Egon Wagenknecht

Egon Wagenknecht (born March 29, 1908 in Rauen near Fürstenwalde / Spree ; † January 19, 2005 in Eberswalde ) was a German forest and hunting scientist . He was considered the nestor of Eberswalder silviculture and hunting science and embodied essential parts of the German forest and hunting history of the 20th century. He was a particularly good connoisseur of the red deer , on which he wrote two standard works.

Life

Egon Wagenknecht, born on March 29, 1908 in Rauen near Fürstenwalde (Spree), came from an old family of foresters . As the third generation's forester's son, he grew up in the north Brandenburg forest houses Altthymen near Fürstenberg / Havel and Wolfsgarten near Zehdenick and attended school in Fürstenberg, Templin and Oranienburg . He gathered impressions of forestry at an early age and was also instructed in hunting by his father. His training requirements were clearly sketched out, and he studied from 1928 to 1933 at the University of Berlin and at the Eberswalde Forestry University . His teachers included Carl Eckstein , Walter Wittich and Alfred Dengler .

After completing the legal traineeship from 1933 to 1935, during which he got to know 20 chief foresters from East Prussia to the Saar region , Wagenknecht passed the state examination to become a Prussian forest assessor in 1936 . He then worked as Dengler's scientific assistant at the Institute for Silviculture in Eberswalde. There doctorate he in 1940 with a study on the impact of different tillage methods on the growth of pine cultures to Dr. sc. In 1937 he joined the NSDAP .

The Second World War and its aftermath then interrupted his professional development for almost ten years. After being seriously wounded as an officer in the Wehrmacht, Wagenknecht briefly managed two forest offices in East Prussia and Mecklenburg . Finally he returned to Eberswalde in a trek from East Prussia. There he started out as a forest worker . In 1948 he became a member of the Central Forestry Office in Berlin, and in the winter semester of 1948/49 his career began as a university lecturer at the forestry faculty of the now Humboldt University in Berlin in Eberswalde. In 1950 he was given a silviculture lectureship and the provisional management of the silviculture institute. After completing his habilitation , Wagenknecht became professor in 1951 and director of the Silviculture Institute in 1952. In 1952 he founded the specialist body Archive for Forestry , which soon developed into the leading forest science journal in the GDR and was supervised by Wagenknecht part-time as editor-in-chief. In 1952 Wagenknecht was appointed a full member of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences , in which he was secretary of the forestry section from 1964 to 1968. From 1965 to 1971 he was also a member of the GDR Research Council.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall , however, at the beginning of the sixties there was a sharp political development against the faculty in Eberswalde, which the SED rulers had disliked. Escape, arrests and show trials poisoned the climate and ultimately led to the faculty being closed in 1963. Wagenknecht had to discontinue his magazine " Archiv für Forstwesen " in 1971 for alleged reasons of rationalization, but became department director for silviculture and department head of hunting at the remaining institute for forest sciences in Eberswalde. There he set up a hunting department and set up game research areas, since for him forestry and hunting were inseparable. Even before his official retirement, Wagenknecht withdrew prematurely from silviculture research in order to devote himself only to wildlife biology. He was also one of the founding members of the "Working Group for Hunting and Game Research". He also wrote several books on this subject in his retirement.

After reunification , true to his motto, “ To be a professor means to be a confessor”, he spoke more clearly when it came time to reorganize the forestry in the new federal states and to found the Eberswalde University of Applied Sciences . The high esteem Wagenknecht enjoyed in forest and hunting circles could also be seen in the fact that more than 400 foresters, hunters and friends from all over Germany came to Eberswalde for an honorary colloquium on April 28, 1998 on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

For 66 years he was married to Charlotte Wagenknecht, with whom he had three children. Egon Wagenknecht died on January 19, 2005 at the age of 96. He is buried in the Chorin monastery cemetery.

