Margarete Weninger

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Margarete Weninger , née Margarete Taubert ( February 6, 1896 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary - October 14, 1987 there ), was an Austrian anthropologist and human geneticist . She is considered an important representative of the Viennese School of Anthropology , which was heavily concerned with the inheritance of morphological characteristics in humans.

Life

Weninger was born in 1896 as the daughter of an advertisement editor for the social democratic workers' newspaper and a seamstress. Actually, the parents had planned a commercial training for the daughter, but allowed her to switch from the community school to a high school. After graduating from high school in 1915, Weninger began studying German and classical philology at the University of Vienna . In the winter semester of 1916/17 she switched to studying geography and anthropology. She was particularly interested in the lectures of Rudolf Höch , who encouraged her to pursue physical-anthropological questions. As early as 1920 she had started a close scientific collaboration with her future husband Josef Weninger , who worked as Pöch's assistant and became professor of physical anthropology in 1928. In 1921 she completed her studies with a dissertation on " Precipitation fluctuations in Dutch India from 1880 to 1914 ". During this time, Josef Weninger became one of the leading figures in the Vienna School of Anthropology.

In 1928 Margarete Taubert and Josef Weninger married. Weninger had been working for her husband as an unpaid research assistant since 1927. In 1932 she became an employee of the hereditary biological working group founded by Josef Weninger, which wanted to research the inheritance of morphological characteristics in humans. During this time, Weninger specialized in the human skin ridge systems and their inheritance. This work was to establish her later reputation as a scientist. When the National Socialists came to power, the Weningers' scientific career initially ended. Weninger himself was no longer allowed to work, her husband was forced to retire as the husband of a "full Jewish woman" within the meaning of the Nuremberg race laws . Thanks to the intervention of colleagues and friends like Viktor Christian , the couple was able to stay and survive in Austria. Josef Weninger was employed by Christian in 1941 in the Museum of the Reichsgau Niederdonau.

In 1945 Josef Weninger took over the management of the anthropological institute again and his wife worked again as an unpaid employee at his side. In the early post-war period she dealt primarily with anthropological and hereditary paternity reports, but also devoted herself increasingly to human evolution and paleoanthropology. In September 1948 Margarete Weninger was granted the license to teach physical anthropology at the University of Vienna, and in 1956 she was awarded the title of extraordinary professor for anthropology and human genetics. During this time, she was largely ignored by her colleagues who were prejudiced by the National Socialists, took part in conferences of the German Society for Anthropology for the first time in 1958 (participants were also Nazi aides Johann Schaeuble , Heinrich Schade , Bruno K. Schultz and Hans Fleischhacker ) and was largely isolated in the department of anthropology after the death of her husband in 1959. She increasingly devoted herself to her research on papillary lines and dermal ridge systems. Again and again she was able to fall back on data collections by Pöch and her husband that they had obtained from prisoners of war of the First World War.

In the 1960s she was able to conduct extensive field research for the first time and traveled to the Canary Islands , Angola and Mozambique .

Together with her husband, she founded the Vienna Anthropological Society and was its vice-president from 1969 until her death in 1987. She was also the Austrian representative at the European Anthropological Association.

Fonts

  • Fingerprints from Central African Batwa pygmoids from the Kivu area . Frankfurt / New York 2003, 1937
  • The occurrence of the four-finger furrow in Asian and African dwarfs as well as in a European comparison group . Springer-Verlag, Vienna 1953

literature

  • Brigitte Fuchs: Weninger, Margarete. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 809-812.
  • E. Reuer: Professor Margarete Weninger on her 80th birthday . In: Anthropologischer Anzeiger , Volume 35, H. 2/3 (March 1976), pp. 225f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brigitte Fuchs: Race, people, sex: anthropological discourses in Austria 1850-1960 . Campus, p. 288
  2. ↑ Margarete Weninger: On the question of the so-called primitiveness of the African dwarfs. In: Koch (Hrsg.): The Society for Constitution Research. P. 106.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 2227, note 7.
personal data
SURNAME Weninger, Margarete
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Taubert, Margarete (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian anthropologist and human geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1987
Place of death Vienna