Christoff from Vojkffy

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Christoff von Vojkffy (full name: Christoff Graf Vojkffy von Voikovic , first name also Christoph and Christof , he himself simply signed with Christoph Vojkffy or C. Vojkffy ; * November 29, 1879 in Oroslavje ; † March 18, 1970 at Zeil Castle near Reichenhofen ) was a nobleman and amateur archaeologist who made merits in researching the prehistory of Bavaria . He was the finder of the Venus von Mauern and is considered a pioneer of Stone Age research in the Allgäu Alps. P. 19

Life

Christoff's father Janko, Count Vojkffy had married Pauline, Countess Fugger from the house of Prince Fugger von Babenhausen in early 1879 . The young couple initially lived in the Vojkovic family castle in Oroslavje. Oroslavje, 40 km north of Zagreb in present-day Croatia, was then part of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy . Christoff was born at the end of 1879. Father Janko lost his property while gambling and the family moved to Klagenfurt . Christoff's sister Janka was born there in 1881, brother Hubert in 1883. The mother Paula killed herself in 1886 at the age of 39. She did not live to see the completion of the "Palais Fugger" on Theaterplatz, which still exists today, which her father had built for the impoverished family and which was then sold again.

After the death of their father in 1897, the three children grew up in Karlovac in Croatia and with their grandfather in Bavaria. According to the tradition of the Count's Vojkovic family, Christoff received military training. He did not finish his studies. He is said to have stayed temporarily in Innsbruck.

In 1906 Janka von Vojkffy moved into the Fugger house in Oberstdorf , which her uncle Prince Karl Fugger von Babenhausen had built as a summer house on the Fugger site in 1892 according to plans by Leonhard Romeis in the Allgäu country house style. Christoff came to his sister in 1915 as a subtenant, but in the same year he was drafted as a corporal to the 53rd kuk infantry regiment in Zagreb. For a short time he also served in the 25th Kgl. Hungarian Honved Infantry - Regiment . He experienced the end of the war as a company commander of the machine gun company in South Tyrol.

Christoff and Janka, who supported him all their life, lived in the Fuggerhaus until 1935, when their uncle's heirs sold the house to Markt Oberstdorf. They then moved into another house belonging to the Fugger family and in 1946 they moved from Oberstdorf to Oberndorf Castle , north of Augsburg. The two of them moved from one castle to another in the following years, sometimes living in different places within a month. Finally Janka came to Dillingen an der Donau in 1957 , where she spent the end of her life and died on February 25, 1968. She was buried in the family grave in Oberndorf.

From 1961 Christoff von Vojkffy stayed as a guest of Count von Waldburg-Zeil at Zeil Castle near Reichenhofen (Allgäu). Christoff, the last male member of the von Vojkovic family, died in 1970 and was buried in the Reichenhofen-Unterzeil cemetery.

Excavations

Christoff von Vojkffy was extremely interested in archaeological research and was active in all of his places of residence and beyond, if he managed to get involved in other projects.

Federsee Moordorf

Federsee

Inspired by the contact with archaeologists who were carrying out excavations on the Federsee in Upper Swabia, Vojkffy began to look for himself and found Stone Age devices, many of them made of red and green radiolarite rock. P. 15

Oberstdorf

He then systematically explored its immediate surroundings, the Oberstdorf municipality, and discovered numerous Stone Age residential areas. In several places (at Faulenbach, Wannenbichel, Schlattbichel, Schrattenwang, Plattenbichel, First, at Schöllanger Burg and at Ochsenwand) he found almost 700 stone tools made from local radiolarite . Radiolarite is also known under the name Breitachstein in Oberallgäu and is processed as a gemstone. He made careful sketches of the many narrow and wide blades, scratches and burins.

Vojkffy had particular success with the Ochsenwand (Jehlefelsen) site near the small village of Tiefenbach. Together with the archaeologists Eduard Peters and Ferdinand Birkner in 1936/37 he was able to excavate and evaluate a Stone Age hunters' camp under a rock face. Birkner, who was considered an expert on the Middle Stone Age, also attracted geologists and biologists to dig added, and the results of the experts were contradictory and confusing: Geologists arranged the bearing according to the soil conditions of the last interglacial period about. After the pollen studies, the biologists were more likely to think of the Bronze Age. The archaeologists were correct with their presumed Mesolithic Age, but considered a settlement of the Oberstdorf valley basin at this time to be too early and impossible. Vojkffy finally found a way out of interpretation. He assumed a people who had stopped developing, similar to the population minorities living at Stone Age level in the jungle of New Guinea or in the Amazon region. Pp. 16-17

The Venus of Walls

Vineyard caves near Rennertshofen walls

In 1936/37 Vojkffy got involved in the exploration of the vineyard caves near Rennertshofen walls in the district of Neuburg-Schrobenhausen. The project ran under Himmler's special organization, the Research Foundation of German Ahnenerbe . However, the aristocratic Vojkffy was suspicious of the National Socialists, who first replaced Robert Rudolf Schmidt , the excavation manager he had chosen, with the Frisian (Dutch) nationalist Assien Bohmers , the head of the archaeological department of the heritage. After a month, Bohmers forbade his SS workers to “ talk to Vojkffy and have any dealings with ”. Vojkffy was offended by his honor and challenged Böhmers - but in vain - to a duel . The former home keeper for the Gau Schwaben wrote to the geologist SS-Obersturmführer Rolf Höhne, who was known for his Nazi-purpose-oriented excavations for his ancestral legacy : “... The social circles behind RR Schmidt and push him are our aristocratic circles Fugger, Zeil, Öttingen-Wallerstein etc. […] But these circles reject the National Socialist state and its work from the bottom up. I know from personal experience with the exponent of these circles, Count Vojkffy… ” Vojkffy was quite ready to come to terms with the rulers, because he dropped Schmidt, calling him“ an actor and a fool ”while he turned him into one after the war Letter to the Bavarian State Monuments Office as " ... known to be an outstanding prehistoric and famous Paleolithic researcher ".

