Kurt Lindner (hunting scientist)

Kurt Lindner Jr. (* November 27, 1906 in Sondershausen ; † November 17, 1987 in Bamberg ) was a German entrepreneur , bibliophile and hunting scientist . Several of his publications are standard works of hunting literature . Also known was the Bibliotheca Tiliana that he had compiled , a specialist library of around 12,000 volumes of hunting and forest books, which was auctioned after his death and therefore dispersed again.

Live and act

Kurt Lindner was born in 1906 as the eldest son of the entrepreneur Kurt Lindner in Sondershausen, Thuringia . His father, a councilor and hunter, ran the porcelain factory for electrical accessories (today ELSO). In his hometown, Lindner attended the humanistic grammar school. Since then he has been chosen as the oldest of his siblings for the company succession, which he later assumed. To prepare for this task, he took a degree in economics on. During his years of study in Munich , Frankfurt am Main , London and Berlin , he was also enrolled in philosophy and history . In addition, he trained in forest and hunting science lectures, including with Professor Max Endres in Munich.

Hunting was Kurt Lindner's greatest passion - he once called her his true "lover". As a small child he had accompanied his father on the hunt and learned to love this activity. His scientific occupation with hunting began when, at the age of seventeen , he was allowed to examine the hunting records of the small Duodec principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen . The result was the work Contributions to the hunting history of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen , published in 1924 .

After completing his studies , Lindner received his doctorate in 1929 at the age of almost 23 with the research on the provision of real estate loans to medium-sized and small industries after the currency renewal at the University of Jena summa cum laude for Dr. rer. pole. He then joined his father's company, but it went down after the end of the Second World War : on March 11, 1946, the entire company was dismantled by the Soviet occupying forces and transported to the east in more than 90 railway wagons full of machine tools. In 1948 the expropriation of his father's work and all of his private fortune followed. The Lindner family moved penniless to Eggolsheim near Forchheim , where a branch had existed since 1938. The son Kurt Lindner built an electrotechnical factory there together with his brother. This soon flourished, so that a branch could be set up in Greece . Among other things, the "Wagenfeld lights" designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld for Lindner in 1955 were known . As a successful entrepreneur, Kurt Lindner was appointed to numerous economic committees. He was a member of the board of the Central Association of the German Electrical Industry , had a seat on the supervisory board of Hannover-Messe AG for many years , and was deputy chairman of the supervisory board.

His income enabled Lindner to amass an extensive private library over the years , which he called Bibliotheca Tiliana . At last it contained around 12,000 books and manuscripts from several centuries, all of which were related to hunting, making it one of the world's most extensive libraries on this topic. Lindner had already started collecting books when he was a student, when several thousand volumes had already been collected. Much of this first library was carried off to Russia in the post-war chaos. Lindner presented the later collection to the public in 1977 with the exhibition Bibliotheca Tiliana - Old Hunting Books from All Over the World in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel . Since after Lindner's death in 1987, after many efforts, there was no institution in the long run that wanted to buy the extensive collection in full, the volumes were individually publicly auctioned in several auctions between 2003 and 2005. The context of the collection was thus lost.

Kurt Lindner was not only a book lover, but also used his collection for extensive hunting history studies. However , Lindner was only able to partially realize his pasture history, originally laid out in six volumes . As early as 1937 he published Die Jagd in Vorzeit as Volume I and followed in 1940 with Volume II of The Hunt in the Early Middle Ages . Both publications are standard works of hunting literature. While volume I was well received by prehistorians and was also translated into French , the importance of the second volume lay primarily in the initial clarification of some legal contexts, the illumination of the term forestis and the systematic foundation of large parts of the hunting technique. The manuscript The History of Falconry , intended for publication as the third volume, was no longer in print in 1943 due to the scarcity of paper and, like the large parts of the manuscripts for Volumes IV to VI, became together with most of Lindner's books in the turmoil of the post-war period abducted to Russia, where it has since been considered lost. In later years Lindner himself made no more attempts to continue his pasture history in extensive overall considerations.

Since 1954 his research on hunting history has appeared in the series Sources and Studies on the History of Hunting, which he edited . It was Lindner who, with these volumes, made previously unprocessed sources from antiquity , the Middle Ages and the first modern centuries accessible to science and an interested readership. Since 1937, Lindner's publications have mostly been published by the scientific specialist publisher Walter de Gruyter .

Due to his significant achievements in hunting science, the forestry faculty of the University of Göttingen awarded him an honorary doctorate (Dr. forest. Hc.) In 1964 . In 1980 Lindner was honorary professor for hunting at the Forestry Faculty in Göttingen.

Kurt Lindner died on November 17, 1987 in Bamberg.

Honors

• 1964: Honorary doctorate from the University of Göttingen
• 1970: DJV Culture Prize for his literary work in the field of hunting history and culture

The “Kurt Lindner House” in Wolfenbüttel is named in his honor and has belonged to the “Society of Friends of the Herzog August Library eV” - whose first president Lindner was - since 1988.

