Alfred Schliz

Alfred Schliz 1877

Alfred Schliz (born September 18, 1849 in Heilbronn ; † June 22, 1915 there ) was a doctor , anthropologist and archaeologist who discovered the Stone Age Großgartach culture . He is considered one of the most important German prehistorians and dealt primarily with the prehistory of southern Germany and the Alpine region. He has also made an outstanding contribution to promoting the Heilbronn museum system.

Life

family

Schliz comes from a family originally resident in the Wetterau , who arrived in Heilbronn at the beginning of the 19th century with his grandfather Joseph Christian von Schliz (1780–1861), the Württemberg governor of Heilbronn , who was ennobled for his services .

Alfred Schliz's father, Adolf Schliz (1813–1877), was a doctor from 1843, from 1873 a city doctor in Heilbronn and, besides his son Alfred, had two daughters: Maria Charlotte Katharina (* 1848) and Pauline Caroline Mathilde (* 1858). Alfred Schliz's first marriage was from 1877 to Eugenie Amalie Meißner, with whom he had their son Alfred and who died in 1880 when their daughter Herta was born. Four years after her death, he married Bertha Emilie Link (daughter of Heilbronn Kommerzienrat Louis Link ), with whom he had three more children: Gerolf, Manfred and Renate.

City doctor and builder

Schliz town house on Hohen Strasse in Heilbronn

Alfred Schliz studied medicine in Tübingen, Leipzig and Freiburg from 1867. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1871 he became a field doctor as a volunteer. After the war he remained in military service as an assistant doctor in the Landwehr regiment in Heilbronn until 1882. In 1873 he wrote his thesis on elephantiasis and settled as a doctor in Heilbronn the following year. In 1877, like his father Adolf Schliz, who died in 1876, he took up a position as a city doctor in Heilbronn, where he devoted himself, among other things, to public health care as a school doctor and tuberculosis prevention. In 1898 he was commissioned by the State Statistical Office in Stuttgart to describe the descent and development of the population in the Heilbronn Oberamt. From the subsequent measurements and investigations his interest in anthropological topics grew, which he later tried to fathom through excavations and the like.

Bust of Sigilgaita at the summer house Villa Schliz in Heilbronn

Although his late life's work is particularly characterized by archaeological and regional historical deeds and works, he continued to work as a doctor in Heilbronn until his death. He was the director of the Erholungshaus (later Katharinenstift ) in Heilbronn and he was involved in setting up a sanatorium at Horneck Castle in Gundelsheim . In 1899 he was appointed privy councilor for his medical services . In 1913 he resigned as a city doctor, then took up this post again briefly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and looked after an auxiliary hospital , but resigned from the post in the same year due to illness.

Schliz also left its mark on Heilbronn as a builder. He had his town house built in 1885 by the prominent Berlin architects Heinrich Kayser and Karl von Großheim on Hohen Strasse in Heilbronn. The building was a representative "town castle" in the style of historicism , with a splendid ornamental gable and bay window with an onion roof. On the Heilbronn Lerchenberg , the Villa Schliz followed in 1901 as a summer house with a farmyard as an Art Nouveau country house . The villa, which is now a listed building, is one of the most architecturally striking buildings in Heilbronn , as the floral Art Nouveau that can be seen on it is otherwise rare in Württemberg. In 1904, on Schliz's initiative, the sixteenth-century seven-tube fountain near Heilbronn's Kilian's Church was restored and has been one of the city's landmarks ever since.

Anthropologist and archaeologist

At the age of 50, Schliz published his first work in 1899, which dealt with the descent and physical composition of the population in the Heilbronn district . His chronological assignment of historical relics is more certain than earlier authors such as Karl Wilhelmi , but Schliz is not yet free from mythological ideas such as “people's castles”. To categorize the population of the Oberamt from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages according to different breed types, in 1898 he examined more than 1,400 twelve to 14-year-old schoolchildren by head shape, hair color, etc. The classification of races occupied him all his life. As late as 1912, in his classification of the diluvial prehistoric races, he described, for example, the origin of humans from the Neanderthals to the Brünner form, Cro-Magnon man and Grimaldi breed up to three "final forms": the narrow and wide "long-headed races" and the "short-headed races".

