Wilhelm Volz (geographer)

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Wilhelm Theodor August Hermann Volz (born August 11, 1870 in Halle , † January 14, 1958 in Markkleeberg ) was a German geographer and geologist .

Life

Volz was the son of a grammar school director and studied geography, ethnology and geology in Leipzig, Berlin and Breslau from 1890. In Breslau he was an assistant at the Geological Institute and received his doctorate in 1885 (The coral fauna of the strata of St. Cassian in South Tyrol) and in 1899 in geology (contributions to the geological knowledge of North Sumatra).

In 1902, Volz married the daughter of a Jewish industrialist, Anna Kauffmann. With her he had five children (Peter, Joachim, Hildegard, Dietrich and Christine).

He undertook three research trips to Southeast Asia (Sumatra, Borneo, Java) between 1897 and 1906, including a multi-year expedition to North Sumatra on behalf of the Humboldt Foundation of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin from 1904–1906.

He spent the time of the First World War as a reserve officer on the Eastern Front (1914), as a company commander of a Landsturm battalion in eastern Upper Silesia for border guarding (1915-1916) and as head of the espionage defense unit Dept. I a in Wroclaw (1916-1917).

He was university professor for geography in Erlangen (from 1908), Breslau (from 1918) and Leipzig (from 1922).

In 1921 Oxford University appointed him a member of the Geographical Association. In 1925 he became a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences . As a professor of geography in Leipzig, Volz supervised up to 500 students and around 70 doctoral students. The Leipzig Geography Institute was thus the second largest in the German Empire. 

Wilhelm Volz's academic work can be divided into three different periods. The first runs from 1894 to 1916, during which time he devoted himself to the geology, geography and anthropology of Southeast Asia. In the second phase, from around 1919 to 1935, he dealt on the one hand with regional geography in Upper Silesia with a special focus on demarcation and population, and on the other hand with the overall German population and economic geography. The third period overlaps with the second. It ranges from around 1922 until his death. Here his research focus was on theoretical geography and physical anthropology.

Between 1926 and 1931 he was the managing director of the Foundation for German Folk and Cultural Soil Research in Leipzig. 

He was a member of the DNVP from 1923 to 1928.

In November 1933 he signed the German professors' confession of Adolf Hitler .

After the end of the Second World War, the u. a. Text published by him and Karl Schmeißer Oberschlesien and the Geneva Arbitration: Eastern European Institute in Breslau (Berlin 1925) placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

Fonts

  • North Sumatra, 2 volumes, 1909, 1912
  • Two millennia of Upper Silesia represented in eight maps, 1920
  • In the twilight of the Rimba, 1921, 1929, 1948
  • The economic geography of the Upper Silesian question, 1921 (also translated into French, Italian, Spanish, English, Danish and Swedish)
  • The national structure of Upper Silesia. In three maps, 1921
  • Settlement map of Upper Silesia, 1922
  • The East German economy, 1930
  • The occupation of the earth by the human race, 1942

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Personal files W. Volz (1870–1957), Leipzig University Archives, Sig .: PA64
  2. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-o.html
personal data
SURNAME Volz, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Volz, Wilhelm Theodor August Hermann (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geographer and geologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Hall
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1958
Place of death Markkleeberg