Heinrich von Salisch

Karl Wilhelm Rudolph Heinrich von Salisch (born June 1, 1846 in Jeschütz , Silesia , today Jaszyce , Poland ; † March 6, 1920 in Postel, Silesia, today Postolin , Schulzenamt der Stadt Milicz , Poland) was a German forester , landlord and politician . He was a member of the Reichstag from 1893 to 1903 . He became known through his book Forest Aesthetics , with which he had a decisive effect not only on forest maintenance .

origin

His parents were Rudolf Georg Gustav von Salisch (* June 13, 1797; † February 28, 1861) and his second wife Johanna von Rehdinger (* August 2, 1811; † March 26, 1873). The manor owners and parliamentarians Arthur von Salisch and Paul von Salisch were his brothers.

Life

After attending the humanistic high school at St. Maria Magdalena in Breslau , Heinrich von Salisch began studying law at the Universities of Breslau and Heidelberg in 1865 . While still studying in Heidelberg, he fought in the German War in 1866 as a personal cuirassier in Bohemia during the campaign against Austria . After a forestry apprenticeship from 1867 to 1869 as Forsteleve in Katholisch Hammer (today Skoroszów ), he studied at the Eberswalde Forest Academy . In Eberswalde he also became a member of the Academic Schützenhaus-Gesellschaft (ASG). He experienced the Franco-German War of 1870/71 as a reserve officer for the body cuirassiers with the hussars . In France he fought mainly at Verdun and Lunéville . He eventually reached the military rank of prime lieutenant .

From 1869 von Salisch worked as a forest referendar in the forest administration, but left the Prussian civil service in 1874, married Susanna von Schlegell and took over the management of the parental manor at Postel, which covered a total of 1048 hectares. He not only made structural changes to the courtyard, palace and church, but also transformed the Postel district, which covers a good 700 hectares, into a model forest area - not least in terms of the forest aesthetic , which he increasingly began to propagate. Heinrich von Salisch founded a park on his property, which still impresses with numerous exotic trees, including species such as the Caucasian fir , Caucasian spruce , bald cypress , great coastal fir , American linden , Crimean linden and tulip tree . In 2000, the approximately 5.2 hectare park was declared a cultural monument. The courtyard of the von Salisch family belonging to the park was completely destroyed by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War in 1945 .

In addition, Heinrich von Salisch was involved as a supervisor for the Jeschützer Wald, held the office of state elder , was a member of the German Conservative Party from 1893 to 1903 in the Reichstag and sat in the Prussian mansion from 1908 to 1918 . In 1893 and 1898 he ran in the constituency of Militsch-Trebnitz (Breslau 2) as a joint Reichstag candidate of the German Conservative Party, the German Reich Party (DRP) and the Federation of Farmers (BdL) . As the excellent speaker with a sense of humor that he was, he was always very active in the meetings of the Silesian Forest Association, which made him an honorary member in 1914. Heinrich von Salisch also wrote a number of articles for the yearbooks of the Silesian Forest Association and later for the communications of the German Dendrological Society .

He set his district forester Eduard Labitzky with a boulder bearing the inscription “To the memory of the district forester Eduard Labitzky 1846-1892. HvS 1909 ” carries a massive monument in the Posteler Wald. His brother-in-law was Ernst von Heydebrand and the Lasa .

Heinrich von Salisch died after a short stay in the Postel hospital on March 6, 1920. He found his final resting place in the forest of Postel. Six years later, his wife was also buried there. The grave is located next to the small Protestant forest cemetery in Postel, near a boulder. While only a few traces of the former cemetery can be found, the grave of the von Salisch family has been preserved. Today it is maintained by the local Polish forest authorities. In the immediate vicinity there is a nature trail, the stations of which remind of the deserved forester and founder of forest aesthetics.

effect

It is largely thanks to Heinrich von Salisch that, in addition to commercial interests, aesthetic and land-care considerations were anchored within forestry . He succeeded in doing this with his main work, forest aesthetics , which he defines as "the doctrine of the beauty of the commercial forest ". His book was published for the first time in 1885 and had two more, improved editions by 1911. Between 1875 and 1915, von Salisch also published numerous essays and reports, often also on the subject of forest beautification. He supported the dissemination of his ideas through exemplary management of the Postel district (so-called “Posteler thinning”) in practice. In doing so, he avoided both plenter and deforestation . He recommended Hochwald in "rich design with overhangs, substructure friendly mixture and pleasant variety" . It is true that Gottlob König had already suggested similar ideas to those of Salisch and implemented them in practice. But it was only von Salisch who systematically summarized the aesthetic values ​​of the individual tree species , the other forest plants, the meadows and bodies of water as well as the forest coats in relation to the various forest management forms and individual measures.

With the book Forest Aesthetics, he not only aimed to present his own thoughts to a broader audience, but also to unite all forest aesthetic thoughts and publications in one overview. Above all, however, his work should pave the way for forest aesthetics as an independent scientific discipline. At the meetings of the German Forestry Association in 1905 and 1906, von Salisch therefore requested that the forests should be managed in future with consideration of beauty aspects and that the "forest beauty theory" should be anchored in forestry training. After hard arguments, the members accepted the first item but rejected the second. Nevertheless, the Salischs' ideas proved to be more permanent and prevailed. As early as 1903, in the second edition of the very influential manual of forest science founded by Carl Julius Tuisko von Lorey , the forest aesthetics was found as an appendix to the section " Silviculture ", and then in the third edition published by Christof Wagner in 1913, it had its own section. This was done at the special suggestion of the owner of the publishing house, Paul Siebeck. The 22-page section written by Hermann Stoetzer was edited by Salisch. Later, the ideas of forest aesthetics flowed into the lectures on nature conservation and forest landscape design that Arnold Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch gave at the University of Göttingen after 1945 . In the 1960s, landscape management finally became compulsory as part of the course at all forestry faculties in Germany. Many of Salisch's ideas can be found in it.

Beyond the boundaries of the field of forest science , forest aesthetics also had a fertilizing effect on other related areas such as landscape architecture . Von Salisch is largely the only forester who is known and recognized by state keepers and nature conservationists .

Fonts

• Forest aesthetics. Berlin 1885. (4th edition - based on the 3rd edition from 1911 - published by Kessel Verlag, Remagen 2009, ISBN 978-3-941300-06-4 . (Table of contents) )

literature

• Jerzy Wiśniewski: Heinrich von Salisch (1846-1920) . In: Archives for Forestry and Landscape Ecology. Issue 2/2007, p. 89 f. (Digitized version)
• Richtsteig: Heinrich von Salisch . Obituary (with portrait) In: Zeitschrift für Forst- und Jagdwesen. 1921.
• Reichstag Bureau (Ed.): Official Reichstag manual. (1890-1903). Reichstag printing house, Berlin
• Genealogical paperback of the knights and Aristocratic families, 1877, second year, p.632

Web links

• Heinrich von Salisch in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Speeches by Salisch during the sessions of the Reichstag 1893–1903 (digital copies of the Reichstag minutes)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Jerzy Wiśniewski: Heinrich von Salisch (1846–1920) . In: Archives for Forestry and Landscape Ecology. Issue 2/2007, p. 89 f.
2. ^ Hermann Stoetzer, Heinrich von Salisch: Forest aesthetics . In: Handbuch der Forstwissenschaft. 3. Edition. Volume 4, Verlag der Laupp'schen Buchhandlung, Tübingen 1913, p. 288, footnote.