Kurt Leuchs

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Kurt Leuchs (born September 14, 1881 in Nuremberg , † September 7, 1949 in Vienna ) was an Austrian geologist and paleontologist .

Life

Leuchs, the son of a factory owner, attended secondary school in Nuremberg, which he graduated from high school in 1900, and studied natural sciences, especially geology and paleontology, at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , with Karl Alfred von Zittel among his teachers. After completing his doctorate in 1906 (The Geological Composition and History of the Kaiser Mountains ), he took part in Gottfried Merzbacher's expedition to the Tianshan and then undertook several research trips to the Mediterranean (1908 Spain and Italy, 1911/12 Libya, Egypt, Palestine). In 1912 he completed his habilitation in Munich on the geological results of the Tianshan expedition. During the First World War, he worked as a military geologist in France, Belgium and Macedonia from 1915 (he had previously been exempt from military service because of severe myopia). In 1919 he received the title of associate professor and taught at his alma mater , the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.

In 1925 he became professor of geology in Frankfurt am Main, made his second trip to Central Asia (West Turkestan, South Siberia) in 1928 and became a professor in Ankara in 1936, where he was dean of the natural science faculty in 1938/39. At the beginning of the Second World War he left Turkey, as he was subject to severe travel restrictions there (like other foreigners, he was not allowed to leave Ankara). In 1939 he became a full professor at the University of Vienna and head of the Geological Institute.

After the end of the Second World War he was relieved of his office, as he had been a member of the NSDAP since 1933 (membership number 1,811,429) and from 1934 to 1936 a member of the SA and from February 1934 an employee of the SS Ahnenerbe . Leuch's house in Gersthof was confiscated by the Allies in 1945 and his membership of the Academy of Sciences was suspended. Subsequently, Leuchs stated in the "de-registration files" that he had also been a member of the National Socialist Teachers' Association from 1934 to 1940, and he described his accession to the NSDAP as a "mere formality". Leuchs received positive references in this matter from Hugo Hassinger , Leo Waldmann , Josef Keil and Hans Leitmeier .

As part of the amnesty law in April 1948, Leuchs was able to fill his chair for paleontology in Vienna in the form of a substitute professorship. The re-establishment was justified by the Faculty of Philosophy with the fact that the only two “palaeontologists of stature” were said to have been much more heavily damaged by National Socialism than Leuch, so that they were rejected by the Faculty from the outset. Membership in the Academy of Sciences was also reactivated in 1948.

In 1949 Leuchs died of complications from a brain tumor.

Act

He dealt with the Northern Limestone Alps (Kaiser and Wetterstein Mountains, Bavarian Alps) as well as the geology of Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean (Turkey). In his tectonic investigations in the Kaiser Mountains he was partially in opposition to Otto Ampferer . Most recently, he mainly dealt with the formation of rock formations (lithogenesis), especially of reef limestone from the Triassic . His investigations into layer gaps and breccia formation led him to the realization that the sediment deposition in the Tethys in the Triassic and Jura in the Alps did not proceed as smoothly as had been assumed until then.

Since his youth he had been an excellent mountaineer like his brother Georg, who was five years older (who had a great reputation as a mountaineer in Munich at the turn of the century), with whom he developed difficult routes in the Kaiser Mountains . Among other things, they led the second ascent of the Marmolada by -Südwand. He wrote the geological part in Georg Leuch's Guide through the Kaiser Mountains, published in 1922.

He was a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 1943. 1940 to 1942 he was chairman of the Geological Society in Vienna.

In 1908 he married Eleonore von Bezold, the daughter of the director of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg, Gustav von Bezold . The marriage remained childless.

Honors

In the Viennese district of Floridsdorf , the Leuchsweg was named after Kurt Leuchs in 1954 .

Fonts

  • Geological guide through the Limestone Alps from Lake Constance to Salzburg and its foreland, Munich 1921
  • Geology of Asia, 2 volumes, Geologie der Erde, Berlin 1935, 1937
  • Geological investigations in Chalyktau, Temurlyktau, Djungarian Alatau (Tian-Schan): from the scientific results of the Merzbacher Tian-Schan expedition, treatises of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences 1912
  • Central Asia, Handbook of Regional Geology V, 7, Heidelberg 1916
  • Bavarian Alps, in Ernst Krenkel (editor), Handbook of Geology and Mineral Resources in Germany, Division 2, Volume 3 (Bavaria), Borntraeger 1927
  • Instructions for geological observations, Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer 1931

literature

  • HP Cornelius , obituary in Mitteilungen der Geologische Gesellschaft in Wien, Volume 42/43, 1949/50, 265–276 (with list of publications)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The dissertation answered an award from the university and was published in the Z. Ferdinandeum, 3rd volume, volume 51, 1907, pp. 53-133
  2. ↑ a b c Street names in Vienna since 1860 as “Political Places of Remembrance” (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 285ff, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 369
personal data
SURNAME Leuchs, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian geologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH September 7, 1949
Place of death Vienna