Ernst Krause (writer)

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Ernst Ludwig Krause (born November 22, 1839 in Zielenzig ; † August 24, 1903 in Eberswalde ) was a German pharmacist , biologist and popular science writer . He published many of his works under the pseudonym Carus Sterne.

Krause was one of the representatives of Darwinism in Germany and was in close contact with Ernst Haeckel . At the beginning of the 1890s, Krause devoted himself to Germanic prehistory. He popularized the racist thesis of the Nordic origin of Greece in the national movement . In botany his author's abbreviation was E. L. Krause .

life and work

Born in Zielenzig, the second of five children of Ernst Friedrich and Eleonore Krause, he grew up in Neumark , attended secondary school in Meseritz and was introduced to biology, botany and chemistry by its director Hermann Loew . After his parents had taken him from school, Krause completed an apprenticeship as a pharmacist, which he successfully completed. His military service he performed as a one-year volunteer in the military hospital of Küstrin from as a pharmacist. He then went to Berlin in 1862 to hear lectures from the physicist Gustav Magnus , the mineralogists Eilhard Mitscherlich and Gustav Rose, and the botanists Otto Berg and Alexander Braun . After a year he passed the state examination and worked as a pharmacist in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Krause began to publish popular science books and to write for newspapers and journals, including the Gartenlaube , Gegenwart , Prometheus , Our Time , Over Land and Sea , the Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung , the Daily Rundschau and the Vossische Zeitung . In 1862 the fortune telling from the movements of lifeless bodies under the influence of the human hand (dactylomancy) appeared , in 1863 the natural history of ghosts and in 1866 the botanical systematics in their relationship to morphology , in which he transferred Darwin's theory of evolution to the plant world.

After the war of 1870/71 as a staff pharmacist at the General Staff of the XI. Had participated in the Army Corps , Krause received his doctorate from the University of Rostock in 1874 on application with his book The botanical systematics in their relationship to morphology , published in 1866 . At Haeckel's suggestion, he founded the magazine Kosmos in 1877 . Journal for a uniform worldview based on the theory of development in connection with Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel as well as a number of outstanding researchers in the fields of Darwinism together with Otto Caspari from Heidelberg and Gustav Jäger from Stuttgart. The magazine should devote itself entirely to the dissemination of Darwinian evolution.

On behalf of the Association for German Literature , Krause wrote a popular, Darwinian-style creation story. The book was published under the pseudonym Carus Sterne and under the title Werden und Vergehen in 1876 and had six editions by 1905. As a result, Krause became the target of public attacks in the Kulturkampf that reached into the Prussian House of Representatives .

At the beginning of the 1890s, Krause devoted himself to Germanic prehistory. Taking the racial paradigm as a basis, he argued that one should not infer an Indo-European race from the Indo-European language family , but that the fair-skinned and blonde Aryans are an independent ethnic group of Nordic origin. Stone setting and the comparison of Germanic and Greek mythology served him as proof that the Aryans had moved south from their ancestral homeland. In doing so, he established the theorem of "Nordic Greece" in the national understanding of history. It met with unanimous rejection and ridicule among university archaeologists.

After a long period of life in Berlin, Krause moved to Eberswalde and is buried there in the forest cemetery.

Works (selection)

  • The natural history of ghosts. Physical-physiological-psychological studies , Weimar , 1863
  • Becoming and passing away, a development history of the whole of nature in a commonly understood version , 1876
  • Erasmus Darwin and his place in the history of the theory of descent
  • Charles Darwin and his relationship with Germany , 1885
  • The general worldview in its historical development , Stuttgart 1889
  • Nature and Art: Studies in the History of the Development of Art , 1891
  • History of the biological sciences in the 19th century , Berlin 1901
  • Article in the Meyers Lexicon
  • An extensive number of articles in magazines such as Die Gartenlaube , Gegenwart , Prometheus , Unser Zeit. German Review of the Present , Over Land and Sea and in Leipzig the Illustrirte Zeitung and the Daily Rundschau

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Ernst Krause  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Bölsche: In memory of Carus stars . Epilogue. In: Becoming and passing away . Berlin 1903
  2. ^ Andreas W. Daum: Science popularization in the 19th century. Civil culture, scientific education and the German public, 1848–1914 . 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg, Munich, ISBN 978-3-486-56551-5 .
  3. ^ Andreas W. Daum: Scientific journalism in the service of the Darwinist worldview: Ernst Krause alias Carus Sterne, Ernst Haeckel and the magazine Kosmos . In: Mauritiana (Altenburg), 15, 1995, pp. 227-245.
  4. ↑ Kosmos , Issue 1, archive.org
  5. ^ Daum: Science popularization in the 19th century . S. 71-73, 309, 497 f .
  6. ^ Rainer Kipper: The Germanic myth in the German Empire. Forms and functions of historical self-thematization (= forms of memory , volume 11). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, p. 228. Uwe Puschner: Sparta - “Ray of light in human history”. Volkish Perspectives . In: Monika Schuol, Christian Wendt, Julia Wilker (eds.): Exempla imitanda. Coping with the present with the past? Festschrift for Ernst Baltrusch on his 60th birthday . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2016, pp. 139–152, here p. 142.
personal data
SURNAME Krause, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Krause, Ernst Ludwig; Carus stars
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Author, scientist, biologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1839
PLACE OF BIRTH Targeted
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1903
Place of death Eberswalde