that could be called a ‘hoax,’” he says. “What matters is the book’s message. Is it relevant what liberties Scheurmann took if he managed to introduce a perspective that offered a different lens through which Western society could be viewed?”
 
Of course, it also matters where that perspective comes from, and what form it takes. The most relevant liberty taken in The Papalagi has less to do with pseudonymous deception than with uninformed cultural appropriation.
 
“It is high time that we are willing to learn more about the life and culture of other ethnic groups, countries, and nations,” writes Senft. “And we should always be aware of the fact that any form of idealization of the so-called ‘primitive native living an unspoilt life’ is just another form of European colonialism and colonialization.”
 
The Hoax Book That Became an Anarchist and Hippie Bible.  ‘The Papalagi’—supposedly written by a Samoan chief in 1920—offered a societal critique, but carried on a problematic racial trope.  By Jordan Todorov.  Atlas Obscura,  September 8, 2020.
 

 Introduction 

The writer called these speeches, The Papalagi, which means, the White Men or the Gentlemen. These speeches by Tuiavii of Tiavea were not delivered as yet, but the essence had been written down in the native language, out of which the first German translation was made.
 
Tuiavii never intended to have his speeches published for the Western public, nor to have them printed anywhere at all. They were strictly meant for his Polynesian people. Yet I have, without his consent and definitely in disregard of his wishes, taken the liberty to bring these speeches of a Polynesian native to the attention of the Western reader, convinced, that for us white people with our Western civilization it could be very worthwhile to find out how a man who is still closely bound to nature sees us and our culture.
 
Through his eyes we look and see ourselves from a standpoint we can never occupy again. Certainly there will be people, specially culture-freaks who will deem his point of view childish, perhaps even ignorant; but those of you who are more worldly-wise, and above all feel more humility, will be moved to reflection and self-criticism by much of what is going to be said. Because his wisdom is the fruit of simplicity, the greatest grace that God can bestow upon a man, showing him the things that science fails to comprehend.
 
These speeches were no less than a calling out to all the peoples of the South Pacific to cut off all their ties with the so-called enlightened people of European stock. Deep within, Tuiavii, the scorner of Europeans held the steadfast conviction that his forefathers had committed a grave error by letting themselves be enticed by European culture. He is like the maiden of Fagaasa who, seated high upon a cliff, saw the first white missionaries coming, and with her fan motioned them to leave: "Away with you, you criminal devils!". He also saw Europe as the dark demon, the big defoliator, from whom mankind should protect itself, if it wants to remain as pure as the Gods.
 
When I first met Tuiavii, he was living a peaceful life, secluded from the European world on his tiny, out-of-the way island called Upolu, one of the Samoan islands, in the village Tiavea of which he was chief. The first impression he made was of a big, kind-hearted giant. Almost 6 feet 2, and built like a brick outhouse. But his voice was soft and gentle as a woman's and his large, deepset eyes, overshadowed by bushy eyebrows had a slightly vacant stare. But when suddenly spoken to, they would light up and betray his warm and sunny heart.
 
In no outward manner was Tuiavii markedly different from his brothers. He drank his kava (1), went to loto (2) in the morning, ate bananas, toras and yams and observed all native customs and rituals. Only his few intimate friends knew what was brewing inside his head and what was struggling to come to the light, whenever he lay, dreaming it seemed, on his housemat.
 
In general the native lives like a child, purely in the visible world, without questioning either himself or his surroundings, but Tuiavii had an extraordinary character. He had risen high above his fellows, because he lived consciously and therefore possessed that inner drive that sets us apart from primitive peoples, more than anything else does.
 
Because of his being his own kind of man, Tuiavii had felt the wish arise to get to know more of that far-away Europe. That desire had been burning inside of him ever since his schooldays at the Marist's mission and was satisfied only when he had become a grown up man. He joined a group of ethnologists who went back to Europe after their studies, and that way- got to visit, one after the other, most of the states in Europe, where he became thoroughly acquainted with their culture and national peculiarities. Time and again I marveled at the accuracy with which he remembered even the smallest detail. Tuiavii possessed to a high degree the gift of sober and unprejudiced observation. Nothing could dazzle him; he never let himself be steered away from the truth by words. In fact he saw everything in its own original form, though throughout all his studies he never could abandon his own standpoint.
 
Although I was a close neighbour of his for more than a year, being a member of his village-community, Tuiavii took me into his confidence only after we became friends. After he'd entirely overcome, even forgotten the European in me. When he had convinced himself that I was ripe for his simple wisdom and wouldn't laugh at him (something I never did), only then did he consider me worthy enough to listen to fragments of his writings. He read them aloud to me, without any pathos, as if it were a historical narration. Though for just this reason, what he was saying worked itself into my mind and gave birth to the wish to retain the things I have heard.
 
