Rolf Keilbach

Rolf Keilbach (born June 28, 1908 in Cottbus ; † September 24, 2001 in Greifswald ) was a German entomologist and zoologist . From 1953 he worked as a professor at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald , where he was director of the Zoological Institute until his retirement in 1973.

Life

Rolf Keilbach studied natural sciences at the Universities of Innsbruck , Göttingen and Halle . In addition, he also took humanities subjects such as French literary history . Since his dissertation on the asymmetrical wing position in insects, he has primarily devoted himself to entomology. Keilbach became an assistant at the Geological-Paleontological Institute of the University of Königsberg and subsequently an expert on fossil insects trapped in amber . During a leave from the front, Keilbach completed his habilitation in 1943 on the subject of the fulgorid cicadas of Baltic amber .

In the first years after the war he worked for a pest control company in Halle (Saale) . From this activity his textbook on pest control emerged, which should reach a circulation of 100,000 copies.

In 1949 he found a job at the Institute for Practical Biology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Ostrau, founded by Erich Menner . Under the direction of Ludwig Freund , Keilbach became a lecturer at the Zoological Institute of the University of Halle in 1950 and was appointed professor of zoology there in 1952.

Just one year later, in 1953, he accepted a position at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald , where he became director of the Zoological Institute as the successor to the late Rudolf Seifert . He initially reorganized the scientific work in the entomological, physiological and hydrobiological fields. In accordance with the demand for application-oriented research at the time, Keilbach set up a department for applied entomology, which was headed first by Ulrich Sedlag , then by Hubert Schumann and, from 1960, by Lothar Kampf . Even after his retirement in 1973, Keilbach continued to work at the Zoological Institute and was active there after the political change until his death in 2001.

Rolf Keilbach's grave in the old cemetery in Greifswald (2014)

From 1961 to 1971 he was Vice President of the Biological Society of the GDR , in 1982 he became its honorary member. The German Society for General and Applied Entomology honored Keilbach in 1995 with the award of the Fabricius Medal .

Rolf Keilbach died in 2001 and was buried in the old cemetery in Greifswald.

Publications (selection)

• Expertise in pest control . People and Knowledge, Berlin 1952.
• Chronicle of the Zoological Institute and Museum of the Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswals. In: Wilhelm Braun , Ernst Kähler, Johannes Schildhauer, Hans Schwarz, Otto Wegner (eds.): Festschrift for the 500th anniversary of the University of Greifswald October 17, 1965. Greifswald 1956, pp. 561-570.
• The animal pests of Central Europe. With brief information on how to combat them. G. Fischer, Jena 1966.
• with Rolf Fritzsche: The plant, food and material pests of Central Europe. With references to countermeasures. G. Fischer, Jena / Stuttgart 1994.

literature

• Rolf Gattermann , Volker Neumann: History of zoology and the zoological collection at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg from 1769 to 1990 . Publishing house of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3777613916
• Lothar Kampf : Keilbach, Rolf (1908-2001). In: Dirk Alvermann , Nils Jörn (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon für Pommern . Volume 1 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Pomerania. Series V, Volume 48.1). Böhlau Verlag, Cologne Weimar Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-20936-0 , pp. 149–152.
• Gerd Müller-Motzfeld : In Memoriam Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Rolf Keilbach . In: DGaaE news . Vol. 15 (2001), pp. 143-144. (PDF; 2.7 MB)

Web links

• Literature by and about Rolf Keilbach in the catalog of the German National Library