Curt Heinke

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Dr. Curt Heinke Tower on the Breiteberg

Curt Heinke (born January 6, 1890 in Bautzen , † April 2, 1934 in Athens ) was a German geologist and high school teacher. He was the founder of the Geological Heritage Museum of South Lusatia, from 1922 chairman of the Natural Science Society in Zittau and from 1929 at the same time first chairman of the Lusatia Association of Humboldt, advanced training and mountain associations in Upper Lusatia.

Live and act

Memorial plaque for Dr. Heinke in the Jonsdorf mill stone quarries

Heinke attended elementary and secondary school in his hometown. From 1906 to 1909 he continued his education at the Zittauer Realgymnasium . Already during his high school he was occupied with geology and mineralogy . During this time he went on exploratory tours through Upper Lusatia and the Giant Mountains , in the summer of 1908 he traveled to the High Tatras with two school friends . In 1909 Heinke began studying geography and natural sciences at the Philipps University of Marburg and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich , which he had to interrupt because of a kidney disease. After that, Heinke stayed for several months to recover in Egypt and Italy . From October 1910 he continued his studies at the University of Leipzig . In January 1913, Heinke went on a nine-month recreational and study trip through southern Europe and North Africa, the geographical and climatic observations made in 1914 formed the basis for his dissertation .

During the First World War, Heinke was retired from military service due to his illness. He continued his studies and passed the state examination in 1915. Then he was a teacher at the secondary school in Meerane until Easter 1917, on April 16, 1917 he switched to teaching geography and natural history at the secondary school in Zittau and married in the same year in Zittau. Since then he has been in charge of the school collection of the secondary school.

On February 18, 1918, Heinke was accepted into the Natural Science Society in Zittau and gave his first lecture there two months later on the activity of the wind. In cooperation with the regional association of Saxon homeland security , Heinke was committed to the rescue of geological natural monuments, in 1921 the Jonsdorf millstone quarries were placed under protection on the initiative of the Jonsdorf cantor Reinhold Bauer.

On Heinke's initiative, the Natural Science Society held a geological home exhibition from August 27 to September 10, 1922 in the Higher Technical College for the Textile Industry, which had 4,500 visitors. Due to his commitment, Heinke was elected chairman of the Natural Science Society on June 29, 1922. Between Christmas 1922 and Easter 1923, Heinke gave eleven lectures on geological topics at the adult education center in Zittau, then in the summer of 1923 the adult education center organized ten joint geological hikes together with the Natural Science Society, which would be continued in the following years. During the school holidays, Heinke traveled to numerous countries in Europe.

The desire for a permanent exhibition that arose after the local exhibition was taken up by the organizers of the geological hikes, and a working group was formed to set up a geological museum. On October 28, 1923, the museum was opened in the premises of the Zittauer Realgymnasium; in the first year and a half of its existence, it had around 3000 visitors. Heinke was supported in the construction and expansion of the museum primarily by master locksmith Oskar Mießler. In 1925 the Natural Science Society joined the Lusatia Association of Humboldt, Advanced Training and Mountain Associations in Upper Lusatia. During the renovation of the secondary school, the former rector's apartment was made available to the museum in the winter of 1925 so that biological preparations could also be exhibited. In the future, the museum should be expanded into a local museum with all branches of the natural sciences. In 1928 the Saxon Heritage Protection Association and the community of Spitzkunnersdorf bought the Goethekopf near Spitzkunnersdorf, which was threatened by a quarry, on Heinke's initiative . He was less successful in his commitment to preserving the basalt roses in the stone quarry at Steinberg near Ostritz , which could not be saved. On March 9, 1929 Heinke was elected first chairman of the Lusatia Association of Humboldt, Training and Mountain Associations in Upper Lusatia.

