Walter Jankowsky

Walter Gustav Herrmann Robert Jankowsky (born June 15, 1890 in Wittingen , today district of Gifhorn , † May 2, 1974 in Darmstadt ) was a German physician and anthropologist .

Medical research

Jankowsky came from a Silesian family. His father was the doctor Gustav Albert Jankowsky (1860–1895), who stayed in Wittingen in 1890 for professional reasons. Walter Jankowsky was married to Elisabeth Mette geb. Martelleur (1894-1982). Walter Jankowsky studied medicine at the Silesian Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau and was awarded a doctorate by Hermann Klaatsch (1863-1916) in 1915. med. PhD . In the following period he researched at the University of Breslau, from 1929 as an extraordinary assistant at the Anthropological Institute, from a medical point of view, the phenomenon of unrelated doppelgangers, which until then had hardly been considered by science . The research work, which had already been largely completed, was intended as a habilitation thesis at the University of Breslau. The habilitation was prevented by Egon von Eickstedt , who from 1928 only as a lecturer and from 1934 as a professor headed the Anthropological Institute, for unknown reasons. From this a personal scientific dispute developed between the director and the assistant at the Anthropological Institute from 1931, which has been traced in the current medical-historical literature also because of the associated attitude towards National Socialism . Jankowsky had become a member of the NSDAP on March 1, 1931.

Walter Jankowsky left the university in a dispute in 1931 and initially switched to the Race and Settlement Office in Breslau. In the meantime he had completed his research on the doppelganger phenomenon and published the results in 1934 as a resident specialist in Breslau and thus as a private individual. In addition to his work as a specialist in internal diseases, Jankowsky prepared the publication of a biography of Herman Klaatsch ( Hermann Klaatsch. His life picture and his scientific legacy ) as the last anthropologist from his group between 1939 and 1945 . For this purpose, after extensive correspondence with his daughter Klaatsch, numerous originals were loaned by Klaatsch to Breslau. The work was almost finished by February 1945, but could not be published before the end of the war; some of the documents remained in Silesia.

His career as a practicing physician with an important internal medicine practice in Breslau was abruptly interrupted in February 1945 when he fled from Silesia to Hesse. After difficult transitional years, he was able to establish a secure existence at the Federal Employment Service in Kassel and later in Frankfurt, and from 1955 onwards he settled again as a doctor in Darmstadt. At the same time, Jankowsky began again to give lectures on anthropology at international meetings of the “Bureau international d'Anthropologie différentielle” in San Remo in 1956 and in Amsterdam in 1958, to publish in various specialist journals and to renew his contributions, some of which were from the 1930s, in updated form to publish. Due to his death, he was unable to finish the final work he had edited in the last years of his life. So this manuscript was ignored.

Monographs

• About the nature and cause of osteomalacia . 1922
• The consanguinity in the people and in the family . Stuttgart 1934
• Treatises from the field of anthropology (human and racial studies) . Darmstadt 1962
• Treatises in the field of anthropology . Uelzen 1968

Essays

• Nature and cause of cardiac hydrops . In: Münchner medical Wochenschrift. Volume 22, 1925, pp. 900-904
• Constitution, physique and race in their mutual relationship and demarcation . In: Anatomischer Anzeiger . Volume 70, 1930, pp. 470-515; Volume 73, 1931, pp. 394-399; Volume 74, 1932, pp. 405-414
• Contribution to the question of hair pigments . In: Journal of Racial Physiology. Volume 5, 1932
• The bases and limits of the anthropology . In: Revue anthropologique. 1936, p. 254
• Considerations on biological inheritance theory . In: Our world. 162 and 183, 1941
• The kinship between people . In: Medical monthly mirror. Publisher: Merck AG, Darmstadt, issue 5/1960, pp. 97-102
• Genetics and genealogy . In: Medical monthly mirror. Published by: Merck AG, Darmstadt, issue 5/1973, pp. 116-121

literature

• Heidrun Kaupen-Haas , Christian Saller: Scientific racism. Analysis of continuity in human and natural sciences. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-593-36228-7 , p. 24 f.
• Bernhard Wilhelm Matz: The constitution typology from Ernst Kretschmer. A Contribution to the History of Psychiatry and Psychology in the Twentieth Century . Dissertation FU Berlin, 2002
• Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich . Bio-bibliographical manual, Akademie Verlag, 2006. ISBN 3-05-004094-7 , p. 324
• Dirk Preuß: "Anthropologist and explorer". Biography and anthropology of Egon Freiherr von Eickstedts (1892–1965) . Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2009. ISBN 978-3-8316-0872-0 , pp. 57-68

credentials

1. ↑ birth certificate
2. ↑ marriage certificate
3. ^ Letter exchange Walter Jankowsky - Liesbeth Klaatsch 1939-1944
4. ↑ Correspondence