Harry Marcus

Louis Harry Marcus (born February 3, 1880 in Alexandria , Egypt , † January 25, 1976 in Munich ) was a German anatomist , entomologist and university professor . He, his wife and children and their spouses were persecuted by the Nazi regime .

Life

Origin, education and profession

Marcus was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of the Jewish merchant Gerson Marcus, owner of a shipping line between Hamburg and Alexandria, and the Florence- born Italian Emma, ​​née Padova. Marcus grew up in Egypt until he was seven, traveled a lot with his parents and received private tuition from German teachers. In order to give him a good education, the family moved to Hamburg . He passed the Abitur at the humanistic Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Hamburg-Harvestehude .

He then turned to studying medicine at the University of Leipzig and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he was awarded a Dr. med. PhD . He immediately got a position as an assistant at the anatomical institute there and in 1910 he qualified as a professor in the subjects of anatomy and development history. In 1915 he was appointed as a non-official extraordinary professor of anatomy with a teaching position for anatomy for students of dentistry . Marcus took part in the First World War as a hospital doctor on the French front. Despite a serious illness he remained until the war ended in 1918 he was awarded the Hamburg Hanseatic Cross awarded. In 1923 he was appointed as a lifelong curator at the Anatomical Institute.

family

In 1900, Marcus married Margarete Boyer in London , with whom he had seven children: Reinhard, Hertha, Helmut, Emma Erica, Benno, Ulrich and Margarete. In 1910 the family moved to Pasing . In 1918 he was granted civil rights. In 1919, Marcus converted to the Protestant denomination , which he had again confirmed in 1935. In 1935 he bought a house on August-Exter-Strasse, which the family moved into in 1936.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the Reich Citizenship Act came into force in 1935, he was banned from practicing his profession due to his Jewish origin . Initially on leave, then retired, his license to teach was withdrawn and his professorial title revoked. Publishing was now also forbidden. He lost his livelihood. No colleague dared to employ him in his institute. He himself and his correspondence were monitored by the Gestapo , as was his son Reinhard, a physician in Essen. His pupil and son-in-law Titus von Lanz , co-author of the practical anatomy textbook , was dismissed because of his “ half-Jewish ” wife Hertha († 1948). Marcus lived secluded in his house in Pasing. In autumn 1938 he was on a lecture tour in Italy and was warned by telephone by his daughter Hertha after she had received a visit from the Gestapo. He did not return to Germany and emigrated from Italy with his family members at the beginning of the war in 1939 to South America to his youngest son Ulrich, who had emigrated to Argentina in the twenties . On the high seas on September 1st, all German men, including Marcus and his son Benno, were abducted by a French warship to France and interned there under poor conditions. He and his son finally managed to leave the country. After arriving in Cochabamba in Bolivia , the now sixty-year-old worked as a lecturer, publicist and researcher, particularly in the field of entomology. The husband of his daughter Margarete, Sebastian Weilacher, was not given a permanent job in Germany because of his “half-Jewish” wife. His son Benno was stripped of his doctorate in 1943 and his German citizenship revoked. From 1945 to 1954 Marcus held an honorary professorship at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba. Margarete Marcus died in exile in 1949 after a long and serious illness.

return

By successfully asserting his rights to reparation , Marcus was able to finance his trip to Germany in 1954. He lived again in his house, which had remained in the family's possession. In 1959 he was rehabilitated in Germany. He remained professionally active until his death in 1976 at the age of 96. The Süddeutsche Zeitung mentioned in the obituary of February 3, 1960 that Marcus was the only one to return from the once world-famous medical faculty.

Marcus wrote about 300 scientific papers, especially on entomology.

Publications (selection)

author

• 33 contributions to the knowledge of the gymnophions , 1910 ff.
• First mitochondria display , 1920
• Semen in Ultraviolet Light , 1921
• Lungen , in: Louis Bolk , Ernst Göppert , Erich Kallius, Wilhelm Lubosch : Handbook of the comparative anatomy of vertebrates, Volume 3 , Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin, Vienna 1936, pp. 909 ff.

editor

• Folia Universitaria Cochabamba , Cochabamba 1945–54

literature

• Gerhard Lüdtke, Werner Schuder , Joseph Kürschner (Eds.): Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar 1928/29. 3rd edition. De Gruyter, Berlin 1929, Sp. 1491, 1493.
• Werner Schuder (Hrsg.): Kürschner's German learned calendar. 10th edition. Berlin 1966, vol. 2, p. 1515.
• August Ludwig Degener, Walter Habel: Who is who? 16th edition. Arani, Berlin 1970, ISBN 3-7605-2007-3 , p. 808 f.
• Angela Scheibe-Jaeger: The life of Prof. Dr. med. Harry Marcus. In: Bernhard Schossig (Ed.): Moved into the light. Jewish life in the west of Munich. Herbert-Utz-Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8316-0787-7 , pp. 107-115 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
• Julius H. Kriszan: Escape destination Bolivia 1933–1945: A collection of materials. GRIN, Munich 2009, ISBN 3-640-35334-X , p. 104.