Only much later did Tuiavii come to trust me with his notes and gave me permission to translate them into German. He thought I wanted to use them for my personal studies and never was to know that the translation as it were, would be published. All these speeches are no more than rough drafts and together do not form a well-composed book. Tuiavii has never seen them in any other form. Only when he had all the material neatly filed away in his head and all the things standing out clearly, did he want to start his "mission" as he called it, among his fellow Polynesians. I had to leave the islands before he started out on his quest.
 
Though I've seen it as my duty to render as literal a translation as possible and have not altered a syllable in the composition of the speeches, I am yet aware that the directness originality and uniqueness of his wording have suffered greatly. Anyone who has ever tried to bring something over from a primitive language into a modern one, will immediately recognize the problems involved in reproducing childlike utterances so as not to make them seem stupid or foolish.
 
Tuiavii, the uncultivated island-dweller, regarded European culture as a deviation, a one way road to nowhere. This might sound somewhat inflated but for the fact that it was all said with that wonderful simplicity that betrayed the weakness of his heart. It is true that he warns his countrymen and even tells them to shake off European domination. But in doing so, his voice is filled with sadness and everything indicates that his missionary zeal springs from his love of humanity and is not out of hatred. "You fellows think that you can show us the light," he said to me when we were together for the last time, "but what you really do is try to drag us down into your pool of darkness". He regarded the comings and goings of life with a child's honesty and love of the truth and so encountered discrepancies and moral shortcomings and by storing them all in his memory, they became lessons for life to him. He cannot come to understand where this supposed value of European culture resides, when it alienates people from themselves and makes them false, unnatural and depraved. When he sums up what civilization has brought us, starting with our appearance, as he would do when describing an animal, calling everything by its appropriate name, a very un-European and irreverent attitude; then he's picturing us in a way that, however incomplete is not incorrect, so that we do not know who to laugh at: the painter or his model.
 
This childlike, openhearted approach to reality, along with his complete lack of reverence is where I believe the true value of Tuiavii's speeches to us Westerners resides; that's why I feel that their publication is justified. The world wars have made us Westerners skeptical towards ourselves, we also begin to wonder about the intrinsic value of things and start to doubt whether we can ever really achieve our highest ideals through our civilization. Therefore we shouldn't consider ourselves to be so civilized and come down from our spiritual level to the way of thinking of this Polynesian from the Samoan islands, who is not as yet burdened down with an overdose of education and who is still original in his feeling and thoughts, and who wants to make us feel that we killed the Godlike essence of our being and have replaced it with idols.
 
Erich Scheurmann
 
The Papalagi. 

Fandom

A number of books moulded German opinion on Sāmoa, such as Richard Deeken Manuia Sāmoa! Poet, painter and novelist Erich Scheurmann had an uncanny impact, not only at the time of publication of his Der Papalagi – Die Reden des Südseehäuptlings Tuiavii aus Tiavea, or The Papalagi. It still attracts naive readers who see ancient truths.

 
Published in 1920, it claimed, falsely, to be a collection of 11 speeches made by matai Tuiavi’i of Ti’avea at the north eastern end of Upolu.
 
Scheurmann was born in Hamburg 1878 and as a young man wandered Germany, moving in literary and arts circles. He met and married a young and wealthy Saxon, settling down at Lake Constance, on the German-Swiss border. In the neighbourhood was novelist Hermann Hesse who planted wanderlust ideas in his head.
 
With two moderately successful novels produced, Scheurmann got an advance to write a book on German Sāmoa. Aged 36, he left his ailing wife and headed south on the Reichpost steamship Scharnhorst, arriving at the ‘paradise of the South Seas’ in June 1914. Two months later New Zealand soldiers invaded and Scheurmann was interned. He was not sent to New Zealand but in November 1915 he was allowed to leave for the United States. When they entered the war, he was again interned. Back in Germany after the war his Paitea & Ilse appeared, a tale of a young German marrying a Sāmoan girl. It ended badly.
 
A year later came The Papalagi, which was touted as but a true account. Scheurmann claimed to have obtained the speeches from Tuavi’i who, he said, had toured Europe in one of the cultural circuses that featured at the time. The title, Tuiavi’i is noted in Krämer, from Tiave’a. Scheurmann could have simply borrowed it from that as it had been available for 14 years, and was already becoming a handbook for fa’a Sāmoa. Tuiavi’i was said to have written the speeches to warn his people of the demonic traits of Europeans that endangered Polynesian innocence.
 