Shortly after the war, Lothar Zotz resumed excavations in the vineyard caves in collaboration with the University of Erlangen. Christoff Vojkffy (after Zotz " an enthusiastic and tireless helper ") was there again and found a Upper Paleolithic statuette there in 1948, which he named " Red of Walls ".

Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen

Unteruhldingen and Leutkirch

Vojkffy also got involved in researching the Unteruhldingen pile dwellings and had good contacts with the excavation manager there, Hans Reinerth . After the war, he bequeathed valuable book holdings to the “Research Institute for Prehistory and Early History on Lake Constance”, as well as his collection of finds from the Middle Stone Age, which he had made at Zeil Castle in the Reichenhofen area.

ancestry

  1. Janko, Count Vojkffy von Vojkovic, Klokoc and Trebinje (born January 26, 1850 - † May 23, 1897 in Karlovac)
    ⚭ 1879 Pauline, Countess Fugger (born January 9, 1857 in Klagenfurt, † August 11, 1886 at Meiselberg Castle near Maria Hall in Carinthia), daughter of the Hereditary Imperial Council of the Crown of Bavaria Karl Ludwig Fugger von Babenhausen (1829–1906).
    1. Christoff (born November 29, 1879 in Oroslavje; † March 18, 1970 at Zeil Castle near Reichenhofen).
    2. Janka (* March 12, 1881 in Klagenfurt; † February 25, 1968 in Dillingen ad Donau)
    3. Hubert (* May 27, 1883 in Klagenfurt, † June 17, 1962 in Donauwörth)
      ⚭ Princess Margit von Arz-Vasegg (* 1893).

Collections

  • Vojkffy gave most of the original finds from Oberstdorf to the Prehistoric State Collection in Munich, where except for about 60 mostly radiolarite objects from the Tiefenbach-Ochsenberg excavation (Jehlefelsen) they were lost in a bombing attack in World War II.
  • In addition to a number of other collections on the subject of prehistory, the Pfahlbautenmuseum Unteruhldingen also houses one by Count Christoph Vojkffy entitled “Schloss Zeil u. Surroundings / Allgäu, Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, 1930s to 50s "

Publications

  • 1934: stones speak. In: Oberstdorfer municipality and foreign newspaper . Again commented in the magazine Unser Oberstdorf 18, 1991, p. 103 ff. (About the Jehlefelsen excavation).
  • 1936: Wildemen's legends and Urallgäu; The Jehlefels near Tiefenbach. Reprint from the Oberstdorfer municipality and foreign newspaper, No. 441936, Oberstdorf, 1936, Verbund-ISN: BV021034733
  • 1936/37: The "grazing reindeer" from Thayngen. In: IPEK. Yearbook for Prehistoric and Ethnographic Art 11, pp. 127–128.
  • 1955: The History of the Exploration of the Vineyard Caves . In: Lothar Zotz: The Paleolithic in the vineyard caves near walls. Volume 2, Röhrscheid, Bonn, pp. 9ff.
  • 1961/62: Big game and hunting in the later Paleolithic. Vorzeit am Bodensee, H. 1–4, 1–9.
  • 1965: Altamira. , Vorzeit, H. 1/2, 11-14.

In addition to the excavation reports, Vojkffy should point out that, as a paleontological expert, he was repeatedly quoted and consulted on technical questions at the latest in the last two decades of his life. The reproduction of the brief notes and clarifications would overwhelm the scope of this section.

literature

  • Birgitt Gehlen: Christoph Graf Vojkffy - hunters and gatherers in the Allgäu. In: platform. Journal of the Association for Pfahlbau und Heimatkunde eV Unteruhldingen 15/16, 2006/07, pp. 112–117.
  • Alexander Rößle: Christoff Graf von Vojkffy. In: Unser Oberstdorf 53, 2008, pp. 2052–2061.
  • Detlef Willand : The raven woman's answers. Encounters with hunters and shepherds of ancient times. Allgäu - Kleinwalsertal - Vorarlberg. Kunstverlag Josef Fink, Lindenberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-89870-572-1 , mentioned Vojkffy on pp. 15-22.
  • Birgit Gehlen and Werner Schön: Stone Age inventories from the Westallgäu: The Count Vojkffy Collection in the Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen , Archäologischeberichte 22, pp. 131–168. Summary of the Stone Age settlement landscape in the valley of today's Wurzacher Ach / Aitrach as pdf

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Alexander Rößle: Count Christoff von Vojkffy. D'r Boatschexavere explores the Stone Age. (No longer available online.) In: Oberstdorfs Online Guide. Archived from the original on July 14, 2014 ; accessed on June 16, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.oberstdorf-online.info
  2. ↑ a b c Detlef Willand: The answers of the raven woman.
  3. ^ Fund archive Unteruhldingen
  4. ^ CL Camp, HJ Allison and nd RH Nichols: Bibliography of Fossil Vertebrates 1954-1958 published by The Geological Society of America, 1964
personal data
SURNAME Vojkffy, Christoff von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vojkffy, Christoph Grav from Vojkovic
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-German amateur archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Oroslavje
DATE OF DEATH March 18, 1970
Place of death Zeil Castle near Reichenhofen