Erich Maurer

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Erich Otto Heinrich Maurer (born December 5, 1884 in Gohlis near Dresden , † April 28, 1981 in Berlin ) was a German horticultural and fruit growing scientist . In 1929 he was appointed as the first full professor to the chair for horticultural crop production and director of the institute of the same name at the Agricultural University in Berlin .

Live and act

Erich Maurer comes from a family that has been involved in horticulture for seven generations. By 1910 he acquired extensive knowledge in the field of horticulture in horticultural businesses, on extensive trips through Western European countries and through studying for several years at the Technical University of Dresden , the Royal Horticultural School in Berlin-Dahlem and at the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg . In 1911 he appeared as a landscape architect in the firm L. Spaeth one, a large company for garden culture. He had to interrupt this activity by participating in the First World War for four years . From 1919 he ran a 400 hectare tree nursery for this company in the Ketzin area ( Mark Brandenburg ). Since 1927 he was general director of this world-famous company.

With the establishment of the horticultural university course at the Agricultural University of Berlin in 1929, Maurer was appointed as the first full professor to the chair for horticultural crop production and at the same time was appointed director of the teaching and research institute for horticulture (LuFA) in Berlin-Dahlem . Since then, in addition to growing flowers and ornamental plants, he has mainly focused on the selection of frost-resistant fruit bases . In the Generalgouvernement of Poland he was commissioned in 1941 at the Institute for German Ostarbeit with the improvement of the horticulture in order to upgrade the landscape and to overcome the Polish "hostility to trees". In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Soviets and only returned to Germany in 1948. He could not resume his offices. In 1949, however, he received a teaching position on tree nursery at the teaching and research institute in Berlin-Dahlem. In 1950 he founded a private landscaping company with one of his students. With financial support from the German Research Foundation and the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forests, he was able to continue his life's work, fruit root research, here.

Maurer has published the most important results of his scientific work in the agricultural yearbooks , the magazine for plant breeding and Der Züchter . His most important publication is the handbook The Documentation of Fruit Trees , published in 1939 . In this standard work of fruit growing literature , he particularly presented the morphological characteristics of the bases of the various types of fruit and their nursery performance. As chairman of the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Gartenbau, he published the publication Horticulture Research in the Service of War Nutrition in 1943 . His “Report on Horticultural Research in the Framework of the Horticultural Working Group 1930-1945”, published in 1952, is considered to be an important documentation for the history of science.

In 1973 he donated his 3,000-volume library, which also contains acquisitions by his ancestors, to the library of the Deutsche Gartenbaues eV in the university library of the Technical University of Berlin .

Erich Maurer died in Berlin in 1981 at the age of 96. His grave is in the Dahlem cemetery .

Books and writings

  • The roots of the fruit trees. A handbook of vegetatively propagated fruit bases for the practice of the tree nursery and fruit grower, for the recognition system and the horticultural offspring . Publisher Paul Parey Berlin 1939.
  • Horticultural research in the service of war food . Verlag Rudolf Bechtold & Co. Wiesbaden 1943 = Increased performance in horticulture, issue 1 of the scientific series.
  • Report on horticultural research within the framework of the Horticultural Working Group 1930-1945 . Series of publications by the agricultural and domestic evaluation and information service, No. 16, Frankfurt am Main 1952.

See also

literature

  • F. Hilkenbäumer: Professor Erich Maurer Berlin on his 75th birthday . In: Journal for Plant Breeding Vol. 42, 1960, pp. 205-207 (with picture).
  • Erich Noack: Professor Erich Maurer, Berlin † . In: Obst und Garten Jg. 100, 1981, H. 7, S. 344 (with picture).
  • Professor Erich Maurer died on April 28, 1981 at the age of 96 in Berlin-Zehlendorf . In: Obstbau Jg. 6, 1981, p. 390.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Burleigh : Germany turns eastwards: A study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich , UP Cambridge 1988, p. 265f
  2. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 571.
personal data
SURNAME Mason, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maurer, Erich Otto Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German horticultural and fruit growing scientist
DATE OF BIRTH December 5, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Gohlis near Dresden
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1981
Place of death Berlin