ABSTRACT
Suriname may not be the rst place that comes to mind when thinking about German travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Suriname had, after all, been a Dutch colony since 1667 and remained so until its independence in 1975. At the end of the eighteenth century the colony had roughly 50,000 inhabitants, comprised of Amerindians, Europeans, and African slaves. The latter constituted more than 90% of the population. Europeans formed only a very small part of the population, and, contrary to general belief, Dutch people probably only comprised around half of this group of Europeans. The other half consisted of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, English, French, and Germans.1 The Germans formed the majority of the non-Dutch Europeans in Suriname. It goes without saying that these Germans have inuenced Surinamese language, history, and culture. If the same ratio were to be applied to Suriname as was calculated for that other former Dutch colony, Indonesia, then of the 3000 European citizens of Suriname around the middle of the eighteenth century approximately 1000 are likely to have been of German descent.2 Julien Wolbers pointed out in his nineteenth-century canonical work on the history of Suriname that the German migration to Suriname should be seen as a consequence of the migration of Germans to the Netherlands: it was there that Germans heard of Suriname, its supposed need for European expertise, and the possibilities it offered Europeans to make a quick fortune.3
