Godwalt Christian Hirsch

Gottwalt Christian Hirsch (born November 14, 1888 in Magdeburg , † March 14, 1972 ) was a German cytologist .

Life

Hirsch grew up in Magdeburg as the son of Medical Councilor Dr. Max Hirsch and brother of the later lawyer and notary Hans Christoph Hirsch . After graduating from high school, he studied natural sciences at the universities of Naples , Halle and Tübingen and joined the Corps Rhenania Tübingen in 1910 . After receiving his doctorate in 1914 as Dr. rer. nat. in Tübingen, the habilitation in Halle followed in the same year . During the First World War he did military service as a bacteriologist.

In 1921 he received a teaching position as a private lecturer at the University of Utrecht , where he was appointed associate professor in 1926, head of experimental histology . In 1937 he was appointed full professor and head of the Institute for Cytology in Utrecht, where in 1944 he had to flee from the advancing Western Allies leaving his belongings behind. He was initially museum curator of the collections of the University of Göttingen . From 1946 to 1948 he was appointed professor of biology at the British College in Göttingen by the British occupying forces . Visiting professorships followed in Oxford (1948), Zurich (1951) and Sao Paulo (1954). He retired in Germany in 1953.

Hirsch was the son-in-law of the paleontologist and geologist Otto Jaekel .

Honors

In 1940 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

Works

Hirsch left behind a rich literature not only in his actual field. Here's what he said about academic freedom , which was hotly contested in the 1960s:

“No password has been misused as much since 1500 as the word 'freedom': in the times of the Reformation, the French Revolution, the liberalism of Europe and America, in the headlines of the Soviet zone. It expressed man's natural need to do what he pleases in his existence as an individual. It was the catchphrase of the struggle of individuals against a binding, restrictive group, against a family, a class or in the struggle of a social class against a compelling higher community. But it became more seldom clear - certainly with Kant, Fichte, Chamberlain, Jaspers - that there is no absolute freedom, only a balance between freedom and bondage. For the life of an individual, freedom of movement is just as necessary as the bond with a parental home. The freedom of personal creation in thinking, feeling and shaping is just as important as the binding of these processes to a community that participates and helps to shape through its echo.

We have to start from this balance, from this vital polarity, the polarity between freedom of movement and being tied to a place, freedom of thought and orientation through the community, between the individual and the community, between creative freedom of design and the forms of tradition, between the arbitrariness of the actions of individuals or the groups and the echo, the experience through the higher community. The existence of man embraces both poles; his life is kindled by the energies that flow from one pole to the other: freedom and bondage. "

- Hirsch 1965

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 128 , 652
2. ↑ Member entry by Gottwalt Hirsch at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 9, 2016.
3. ↑ Kösener Handbuch, 5th edition, 1965