Curt Backeberg

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Curt Backeberg (born August 2, 1894 in Lüneburg , † January 14, 1966 in Hamburg ) was a German plant collector and cactus researcher and the author of several standard works on cacti . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Backeb. ".

Life

Curt Backeberg was a student at the Johanneum in Lüneburg and then completed a business apprenticeship. During the First World War he was used as a soldier in the Ukraine , before Verdun and in East Prussia . After the war, he married Emma Marks in 1919, who also came from Lüneburg. Backeberg first worked for various trading companies in Hamburg, and in 1925 he set up an export company for himself. In 1927 he happened to meet the Czech plant hunter Alberto Vojtěch Frič in the Port of Hamburg . Frič's stories aroused his thirst for adventure; he decided to import cacti himself.

Between 1928 and 1938 Backeberg undertook seven extensive collecting trips through Mexico, Central and South America. Backeberg traveled partly on his own account to supply his mail order business for rare cacti with material. Most of the time, however, he was on the road for wealthy American private collectors or for the Erfurt company Kakteen-Haage . The last collecting trip he undertook in 1938 on behalf of the City of Hamburg to collect “giant cacti” in Mexico for an exhibition in Planten un Blomen . He wrote some popular travelogues about these trips ( cactus hunt between Texas and Patagonia (1930); prickly wilderness (1942)).

Backeberg turned on his travels narrow films , from which he later compiled documentation. These mostly dealt with the “hunt” for cacti, but also with other topics such as the animal world of the Humboldt Current or the life of our Germans abroad and ethnic Germans on the Pacific . When further collecting trips became impossible at the beginning of the Second World War , he was on the road as a “film lecture traveler” for the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude , among other things to look after the troops in occupied France.

From 1951 to 1955 he was employed as a research assistant at the Les Cèdres succulent garden near Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat . Here he began work on a complete representation of the cactus family . It was published in six volumes between 1958 and 1962 under the title Die Cactaceae: Handbuch der Kakteenkunde .

In Das Kakteenlexikon ( Gustav Fischer Verlag , 1966) he summarized his structure of the cacti again. This work was continued by Walther Haage after Backeberg's death and was published a total of five times by 1979. The cactus lexicon and The Cactaceae were to remain the only books for almost forty years in which all (then known) cacti were described.

Backeberg was an autodidact as a botanist, which was not the only reason why his division of the cactus family into 233 small genera was fiercely controversial. He introduced a variety of new species, which earned him the charge that this was done out of vanity or business acumen. In doing so, he often disregarded the rules of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature . Sometimes he refused to prove the new species with herbarium material . Some of the species and genera established by him are therefore no longer used in scientific literature today. They are even more common in the dealers' seed and plant lists.

Curt Backeberg died of a heart attack. Numerous short stories, several novels, a radio play and poems were found in his estate. Most of them remained unpublished. The estate is now administered by the Zurich Succulents Collection .

Taxa named after Backeberg

Helia Bravo Hollis named the cactus genus Backebergia (today the genus Pachycereus (A.Berger) Britt. & Rosenach added) after him.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Erhardt among others: The great pikeperch. Encyclopedia of Plant Names . Volume 2, page 1876. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 2008. ISBN 978-3-8001-5406-7
  2. ↑ The Enciclopedia Biográfica e Histórica del Perú (Editorial Milla Batres, Lima 1994, Volume II) states January 14, 1965 as the date of death.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Kej Hielscher, Renate Hücking: In prickly wilderness . In: Plant Hunters. In distant worlds in search of paradise . Piper, 2002, ISBN 3-492-04424-7
  4. ↑ a b Erich Götz, Gerhard Gröner: Kakteen . 7th edition. Eugen Ulmer Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-8001-6674-7
  5. ^ Edward F. Anderson: The great cactus lexicon. Eugen Ulmer Verlag, Stuttgart, 2005, ISBN 3-8001-4573-1
  6. ↑ Entry in GRIN Taxonomy for Plants.
  7. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]
personal data
SURNAME Backeberg, Curt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German cactus collector, researcher and author
DATE OF BIRTH August 2, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Luneburg
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1966
Place of death Hamburg