Gustav Jäger (zoologist)

Gustav Jäger, 1884

Gustav Eberhard Jäger (born June 23, 1832 in Bürg ; † May 13, 1917 in Stuttgart ) was a German zoologist and physician who appeared in numerous scientific books. In addition, he was particularly interested in the development of health-promoting, voluntary reform clothing , which he called normal clothing and which he also sold as an entrepreneur. Contemporaries called him the wool hunter to distinguish it from other people .

Life

Jäger was the youngest of six children of the local historian and pastor Karl Friedrich Jaeger and spent his early childhood in the rectory in Bürg . The family moved from Bürg to Münchingen in 1841 after he changed pastor . In 1842 the father died and the mother moved with the children to the Harling castle , later to an apartment in Markgröningen . Jäger's other early stations were the seminar in Urach and the theological monastery in Tübingen , where he then studied natural sciences and medicine and lived in a vineyard house in front of the city, where he prepared amphibians, birds and small mammals in order to conduct a study “on development of the bony shoulder girdle ”in various animal species. During his student days he joined the Tübingen royal society Roigel .

In Sondelfingen , he married Selma Johanna Krais on December 20, 1860 (born December 11, 1835 in Talheim ; † February 5, 1907), daughter of the Sondelfingen pastor Julius Krais . Nine children arose from the marriage, of which only six reached adulthood: Max Julius (* 1861), Theodora Johanna (* 1862), Sophia Elisabeth (* 1864), Franz (* 1867), Clara Emma (* 1870) and Gustav Julius (* 1873).

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Jäger was the court master of a family of industrialists in Vienna , where he sought to hire a private lecturer in biology. As a Protestant, he was denied a scientific career in Catholic Austria, so that he initially considered establishing a public seawater aquarium and in 1864 opened the first "biological zoo" in the Vienna Prater and published the "Zoological Letters" in which he was one of the first and most active followers of Darwin appeared. The German War ended the Vienna period and in 1866 Jäger returned to Stuttgart impoverished with his family , where he initially continued to work as an author. From 1867 he received various teaching positions, including a. for zoology and physiology at the Agricultural Academy Hohenheim as well as at the Technical and Veterinary University Stuttgart. He also published natural science books such as “Darwinian theory and its position on morality and religion” (1869), “Life in water”, “Human labor” (1878), “The discovery of the soul” (1878), “Germany's animal world ”,“ Das Käferbuch ”and“ Allgemeine Zoologie ”, a standard specialist book of its time.

With his tireless journalistic work, Jäger became one of the first professional popularizers of knowledge and theories of nature in German-speaking countries and - regardless of the controversies that he often sparked - a co-founder of public-oriented popular science.

In the late 1860s, Jäger also began research into hygiene and health care, specific weights and the importance of odorous substances. Together with his brother Otto Jäger , he examined the effects of physical exercises on the body. He was particularly interested in the relationship between main activity and increased performance. Jäger came to the opinion that wool is more compatible with human skin than vegetable fibers. Research into metabolic processes in relation to clothing became the central work of Jäger, to which he continued to devote himself to his death and in favor of which his other scientific subjects were withdrawn. His restless research soon left no more time for teaching activities, which he gave up between 1881 and 1884 in order to be able to fully devote himself to research.

Normal clothing

The normal clothing he propagated for men consisted of air-permeable, woolen components. Jäger not only published about woolen clothing, but from 1879 had it manufactured by the Wilhelm Benger Söhne knitwear factory in Stuttgart . All items were made of animal wool, the normal shirts also had a flap so that the fabric was doubled at the front, resembling soldier skirts. Jäger was familiar with the ideas of anthroposophy and is part of the life reform movement . He also propagated that through the military education the individual as well as the whole of the people receive a capital of vitality, health and productivity and saw militarism as a "school of public health". One of his first followers was Robert Bosch , who for decades only wore normal clothing .

Jäger made his ideas known in England with the book Normal clothing as health protection (1880), where Oscar Wilde published Jäger's ideas. In 1884, a Jaeger health linen shop was opened in London . Around 1890 around 50 different items were made from wool, not just underwear , but also other items such as handkerchiefs and curtains. Around 1900 George Bernard Shaw wore knitted hunter suits, the clothes for the polar explorers Fridtjof Nansen , Robert Falcon Scott and Edmund Hillary as well as for Africa expeditions came from Jäger. In addition to merino wool , camel hair , vicuna , alpaca and cashmere were used .

