Karl Dill

Karl Dill (born May 17, 1924 - January 25, 1996 ) was a German homeland researcher. He worked as a land monument researcher in northeast Bavaria.

Life

Karl Dill earned his living as an administrative clerk at the Bayreuth hospital . He enjoyed spending his leisure hours in nature, where he was particularly interested in botany and geology at a young age . Encouraged by the association “German Stone Cross Research” in Nuremberg , he began in 1968 to take an inventory of the land monuments in the Bayreuth district . Karl Dill traveled the entire region by bike and with watchful eyes, determined the exact location of the land monuments, noted their dimensions and tried to find out the historical truths and legends hidden behind the individual land monuments by interviewing locals but also through extensive literature studies discover. As early as 1969, the inventory in the Bayreuth district was so far completed that Karl Dill was able to expand his activities to the Kulmbach district . While the land monument inventories of Bayreuth and Kulmbach appeared in print in 1970 and 1971, in 1972 Dill began to record the land monuments in the then still independent district of Stadtsteinach . In 1975 and 1977 the Upper Palatinate districts of Kemnath and Eschenbach followed .

In less than ten years, Karl Dill had managed to document a total of 1,697 land monuments. As part of the inventory of the Altland districts Kulmbach and Stadtsteinach alone, he covered around 3000 kilometers during 25 bike tours. In the preface to the inventory of landmarks in the former Stadtsteinach district, published in 1973, he wrote about his work: “The winter before I researched all available literature. I often set off on my bike at 4 a.m. in order to get to my beloved Franconian Forest . I drove a lot of tours throughout the year in the former district of Stadtsteinach and hiked it all over the place, so that sometimes I knew better than some locals. "

In 1975, Karl Dill's tireless activity was honored with the award of the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon. In 1988 he became the ninth winner of the Bayreuth Culture Prize and in September of the same year the Minister for Science and Art, Professor Wolfgang Wild , presented him with the Medal of the Free State of Bavaria for the Protection of Monuments .

Works

• The old land monuments of the Bayreuth district . Bayreuth 1970
• The land monuments of the district of Kulmbach, writings on home care, Volume 10 . Kulmbach 1971
• The land monuments of the former Stadtsteinach district, writings on home care, Volume 12 . Kulmbach 1973
• The land monuments of the former Kemnath district . Tirschenreuth 1977
• Landmarks in the former district of Eschenbach , 1977
• Land monuments in the district of Kulmbach . Kulmbach 1984

estate

Karl Dill's estate was given to the Historical Association for Upper Franconia and is now in the Bayreuth University Library.

literature

• "A researcher on a bicycle: 1700 land monuments in Upper Franconia and the Upper Palatinate torn from oblivion", press report in the Frankenpost of January 12, 1977
• Stone cross research - Studies on German and international land monument research, Mitteilungsblätter 2/1987, p. 44.
• Stone cross research - studies on German and international land monument research, Mitteilungsblätter 2/1988, p. 41 f.
• Contributions to field and small monument research in the Upper Palatinate, 16th year 1993, p. 171 f.