Helmut Blume

Helmut Blume (born March 18, 1920 in Cologne , † July 8, 2008 in Bad Kissingen ) was a German geographer .

World war and studies

As the son of the college teacher Karl Blume and his wife Rosemarie Freitag, he attended the secondary school in Cologne's Kreuzgasse , where he graduated from high school in 1937. Then he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service and was then able to study geology, geography and prehistory at the University of Cologne . In 1938 he moved to the University of Bonn and then in 1939 he found an important teacher in Heinrich Schmitthenner at the University of Leipzig .

PhD and first lecture

He obtained in 1941 in Leipzig, the promotion of Dr. rer. nat. with a theme on the landscape around the city of Dauba : The surface forms of the Daubaer Land in northern Bohemia . He then served in the Wehrmacht as an artillery officer until the end of World War II . At the University of Marburg he worked as an assistant from January 1, 1946, where he was able to work again with Schmitthenner. In the area around Marburg he carried out several research projects, which culminated in the topic of his habilitation in 1948 : Marburg landscape . As a private lecturer, he began lecturing on the North Caucasus in July 1948 . In doing so, he relied on the knowledge he gained there during the war.

Studies in the USA

For the first time he was able to undertake a research stay abroad on the islands of Great Britain between 1950 and 1951 . Participation in a geography conference in Washington, DC in 1952 led to an invitation to give guest lectures at Valparaiso University . The following year he engaged in studies in Louisiana , where he became interested in the requirements of growing sugar cane . In 1954/1955 he was appointed full professor. The questions of sugar cane cultivation in the years 1954 to 1958 concerned his investigations on the southern Mississippi and in southern areas of Spain.

Lecturer years in Kiel and Tübingen

Family grave in Melaten cemetery

From 1954 to 1963 he taught at the University of Kiel . In the years 1959 to 1971 he undertook several research trips into the tropical landscapes, about which he published corresponding books. In 1963 he accepted a call to the University of Tübingen to take over the chair for physical geography. Further trips took him to the USA in 1976 and 1978 . In a study he presented the positive and negative factors of the landscape. The stressful factors for him were the danger of earthquakes, the occurrence of cold snaps, the floods, the hurricanes and the occurrence of periods of drought. In 1985 he retired .

His grave is located in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (hall 11 (F)).

Offices and honorary positions

• from 1963: Editor of the publication series Tübingen Geographical Studies
• 1968–1970 and 1974–1977: Director of the Geographic Institute at the University of Tübingen
• 1975: Expert reviewer from the German Research Foundation and representative of geography in the Collaborative Research Center 19
• 1977–1978: Speaker of the Ordinaries in the Grand Senate of the University of Tübingen

Fonts (selection)

• The Marburg landscape - shape and morphological development , Marburg 1949
• The state of Hessin and its landscapes , Remagen 1951
• Sugar cane cultivation on the lower Mississippi (Louisiana's Sugar Bowl) , Kallmünz 1954
• The development of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi Delta in colonial times with special consideration of the German settlement , Kiel 1956
• The West Indies , Braunschweig 1968.
  • English: The Caribbean Islands . Longman, London 1974, ISBN 0-582481643 .
• Agricultural landscape and agrarian reform in Cuba , 1968.
• Problems of the layered landscape , Darmstadt 1971.
• The Pleistocene relief development in the layer land of the Driftless Area of ​​Wisconsin (USA) - a contribution to the layer morphogenesis with special consideration of the Pleistocene valley and slope formation , Tübingen 1971.
• Geomorphological investigations in the Württemberg Keuperbergland with Hans Karl Barth, Reiner Schwarz and Reinhard Zeese, Tübingen 1971.
• Antilles. Tropical islands in the Caribbean Sea with Henri-Maurice Berney, Bern 1972.
• USA: A geographic study of the country - the greater area in structural change , Darmstadt 1975.
• Saudi Arabia: nature, history, people, etc. Economy , Horst Erdmann Verlag, Tübingen 1976 ISBN 3-7711-0228-6 .
• Structural reliefs with additional climatic geomorphological contributions , Stuttgart 1976.
• Tübingen Atlas of the Middle East , Wiesbaden 1977.
• Baedeker's Caribbean including Bermuda , New Jersey 1982.
• Geography of sugar cane: Environmental, structural and economical aspects of cane sugar production , Berlin 1985.
• The regions of the USA , Darmstadt 1988.
• The relief of the earth: A picture atlas , Stuttgart 1991.
• Color atlas of the surface forms of the earth with Andrew Goudie and Rita Gardner. Belhaven 1992.
• On the Caucasus 1941–1942: From the diary and letters of a young artilleryman , Tübingen 1993.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Herbert Wilhelmy: Helmut Blume for his 60th birthday. In: Hans Karl Barth, Herbert Wilhelmy: Dry areas. Tübingen 1980, p. 1.
2. ^ Herbert Wilhelmy, ibid, p. 2.
3. ↑ Herbert Wilhelmy, ibid, p. 7.
4. ↑ Walter Habel: Who is who? Lübeck 1993.

Web links

• Literature by and about Helmut Blume in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary from the University of Tübingen. Retrieved January 9, 2013.