Jäger lived in a large property in Stuttgart on Hegelstrasse. In addition to the residential building, the property included a villa with a bowling alley, a garden shed, a coach house and a pleasure garden. In 1902 he also acquired a property with woods and meadows on the Karnsberg near Murrhardt , which he had expanded into the Jägerhof and where the family spent the summer months. After the death of his wife Selma in 1908, at the age of 76, he married his second wife, Helene Müller (1864–1942), who was not only much younger than a hunter, but also younger than some of his children. Gustav Jäger died in 1917 at the age of almost 85. His three sons also became healers and continued their father's work.

In Germany, the popularity of "normal clothing" declined significantly after the First World War , but not in England. From 1934 sportswear was part of the Jaeger range. Today the Jaeger company with its headquarters in London has around 60 shops as well as its own flocks of sheep in Australia and around 14 factories in Great Britain.

Appreciation

Memorial plaque on the house where Gustav Jäger was born in Bürg

Jäger was awarded the large gold medal by the King of Württemberg for his general services to trade and commerce and was an honorary citizen of his birthplace in Bürg and his summer residence, Murrhardt. In 1854 he became a corresponding and in 1909 honorary member of the Association for Patriotic Natural History in Württemberg . In Murrhardt, Jägerstrasse is also named after him.

In 1918, the cultural historian Max von Boehn wrote somewhat ironically: He (Jäger, erg.) Wanted to have the experience that humans constantly produce two opposing substances in their body, namely the pleasant smelling pleasure and the stinking fear substances. Now he decided that clothing, especially underwear, should have the right balance of these two fragrances. It should create a body structure in which as few anxiety substances as possible and as much pleasure substances as possible are generated. He believed that he could achieve this by wearing woolen underwear and woolen clothes, and based on his discovery he set up a whole system of normal clothing (...) The hunter uniform he introduced became a fashionable thing as weatherproof, resistant to affects and epidemics. He found the double-breasted Württemberg soldier's skirt to be the healthiest, toughest and protective clothing for men (...) His reform proposal for women's clothing: wool shirt, woolen stockings, underpants and petticoat made of flannel, no corset, plus an outer garment made of wool, closed to the neck (...) )

Later obituaries paid tribute to Jäger's life's work. So wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung - Morgenblatt für nationale Politik und Volkswirtschaft on June 19, 1932: This is how Gustav Jäger will be named among the large number of Swabian originals as one of the many pioneers in the field of health and life science who acted as a pioneer and followed paths on which today's world goes on without knowing it.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Meyers Großes Konversationslexikon, 6th edition, 10th volume, Leipzig and Vienna 1909
2. ^ Andreas W. Daum: Science popularization in the 19th century. Civil culture, scientific education and the German public 1848–1914 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, p. 302, 391-393, 405, 410, 457, 462, 494 f .
3. ↑ Stuttgarter Nachrichten of December 12, 1959: The great entrepreneurs in Cannstatt and Stuttgart with treatises on Jäger and Bosch
4. ^ Honorary members of the Association for Patriotic Natural History in Württemberg
5. ↑ Source: Max von Boehn, Bekleidungskunst und Mode , Munich 1918

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Jäger, Gustav . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 10th part. Imperial and Royal Court and State Printing Office, Vienna 1863, p. 38 ( digital copy ).
• Eugen Dolmetsch: From old Stuttgart . In: Schwäbischer Merkur from February 13, 1938
• H. Göhrum: The work of a life researcher. On the 25th anniversary of Gustav Jaeger's death in: German Life, supplement to the Stuttgarter Neue Tagblatt of May 16, 1942
• Georg Uschmann:  Hunter, Gustav. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 269 ( digitized version ).
• Hans Helmut Jaeger: Family Chronicle Jaeger , V. Volume, Part 1 and 2, Erlangen 1982 and 1980
• Andreas W. Daum : Science popularization in the 19th century. Civil culture, scientific education and the German public 1848–1914 . 2nd, supplementary edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-486-56551-5 .
• Hans Dieter Haller: Gustav Jäger - wool or soul hunter . In: Uracher Köpf - Uracher Geschichtsblätter , Volume 2, 2009
• Jutta Hanitsch: Wool regime with worldwide success . In: Moments. Contributions to regional studies of Baden-Württemberg , issue 2/2018, pp. 26–29

Web links

Commons : Gustav Jäger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Gustav Jäger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Gustav Jäger  in the German Digital Library
• Gustav Jäger's biography on murrhardt.de