Julius Schaxel

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Prof. Schaxel with cat (1917/1918) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Julius Christoph Ehregott Schaxel (born March 24, 1887 in Augsburg , † July 15, 1943 in Moscow ) was a German zoologist and developmental biologist .

Life

Julius Schaxel's father was a master coppersmith in Augsburg. Schaxel studied biology, philosophy and psychology from 1910 in Jena with Ernst Haeckel , later in Munich with Richard Hertwig . It was in 1909 at the University of Jena in Ludwig Plate Dr. phil. PhD . The habilitation took place in Jena in 1912. From 1918 until his emigration in 1933 he was associate professor for zoology in Jena and head of the institute for experimental biology.

Scientific work

Schaxel mainly worked on issues of developmental and theoretical biology . After his habilitation in 1918, he founded his own institute at the University of Jena, the "Institute for Experimental Biology", with financial support from the Carl Zeiss Foundation . Here he mainly researched the development of the axolotl . With the help of the axolotl studies he tried to develop his own theory for the developmental biology that was just being established. Here he distinguished himself from the approaches of Wilhelm Roux and Hans Driesch . With Hans Driesch he led a controversy about the nature of the ontogenetic development of living beings.

Schaxel was one of the first advocates of theoretical biology . However, he was less interested in mathematizing biology than in developing a philosophically consistent set of theories. In this respect, his approach can be compared more with today's philosophy of biology than with today's theoretical biology. In his book Basics of Theory Formation , Schaxel developed a program for a theoretical biology that was based on his historical-critical analysis of contemporary theories. The series of publications on theoretical biology , which he edited, proved to be particularly successful and important , the aim of which was to provide a forum for the discussion that was stimulated in the fundamentals of theory formation in biology . Between 1919 and 1931 31 monographs were published in the series. The authors consisted of established scientists and young, promising researchers. So published u. a. Hans Driesch , Hans Przibram , Paul A. Weiss , Valentin Haecker , Kurt Lewin , Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Alexander Gawrilowitsch Gurwitsch in the treatises. Continued to have Emil Abderhalden , Emanuel Rádl , Wilhelm Roux , Hans Spemann and Sinai Tschulok announced contributions.

Schaxel published his last scientific work in Germany in the first edition of the journal Knowledge, newly founded by Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach .

Political attitude

Schaxel joined the SPD in 1918, where he belonged to the left wing. In 1923, under the Thuringian state government formed by the SPD and KPD, he was appointed to the government council in the Thuringian Ministry of Popular Education. After this government was overthrown in the same year by the invasion of the Reichswehr using the Reich Execution, Schaxel returned to the university, took a leave of absence and visited the Soviet Union twice , as well as the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. He worked as a freelancer for the Marx-Engels Complete Edition directed by Ryazanov and helped in this context to locate and copy Karl Marx's dissertation documents in Jena.

In 1924 Schaxel was one of the founders of Urania Verlagsgesellschaft mbH , which, like Kosmosverlag, published a Urania magazine , monthly cultural and political journals on nature and society and a small, inexpensive, popular scientific series. Schaxel himself published some of these volumes. In contrast to the Kosmos, the writings are oriented towards the interests of the labor movement. The series of issues and the Urania magazine not only contain scientific articles and articles in the sense of Marxism, but also reform pedagogical ideas, travelogues and the like. Ä. An important supplement is Der Leib , the magazine of the proletarian supporters of nudism . Many of the Urania authors had to emigrate in 1933 or were killed. In the first edition of the Urania magazine in 1924 he published an amount on “Life and Form” that was reprinted in 1947.

On April 18, 1933, he emigrated to Switzerland. Under the law to restore the civil service , Schaxel was dismissed from the university in 1933 for Marxist activities. On November 3, 1934, the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger published the third expatriation list of the German Reich through which he was expatriated . On December 13, 1934, he was withdrawn from the university because of his wife's Jewish origins. From October 1, 1933 he was in Leningrad . There he took up a position at the Severzow Institute for Evolutionary Morphology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . At the beginning of 1934 the institute moved to Moscow. After an interim imprisonment in 1938, Schaxel worked both scientifically and in the resistance until 1942. Here he belonged to the National Committee for Free Germany and signed the appeal for the German Popular Front alongside Wilhelm Pieck , Walter Ulbricht , Rudolf Breitscheid , Johannes R. Becher and Heinrich Mann . In 1943 he died in a sanatorium near Moscow. The exact circumstances of his death are in the dark.

Fonts (selection)

Essays
  • The morphology of egg growth and follicle formation in the ascidia. A contribution to the question of chromidia in metazoa . In: Archive for Cell Research , Vol. 4 (1909).
  • The biological individual . In: Knowledge. An international journal of analytic philosophy , Vol. 1 (1930/31), pp. 467-492, ISSN  0165-0106
  • Bergson's Philosophy and Biological Research . In: Die Naturwissenschaften , Vol. 1 (1913), Issue 33, SS 795–796, ISSN  0028-1042 .
  • Darwinism and Marxism . A contribution to the scientific prerequisite of socialism, in: Otto Jenssen , Der lebige Marxismus. Ceremony for the 70th birthday of Karl Kautsky , Jena 1924, pp. 485–500.
Monographs
  • The services of the cells in the development of the metazoa . Gustav Fischer, Jena 1915.
  • Basics of theories in biology . 2nd edition Gustav Fischer, Jena 1922.
  • General and experimental biology in the reorganization of medical studies . Gustav Fischer, Jena 1921.
  • Investigations into the shape of animals. First part: conceptions and phenomena of regeneration (works in the field of experimental biology; issue 1). Bornträger Verlag, Berlin 1921.
  • Basics of theory building in biology . 2., rework. and presumably edition. Gustav Fischer, Jena 1922.
  • Development of the science of life . Urania Verlagsgesellschaft, Jena 1924.
  • The gender. Its appearances, its purpose, its nature in animals and humans . Urania Verlagsgesellschaft, Jena 1926.
  • The present world view and its social foundations . Urania Verlagsgesellschaft, Jena 1932.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tom Bräuer, Christian Faludi: The University of Jena in the Weimar Republic 1918-1933 . Steiner, Stuttgart 2013, p. 248-263 .
  2. ↑ Julius Schaxel: Life and Form. In: Urania . Urania Publishing Company, Jena 1924.
  3. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 5 (reprinted 2010).
  4. ↑ this article is part of Julius Schaxel's dissertation (Jena 1909).
  5. ↑ at the same time annals of philosophy .
personal data
SURNAME Schaxel, Julius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schaxel, Julius Christoph Ehregott (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German zoologist and developmental biologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH augsburg
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1943
Place of death Moscow