Walter Knoche

Walter Alfred Knoche (born March 7, 1881 in Berlin , Germany ; † July 3, 1945 in Buenos Aires , Argentina ) was a German-Chilean meteorologist , geophysicist , geographer and cultural anthropologist who, in 1911, was the scientific director of a Chilean expedition to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) led. In addition, he was from 1910 to 1916 co-founder and executive director of the Central Meteorological Service (Instituto Central Meteorologico y Geofísico de Chile) in Santiago de Chile , a pharmaceutical company founded in Chile and later headed in Buenos Aires until his death, the department climatology of Argentine Directorate of Meteorology, Geophysics and Hydrology.

Life

Walter Alfred Knoche was born on March 7, 1881 in Berlin as the son of the factory owner Moritz Knoche, one of five children. His mother Anna, b. Ehrlich, was the sister of the Nobel Prize winner in medicine, Paul Ehrlich . Both of Walter Knoche's parents came from well-off Berlin upper-class Jewish families. He received his school education a. a. in the years 1898–1899 at the Askanisches Gymnasium in Berlin. Then he was enrolled at the Berlin Friedrichswerder high school . In 1902 he successfully graduated from high school. Walter Knoche then devoted himself to academic scientific studies with a focus on geography and meteorology, especially at the Berlin Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität . In 1905 he successfully completed his doctorate with “magna cum laude”. The title of his dissertation was "On the spatial and temporal distribution of the heat content of the lower air layer" .

In the years 1905–1907 Knoche undertook several geographic and meteorological research trips that took him to the eastern Mediterranean countries. At the end of 1908, Walter Knoche and his wife Editha, born in 1906, arrived. Schiffer went to South America to explore the microclimatic and “air-electric” (aero-electric) conditions at an altitude of 5,200 meters in Mina Aguila as part of an expedition to the Cordillera Quimsa Cruz of Bolivia. At the time, this was one of the highest points in the world where anyone had collected precise meteorological data. The results of his Bolivia expedition were later set out in the publications of the Instituto Central Meteorológico y Geofísico de Chile , the direction and reorganization of which was entrusted to him by the government under Pedro Montt Montt in 1910. Knoche therefore settled in Chile, later took on the Chilean citizenship and returned to this country again and again after moving to Argentina .

At that time, Walter Knoche also followed his great interest in medical problems. Together with numerous Chilean doctors, especially Eduardo Cruz-Coke and his students, Knoche founded the "Instituto Médico Técnico Sanitas" in 1920, today the Instituto Sanitas SA Knoche was the legal founder of this institute, which was structured as a stock corporation, and managed it it was commercially at least until 1933. The institute was a scientific and commercial company with the aim of developing novel drugs and diagnostic methods for prominent diseases of the time and thus also being successful in the pharmaceutical trade.

In 1927 Knoche went on an extensive study trip to southern Mato Grosso and to Paraguay and Argentina. In 1930 he toured Ecuador . In between he was in Germany several times. In 1937 Walter Knoche moved to Argentina, where from August 1940 he held the post of climate advisor in the Climatology Section of the then Directorate for Meteorology, Geophysics and Hydrology of the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional of the Republic of Argentina. From Argentina, he tried to intervene in various institutions, particularly from 1938, to enable family members to leave the National Socialist German Reich and to help friends. Nevertheless, three of his brothers died in the Holocaust . Concerns about his relatives who remained in Germany and who were on the run, as well as the tragic developments in Germany as a whole before and during the Second World War, may have had an impact on Walter Bone's health. On July 3, 1945, Walter Knoche died of a heart condition in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

plant

Knoche exemplifies the dominance of German scientists in the meteorology and geophysics of South America as well as in the natural sciences in general in the decades before 1945. Walter Knoche left behind an extensive oeuvre of 276 publications , which focus on meteorological, climatological, geophysical, geographical, but also ethnological , medical-anthropological and biological aspects. Most of his articles deal with meteorological and geophysical phenomena and topics. The second, somewhat smaller focus within his entire oeuvre consists of 36 publications on the Easter Island expedition and its results. The main work on this is the book Die Osterinsel , published in 1925 in the Chilean Concepción, in German , in which Knoche summarized his own research results and added a historical review.

The Chilean Easter Island Expedition 1911

In 1910, Knoche was invited by the Chilean government to lead a scientific expedition to Easter Island. The aim of the expedition was to set up a first-order meteorological station and a seismological station on the island and to ascertain the health and hygienic situation of the indigenous inhabitants of Easter Island.

The following people were selected as participants in the scientific commission:

1. Walter Knoche, Director of the Central Station for Meteorology and Geophysics, Santiago de Chile and Head of the Scientific Commission,
2. Francisco Fuentes, botanist at the Lyceum in the northern Chilean city of La Serena,
3. Edgardo Martínez, Assistant to the Central Station for Meteorology and Geophysics, Santiago de Chile, and
4. Juan Calderón, Mechanic of the Seismological Service, Santiago de Chile.

The command of the expedition ship was transferred from the Chilean naval command to Arturo E. Otaegui Swett. The training ship General Baquedano was chosen for the expedition . The General Baquedano was probably the ship of the Chilean Navy that most frequently came to Easter Island during its active service.

