Werner Fischel

Werner Fischel (born October 21, 1900 in Saarburg , † December 8, 1977 in Leipzig ) was one of the first academic representatives of ethology in Germany. On September 1, 1941, he received a lectureship in animal psychology in Leipzig - the first in Germany.

Career

Werner Fischel was the oldest of four children in a family of lawyers and studied natural sciences in Würzburg , Königsberg and Munich after graduating from high school . In Munich his interest in psychology , especially in experimental research into animal behavior, solidified. In 1925 he wrote his doctoral thesis and was at Otto Koehler in Munich PhD , for animal psychology topic Got Birds a memory for numbers . Following his doctorate, he did research a. a. with Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk in Groningen . From 1935 he was able to set up a research center for animal psychology in the zoological garden of Münster (Westphalia) , and in 1937 he received his habilitation in Münster . In 1940 he joined the NSDAP . From 1941 to 1945 he worked as a lecturer in animal psychology at the University of Leipzig and headed the animal psychology department, which was only set up in 1941 within the psychology department.

Since many buildings at Leipzig University were also destroyed by the bombing raids in World War II, Fischel first moved to Bamberg in 1947 , and from 1950 he was a private lecturer at the University of Munich . In 1953 he returned as a professor at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, where he headed the Institute of Psychology until his retirement in 1966 and the Department of Animal Psychology until 1968. He benefited from the fact that the GDR leadership established the research focus on animal psychological and bio-psychological research in the GDR at Leipzig University.

Werner Fischel initially dealt primarily with ethological topics such as research into memory and memory in dogs , but later also with neurobiological and human psychological issues. He published numerous popular science books.

In his study The Professionalization of German Psychology under National Socialism (Suhrkamp 1988), Ulfried Geuter pointed out that Werner Fischel owed his professional career to a large extent to the military-political goals of the German Wehrmacht : Leipzig University had set up a lectureship in animal psychology “ u . a. reached with the argument that the army command was interested in the care of dog psychology ”. Previously, in January 1941, the Army High Command had expressly expressed its interest in “ theoretical and applied animal psychological research at German universities ”.

Fonts

• Ancestry and Animal Psychology . In: Sudhoffs Archive for the History of Medicine and Natural Sciences (SudArch) , Volume 27, 1934, pp. 511 ff.
• Psyche and performance of animals. de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin 1938.
• Life and experience with animals and people. An ontology of the living. Johann Ambrosius Barth, Munich 1949
• The combative edition in the animal world. Johann Ambrosius Barth, Leipzig 1955.
• The dog's soul. Paul Parey publisher 1961.

literature

• Ulfried Geuter: The professionalization of German psychology under National Socialism. Suhrkamp (stw 701), Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-28301-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Harry Waibel : Servants of many masters. Former Nazi functionaries in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-63542-1 , p. 87.

Web links

• Curriculum vitae Werner Fischel, in the list of professors at the University of Leipzig from 1945–1991