Otto Tornau

Otto Tornau (born March 17, 1886 in Beidersee ; † January 6, 1982 in Göttingen ) was a German crop scientist.

Life path

Otto Tornau, son of a landowner, studied agriculture at the University of Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1911 under Conrad von Seelhorst with a description of the varieties of Göttingen oat varieties. After several years as the head of a seed breeding company in Thuringia, he returned to the University of Göttingen in 1918. In 1920 he completed his habilitation here for the entire field of agricultural studies with an investigation into the influence of the World War on the operating conditions of farms. From 1922 to 1955, he succeeded his teacher Conrad von Seelhorst as a full professor of crop production at the University of Göttingen. Tornau was one of the signatories of a "counter-declaration" published on April 24, 1933 by 42 university lecturers who, after the resignation of the Jewish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate James Franck, defamed Franck's move as an "act of sabotage" as a protest against the National Socialist "law to restore civil service" and hoped "that the government will therefore accelerate the necessary cleaning measures".

Research priorities

Tornau's appointment in 1922 coincided with a fundamental restructuring of the agricultural sciences at the University of Göttingen. The amount of knowledge in the individual subject areas had grown so much that the existing organizational structure, in which all agricultural university disciplines were united in one institute, no longer seemed realistic. Following the example of Kurt von Rümkers (1859–1940), who had set up independent institutes for the most important agricultural disciplines at the University of Breslau as early as 1900, this path of differentiation was also embarked on in 1922 in Göttingen and Tornau was appointed director of a newly founded institute for crop production .

Tornau's research focus was initially on the problem of the different drought resistance of cereal varieties. He first tried to clarify whether the physiological or morphological properties of the cultivated plants can be used for the varietal assessment of drought resistance . The experiments, which were mainly carried out in vegetation vessels, however, produced contradicting results and showed the methodological limits of vessel experiments. After 1930 Tornau put his research on a broader ecological basis. From then on, the focus was on field tests on the fundamental relationships between soil, water and plants. He paid particular attention to the root growth of cultivated plants and the problems of tillage. Many of his field experiments were aimed solely at influencing the water balance of the arable soils positively through suitable cultivation measures.

Book author and editor

As early as 1931 Otto Tornau had made a groundbreaking contribution on agricultural tillage in the eleven-volume “Handbuch der Bodenlehre” published by Edwin Blanck . Tornau's concern to make the problems of tillage and other areas of agriculture accessible to wider circles led to his book Der Boden , published in a textbook series , of which eight editions were published between 1935 and 1943. With a total of 121,000 printed copies, it achieved a print run that has never been achieved by any other book on this subject. When, after Theodor Roemer's death, his textbook on arable farming , which was published together with Fritz Scheffer , was to be reissued, Otto Tornau took over the reworking of the arable farming section. The fourth edition appeared in 1953 and the fifth in 1959 with his name.

The name Otto Tornau is inextricably linked with the magazine for arable and plant cultivation . From 1922 to 1963 Tornau was co-editor, since 1927 also sole editor-in-chief of this magazine, which was published until 1944 under the title Journal für Landwirtschaft . Originally this oldest, still appearing scientific journal of the agricultural theory published articles from all agricultural disciplines. Under the leadership of Tornaus, it developed into a purely agricultural trade journal.

Teaching

As a university lecturer, Tornau represented agricultural crop production in all its breadth. The training of students and young scientists, but also that of practical farmers, was a matter close to his heart. A large group of students was always involved in the experimental research work at his institute. He led 62 doctoral students to doctorate, four of them ( Konrad Meyer , Georg Gliemeroth , Karl Bär and Rolf Hübner ) completed their habilitation under his aegis.

Otto Tornau was an honorary member of several agricultural specialist societies. In 1961 the Hohenheim Agricultural University awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Fonts

• Göttinger Hafer I, II, III and IV. A description of the variety . Diss. Phil. Göttingen 1911. Excerpt from: Journal für Landwirtschaft, Vol. 59, 1911, pp. 137–184.
• A north German economy under the influence of war . Habil.-Schr. Phil. Fac. Göttingen 1920. Zugl. in: Landwirtschaftliche Jahrbücher Vol. 56, 1921, pp. 243-311.
• Agricultural tillage . In: Handbuch der Bodenlehre, ed. by Edwin Blank, Julius Springer Verlag Berlin; Vol. 9, 1931, pp. 93-208.
• The floor . Agricultural textbook series. 1st chapter. Reichsnährstand Verlag Berlin 1935, 2nd edition 1937, 3rd edition 1938, 4th edition 1939, 5th edition 1940, 6th edition 1941, 7th edition 1942, 8th edition 1943.
• The plants . Agricultural textbook series 2nd part. Reichsnährstand Verlag Berlin 1935.
• Roemer-Scheffer: Textbook of agriculture . 4th edition, revised by F. Scheffer and O. Tornau. Publishing house Paul Parey Berlin and Hamburg 1953. - 5th edition ibid. 1959.

literature

• Arnold Scheibe : Otto Tornau on his 70th birthday . In: Zeitschrift für Acker- und Pflanzenbau Vol. 101, 1956, pp. 1-4 (with picture).
• Wolfgang Böhm : On the 100th birthday of Otto Tornau . In: Zeitschrift für Acker- und Pflanzenbau Vol. 155, 1985, pp. 281–284 (with picture).
• Wolfgang Böhm: Göttingen crop scientist. A bibliography . Regensburg 1988 (with a complete list of all writings by and about Otto Tornau, pp. 57–74).

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Tornau in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Anikó Szabó: Expulsion, return, reparation. Göttingen university professor under the sign of National Socialism, Wallstein Verlag, 2000, p. 46 f.