On March 26, 1911, the General Baquedano ran out of the Chilean naval port of Talcahuano . On April 13th, Easter Island was reached without incident and the ship anchored in Hanga Roa Bay . The stay on Easter Island lasted until April 25, 1911. The journey took eighteen days, the stay on the island twelve days, the return journey fourteen days. Bone's assistant Edgardo Martínez stayed on the island until the beginning of June 1912 to carry out meteorological measurements and observations as part of a one-year observation period. The German-Chilean scientist brought back numerous ethnographic objects from the island , which are in Chilean and European museums. In Bone's surveys, limitations arose, on the one hand due to the shortness of his stay, on the other hand, because his main informant and interpreter Juan Tepano Rano Veri 'Amo (born 1872, died 1938) spoke Spanish, but in dealing with the indigenous Rapanui spoke a Rapanui-Tahitian idiom on the island, which differed significantly from the original Rapanui language, which was still spoken by a few old people.

An unintentional negative consequence of the Chilean Easter Island expedition was that the grain weevil ( Sitophilus granarius , family of weevils ), which is damaging to supplies, reached Easter Island with the participants' provisions through the potato boxes left on the island in 1911 , as Knoche himself later noted (Knoche 1925: 137, 148). The Easter Island researcher Stephen Roger Fischer commented on Bone's research results overall as useful and paid him respect by describing Bone's Easter Island book from 1925 as “a model of sober and precise scholarship, one of the best to appear about the island in the first half of the twentieth century ”. The importance of Knoche's Easter Island expedition and the publications derived from it are based on the fact that in 1911 Knoche was still able to question two old Easter Islanders about the traditional and largely vanished traditions. He was able to record myths, chants, dances and details of religious rituals. This was no longer possible for the British traveler and researcher Katherine Routledge Scoresby, who traveled to Easter Island three years later . Knoche was the last to come into contact with representatives of the old Easter Island culture.

Honors

In 1933 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

Publications (selection)

• Knoche, Walter (1912): Tres notas sobre la isla de Pascua. 1.) Observaciones de algunas pinturas, en sus reproducciones. 2.) Los últimos tatuajes en la isla de Pascua. 3.) Un cuento y dos canciones . In: Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía, Vol. 2, No. 6, Santiago de Chile: Universitaria, pp. 442–466.
• Knoche, Walter (1912): A fairy tale and two little songs from Easter Island . In: Journal for Ethnology, Vol. 44, Berlin: Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory , pp. 64–72.
• Knoche, Walter (1912): Preliminary remarks on the creation of the statues on Easter Island . In: Journal for Ethnology, Vol. 44, Issue 6, Berlin: Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory, pp. 873–877.
• Knoche, Walter (1912): Leprosy on Easter Island . In: Journal for physical and dietary therapy, No. 1, Berlin: G. Thieme.
• Knoche, Walter (1925): Easter Island: a summary of the Chilean Easter Island expedition of 1911 . Concepción: Publishing house of the Scientific Archives of Chile.
• Knoche, Walter (1939): Some relations of a fairy tale of the Easter Islanders to fish worship and to fish people in Oceania . In: Communications from the Anthropological Society in Vienna; Vol. 69, Issue 1, Vienna: Anthropological Society in Vienna , pp. 32–33.

literature

• Mückler, Hermann (2015): Walter Knoche. Easter Island. The Chilean Easter Island Expedition of 1911. Edited, initiated and commented on. Südsee series, sources vol. 6, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag .
• Mückler, Hermann (2016): The forgotten Easter Island researcher Walter Knoche, scientific director of the Chilean Rapa Nui expedition in 1911. In: Yearbook for European Overseas History, Vol. 15, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 123-146.
• Mückler, Hermann (2016): The Forgotten Easter Island Explorer Walter Knoche, Scientific Leader of the 1911 Chilean Expedition to Rapa Nui. In: ders. U. Ian Conrich (eds): Rapa Nui - Easter Island. Cultural and Historical Perspectives. Berlin: Frank & Timme, pp. 13–33.

Individual evidence

Unless otherwise stated, all information comes from the book published by Hermann Mückler about Walter Knoche and the Easter Island Expedition of 1911 (Mückler 2015).

1. ↑ Knoche, Walter (1911): Observaciones en la Mina Aguila: 5,200 m (Cordillera de Quimza Cruz - Bolivia) on the 26th of April hasta on the 12th of September of 1909. In: Periódico Instituto Central Meteorológico y Geofísico de Chile, Santiago de Chile : Sección Impresiones del Instituto Meteorológico, 244 pp.
2. ^ Schneider, Otto (1945): Dr. W. Knoche. Obituary. In: Nature, No. 156, September 15, p. 328.
3. ^ Knoche, Walter (1925): The Easter Island: a summary of the Chilean Easter Island expedition of 1911. Concepción: Publishing house of the Scientific Archives of Chile.
4. ^ ^{A b} Fischer, Steven Roger (1997): Rongorongo. The Easter Island Script. History, traditions, texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 123.
5. ^ List of members Leopoldina, Walter Knoche