Amalie Dietrich

Amalie Dietrich on her 60th birthday, drawn by Christian Wilhelm Allers , 1881

Concordia Amalie Dietrich (born May 26, 1821 in Siebenlehn , Saxony , † March 9, 1891 in Rendsburg ), née Nelle, was an important German Australian and natural scientist , botanist , zoologist and plant hunter in the 19th century. For a decade she collected plants, animals, ethnographic objects, human skulls and skeletons for the Godeffroy Museum on the “fifth continent” ( Australia ), which was then called New Holland .

Life

Amalie Dietrich came from a very poor family in Siebenlehn / Saxony. She received a poor elementary school education and then had to help her father in the Beutler workshop. In 1846 she married the pharmacist and botanist Wilhelm Dietrich, who first introduced her to the basic concepts of botany. He taught them how to collect, identify and prepare plants and how to create herbaria . Later she continued her self-taught training.

In 1848 their daughter Charitas was born. Wilhelm Dietrich had meanwhile given up his position as a pharmacist and tried to make a living from trading in botanical articles, but this hardly brought in any money. As a result of the material hardship there were rifts between the spouses, as a result of which Amalie started her first major trip in 1852: to Bucharest, where her older brother had settled as Beutler. Only after a year did she return to Siebenlehn and to Wilhelm Dietrich.

In the years that followed, Amalie Dietrich undertook long trips on foot across Germany and Austria. She sold her products to pharmacies or botanical gardens; At the same time, these trips also served to collect non-native plants, in other words to “expand the range”. Her daughter Charitas was placed with foster families.

In 1861 she fell seriously ill with typhus in Holland and was in hospital for months. Wilhelm Dietrich, who thought she was dead, gave up the botanical business and took a position as private tutor. After Amalies Dietrich's return there was a break between the spouses, whereupon Amalie continued the business with the herbaria alone. In the meantime she had become well known in the professional world through her numerous hiking trips. In 1862, through the mediation of the factory owner and leisure botanist Heinrich Adolph Meyer , she got to know the Hamburg shipowner Cesar Godeffroy , the so-called "King of the South Seas", who ran various trading companies and scientific research in America and Australia. Amalie Dietrich applied to him for a job as a research traveler. Back then, Godeffroy was planning a museum for natural history and ethnology of the South Seas and entrusted her with a 10-year research assignment in Australia.

In 1863, the 43-year-old Amalie Dietrich landed in Brisbane . She sent box after box of preparations to Europe. From 1866 on, the museum regularly published catalogs of “their” plants. Dietrich not only collected plants, but also insects and other small animals. In addition, she sent eight skeletons and two skulls of Aborigines from Queensland to Germany for the collection of the Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg . In Australia it is therefore also called "Angel of Black Death". Some of the plant and animal species she discovered bear her name.

In 1873 Amalie Dietrich returned to Germany on the ship Susanne Godeffroy . She and her two tamed eagles first found accommodation with the Godeffroy family , where they looked after and managed their collections. In 1879 she found a job as a curator at the Botanical Museum in Hamburg. She died in 1891, almost 70 years old, in the care of her daughter Charitas Bischoff , who set a monument for her with the biography Amalie Dietrich - A Life . Amalie, who is enthusiastic about nature, expressed the wish “Put an ivy on my grave” before her death.

Appreciation

After Maria Sibylla Merian, Amalie Dietrich was the most important natural scientist and research traveler in Germany. The collection of botanical and zoological material that Amalie Dietrich put together during her stay in Australia is considered to be the most extensive of any individual. She was the discoverer of almost 640 species of plants.

The algal species Sargassum amaliae , the sundew species Drosera dietrichiana , the moss species Endotrichella dietrichiae and the wasp species Odynerus dietrichianus were named after Amalie Dietrich . Some of these names are only used as synonyms .

Honors

• The Amalie-Dietrich-Stieg in Hamburg-Barmbek-Nord was named after her.
• The Amalie-Dietrich-Platz in Dresden- Gorbitz was named after her.
• Amalie-Dietrich-Straße is located in Rendsburg.
• In Siebenlehn, a street and a day-care center bear her name. A memorial stone was erected on the Amalie-Dietrich-Höhe in 1928. There is a memorial plaque where her parents' house was.
• Another memorial plaque was inaugurated on the site of the former forester's yard in Siebenlehn for his 195th birthday. Amalie and Wilhelm Dietrich lived and worked here from their wedding in 1846 until 1861. On March 7, 1848, their daughter Charitas saw the light of day here . In 1901, the building burned to the ground and was never rebuilt.
• The "Wilthener Mountain Herbs" liqueurs from Hardenberg-Wilthen also advertise and are reminiscent of Amalie Dietrich.

