Gustav Adolf Lohse

Gustav Adolf Lohse around 1955

Gustav Adolf Lohse (born December 27, 1910 in Hamburg-Uhlenhorst ; † April 30, 1994 in Hamburg ) was a German dentist and coleopterologist .

Life

The son of the art dealer Gustav Lohse and his wife Elfriede, née Lesberg, studied dentistry in Hamburg and Munich after graduating from high school . It was in 1933 for his dissertation on the topic to today's state of Cariesforschung to (Dr. med. Dent. Doctor of Dental Medicine ) PhD . From 1934 he ran a dentist's practice in Hamburg with a modest income because he had been refused admission to health insurance due to his classification as a “ half-Jew ” because of his Jewish mother .

In 1936 Lohse met Erika Riebe, the mother of his daughter Marlies, who was born in 1938. But because of the National Socialist race laws, he was not given a marriage permit . In 1940 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht , but released again in 1941 because of so-called “unworthiness for military service”. He was obliged to work such as cleaning up after bombing, recovering corpses and building barricades . In 1944 he was banned from continuing his dental practice.

After the war he was able to reopen the practice and marry his partner, with the marriage being legalized retrospectively. In 1946 his son Ulrich was born. In 1974, a disease of lymph gland cancer forced him to give up his dental practice. Thanks to new chemotherapy , he overcame his illness.

Scientific work

Lohse had started collecting beetles at the age of 13 and continued this activity and the scientific processing of beetles throughout his life. His first coleopterological publication appeared in 1938 and was entitled 3 New Species of Local Fauna .

In 1940 he joined the Association for Natural Scientific Local Research in Hamburg, of which he was first chairman for decades after the war. In 1954 he became editor of the coleopterological journal Entomologische Blätter . He held this office until 1991 and had a decisive influence on the content of this magazine.

After years of confined himself to the faunistic research of north German beetles, his taxonomic work became more and more important in the late 1950s . Lohse's preference was for the Central European short-winged birds (Staphylinidae) and especially the Holarctic Aleocharinae and the genus Lesteva . In total, Lohse described 8 genera or sub-genera and 143 new species or sub-species in 282 publications of coleopterological content.

His greatest achievement is likely to be the co-editing of the multi-volume standard work Die Käfer Mitteleuropas . He played a decisive role in the realization of the extensive work, also in that he contributed a large part to it himself. He often took over the processing of difficult groups himself when it was not possible to find a specialist.

In 1977 he was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Hamburg in recognition of his services in the field of systematic entomology . In 1980 he received the Fabricius Medal of the German Entomological Society , in 1986 the Medal of Honor for outstanding achievements in the field of entomofaunistics on the decision of the International Committee of the XI. Symposium on Entomofaunistics in Central Europe. In 1989 he was awarded the Ernst Jünger Prize for Entomology from the State of Baden-Württemberg .

literature

• G. Vukovits: In memory of Dr. Dr. hc Gustav Adolf Lohse , Koleopterologische Rundschau, Volume 65, Vienna, June 1995, ISSN  0075-6547 , pp. 237-250