Eugène Marais

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Eugène Nielen Marais (born January 9, 1871 , † March 29, 1936 ) was a South African lawyer, biologist, poet, writer and newspaper editor.

Eugène Marais

Life

Born near Pretoria , Marais attended school in Pretoria, Boshof and Paarl and then worked as a journalist. At the age of 20 he was editor of the newspaper Land en Volk . In 1894 he married in Winterton in the province of Natal Jacoba Aletta Beyers, called "Lettie" (born August 2, 1871). She died on July 19, 1895, eleven days after the birth of their son, Eugène Charles Gerard Marais. His niece Catherine Dougall, daughter of his sister Katharina Mynardina Dougall (née Marais), died in 1915 at the age of 24 when the RMS Lusitania went down .

In 1897 Marais went to London. He studied law, settled down as a lawyer and also dealt with medicine and psychology. During the Boer War he was viewed as an enemy alien in England and returned to South Africa in 1910, where he practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg. Out of aversion to this activity and when depression began, he withdrew to the Waterberg region, where he conducted animal studies and pursued questions of behavioral research. He carried out animal experiments - before Konrad Lorenz's experiments - and showed, among other things, the difference between the instinctive species memory and the individual memory based on intelligence. Among other things, he observed a herd of wild Chacma baboons for three years and studied the life of termites intensively . His observations and experiments on these animals led him to the conclusion that a termite colony can be viewed as a closed organism. He recognized the emergent properties of the termite community as a superorganism and called it "group soul".

He wrote several works in Afrikaans , including the 1925 published book Die siel van die mier ("The soul of the ant", later published as The soul of the white ant ), but refused to translate them into English, which is why they were outside of South Africa hardly received any attention.

In 1926, Maurice Maeterlinck , the 1911 Belgian Nobel Prize for Literature , (who could understand Afrikaans as a Flame) published his book La Vie des Termites , with which he claimed numerous ideas from Marais' book. Marais took legal action against the plagiarism in vain.

For many years burdened with health problems and dependent on morphine, this plagiarism also depressed him. In 1936, Marais committed suicide with a gunshot.

Marai's life as a scientist and behaviorist received less attention in his native South Africa than his literary works. He is considered one of the greatest poets who wrote in Afrikaans. Only a few of his early poems are in English.

For many years the Marais was friends with the poet Andries Gerhardus Visser .

literature

  • Eugène Nielen Marais: The soul of the white ant . (Translated by Margarete von der Groeben from the English translation by Winifred de Kok. Original title: Die siel van die mier .) Ullstein, Frankfurt / M., Berlin 1987. ISBN 3-548-34374-0
  • Eugène Nielen Marais: The soul of the monkey . (Original title: The Soul of the Ape .) Symposion, Esslingen 1973.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marais, Eugène N .: The soul of the white ant. Are humans developing into termites? FA Herbig, Berlin, 1952, p. 66
personal data
SURNAME Marais, Eugène
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marais, Eugène Nielen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African biologist, author, lawyer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH near Pretoria, South Africa
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1936