On Tuiavii’s Papalagi

Abstract

Papalagi, once considered to be the record of the Western Samoan chief Tuiavii’s first sightseeing tour of Europe at the time of World War I, which is an iconic work for the youth of his homeland, is today considered a forgery. Furthermore, this view was pioneered by the German linguist Senft. He claimed in his book that Scheuermann who translated Tuiavii’s words into German and published “Papalagi” in 1920, actually created the Papalagi himself. And that Senft claimed Scheuermann that he had plagiarized Lukanga Mukala by Hans Paasche, a German politician and pacifist. If the book is a forgery, it should be taken as Scheuermann’s own criticism of modern civilization. This takes on special significance when the text is juxtaposed with the German poet Hölderlin’s masterpiece Hyperion, an epistolary novel writings from the young Greek Hyperion to his friend Bellarmin. The best-known section of the work is the so-called “criticism of Germany,” which appears in the novel’s second part. Here, we draw the reader’s attention to the civilization-critical framework of the novel, in which Hölderlin, himself German, vehemently criticizes his modern homeland through his protagonist Hyperion, a Greek. This paper discusses the possibilities and problems of Papalagi through a comparison with Hyperion and Paasche’s Lukanga Mukala.