Martin Behaim

There is probably no country in the world where someone has claimed that the ‘discovery of America’ is down, not to Christopher Columbus or Leif Eriksson, but to a German – Martin Behaim of Nuremberg. Except, that is, for Germany. The figure of the man who created what has been alleged to be the world’s first globe is the epitome of a German lieu de mémoire; his fame extends far beyond his city of birth, which has a monument to Martin Behaim, a street and a school named after him. In 1992, the German federal postal service issued a stamp commemorating Behaim. It should be of little surprise to us, then, that such a household name appears in numerous textbooks from various German states. Recent work in international textbook research has demonstrated that the Behaim narrative has served the ‘generation of meaning via mythomotor’ within historical culture. This chapter will cast light on the patterns in accordance with which this generation of meaning takes place in relation to the Behaim myth as it lives in societal historical consciousness, and its narrative structures. It will further explore the functions served by this narrative within historical culture, focusing primarily on textbooks, understood in this context as manifestations of historical culture. Additionally, the chapter, drawing on the myth of Behaim as an exemplary case, will examine how teachers might harness the potential of historical myths in textbooks to encourage pupils to develop a mature and self-reflective historical consciousness.

In this paper a German national myth about Martin Behaim who is said to have constructed the first globe in history in 1492  is discussed. German textbook in the 21st century still construct a German "hero" of the scientific revolution with a mythical narrative about Martin Behaim. It is shown how this myth in textbooks has aesthetic and political implication.

Martin Behaim’s famous globe,
conceived and realized in Nuremberg in
1492, is not the only medieval witness
of this particular form of representation
of the Earth. When we examine the first
testimonies, we realize that the function and
content of these globes change significantly:
they stop illustrating the effects of celestial
phenomena and are limited to the
representation of the Earth’s surface. Hence
the questions: how and why did we move
from the two-dimensional representation of
the mappae mundi to the three-dimensional
in the fifteenth century? And how and why
did the change of content in the threedimensional
representations take place?
The adaptation of the Ptolemaic image
to the particular shape of a globe, and its
enrichment with data from voyages in Asia
and maritime explorations in Africa have
arisen before Behaim in Germanic circles
that are still little known