Filchner’s original plans mirrored Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition a few years later, with two ships and men starting from both the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea then meeting mid-way. Shackleton and Nordenskjöld helped him get a ship, the Deutschland, but he could get only one and went only to the Weddell Sea. He named the iceshelf after Kaiser Wilhelm II, but the Kaiser renamed it after Filchner. The ship was trapped in ice but was freed in the austral summer of 1912. The expedition is noted for its animosities, hostility not indicated in the passages here.
p. 9: A varied and extensive library which a dear friend in Berlin, George Stilke, was kind enough to donate, was of special significance for our intellectual needs.
p. 141: After dinner everyone occupied himself according to his own taste. There was an excellent library available. It was a gift from Hermann [?] Stilke in Berlin, supplemented by welcome contributions from the Verlag des Kladderadatschy, from Lustige Blätter and Simplizisismus. Only somebody who knows from his own experience what it means to spend hundreds of days through a polar winter in a little cabin aboard an icebound ship, can sympathize with how precious it is to have a varied mental diet. I personally never really became bored, since expedition work and preparation of this manuscript occupied a good part of my time. A large conversational dictionary donated by the Bibliographical Institute in Leipzig was universally popular as an indispensable counselor and was heavily used. The assistant engineer, Müller, even managed to read the entire dictionary from A to Z, including the supplement, during our drift.