Fonts (selection)

Own works

• Contributions to the hunting history of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen , Sondershausen 1924.
• The supply of real estate loans to medium-sized and small industries after the currency renewal , dissertation, Jena 1929.
• The hunt of prehistoric times , (History of the pasture, volume I), Berlin and Leipzig 1937.
• The hunt in the early Middle Ages , (History of the pasture, Volume II), Berlin 1940.
• The German hawk theory. The Beizbüchlein and its sources , (sources and studies on the history of hunting, volume 2), Berlin 1955; Reprint there in 1964.
• German hunting tracts of the 15th and 16th centuries , 2 volumes, de Gruyter, Berlin 1959 (= sources and studies on the history of hunting , 5–6).
• German hunting writer. Biographical and bibliographical studies , Volume 1, (Sources and studies on the history of hunting, Volume 9), Berlin 1964.
• Contributions to bird trapping and falconry in antiquity , (sources and studies on the history of hunting, Volume 12), Berlin and New York 1973, ISBN 3-11-004560-5 .
• History and systematics of wolf and fox fishing , (Institutions för Allmän och Jämförande Etnografi vid Uppsala Universitet, Volume 3), Uppsala 1975.
• Bibliography of German and Dutch hunting literature from 1480–1850 , Berlin and New York 1976, ISBN 3-11-006640-8 .
• Hunt. Defense of a definition , (Homo venator, Volume 1), Bonn 1978, ISBN 3-7749-1606-3 .
• Suitable for pasture . Origin, history and content , (Homo venator, Volume 2), Bonn 1979, ISBN 3-7749-1691-8 .
• Hunting science. Location and system of a discipline , (Homo venator, Volume 5), Bonn 1982, ISBN 3-7749-1910-0 .

As editor (and often also translator)

• Guicennas : De arte bersandi. A treatise from the 13th century on the hunt for red deer , (sources and studies on the history of the hunt, Volume 1), Berlin 1954 (Latin and German).
• The Doctrine of the Signs of the Deer , (Sources and Studies on the History of Hunting, Volume 3), Berlin 1956.
• Petrus de Crescentiis : The hunting book of Petrus de Crescentiis. In German translations of the 14th and 15th centuries (OT: Ruralia commoda ), (Sources and studies on the history of hunting, Volume 4), Berlin 1957.
• Albertus Magnus : Of falcons, dogs and horses. German Albertus Magnus translation from the first half of the 15th century (OT: Liber de animalibus ), 2 volumes, Berlin 1962.
• A little Ansbach pickling book from the middle of the 18th century , (Sources and Studies on the History of Hunting, Volume 11), Berlin 1967.

literature

• Sigrid Schwenk , Gunnar Tilander, Carl Arnold Willemsen (eds.): Et multum et multa. Contributions to the literature, history and culture of the hunt. Festschrift Kurt Lindner. Berlin, New York 1971, ISBN 3-11-004034-4 .
• Rolf Roosen, Kurt Lindner and his Bibliotheca Tiliana. In: Librarium. Journal of the Swiss Bibliophile Society. 38th volume (1995), volume I, pp. 26-50.
• Zoltán Rozsnyay, Frank Kropp: Kurt Lindner. In Zoltán Rozsnyay, Frank Kropp: Lower Saxony Forest Biography. A source volume. (= From the forest. Messages from the Lower Saxony State Forest Administration, issue 51). Lower Saxony Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forests, Wolfenbüttel 1998, pp. 302–304.
• Kurt Lindner, Helmar Härtel : Old hunting books from all over the world: Bibliotheca Tiliana. Exhibition from the Kurt Lindner Library in the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel from November 12, 1977 to February 28, 1978. Exhibition catalog. Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel 1977.
• Book and Art Auction House F. Zisska & R. Kistner: Auction Catalog Hunting Library Prof. Dr. hc Dr. Kurt Lindner. Voluntary auction 6. – 7. May 2003. Book and art auction house Zisska and Kistner, Munich 2003.
• The Bibliotheca Tiliana is history. In: Journal for Hunting Science. 49, number 3, September 2003.
• Rolf Roosen: "The noblest form of hunting ever" - Kurt Lindner and falconry. In: Raptor and human - falconry and bird symbolism throughout the millenia on a global scale, ed. v. Karl-Heinz Gersmann and Oliver Grimm (Advanced studies on the archeology and history of hunting). Kiel / Hamburg 2018, Volume 1.1, 403–419.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See a summary of the auctions in: Christoph Glasser and Hanns Lindner: The library of Reichard von Reichardsperg and the Bibljoteka Julinska . In: From the antiquarian bookshop New Volume 11 (2013) No. 3/4, p. 116 and note 12.
2. ↑ Martina Giese: On the sale of Kurt Lindner's hunting library in 2003. A short report. In: Würzburger medical historical reports 22, 2003, pp. 532–537.

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Lindner in the catalog of the German National Library
• "The Biblitheca Tiliana is history" (Z. Jagdwiss. 49 (2003), 242-245) - information about the "Bibliotheca Tiliana" doi: 10.1007 / BF02189743 accessed on March 12, 2019
• Brief outline of the Lindner company history
• German hunting dictionary: [1] accessed October 24, 2015