Wegener Diaries - PDF Depot

Wegener exhibition - Overview

In 2013, Christian Kehrt published one of the Environment & Society Portal’s first virtual exhibitions, “The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions into the Eternal Ice.” The exhibition was updated in March 2020 to make it responsive and archivable, with only minor changes to the presentation. You can find version 2.0 here.

This page contains links to PDFs of the original 2013 version of the exhibition, scans of the original document, and selected transcribed and translated diary entries for archival purposes:

View PDF of the original 2013 virtual exhibition here.
View PDF of the updated 2020 virtual exhibition here.
Link to scans from the original diary from the three expeditions, arranged by month here.
The Danish Danmark Expedition, 1906–1908, PDF of selected transcribed and translated diary entries.
The Danish North Greenland Expedition, 1912–1913, PDF of selected transcribed and translated diary entries.
The German Greenland Expedition, 1930–193, PDF of selected transcribed and translated diary entries.

To cite from the diaries:
Alfred Wegener, Tagebücher, June 1906 – September 1930. Deutsches Museum Archiv, NL 001, in Christian Kehrt, “The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions Into the Eternal Ice.” Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2013, no. 2 [updated 18 March 2020]. Version 2.0. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/8941.

To cite from the exhibition:
Kehrt, Christian. “The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions Into the Eternal Ice.” Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2013, no. 2 [updated 18 March 2020]. Version 2.0. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/8941.

The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions into the Eternal Ice

This virtual exhibition sheds light on Alfred Wegener’s expeditions to Greenland between 1906 and 1931. Its main focus is on the diaries Wegener wrote during his explorations, which offer unique insights into the manifold challenges man and material faced in Greenland’s extreme environments. You may choose to read the diaries in their original state, or browse the expeditions individually and read transcribed and translated excerpts by clicking on the individual chapters.

This version, published in 2020, includes minor updates to the original 2013 virtual exhibition. PDFs of the virtual exhibition, as well as original scans and transcripts of the Wegener Diaries, can be found at the exhibition’s PDF Depot.

Christian Kehrt

About the author

Kehrt, Christian

Christian Kehrt works in the fields of environmental history, military history, and the history of science and technology. He studied history and philosophy in Tübingen and Stony Brook, NY. His PhD “Moderne Krieger. Die Technikerfahrungen deutscher Militärpiloten, 1910–1945” deals with flying experiences of military pilots in the age of the two world wars. It was completed as part of the postgraduate research program “Technology and Society” at the Technical University Darmstadt and received the Werner-Hahlweg-Prize for military history, the Georg-Agricola Prize and the prize for young scholars of the German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics. As a postdoc he worked at the Deutsches Museum in Munich on a project on the origins of nanotechnology. In 2009/10 he was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Center for Environment and Society. Currently he is pursuing a habilitation project on polar exploration in the period of the Cold War at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg where he holds a position as a research associate.

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Wegener Diaries - PDF Depot

The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions into the Eternal Ice

About the author

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