Schliz acquired his anthropological and prehistoric knowledge purely autodidactically . He was close to the Heilbronn Historical Society , which opened a historical museum in the Heilbronner Fleischhaus in 1879 and at that time focused on prehistory and early history through soil research. Since he saw how insufficiently previous excavations had been observed, he began his own excavations in 1898. In 1899, as the successor to Friedrich Betz, he became chairman of the historical association and thus also head of the Heilbronn museums .

After a serpentinite ax allegedly found in 1898 on Heuchelberg near Großgartach in what is now Leingarten's district , Schliz began to dig at the alleged site in 1899 with the help of the engineer Albrecht Bonnet , as he believed the topographical conditions of the location in Gewann Sumpfwörschig to be favorable for a prehistoric settlement recognized. At the site that had previously been ransacked by third parties in search of salable finds, he located several rectangular, Stone Age residential areas. The excavation method developed by Bonnet and Schliz, which focuses on selected individual points of interest instead of large areas on an entire area, is still known today as the Bonnet-Schlizsche method . During the 13 years of excavations, ceramics were found in addition to building traces , the Schliz on the 3rd / 4th. Millennium BC And which was not comparable with previous finds. Schliz coined the term Großgartacher Kultur for the linear ceramics he found .

The majority of Schliz's own sites are around Großgartach (see Stone Age settlement of Großgartach ), as after the large find there he only dug elsewhere in exceptional cases. However, he also dealt with the barrows on the Heilbronner Schweinsberg and located the remains of a Bronze Age hilltop castle with a ring wall and moat on the Wartberg . Schliz secured finds from all important epochs of settlement in the Heilbronn area from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages. He also registered around 40 graves from the transition period between the Alemannic and the Franconian times around 500 AD on the Heilbronn Rosenberg and described their grave goods, including a. the leg box of Heilbronn .

• Picture panels for a publication by Schliz on grave goods from Heilbronn
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Thanks to his finds, Schliz was able to significantly expand the Historical Museum and also reorganized the collection. In 1905, the museum in the meat store was redesigned and reopened. On November 25, 1914, another natural history museum in Heilbronn was opened in the former morgue of the old cemetery , which was created under his sponsorship.

In the 15 or so years from its first publication in 1899 until his death in 1915, he wrote more than 100 publications on anthropology and archeology. His anthropological ideas and his interpretations of some of the finds are now partially outdated, but his undeniable merit remains the recording of the numerous prehistoric finds in and around Heilbronn, which were particularly important in the many large building projects in the economically prosperous period at the end of the 19th century and through the deep plowing of the fields with the steam plowing, which was new at the time, came to light. In 1901 his publication appeared Das Steinzeitliche Dorf Großgartach , with which he comprehensively presented the form of settlement he had reconstructed. His reorganization of the Historical Museum in the Fleischhaus in 1906 resulted in an important catalog with which he already drew a "complete picture of the culture and historical development of the lower Neckarland from the oldest prehistory to the modern age" Contribution to the settlement system and cultural development of the Neckarland originated in prehistoric times . He also made numerous plastic models of settlement forms he had reconstructed.

In 1909 he chaired the congress of the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory in Poznan, and in 1911 the congress took place in Schliz's hometown Heilbronn. In 1913, the Württemberg government sent Schliz as the official government representative to the anthropologists' congress in Monaco.

death

Schliz family grave in the main cemetery in Heilbronn

In 1914, Schliz retired from all activities due to illness, and he became depressed because of the war. He died on June 22, 1915 at the age of 65 and was buried in the Schliz family grave in the Heilbronn main cemetery. The grave site is an imposing megalithic building designed by him, the entrance of which is flanked by two life-size mourning children's figures. The names of the family members buried here are recorded on a stone tablet attached to the interior, which is similar in size and design to medieval grave slabs.

Appreciation

• At the instigation of his son of the same name, Alfred, the Natural History Museum in Heilbronn's Old Cemetery was expanded in 1935 and named after Alfred Schliz. The building and its collection were destroyed in the 1944 air raid on Heilbronn .

• In 1999, on the occasion of his 150th birthday, Schliz was presented with a special exhibition by the Heilbronn Municipal Museum.