In 1929 Heinke received an invitation to the International Geological Congress in Pretoria . He managed to enforce his plan of a six-month crossing of the African continent against official opposition and to secure the financing. On May 17, 1929, he sailed with the Watussi from Hamburg to Walvis Bay in South West Africa . He traveled to the northern part of South West Africa by train or car and visited the copper mine in Tsumeb , tin mines and dioptase sites in the Otavibergland and the beryl sites on the Spitzkoppe and Waterberg . He then traveled via Cape Town , where the congress participants were received and guided to the conference venue after excursions to the diamond mines of Kimberley and the gold fields of Johannesburg . Heinke began his return journey via the Bechuanaland and southern Rhodesia , where he visited asbestos, chrome ore and gold mines. Further stops on his trip were Northern Rhodesia , where he visited the Victoria Falls, and via Lusaka to the copper mines in Shaba Province in the Congo Free State . He went by ship on the Lualaba from Bukama to Kabalo , then Heinke traveled by train to Lake Tanganyika and to Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika , visited Zanzibar and drove from Tanga past the Usambara mountains to Kilimanjaro , which he only went to because of the tight travel plan climbed an altitude of 4500 m. He then traveled to Uganda via Lake Victoria . From Kampala he started his return journey on the White Nile via Khartoum to Cairo , from where he left on November 22, 1929. Heinke returned from the trip to Africa with new knowledge of geology, geography and ethnography as well as collected minerals and rocks. On November 29th, he was greeted by numerous friends and students at the Zittau train station .

From the end of 1929 Heinke worked closely with the surveyor Josef Sitte from Grottau , who carried out the geological and cartographic mapping of the Jonsdorf millstone quarries.

After smaller fossils had been found in the Hartau clay pit in the previous years, an upright tertiary tree trunk was cut in the winter of 1928/29 using clay. With the consent of the tenant, the four-meter-high stump of a tertiary sequoia tree (" Sequoioxylon gypsaceum ") with a circumference of six meters was dug up from 500 tons of Latvians by students of the secondary school under the direction of Heinke by July 1930 and exposed. The find known as the Zittau bald cypress was transported to Zittau in September 1932 and placed in front of the Johanneum on September 7th.

In 1932 Heinke developed the geological part of the home exhibition in Schirgiswalde, as well as in the following year for the millennium of Upper Lusatia in Bautzen and in Zittau. During the Easter vacation in 1934 he went on an excursion to Greece . He had an accident on Good Friday on the journey from Cape Sounion to Athens and died on Easter Monday in Athens from his severe head injuries.

A memorial service for Heinke took place on April 10, 1934 in the Realgymnasium Zittau. His coffin was transferred from Hamburg to Zittau on May 1, 1934, on the last section on Görlitzer Strasse to the mourning hall through a line of schoolchildren. Heinke was solemnly buried on May 2, 1934 in the Zittau women's cemetery.

Fonts

Heinke first published in the Oberlausitzer Heimatzeitung and in both parts of the Lausitzer Wanderbuch. In September 1924, the Zittauer Heimatblätter appeared as a weekly supplement to the Zittauer Nachrichten and Anzeiger . They were the first local newspaper supplement after the First World War, the first article under the title Die Zittauer Landschaft was written by Heinke. Together with the teacher Ernst Gäbler from Kleinschönau , Heinke designed a series of photographs in 1924 on the geology of southern Lusatia. In 1931 Heinke was responsible for the publication of the Lusatia yearbook, which only appeared in one year. He published further articles in the treatises of the Naturforschende Gesellschaft zu Görlitz. He also gave a large number of lectures, in particular on the geology of South Lusatia.

  • Zittau History and Museum Association, Wolfram Lange (Hrsg.): Curt Heinke - Africa trip of a Zittau teacher and geologist: the travel reports of Dr. Curt Heinkes from 1929 , Verlag Gunter Oettel 2008, ISBN 978-3-938583-30-2

Honors

Dr. Curt Heinke Museum in Zittau

In autumn 1934 the Lusatia decided to erect a stone obelisk in memory of Heinke on the slope of the Lausche . However, this project was not implemented. Instead, the Lusatia Association had a stone observation tower built on the Breiteberg in 1936 based on a design by the Zittau architect Richard Schiffner , which was named "Dr. Curt Heinke Tower". In 1937 the Lusatia had a memorial plaque installed in the Jonsdorf mill stone quarries for Heinke and the Jonsdorf cantor Reinhold Bauer, who died in 1937 .

The local history museum for geology was relocated from the Johanneum to House II of the engineering school for energy technology (former construction school) on Schliebenstrasse in 1967 due to the growing space requirements of the extended secondary school. On May 14, 1976, the Dr. Curt Heinke Museum for Geology of Southeast Upper Lusatia was opened as a branch of the Zittau City Museum in Exner's house on Kirchstrasse .

In 1984 the Geology Day of the Dresden district in Zittau was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Curt Heinke's death.

literature

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personal data
SURNAME Heinke, Curt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geologist and teacher
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Bautzen
DATE OF DEATH April 2, 1934
Place of death Athens