Friedrich Tamnau

Friedrich Tamnau (born December 8, 1802 in Berlin ; † September 30, 1879 there ) was a German banker, mineralogist and mineral collector who built up one of the largest and best-equipped private collections of minerals of his time.

Live and act

Tamnau was the son of the evangelical merchant Johann Friedrich Tamnau (died around 1859) from Königsberg and his Jewish wife and was sent to Königsberg to be educated by him as private tutors. He studied at the Tharandt Forest Academy and the Freiberg Bergakademie (mineralogy with Friedrich Mohs ). Back in Berlin he had contact with the mineralogists Eilhard Mitscherlich , Christian Samuel Weiss and Gustav Rose and began collecting minerals on extensive journeys (1821 Italy, 1824 Hungary, Transylvania, 1828 Scandinavia, 1835 France). He received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1836 on the basis of published or pending publication of mineralogical works (crystal form of dichroit , a monograph on chabazite , which appeared in the same year) and geology of Bohemia and Transylvania. In 1838 he published on Gieseckite . After that he did not publish anything for a while, but continued to collect at great expense and in exchange with other collectors. His main occupation was still a businessman, from the mid-1830s he called himself a banker.

When the first collection became too extensive for him, he offered it to Prussia for sale in 1829. The negotiations dragged on, however, because Weiss, who had been appointed as an appraiser, resisted (according to Hoppe, he had a contentious obstinacy and Tamnau was a student of Mohs, with whom he was feuding) and the lack of a catalog was criticized. In the end, around 32,000 pieces were bought for the Berlin University in 1841 (it is in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin ). The purchase price of 18,000 thalers seemed to Tamnau to be only about half of the value, but he still agrees. He kept a part (duplicates and selected pieces). He bequeathed the second, even larger collection (50,000 pieces after Tamnau, only around 10,000 in the later catalog) to the TH Berlin (at that time the trade academy), which built a museum room for it (1884). His son, the businessman Johann Friedrich Adalbert Tamnau, his wife and his daughter died before him.

The Tamnau collection of the TH Berlin was cataloged in 1885 by Julius Hirschwald (1845–1928) and was transferred from the TH Berlin to the TH Darmstadt in 1938. Tamnau bequeathed duplicates of the collection to his grandson Alfred von Janson, who increased them to around 14,000 and sold them to the Prussian state in 1892 for the high sum of 150,000 marks (most of it also came to the Natural History Museum in Berlin, but also to Posen, Königsberg, Göttingen, Greifswald). Tamnau left a Tamnau Foundation that financed mineralogical trips abroad. The foundation existed until 1923, when inflation devalued the remaining capital.

In 1848 he was a founding member of the German Society for Geosciences and its first treasurer, which he remained for 22 years. He was a privy councilor.

He published about mineralogy in the Annalen der Physik and (shorter messages) in the messages of the German Society for Geosciences.

Death and grave

Grave inscription for Friedrich and Marianne Elise Tamnau at the Mosisch-Tamnau-Stechow hereditary funeral in Berlin-Kreuzberg

Friedrich Tamnau died in Berlin in 1879 at the age of 76. He was buried in a hereditary funeral in the cemetery of the Bethlehem parish in front of Hallesches Tor , where his father Johann Friedrich (1779–1859), his wife Marianne Elise nee. Koch (1805–1870) and his son Adalbert (1827–1872) had found their final resting place.

The wall grave complex on the west wall of field 3 of the cemetery was laid out for the family of Martin Daniel Mosisch in 1796 and was bought by the Tamnau family in 1834. In 1883 it was taken over by the Stechow family, who used it for further burials. The wide, plastered sandstone wall with large inscription panels is crowned by a late Baroque putto that clasps an urn. Presumably it was the Tamnau family who chose this location for the sculpture, which is one of the oldest preserved works of sepulchral culture in the cemeteries in front of Hallesches Tor . The grave field with the crypt below is framed by a grid.

literature

• Günter Hoppe : Friedrich Tamnau (1802–1879) - mineralogist, mineral collector and patron. Fossil Record, Volume 7, 2004, pp. 45-59
• Eberhard Stechow and Paul von Groth : Neues Jb. Mineralog. Monthly books. 1954, pp. 69-72

Fonts

• Over some basalt mountains in Transylvania. Taschenbuch fur die Gesamt Mineralogie (sub-title Zeitschrift für Mineralogie), Jg. 1826, pp. 333–339
• About the crystal form of dichroite. Annalen der Physik und Chemie 12, 1828, 495-499.
• About the geognostic conditions in the area around Rodna in Transylvania. New yearbook for mineralogy, geognosy, geology and petrefactics, born in 1836
• Monograph of the Chabazite. New yearbook for mineralogy, geognosy, geology and petrefacts, 1836
• Over the serpentine of Snarum in Norway. Annalen der Physik und Chemie 42, 1837, pp. 462-468.
• About the occurrence of the Gieseckite and about the identity of the same with the Elaeolite and Nepheline. Annalen der Physik und Chemie 43, 1838, pp. 149–153.
• About the Aegyrin, Annalen der Physik und Chemie 48, 1839, 500.
• About the leukophane. Annalen der Physik und Chemie 48, 1839, p. 504.

Web links

• dig

References and comments

1. ↑ In contrast to the information provided by Stechow, this was a real doctorate and not an honorary doctorate.
2. ↑ Mineralogical Collection, Natural History Museum Berlin ( Memento of the original from July 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ^ Mineralogical Collection TH Berlin
4. ↑ According to information on the website of the Mineralogical Collection of the TH Berlin, the TH Berlin collection that remained in Berlin suffered great losses due to looting during the Second World War
5. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 221.Bethlehem's cemetery and church of the Brethren . Description of the cemetery in the database of the Berlin State Monuments Office (accessed April 8, 2019).