Heinz Nowak

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heinz Nowak (born December 28, 1925 in Altenweddingen ; † May 31, 2012 ) was a German local researcher and museum director. The focus of his work was the history of the Magdeburg Börde .

Life

Heinz Nowak was born the son of a carpenter and grew up in Altenweddingen. After finishing school he started an apprenticeship as a toolmaker in aircraft construction. During the Second World War he was taken prisoner of war. After his return he worked from 1948 as an excavation assistant as part of the archaeological research into the city center in the heavily destroyed city of Magdeburg .

On April 20, 1954, Nowak took over the management of the Ummendorf Museum and set up the museum as a regional museum of natural and cultural history. In his role, he also recorded the buildings in the Wanzleben district that were to be classified as monuments . In addition, he carried out the necessary archaeological emergency excavations and recoveries. He published relevant documentation in specialist journals. From 1955 to 1962 he also led excavations in an area near Stemmern threatened by gravel mining . Nowak also created the library of the museum, building on the old holdings of the Heimatverein.

He worked on the local magazine Bördebote, published by the Wanzleben district between 1955 and 1957 . From 1959 he was editor and editor of the series The Magdeburger Börde - Publications of Nature and Society , created for the museum .

From 1954 to 1958 Nowak completed an apprenticeship at the technical college for local museums in Weißenfels . In 1957 he submitted a seminar paper on the history of the Klein Wanzleben sugar factory. Later, from 1965 to 1970, he studied German folklore and agricultural history at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In terms of content, he was particularly concerned with the history of agriculture, as a defining element of the development of the Magdeburg Börde. In 1969, as part of his studies, he worked on the history of the Wanzleben deep cultivation plow . In the mid-1970s, he managed to acquire a complete steam jet set for the museum .

In 1972 he succeeded in taking over the estate with more than 900 works by the stock exchange painter August Bratfisch into the museum's collection. A special focus of his activity was the renovation of the museum's headquarters, Ummendorf Castle, which was carried out over decades. From 1979/1980 he built the herb garden belonging to the museum, in which 400 historical useful plants are grown.

At the end of 1990 he retired and moved to Klein Wanzleben . Heinz Nowak was still active in the field of local research and published a large number of articles. He worked on the Magdeburg Biographical Lexicon published in 2002 .

literature

  • Thomas Ruppel, obituary for the stock exchange researcher Heinz Nowak in Börde, Bode, Heide - Heimatheft 2013 , publisher: Landkreis Börde Haldensleben 2012, page 92 ff.