Hans Woldemar Schack

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Hans Schack (born July 3, 1878 in Neustadt bei Coburg , † February 15, 1946 in Leipzig ; full name Hans Woldemar Schack) was a German botanist . Its botanical author's abbreviation is " Schack ". The trained lawyer was, among other things, State Councilor of the Free State of Coburg and judge at the Imperial Court in Leipzig.

Live and act

childhood and education

Hans Schack was born on July 3, 1878 in Neustadt bei Coburg , then the Duchy of Saxony-Coburg , now Upper Franconia . His father Dr. Gustav Schack was an assessor at the justice office in Neustadt and later a district judge in Meiningen . His mother was Lina Schack, née Döll.

The Bernhardinum in Meiningen

The young Hans attended elementary school in Rodach . He then moved to the Bernhardinum grammar school in Meiningen , where he graduated from high school at Easter 1899. He subsequently studied six semesters Law at the University of Jena and laid on July 12, 1902, the first state examination. In Jena he became a member of the Arminia fraternity in the castle cellar in 1899 . From 1902 to 1906 he was - as a preparatory service for the higher judicial service of the Duchy of Saxony-Coburg and Gotha - trainee lawyer at the district court in Neustadt, at the district courts of Meiningen and Gotha, at the district office at Schloss Tenneberg and at the higher regional court in Jena and successfully passed the exam in 1907 for the higher judicial service. Schack was promoted to Dr. Schack on April 16, 1907 by the Faculty of Law at the University of Jena. jur. PhD; his dissertation, written under the direction of Professor Rosenthal , was entitled The Liability of Board Members of the Aktiengesellschaft .

Careers in justice and politics

After completing his doctorate, Hans Schack worked as a lawyer in Gotha and joined a law firm in Coburg in 1908 ; on April 1, 1914, he changed to the state judicial service as a district judge at the district court of Coburg .

Schack showed great commitment in public life and politics in the city and country of Coburg. In November 1918 he was one of the founders of the German Democratic Party (DDP) for Saxony-Coburg. After the election of February 9, 1919, Schack entered the Coburg state assembly as a candidate for the DDP on the unified list of bourgeois parties . After the abdication of Duke Carl Eduard von Sachsen-Coburg , the Free State of Coburg was faced with the decision to join Thuringia or Bavaria. Schack was one of the proponents of the separation of Saxe-Coburg from Gotha and the unification with the Free State of Bavaria. He took part in the negotiations with Bavaria, formulated the Coburg wishes and influenced all legal considerations about the state future of Coburg at that time. On July 11, 1919, he became a state councilor in the state government of Coburg. After the annexation of Coburg to the Free State of Bavaria in the course of a referendum on July 1, 1920, Schack was one of the three Coburg MPs who moved into the Bavarian state parliament . A few months later he had to give up this seat after a by-election to the Bavarian state parliament.

Schack's commitment to public life in Coburg includes his advocacy of the establishment of a state foundation, the establishment of which he made a major contribution in 1919 and which took over the cultural assets of the ducal house with art, antiquity and natural science collections as well as other cultural assets of the Veste Coburg and castles Museums should accommodate. In this way, the cultural history of the dissolved Coburg state should be preserved in the Coburg region as a cultural heritage. From 1919 to 1930 Schack was a member of the board of the Coburg State Foundation . During this time, the renovation and extensive expansion of the Veste Coburg and its art collections fell. In November 1920 he followed the appointment as director of the newly established Coburg Regional Court . From February 1, 1930 to 1945, Schack was a judge at the Reichsgericht in Leipzig , the highest German court at the time.

Work as a botanist

As early as 1904, Hans Schack became a member of the Thuringian Botanical Association . From 1910 he maintained continuous correspondence with Joseph Bornmüller , the curator at the Haussknecht Herbarium in Weimar, who supported him and sent him literature. In 1925 Schack created the first overview flora of the Coburg area including neighboring areas such as Haßberge, upper Werra area, Grabfeld and northern Franconian Jura with his work Flora of Vascular Plants of Coburg and the Surrounding Area. He added a supplement to this flora in 1926.

Schack increasingly directed his botanical interest to the species-rich plant genera of the hawk herb ( Hieracium ) and Rubus , but continued to limit himself to the regional reference to the areas of Franconia and Thuringia. A stimulus for him was the monograph of the genus Hieracium written by Karl Hermann Zahn , which appeared in Adolf Engler's monumental work The Plant Kingdom from 1921 to 1923. He was also influenced by other publications by Zahn, as well as by Kurt Harz's area processing for Bamberg (1914, 1925 and 1927) and by Karl Touton for the Kissinger area (1925). According to current taxonomic knowledge, the genus of the hawkweed comprises around 850 to 1000 species, the Rubus genus even several thousand species.