In his introduction Scheurmann said Tuiavii never intended to have his speeches published as they were only intended for Sāmoans. Scheurmann ignored that because he was convinced it would be good for Western civilization to ‘find out how a man who is still closely bound to nature sees us and our culture.’
 

Scheurmann said Tuiavi’i was a ‘big, kind-hearted giant. Almost 6 feet 2, and built like a brick outhouse. But his voice was soft and gentle as a woman’s and his large, deep set eyes, overshadowed by bushy eyebrows had a slightly vacant stare.’
 
The opening speech was on the flesh. Whites after forever trying to cover up. Scheurmann had the matai rambling on like an early hippy about the motives of covering up bodies. Tuiavi’i was said to dismiss much clothing, including shoes which he is said to have described as ‘a kind of canoe with high sides.…’ Tuiavi’i favoured less clothing for Sāmoans; ‘Let’s enjoy the sight a maiden offers, slender of body, and limbs flashing in the sunshine as well as under the moon. The white man, who has to cover himself up so much in order to hide his shame is foolish, blinded, and without feeling for the true pleasures of life.’ In a defeated famished Germany, the notion of sun and nakedness would have helped sell Scheurmann’s book.
 
‘The Papalagi live like crustaceans in their concrete houses,’ the second chapter begins. His hut is like a ‘stone crate’
 
‘These stone crates with all those people, these deep fissures of stone intertwining like long rivers, the hustle and bustle, the black smoke and the dirt floating overhead without one single tree, without a spot of blue sky or nice clouds, all this together is called “town” by the Papalagi. ‘
 
Must of the work is implausible, at least in tone; ‘When you speak to a European about the God of Love, he smiles and makes a funny face. He smiles at your stupidity. But as soon as you show him a piece of round, shiny metal or a sheet of heavy paper, then his eyes light up and saliva starts drib­bling down his lips. Money is his only love, money is his God.’
 
When he was 50, Scheurmann secretly confessed in a letter of thanks that Tuiavi’i was the ‘fictitious author’. The confession, in an era when Nazis were growing in power, may have been in self-interest and protection. His book had been strongly against German culture. Der Papalagi sold well, despite its rambling inaccurate accounts of life, both European and Sāmoa. It had hit a mark in what was still the Weimar Republic, in its dying days. Hitler’s first volume of Mein Kampf was published five years after Der Papalagi.
 
In 1922 Erwachen (Awakening) followed from Scheurmann, yet again on the theme of interracial sex in Sāmoa. In 1928, Die Lichtbringer. Die Geschichte vom Niedergang eines Naturvolkes (The Lightbringer: The Story of the Decline of a People of Nature) warned against white races imposing themselves on ‘primitive people’. Die Lichtbringer was re-published in 1936 with that warning removed.
 
Scheurmann had joined the Nazi Party. A novel in 1928, Zweierlei Blut (Two Kinds of Blood) reflected this. Scheurmann was not one to walk away from a basic theme; this time the book was about a German wanting to marry a young Sāmoan. Nazi racial purity dogma ran through it. His protagonist Georg is a young man who ‘does not yet know anything about the ties of blood and race’ and who wants to share life with a native woman ‘one of these beautiful and strange growths of the tropics’. Such ignorance is, of course, straight out of Nazi philosophy. Scheurmann, who was 36 when visiting, moves quickly to exotic fantasy in which Georg becomes obsessed with a 14-year-old girl. The author lingers on her breasts,, describing them as ‘high-curved, firm’ and ‘like a bowl’ and like ‘ripe fruits’. Other naked girls feature, but in time Georg realises he is a member of the white race, that there is ‘a sense and a depth in every blood-community’ and his marriage ‘was a sin against the sense in Creation, against all laws of blood and species’. Zweierlei Blut sold 27,000 copies in its first year. Presumably some copies washed up in Sāmoa.
 
Scheurmann, made rich off Sāmoa, died in 1957, aged 79.
 
His work is so execrable, it should have disappeared and would have, had not so many chosen to believe a man who spent just 17 months in Sāmoa. In 1980 a Swiss publisher reprinted Der Papalagi. Spiegel reviewed it as ‘a cult book of alternatives, primer of the Greens….’ It sold around 200,000 copies.
 
In 1997 it appeared in English, translated from German by a non-Sāmoan speaker. Canadian Peter C. Cavelti wrote a lengthy introduction saying that Tuivi’i should be popular ‘as a skillful storyteller…(and) a great prophet.’ Cavelti denied Tuivi’i’s speeches were made up the German author: ‘Tuiavi’i’s words give us the most valuable gift imaginable – a mirror in which to see ourselves.’
 
Perhaps the best that could be said of Scheurmann is that his books have good pictures in them.
 
Fictional matai and his German creator. By Michael Field.  Invincible Strangers,  September 20, 2018.