Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch

Arnold Harry Konrad Oskar Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch (born August 14, 1895 in Neschwitz , † April 2, 1962 in Unna ) was a German forest scientist , Saxon forest master , ornithologist , founder of German bird sanctuaries and author .

Live and act

Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch was the second of nine children of Arnold Gustav Heinrich (called Harry) Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch (1860-1942) and Marion Concordia Isabell Freifrau von Vietinghoff-Riesch born von Funcke (1870-1945) on estate Neschwitz was born in Upper Lusatia . From 1905 to 1914 he attended two grammar schools in Dresden and passed his humanistic Abitur there. While staying with relatives in Livonia in 1914, when the First World War broke out , he was arrested and interned in various Russian camps. His first attempt to escape ended at the Romanian border, but in 1917 he managed to escape from Astrakhan via Moscow back to Riga . In the last year of the war he enlisted in Germany for basic military training and then came to the Eastern Front . His studies have just taken in Leipzig in 1918, he interrupted to in Livonia and Estonia in the Freikorps against the Bolshevik fighting troops.

After the end of the war, Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch began an apprenticeship in a forestry office from Neschwitz . This was followed by the study of forest sciences at the Royal Saxon Forest Academy in Tharandt and from 1921 on as a student of Karl Escherich in Munich, which he obtained in 1923 with a doctorate as Dr. oec. publ. on an entomological topic: The behavior of Palearctic birds towards the more important forest-damaging insects . In the same year he also married Editha Freiin von Seherr-Thoß, who, as divorced von Haugwitz, brought two children with her. The couple moved to Neschwitz, where Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch supported his father in the management of the 2,000 hectare estate with the associated baroque palace. After the legal traineeship, the Great Forest State Examination followed in Dresden in 1926 . A year later, he was appointed "private forest master", and in 1928 when the Fideikommiss was dissolved, he became co-owner of the Neschwitz estate and in 1939 finally its sole owner.

The family property, located north of Bautzen in the Upper Lusatian heath and pond landscape, included not only agriculture, but also a 1,000 hectare forest enterprise . After Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch introduced management there that renounced clear-cutting , the estate was already considered a natural model business in the 1930s. This made von Vietinghoff-Riesch a pioneer in natural forest management , a forestry direction that he also represented during his later teaching activities at the forestry faculties in Tharandt and Göttingen . In the summer of 1935 he received a visit from Aldo Leopold , a pioneering American ecologist. Even in the GDR, Neschwitz remained a model area for stock management and natural farming.

Encouraged by Gottlob König and above all Heinrich von Salisch , Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch campaigned for nature conservation and landscape management as tasks of forestry . This was also the subject of a 1936 work in which he was at the academy of forestry Tharandt habilitated , where he since 1935 as a lecturer in the subjects of Forestry, Nature Conservation, production hunt customer , ornithology and bird taught. In addition, on August 13, 1930 , the passionate falconer and ornithologist founded the Neschwitz bird sanctuary on his estate as a facility of the Saxon Heritage Protection Association, which existed until 1970.

At the beginning of the Second World War , von Vietinghoff-Riesch joined the German armed forces . During his military service he worked in Russia in 1941 as an interpreter and orderly officer in the General Command. In 1943 he was made an extraordinary professor in Tharandt and held lectures there on forest protection, hunting, fishing , ornithology and nature conservation. After the new palace (the baroque palace) in Neschwitz was burned down and looted on May 20, 1945, expropriation and flight from the Soviet occupation zone to the West followed. Soon after , von Vietinghoff-Riesch converted to Catholicism .

After briefly managing the Gräflich Schönburg Forestry Office in Glauchau and managing a nesting cave factory in the forest administration of Baron von Knigge in Steinkrug am Deister , he founded the "State-recognized Lower Saxony bird protection station , research center for nature and bird protection" there in 1947 . Since 1946 he has held lectures on forest protection , forest entomology and ornithology at the Hannoversch Münden-based forestry faculty of the University of Göttingen , where he represented the professorships in forest history , silviculture and forest zoology . After his habilitation in 1949, he himself became a lecturer in silviculture and head of the Institute for Forest Zoology in 1951. In 1956 he took over the chair for forest history, forest protection and nature conservation as an associate professor, shortly afterwards he received the personal professorship . In addition, he gave lectures on forestry at the Faculty of Agriculture in Göttingen and on nature conservation for students from all faculties. From 1960 to 1961 he was dean of the forestry faculty.

Vietinghoff-Riesch's importance as a university lecturer can be seen primarily in the fact that he anchored nature conservation in forestry training and, as a result, also brought in landscape management through thoughts on forest aesthetics . He was known for his closeness to the students as well as for witty and humorous lectures peppered with classic quotes. Due to his diverse interests in philosophy, history and art history, he provided a unique overview of things. He published 240 articles on the topics already mentioned as well as on the history of forest and hunting . His main works include the non-fiction book " The Upper Lusatian Forest, its history and its structure until 1945 ", the novel " The dancing crane " and his autobiography " Last Lord on Neschwitz ".

His wife Editha died in a serious car accident near Unna on March 23, 1962 , and he himself died on April 2, 1962 of the consequences of this accident.

Fonts (selection)

Scientific writings

• The behavior of Palearctic birds towards the more important forest-damaging insects , Munich 1923 (reprinted under this title in Zeitschrift für angewandte Entomologie 1924, Volume 10, Pages 1-55 and 327-352 doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0418.1924.tb01146.x and doi : 10.1111 / j.1439-0418.1924.tb01530.x )
• Nature Conservation - A National Political Cultural Task , Habilitation Thesis, Neudamm 1936.
• Forest landscape design , Berlin 1940.
• The Barn Swallow , Berlin 1955.
• The dormouse (Glis glis L.) . Monographs of Wild Mammals, Volume 14, Jena 1960.
• The Upper Lusatian Forest. Its history and its structure until 1945 , Hanover 1961 (Reprint 2004, ISBN 978-3933827463 )

Popular scientific writings

• together with Max Pfeiffer : Falken über uns , Berlin 1937 (unchanged reprint 1998, ISBN 978-3933459008 )
• A wooded area in the fate of the times. Upper Lusatia , Hanover 1949.

Novels

• The dancing crane , Braunschweig, Berlin and Hamburg 1949.

Autobiography

• Last gentleman on Neschwitz. A Junker without regrets , Limburg an der Lahn 1958 (unchanged reprint in 2002 in the series From the German Adels Archive , Volume 3, ISBN 978-3798006034 )

Quotes

• "A system is seldom destroyed by the onslaught of opponents, almost always by its own perplexity. "

literature

• Zoltán Rozsnyay, Frank Kropp: Arnold von Vietinghoff-Riesch . In this: Lower Saxony Forest Biography. A source volume. From the forest (1998): Messages from the Lower Saxony State Forest Administration (Issue 51). Lower Saxony Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forests (MELF), Wolfenbüttel 1998. pp. 450–458 - concise biography, but extensive list of publications.

Web links

• Literature by and about Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch in the Saxon Bibliography