On a joint excursion with Bornmüller in autumn 1928, the area of Lichtenfels and Kulmbach was explored, and Schack decided to publish all hierarchies that had been determined so far in Thuringia and Franconia. The subsequent determination of the plants was taken over by Karl Herrmann Zahn, who suffered from the years of delay in having his article published in the Synopsis of Central European Flora and gladly took the opportunity to publish his own research results elsewhere. Numerous excursions brought together thousands of collected Hieracium plant specimens, which were kept as herbarium specimens in the private herbaria of Schack and Bornmüller. During an excursion in June 1929, Schack happened upon the Thuringian botanist Werner Rothmaler , with whom he remained in contact throughout his life. When publishing the study results, Bornmüller decided not to be named as a second author besides Schack, as he considered his own contribution to be small.

Schack increasingly used his vacation trips to collect plants and thus expanded his botanical knowledge. The Giant Mountains , Bavaria and the Alpine region (especially Carinthia , Tyrol and Vorarlberg ) as well as Liechtenstein became further geographical focal points for his studies on hawkweed. Numerous journeys of this kind between 1926 and 1943 are documented by herbarium records. His friends Georg Kükenthal (Superintendent of Coburg, but at the same time botanist specialized in the sour grass family ) and Johann Schwimmer from Bregenz accompanied him on many of his trips to the Alps .

In 1934, Schack and Schwimmer published the results of their joint excursions in the extensive work Flora of Hawk Herbs of the Principality of Liechtenstein . Schack published further works on the hawk herbs in 1934 and 1936 in Feddes Repertorium , in 1934 and 1941 in the reports of the Bavarian Botanical Society , in 1937 in Hercynia and in 1937 and 1943 in the messages of the Thuringian Botanical Association .

In Schack's writings between 1930 and 1943, around 120 clans in the genus Hieracium were newly described; most of these publications were made together with Karl Hermann Zahn. Another 30 or so clans of the genus, which Zahn published in his Synopsis of the Central European Flora , were recognized by Schack himself or were at least based on his plant material.

From 1925 to 1933, Schack had created a herbarium comprising 6,000 documents on the genus of the hawkweed, which was one of the most important collections for this genus. Schack maintained exchange connections with the two botanists from Weimar, Joseph Bornmüller and Werner Rothmaler, with Rudolf Baschant in Halle , with G. Samuelsson in Stockholm , F. Käser in Zurich and with the Berlin Botanical Exchange Association . In 1933, Schack handed over his herbarium for the Hieracium genus to the Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem . In the years that followed, Schack continued to collect hawkweed specimens; this resulted in a second Hieracium collection comprising more than 6,000 specimens , which he handed over to the Bavarian Botanical Society in Munich in 1942. Schack had been a member of this society since 1923.

In addition to Zahn, Schack was another excellent expert on the Hieracium genus and received many broadcasts from botanists such as Bornmüller and Rothmaler for identification.

In addition to his main research area, the hawk herbs, Schack also devoted himself to the complex genus Rubus . He shared his interest in this genre with his friend Georg Kükenthal . As early as 1930, Schack published a major article on the blackberry flora of Franconia and Thuringia ; other smaller contributions to the genus Rubus appeared in 1933 and 1939 in the messages of the Thuringian Botanical Association .

In his later years of activity, Schack was the scientific supervisor of Otto Behr's exsiccate plant Herbarium Hieraciorum from Forst.

Due to a serious illness that was noticeable as early as 1934, Schack was forced to take several spa stays in Bad Steben, Bad Schandau, Bad Wörishofen and Bad Faulenbach near Füssen. A progressive eye disease made the work of plant identification increasingly difficult for him. In 1944, for health reasons, among other things, he turned down Rothmaler's offer to write the contribution to the genus Hieracium in his work Flora von Europa . In addition, he believed at the time that the power delivered to the Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem part of his Hieracia -Herbars was a fire in 1943 fell victim; this turned out to be wrong only later, as Schack's documents were fortunately outsourced at the time.

Schack died on February 15, 1946 at the age of 67 in Leipzig ; According to his will, he was buried in Meiningen .

Honors

Karl Hermann Zahn named the subspecies Hieracium murorum subsp. schackii in Schack's honor. In the stairwell of the Coburg town hall , Schack's name is noted on a bronze plaque for his services in connecting Coburg to Bavaria, and a street is named after him next to it.

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 5: R – S. Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1256-9 , pp. 180-181.
personal data
SURNAME Schack, Hans Woldemar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schack, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German botanist, lawyer and politician
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Neustadt near Coburg
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 1946
Place of death Leipzig