Alexander A. Prashnowsky

Alexander A. Prashnowsky (born July 4, 1921 in Mukden , Manchuria ; † May 21, 2015 on the island of Cyprus ) was a geologist and geochemist .

Life

Alexander A. Prashnowsky joined the anti-communist Russian Liberation Army (Vlasov Army) when he was in his early 20s, and so ended up in Germany during the Second World War . After the end of the war, the former members of the Vlasov Army had to be handed over from the United States to the Soviet Union in accordance with the agreement reached at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The expected punishment could not be foreseen in May 1945 for the victims themselves. There was a threat of execution, deportation to the Gulag forced labor camp or, as a minimum sentence, at least several years' exile . Ultimately, he was saved from all this by his personal acquaintance with Hans Cloos , who hid him in the Geological Institute of the University of Bonn after the war and protected him from extradition.

Prashnowsky studied thanks to the patronage of Hans Cloos at the University of Bonn and Geology in 1955 with Wilhelm Bierther with his dissertation sedimentary petrographic and geochemical studies of sediments of southern Rhenish Massif doctorate .

The focus of his research over the next few years was on biochemical and electron microscopic examinations of the Precambrian rocks of the old shields, which he carried out with the support of industrial projects and partly together with his wife Helena Prashnowsky-Dobrowolsky. Furthermore, he was the first researcher to be able to detect amino acids in volcanogenic kaolin-carbon clay stones of the upper carbon .

Against the background of his pronounced affinity for organic geochemistry, Prashnowsky moved to the University of Würzburg , completed his habilitation with Georg Knetsch , and then headed the department of organic geochemistry until he retired on October 1, 1986.

On the occasion of the 80th and 100th birthdays of Alfred Treibs , the founder of organic geochemistry, Alexander A. Prashnowsky organized two major international symposia and published an extensive volume of symposiums in 1980 and 2002 with contributions from important chemists and geochemists.

In connection with Hans Cloos, who was editor-in-chief of the Geological Association from 1938 to 1951 , as a decade-long member of this society, he wrote the Russian translations of the abstracts of all articles for the Geological Review on an honorary basis and thus promoted the circulation of the magazine in the countries of the USSR and the then Eastern Bloc.

Alexander A. Prashnowsky died while doing research on the island of Cyprus and was later buried in the old cemetery in Bonn in August 2015 .

Fonts (selection)

• Sediment petrographic and geochemical investigations of sediments from the southern Rhenish Slate Mountains . Dissertation, Bonn 1955
• with Frida Oberlies and Kurt Burger : Electron microscopic evidence of fossil microorganisms in rocks of the Ruhr Carboniferous . In: Glückauf-Forschungshefte, 44, 1983, pp. 49-56

literature

• Ulrich Jux , Joachim Nagel and Diethard E. Meyer : Alexander A. Prashnowsky 1921–2015 . In: Geoscientific Communications (GMIT), 62, December 2015, p. 117

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander A. Prashnowsky in the bibliographic database WorldCat