Ernst Tschernik

Ernst Tschernik ( Upper Sorbian Arnošt Černik ; born June 12, 1910 in loop ; † February 27, 1988 in Berlin ) was a Sorbian teacher, scientist and statistician.

He was born in 1910 as the youngest son of a Sorbian family of cottagers and attended elementary school there. From 1925 to 1930 he studied at the teachers' college in Ostrzeszów near Breslau and then worked as a teacher at various schools in Poland until 1934 . After returning to Germany, he had to take his Abitur in Berlin because his Polish degree was not recognized. After graduation, he studied law and political science there and in Krakow and graduated in 1940 with a degree in economics.

After the Second World War , he initially chaired the Domowina Economic Committee before going to Poznań to study statistics and economic geography. In May 1947, as a Sorbian envoy, at a meeting with Polish government representatives, he addressed the problem of German-speaking expellees and their negative impact on the Sorbian language in Lusatia and handed over a memorandum with the wish for Sorbian independence. In autumn 1948 he returned to Lusatia at the request of Domowina. He received his doctorate in 1950 on the economic and demographic situation in Lusatia. In 1950/51 he taught at the newly founded Sorbian High School in Bautzen.

In 1954/55, Tschernik carried out a detailed demographic-statistical study in the villages of Upper and Lower Lusatia on behalf of Domowina as an employee of the Institute for Sorbian Folk Research in order to determine the number of Sorbs in the communities. The last such statistic was collected in 1884/85 by Arnošt Muka , whose results Tschernik published in 1954 in a summarized form. His own figures could not be published in the GDR , as the low figure of 81,000 was viewed as politically unfavorable.

Until 1958 Tschernik was head of the regional studies / demography department at the Institute for Sorbian Folk Research. In 1959 he moved to Berlin.

Ernst Tschernik had a daughter and two sons.

literature

• Ernst Tschernik: The development of the Sorbian population . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1954.
• Ludwig Elle: Language Policy in Lusatia . Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen 1995. (Results from Tschernik's statistics in the appendix)

swell

• Piotr Pałys: Přinošk k biografiji Arnošta Černika. In: Rozhlad 2/2014 [Volume 64], pp. 34–37.
• Irena Šěrakowa: Što je znate where dr. Arnošće Černiku? In: Rozhlad 12/2013 [Volume 63], pp. 30–33.