Georg Joseph August Kollmann

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Georg Joseph August Kollmann (born December 30, 1797 in Würzburg , † March 7, 1839 in Padang on West Sumatra ) was a German doctor and botanist in the service of the Royal Dutch East Indian Army .

Life

Sight of Batavia in the 19th century
The roadstead of Padang around 1844. From 1837 until his death in 1839 (tropical disease) Georg Kollmann worked here as a German doctor in the service of the Royal Dutch East India Army
Anna Josephine Sinner (born October 15, 1794 in Ochsenfurt - died July 26, 1886 in Würzburg) widow of the Royal Dutch Medical Councilor Georg Joseph August Kollmann on Java and Sumatra. After the death of her husband, she returned to Hamburg with her 7 children. On the way home, a mutiny occurred on the sailing ship, which is why she only reached Germany after an adventurous journey that lasted well over four months.

Georg Joseph August Kollmann was the first child of Professor Nikolaus Kollmann and Elisabeth Göbel. After completing his medical studies in Würzburg and Heidelberg, he joined the Royal Dutch East Indian Army in 1821 as a surgeon and troop doctor . He was then 24 years old. In August of the following year he was embarked for Java , where he arrived in Buitenzorg (today Bogor ) on December 13 and was stationed there.

For the first 13 years - from 1822 to 1835 - Kollmann served as personal physician to the governors-general of the Dutch East Indies , who took turns at that time. During his time the Dutch colony was ruled by Baron Godert Alexander Gerard Philip van der Capellen (from 1819 to 1826), Léonard Pierre Joseph Burgrave du Bus de Ghisignies (1826 to 1830), Hendrik Merkus Baron de Kock (1826 to 1830), and Johannes Graf van den Bosch (1830 to 1833) and Jean-Chrétien Baud (1833 to 1836).

Shortly after his arrival in Java, Kollmann started his local art collection. In 1823 he gave a Javanese stone figure of the Hindu god Shiva to King Ludwig I of Bavaria. A kris (dagger), as well as a saber (klewang) and a rice basket made from Bambu from Surakarta, Central Java, followed in 1835. The objects became part of the royal private collections as the VIII. Division of the so-called "United Collections" as "Pheloplastic, Indian Chinese and other works of art "opened to the public in the gallery building in 1844. In 1869 they were added to the royal household.

In 1834 Kollmann, who had the official title of Royal Dutch Medical Councilor, also experienced the great earthquake that destroyed a large part of Batavia and Buitenzorg, including the magnificent palace built in 1744, the residence of the governors general, which could only be rebuilt in 1856. His work as a doctor in disasters was particularly put to the test at that time.

In addition to his work as an official physicist and art collector, Kollmann was also a renowned botanist who had put together a collection of over 4,200 species of dried plants that he offered to the Dutch government for the Royal Herbarium in Leiden during his one-year home leave in Europe in June 1836 . After his return, he was transferred to the city of Padang in West Sumatra in 1837, a fishing village close to the equator that had been devastated four years earlier by the earthquake and the following tsunami . There, the water mass from over four meters deep had killed 200 people.

Kollmann did not stay long in Padang. He died of a tropical disease on March 7, 1839. Shortly after his death, his then 47-year-old widow, Anna Josephine Sinner from Ochsenfurt, daughter of the Würzburg regional court doctor Michael Sinner, decided to return to their home in Würzburg with her seven children. She had given birth to 11 children, but 4 of them died as infants in Southeast Asia. She booked on one of the usual sailing freighters from Batavia to Hamburg . At that time the journey usually led via Calcutta , in whose port some of the goods were to be reloaded and reloaded. But the mood on board deteriorated and at some point serious incidents occurred on the Hamburg ship, which ultimately led to a mutiny. The rebelled crew took control of the ship, whereupon Anna Kollmann and her children finally reached the port of Hamburg only after an adventurous voyage that normally lasted well over four months.

Anna Kollmann outlived her husband by almost half a century. She died at the age of 92 in the summer of 1886 and left a diary kept by her about her adventure, which was owned by the family of her son Oskar Kollmann, who later became King. District doctor in Würzburg, remained. Unfortunately, it was lost when his heirs fled Berlin at the end of World War II .

Web links

literature

  • Müller, Claudius: Exotic Worlds. From the ethnological collections of the Wittelsbach family 1806-1848. Verlag JH Röll, Dettelbach, 2007. Pages 291, 299, 300, 301 and 309. ISBN 978-3-89754-264-8 .
  • Bulletin of the Boyttanic Gardens, Buitenzorg. Bogor, Inodesia. Impr. Du department, 1949. page 463
  • Worlds of knowledge: The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the scientific collections of Bavaria: Exhibitions for the 250th anniversary of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Pages 278 and 285.
  • Scientiarum Historia, Volume 15, Issues 1-2. Pages 112 to 114.
  • Wätjen, Hermann: The German merchant shipping in Chinese coastal waters around the middle of the 19th century, in: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 67/68 (1942) pages 222 to 250.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kollmann, George Joseph August (1796-1839) , plants.jstor.org
  2. ^ In Würzburg he became a member of the Corps Franconia Würzburg in 1815 ; Kösener corps lists 1910 202 , 79
personal data
SURNAME Kollmann, Georg Joseph August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and botanist
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1797
PLACE OF BIRTH Wurzburg
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1839
Place of death Padang