Services

In coping with the war and post-war consequences with the large bare land afforestation that became necessary after the reparation blows, Wagenknecht did a great job, especially thanks to his book " Afforestation planned according to plan " (1950), which later became known as " The forest renewal " appeared several editions. Wagenknecht embodied a silvicultural era that, based on Friedrich Wilhelm Leopold Pfeil and the ecological silviculture of Alfred Dengler, is known as the so-called "Eberswalder School". Like Pfeil, Wagenknecht always took practical experience into account in his research. The forest location became his leitmotif, particularly clearly in the work " Paths to site-appropriate forestry - Eberswalde 1953 ", which he presented in 1956 together with Alexis Scamoni , Albert Richter and Jobst Lehmann . What was fundamentally new about it was that the starting point was no longer the general, but the individual location, the basis of all measures from regeneration to stand maintenance, an approach that was continued in the later Eberswalde tree species and growth area monographs. With this scientific attitude, Wagenknecht also developed tillering target types for the northeast German Diluvium in 1955 and in the same year initiated a large-scale experiment to convert pure devastated pine forests into high-performance mixed forests in the Schwenow and Tschinka districts near Beeskow .

When a labor shortage emerged in the forestry of the GDR after 1960, the possibilities of intensification and rationalization moved into the focus of forestry research for Wagenknecht and his employees. When developing various methods, they also dealt increasingly with questions of fertilization , the use of herbicides in cultivation, the establishment of mixed stands by cultivation or substructure and natural regeneration .

Wagenknecht's bibliography includes more than 300 publications, 170 of which were written during his retirement and mainly deal with wildlife research and hunting science. Most of these books saw multiple editions, which Wagenknecht always offered the opportunity to update and add. " Management of our hoofed game stocks " (1963), " Rotwild " (1985) and " Roe deer enclosure with the rifle " (1976) are particularly well known . In these works he represented his view of the “unity of forest and game management”. As a forest farmer, Wagenknecht has always campaigned for economically viable game densities depending on the location and the damage caused by game and once commented critically, " Today it is not difficult to do silviculture without game and hunting without considering the forest ". His goal, however, has always been to combine both in such a way that forest and game come into their own.

Fonts (selection)

• On the influence of different tillage methods on the growth of pine cultures , dissertation, Eberswalde 1940
• Reforestation carried out as planned. A guide for forest managers, farmers' forest owners and forest cooperatives , Berlin 1950 (later under the title: Forest renewal )
• Cultivability and silvicultural treatment of the red oak (Quercus borealis Michaux) , habilitation thesis, Berlin 1954 (also in: Die Roteiche und ihr Holz , Berlin 1955, together with Kurt Göhre)
• Paths to site-appropriate forest management. Eberswalde 1953 , Radebeul and Berlin 1956 (together with Alexis Scamoni, Albert Richter and Jobst Lehmann)
• The spruce in the northeastern German lowlands. Cultivation worthiness and silvicultural treatment , Radebeul and Berlin 1959 (together with Günter Belitz)
• Rational thickening care , Radebeul and Berlin 1962 (together with Wolfgang Henkel)
• Management of our hoofed game stocks , Berlin 1965 (later under the title: Management of hoofed game . 6th, revised and expanded edition 1994, ISBN 3-331-00682-3 )
• The age determination of the hunted game , Berlin 1968 (as editor and co-author)
• Hunting facilities , Berlin 1973 (2nd, revised and expanded edition 1989, ISBN 3-331-00318-2 )
• Roe deer enclosure with the rifle , Leipzig and Radebeul 1976
• The red deer (Cervus elaphus). Die Neue Brehm-Bücherei, Volume 129 , Wittenberg Lutherstadt 1980 (3rd, revised edition 1996 by Westarp Wissenschaften, Hohenwarsleben, ISBN 3-89432-500-3 )
• Rotwild , Melsungen, Berlin, Basel and Vienna 1981 (5th, revised and expanded edition 2000, ISBN 3-927848-24-7 )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Harry Waibel : Servants of many masters. Former Nazi functionaries in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-63542-1 , pp. 354-355.

literature

• Albrecht Milnik : Egon Wagenknecht - A long life for forest and game . Forest Biographies Series, No. 13. Kessel, Remagen-Oberwinter 2005, ISBN 3-935638-67-1
• Forest, game and hunting in Brandenburg. Joint honorary colloquium of the Brandenburg Forest Association and the Brandenburg State Hunting Association on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Prof. Dr. Egon Wagenknecht (Eberswalde 1998). Festschrift. Potsdam 1998
• Norbert Kohlstock, Klaus Höppner: Professor Dr. habil. Egon Wagenknecht passed away . Obituary in: Brandenburgische Forstnachrichten , Issue 115, Volume 14, January / February 2005, pp. 21/22
• Siegfried Kuntsche:  Wagenknecht, Egon . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Egon Wagenknecht in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography on the homepage of Albrecht Milnik