FORSTER, GEORG

born Nov. 26, 1754, Nassenhuben, near Danzig died Jan. 12, 1794, Paris in full Johann Georg Adam Forster explorer and scientist who helped to establish the literary travel book as a favoured genre in German literature. With his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, he emigrated to England in 1766. Both were invited to accompany Capt. James Cook on his second voyage around the world (177275). His account of the journey, A Voyage Round the World (1777), was based on his father's journals; it later appeared in a German version, Reise um die Welt (177880). A work of travel, science, and literature, the book not only established Forster as one of the most advanced German thinkers and accomplished stylists of the time but also influenced German scientific and literary writing, including that of Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Alexander von Humboldt. In other writings Forster contributed to the scientific, especially botanical, knowledge of the South Seas. He held professorships at the University of Kassel (177884), and at the university at Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania; 178487), before becoming librarian at the University of Mainz. Sympathetic with the French Revolution, he championed the republican government in Mainz, occupied by the French in 1792, and in 1793 he went to Paris to negotiate on its behalf. Meanwhile the Germans seized Mainz. Forster spent his final days in Paris, reviled among Germans as a traitor and disillusioned by the excesses of the Reign of Terror.