Hugo Iltis

Hugo Iltis (1910)

Hugo Iltis (born April 11, 1882 in Brno , Moravia , † June 22, 1952 in Fredericksburg , Virginia ) was an Austro-Hungarian , later Czechoslovak botanist , who was Gregor Mendel's first and for decades authoritative biographer and founder and long-time director of Mendelianum Museum in Brno. He also gained a certain importance as a popularizer of " racial studies " and as a critic of racism .

Origin and education

Hugo Iltis came from a long-established Jewish family in Brno in the Moravia province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Moritz Iltis, was a doctor. During his school days, while reading a natural history journal in Brno, Hugo came across an old research article by Gregor Mendel , whose person henceforth influenced his life.

Iltis studied botany in Brno, Zurich and Prague. In Zurich he was assistant to Arnold Dodel-Port . At the Prague Botanical Institute he made experiments on the root length growth of aquatic plants, which, according to his findings, was 1.5 to 7.5 times faster in the dark than in daylight. He received his doctorate there in 1903 under Hans Molisch .

Work in Brno

Unveiling of the Mendel monument in 1910. Iltis organized the financing of the monument.

From 1905 to 1938, Iltis worked as a biology teacher at the Brno German Gymnasium. He also taught as a private lecturer for botany and genetics at the German Technical University .

After the First World War , Iltis founded the Mendelianum Museum in Brno (now Czechoslovakia) , for which he bought significant quantities of Mendel's original documents in his hometown and which he managed until 1938. In 1921 he founded the Masaryk Adult Education Center , which he also directed until 1938. One of his students there, Anne Liebscher, became his wife. He was also a member of the board of trustees of the German Society for Science and Art , which campaigned for the preservation of German culture in Brno.

Hugo Iltis in the Brno Adult Education Center (1927)

From September 22nd to 24th, 1922, a Mendel centennial celebration took place in Brno, which Iltis organized and for which he published a commemorative publication.

In 1924, Iltis published his biography Gregor Johann Mendel , which was also published in English in 1932 and was long regarded as the standard work on Mendel. In addition to the scientific presentation, Iltis says that Mendel was a rationalist and only became a priest in order to be able to research undisturbed.

From 1927 to 1938 he published the quarterly magazine Licht ins Volk as part of the adult education center . The acquisition of a separate building for the adult education center was also largely due to Iltis' initiative, and he also raised a large part of the financial resources for it. Adult education, which was still little widespread at the time, was very important to him as an active socialist . In it he saw the basis for the future establishment of a socialist society.

Iltis was tight with Paul Kammerer friends, who because of his attempts on the example of the midwife toad a heritability of acquired characteristics within the meaning of Lamarck , against the evidence Darwinism argued. Because of this relationship with Kammerer and because of his Jewish origins, he was massively attacked in 1929 by the anti-Semitic neo - Darwinist Fritz Lenz .

From the mid-1920s, Iltis dealt with the topic of human races . In 1930 he published his Volkstümliche Rassenkunde , which was widely disseminated. In it he himself represented a division of mankind into five forms, but above all he warned of the dangers of racial biology. Since the end of the war , racist heresies, which had previously been advocated by laypeople like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain , had also penetrated science in Germany, where they were mainly disseminated by Hans FK Günther . Iltis described his teachings as "unscientific" and "politically dangerous", and he wanted to counter them with a neutral and critical presentation of the state of the art in science.

Before his own description of the human races, Iltis added the remark that "almost every author delimits the races differently" and that there are no sharp borders between the races. However, he considered a typological breakdown to be useful. He distinguished between a European, a Mongoloid, a Nigritic and an Australoid group of forms as well as the dwarf races. In the further subdivision of the European form circle, he described a Nordic, a Mediterranean, an Alpine, a Dinaric type and an Eastern road. With reference to Felix von Luschan , he described the postulate of a Jewish race as outdated. The Jews are a mixture of several European races, as it is characteristic of many other peoples of Europe. But mainly from the so-called Near Eastern and Oriental races, branches of the Dinaric and Mediterranean races, which of course also occur in other - both European and Asian - cultures. Polecat also rejected the thesis, which goes back to Gobineau, that a mixture of races is harmful.

Iltis was one of the first authors who coined the term racism. He uses this term relatively broadly: for him, colonialism and the imperialist division and exploitation of the world also belonged to it. His main work on racism was the book Der Mythus von Blut und Rasse , published in 1936 .