However, Schlizstrasse in Heilbronn is not named after Alfred Schliz, but after his grandfather Joseph Christian von Schliz, the first senior bailiff and Heilbronn honorary citizen .

Publications

• The course of development of burial and cremation in the Bronze and Hallstatt Ages in the Heilbronn area. In: Publications of the Heilbronn Historical Society. Vol. 6, 1896/1900, ISSN  0175-9833 , pp. 1-18.
• Gravestone of a noble woman from the von Böckingen family, from 1288, found during the renovation of the church in Böckingen, summer 1900. In: Publications of the Heilbronn Historical Society. Vol. 6, 1896/1900, pp. 63-67.
• The Stone Age village of Großgartach, its ceramics and the later settlement of the area. In: Find reports from Swabia. Vol. 8, 1900, ISSN  0016-2752 , pp. 47-59.
• The Stone Age village of Grossgartach. Its culture and the later prehistoric settlement of the area. Enke, Stuttgart 1901.
• The share of the Alemanni in the grave fields of the early Middle Ages in Neckargau . In: Publications of the Heilbronn Historical Society. Vol. 7, 1900/03, pp. 1-42.
• Franconian and Alemannic art activity in the early Middle Ages after the existence of the Swabian grave fields . Verlag des Historische Verein Heilbronn, Heilbronn 1904, in connection with Beinkasten von Heilbronn , accessed on May 19, 2012.
• The Gallic farms of the early La Tène period in Neckargau and their house inventory. In: Find reports from Swabia. Vol. 13, 1905, pp. 30-57.
• Guide through the collections of the historical museum in Heilbronn . In: Publications of the Heilbronn Historical Society. 8, 1903/06, pp. 1-114.
• Heilbronn prehistory research and its results for the historical museum . In: Publications of the Heilbronn Historical Society. 9, 1906/09, pp. 1-23.
• Settlements and cultural development of the Neckarland in prehistoric times . In: Publications of the Heilbronn Historical Society. 10, 1909/12, pp. 1-56.
• The prehistoric skull types of the German states in their relationship to the individual cultures of prehistory. In: Archives for Anthropology. Vol. 35 = NF Vol. 7, 1909, ZDB -ID 206983-0 , pp. 239-267 and Vol. 37 = NF Vol. 9, 1910, pp. 205-251.
• Settlements and cultural development of the Neckarland in prehistoric times. Printed in: Festschrift for the 42nd Assembly of the German Anthropological Society (V joint assembly of the German and Viennese Anthropological Society) in Heilbronn a. N. Landerer, Heilbronn 1911, ZDB -ID 1046364-1 , separate census.

literature

• Peter Goessler : Alfred Schliz. Man, doctor and researcher 1849–1915. In: Publications of the Heilbronn Historical Society. Vol. 20, 1951, ISSN  0175-9833 , pp. 180-191.
• Christina Jacob: Councilor Dr. med. Alfred Schliz - city doctor, family man and committed citizen. In: Christina Jacob, Helmut Spatz: Schliz - a Schliemann in the Unterland? 100 years of archeology in the Heilbronn area (= Museo 14). Städtische Museen, Heilbronn 1999, ISBN 3-930811-81-2 , pp. 22–41 (exhibition catalog).
• Christina Jacob: A pioneer of settlement research - Alfred Schliz (1849–1915) In: Heilbronner Köpf II , Heilbronn City Archives 1999, pp. 131–140.
• Christina Jacob: Archaeological finds in the Heilbronn area by Alfred Schliz (1898) In: Historischer Verein Heilbronn. Yearbook 34/2001 , pp. 119–130.
• Christina Jacob:  Schliz, Joseph Christoph Alfred. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 95 ( digitized version ).
• Uwe Jacobi : Dr. Alfred Schliz. The digging councilor . In: Heilbronn - you made history. Twelve portraits from the life and work of famous Heilbronn residents (= series about Heilbronn. Vol. 7, ZDB -ID 599663-6 ). Heilbronn printing and publishing house, Heilbronn 1977, pp. 10–17.
• Friedrich Klein: Finds of settlements from the late Hallstatt and early Latène periods in Württemberg . Tübingen 2004 (Tübingen, Univ., Diss., 1985).

Web links

• Literature by and about Alfred Schliz in the catalog of the German National Library