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  Memorial plaque in Siebenlehn

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  Memorial stone on the Amalie-Dietrich-Höhe

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  Memorial at the daycare center named after her

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  Memorial plaque in Dresden-Gorbitz

literature

• Ray Sumner / Hilary Howes: The demonization of Amalie Dietrich / Die Verteufelung der Amalie Dietrich. In: Quill No. LXVIII, April 2019. pp. 1–6, online (PDF 2.1 MB) @ daszentrum.org.au (Australian-German Institute)
• Matthias Glaubrecht : The dark secret of Amalie Dietrich. Der Tagesspiegel Sunday, June 23, 2013, accessed on November 11, 2013 . 
• Mary RS Creese, Thomas M. Creese: Ladies in the laboratory 3 . Scarecrow Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8108-7288-2 , p. 40 ff.
• Hans Doderer: On the 185th birthday of Amalie Dietrich. The plant hunter - Part 1 (PDF, 3.6 MB) and Part 2 (PDF, 4.0 MB), in: Nossner Rundschau , No. 205 (July 2006), p. 26 f.
• Thomas Theye: "... a look at everything remarkable ..." - some aspects of the history of science in Amalie Dietrich's Queensland photographs in the anthropological collection of the Godeffroy Museum. In: Yearbook of the Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig . Vol. 42, 2004, pp. 161–280 (with 46 illustration panels)
• Kej Hielscher, Renate Hücking: The "woman natural scientist" Amalie Dietrich (1821-1891). In: Plant Hunters. Piper, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-492-04424-7 ( review in ZEIT , No. 51/2002)
• Michael Geyer (Ed.): Skulls and skeletons as objects and subjects of a world and human history , in: Comparativ , Vol. 10, No 5-6 (2000), Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2001, ISBN 3-935693-06-0 , digitized
• Margarete Maurer: Amalie Dietrich (1821–1891): housewife and researcher (PDF). In: PCNEWS , No. 64, Sept. 1999, pp. 31-32 - with an extensive list of references
• Paul Turnbull: Ancestors, not Specimens: Reflections on the Controversy over the Remains of Aboriginal People in European Scientific Collections The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History ( Memento of December 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
• Birgit Scheps: The Australian collection from the Museum Godeffroy in the Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig , in: Yearbook of the Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig . Volume XL, Münster and Hamburg 1994, pp. 194-209
• Ray Sumner: A Woman in the Wilderness. The Story of Amalie Dietrich in Australia. University of New South Wales Press, 1993, ISBN 0-86840-197-8
• Georg Balzer:  Dietrich, Agreement Amalie nee Nelle. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 695 ( digitized version ).
• Gertraud Enderlein : The woman from Siebenlehn. From Amalie Dietrich's life and work. Groszer, Berlin 1955
• Augustin Lodewyckx (Ed.): Australian letters from Amalie Dietrich. With a biographical sketch, exercises and a vocabulary. Melbourne University Press, 1943
• F. Bandermann: A woman's life in the service of science. In: Entomological Yearbook, ed. by Otto Krancher, vol. 35, Leipzig 1926
• Charitas Bischoff: Amalie Dietrich - One life. Grote, Berlin 1909; 49th thousand 1918 ( digitized version ); New edition, ed. and with an afterword by Günter Wirth: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1977, 1979, 1980 and Calwer, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-7668-0640-8 - the author of the successful book was the daughter of Amalie Dietrich; the biography is considered unreliable

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ray Sumner: A Woman in the Wilderness , p. 43
2. ↑ Birgit Schepps: The Australian Collection from the Museum Godeffroy in the Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig , p. 197
3. ↑ cf. Front page The Bulletin , November 12, 1991, PDF (photographic image without attribution)
4. ↑ Paul Turnbull: Die Leichen- und Seelenfledderer , in Michael Geyer (Ed.): Skulls and Skeletons as Objects and Subjects of a World and Human History , pp. 51-53, (detailed, differentiated presentation)
5. ↑ Amalie Dietrich at sevenlehn.de .
6. ↑ Plant Hunt - Amalie Dietrich at uni-marburg.de
7. ↑ Amalie Dietrich at sachsen.de .
8. ↑ http://www.wilthener-gebirgskraeuter.de/#amalie

Web links

Commons : Amalie Dietrich  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Amalie Dietrich in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Amalie Dietrich in the Saxon Bibliography
• Amalie Dietrich. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).