Iltis advocated “grasping the concept of race purely in physical terms” and attributed the ability to develop high cultures to all large races. He attributed the cultural superiority of Europeans today, which he noted, to the “horrific history” of colonialism and imperialism, which, according to his account, began with the conquest of America.

emigration

With the help of Franz Boas , whom Albert Einstein had drawn attention to Iltis as a highly threatened scientist after the occupation of Austria by Nazi Germany, he emigrated to the New York City Jewish Emergency Committee In Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars in 1938 after the Munich Agreement UNITED STATES. At first Boas was only able to find him an unpaid position at Washington State University , since he was only a high school teacher full-time and did not do experimental research himself, but that was made possible by Iltis, shortly before the German invasion of Czechoslovakia with his wife, their two sons and the Inventory of the Mendel Museum to get to safety.

Eventually he found a permanent position as a lecturer in biology at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg. There he set up a Mendel Museum again , to which he brought his collection from Brno and to which his wife Anne Liebscher Iltis was appointed curator. (Materials from Polecat's estate are now in the University of Illinois Archives as the Polecat Mendeliana Collection .)

Iltis' sons were the entomologist Fred Iltis (1923-2008) and the botanist Hugh Iltis (1925-2016). A Mendel Museum of Genetics has now been reopened in Brno .

criticism

The sociologist Wulf D. Hund criticizes that Iltis drew a “fatal line” in his criticism of racism while at the same time adhering to a “non-judgmental” racial science. The associated “immunization” of race theory gave the analysis of racism a direction that continues to have an impact today.

Works

• Dissertation: "On the influence of light and dark on the growth in length of the adventitious roots in aquatic plants." In: Reports of the German Botanical Society , Vol. 21, No. 9, pp. 508-517 (1903).
• Gregor Johann Mendel: Life, Work and Effect . Published with the support of the Ministry of Education and Popular Culture in Prague. Julius Springer, 1924.
  • Life of Mendel . Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul . G. Allen & Unwin, London 1932, reprinted 1966.
• Science and Socialism . Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1925.
• "Gregor Mendel's autobiography." In: Genetica: An International Journal of Genetics and Evolution , vol. 8, nos. 3-4, pp. 329-334 (1926).
• Folklore of race . Urania Verlag , Jena 1930 ( excerpt online ).
• "Race research and race question." In: Der Kampf. Social Democratic Monthly (Vienna), Vol. 24, pp. 220–225 (1931).
• The myth of blood and race . Rudolf Harand Publishing House, Vienna 1936.
• "Gregor Mendel and His Work." In: Scientific Monthly , vol. 56, no. 5, pp. 414-423 (1943).
• "The Genes and Academician Lysenko." In: Journal of Heredity , vol. 41, no.6 (1950).

literature

• LC Dunn: Hugo Iltis: 1882-1952 , Science 117, p. 3 f. (1953).
• Wulf D. Hund : "The liberation of the oppressed races can only be the work of the oppressed races themselves". Marginal note on the criticism of racism by Hugo Iltis , in: Das Argument, 57, 2015, 4/5 (314), pp. 493–502 ( online article )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} L.C. Dunn: Hugo Iltis: 1882-1952 , Science 117, p. 3 f. (1953).
2. ↑ Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau 1904 No. 14, XIXth year, p. 179.
3. ^ ^{A b} Treasures of the American Philosophical Society : Albert Einstein asks Franz Boas to help a colleague , 2006.
4. ↑ The "Festschrift in memory of Gregor Mendel" appeared in a volume of the "Negotiations of the Natural Research Association in Brno". Initially, three works by Mendel ("Experiments on Plant Hybrids", "About some Hieracium Bastards obtained from artificial fertilization " and "The Windhose of October 13, 1870") were originally reprinted, which was immediately followed by an article by Kammerer. Other contributions to the Festschrift included a. by the likes of Carl Fruwirth , Erwin Baur , Hermann Nilsson-Ehle , George Harrison Shull , Tschermak , Bateson and Punnett .
5. ↑ Veronika Lipphardt : The "black sheep" of the life sciences . In: Dirk Rupnow & al. (Ed.): Pseudoscience . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main 2008, pp. 223-250, here p. 232 f.
6. ^ Lipphardt, p. 233 f.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Iltis, Volkstümliche Rassenkunde , 1930, p. 6 f.
8. ^ Marius Turda, Paul Weindling: Blood And Homeland . Central European University Press. 2006
9. ↑ Iltis, Volkstümliche Rassenkunde , p. 22.
10. ↑ Iltis, Volkstümliche Rassenkunde , pp. 50–52.
11. ↑ Iltis, Volkstümliche Rassenkunde , pp. 63–76.
12. ↑ Wulf D. Hund : "The liberation of the oppressed races can only be the work of the oppressed races themselves". Marginal note on the criticism of racism by Hugo Iltis , in: Das Argument 314 (2015), pp. 493–502 ( online ), here p. 493.
13. ↑ Volkstümliche Rassenkunde , p. 10
14. ↑ Hund, p. 495.
15. ↑ http://www.library.uiuc.edu/archives/archon/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=3527
16. ↑ Hund, p. 393f.