Othmar Kühn (paleontologist)

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Othmar Kühn 1965

Othmar Kühn (born November 5, 1892 in Vienna - Ottakring , † March 26, 1969 in Vienna) was an Austrian geologist and paleontologist .

Kühn was the son of a sales representative and attended a business school after graduating from high school in 1911. From 1914 he worked for a brewery. Unsatisfied, he studied natural sciences at the University of Vienna and passed his teaching examination in 1916. Then he was a soldier in the First World War on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded in the Battle of the Piave and received the silver medal of bravery. In 1919 he received his doctorate in botany with Richard Wettstein in Vienna . He then initially worked as a secondary school teacher, but at the same time worked at the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

In 1931 Kühn tried unsuccessfully to complete his habilitation.

Kühn was a member of the NSDAP. During World War II he was a soldier in France and Russia. In 1944 he became curator 1st class at the Natural History Museum Vienna.

Klaus Taschwer called Kühn “a typical example of scientific mediocrity at the University of Vienna in the 1950s”, who got far even without a license to teach. From 1951 until his retirement in 1964 he was a full professor of paleontology and paleobiology and headed the university's palaeontological institute. 1957/58 he was dean and 1960/61 rector of the university.

As rector of the University of Vienna, on April 25, 1961, Kühn presented Fritz Noll , the Nazi rector of the university from 1938 to 1945, with the rector's commemorative mark of the University of Vienna and a certificate “in recognition of [the] honorable and courageous administration in difficult times”.

He was an honorary member of the Paleontological Society (1965). In 1944/45 and 1955/56 he was chairman of the Austrian Geological Society and in 1961 its honorary member. He was an honorary doctor of the Universities of Athens and Bucharest. He had been a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 1955, from 1952 as a corresponding member and from 1955 as a full member. He was also a member of the Serbian, Yugoslav, Slovenian, Greek, Danish Academies of Science. In 1962 he received the Great Silver Medal of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria and in 1969 he received the Golden Medal of Honor from the City of Vienna.

Kühn worked in a wide range of fields in paleontology and also in geology and botany. He particularly focused on Anthozoa , rudists and Hydrozoen and the stratigraphy of the Cretaceous Gosau Group . In 1926 he first demonstrated the occurrence of danium in Lower Austria. In 1964 he founded the Catalogus Fossilium Austriae of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was buried at the Döblinger Friedhof .

literature

  • Othmar Kühn . In: Paläontologische Zeitschrift Volume 43/44, 1969
  • Fritz Steininger : Othmar Kühn . In: in Mitteilungen der Geologische Gesellschaft Wien Volume 62, 1969, pp. 175-184 (with list of publications ( PDF ))
  • Helmuth Zapfe : Index Palaeontologicorum Austriae (= Catalogus fossilium Austriae issue 15). Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1971, p. 47, PDF on ZOBODAT

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c d e Klaus Taschwer: stronghold of anti-Semitism. The decline of the University of Vienna in the 20th century. Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2015; P. 265.
  2. ^ Grave site Othmar Kühn , Vienna, Döblinger Friedhof, Group I6, No. 4.
personal data
SURNAME Kühn, Othmar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 1969
Place of death Vienna