Wolfgang Müller-Stoll

Wolfgang Richard Müller-Stoll (born April 21, 1909 in Karlsruhe ; † April 16, 1994 in Potsdam ; until 1935 Wolfgang Müller ) was a German botanist and university professor . His botanical author's abbreviation is " Müll.-Stoll ".

Live and act

The son of a judicial officer attended elementary school and the secondary school in Karlsruhe. In 1928 he began studying natural sciences, particularly botany and microbiology, at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and at the University of Heidelberg . In 1933 he was in Heidelberg with a thesis on the symbiosis of wood-degrading insect larvae, fungi and bacteria to Dr. phil. PhD .

In the same year he got a job as a research assistant at the Baden State Collections for Natural History in his hometown and in 1933 became a research assistant at the Botanical Institute of the University of Giessen .

From 1934 to 1938 he was a government botanist at the Badischer Weinbauforschungsinstitut in Freiburg im Breisgau under the direction of Karl Müller . In 1937 he joined the NSDAP .

In 1938 Müller, who called himself Müller-Stoll since 1935, received a scholarship at the Botanical Institute of the Technical University of Stuttgart , from where he also began a research trip to South West Africa . He was interned there in 1940 . From 1941 to 1944 lecturer at the German School Andalusia, where he helped design a “camp university” and gave lectures and courses on viticulture , fruit growing and pasture management for internees and locals .

In 1944 he returned to Germany as part of a prisoner exchange. From 1944 to 1946 Müller-Stoll was a scientific assistant at the Institute for Forest Botany at the Technical University of Dresden in Tharandt .

In 1946 he completed his habilitation in botany at the Technical University of Dresden with a thesis on fossil wood and became deputy head of the Forest Botanical Institute and Garden in Tharandt, where he was also research representative of the Saxon Ministry for National Education from 1946 to 1949.

In 1949 Müller-Stoll was appointed professor of botany at the Brandenburg State University of Potsdam, known as the Potsdam University of Education from 1951 , where he also became director of the Institute of Botany, which under his leadership became a research institute known beyond the GDR , despite difficult conditions .

Since Müller-Stoll demonstrated publicly after the construction of the Berlin Wall , he was removed from his position as director of the Botanical Institute and was banned from teaching. Some employees who openly expressed their sympathy for him were reprimanded. Müller-Stoll justified his protest against employees of the Ministry of National Education and the University of Education with the fact that " the wall would cement the division of Germany and would lead to the political, economic and scientific isolation of part of the German people ".

From 1962 to 1970 he was employed on the initiative of Hans Stubbe at his department for ecological plant physiology Potsdam at the Institute for Crop Plant Research of the German Academy of Sciences in Gatersleben , where he retired in 1970. In 1961 he was elected a corresponding member and in 1964 a full member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin .

Müller-Stoll was a pioneer in ecological plant physiology . His main interests were microbiology and paleobotany , wood anatomy, plant physiology and ecological plant sociology . He also dealt with aspects of national culture and nature conservation .

During his research life he was an opponent of political doctrines in biology. Among other things, he publicly opposed the “ dialectical-materialistic genetics ” of the Soviet biologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, which the SED propagated .

After reunification , students and former employees of Müller-Stoll campaigned for his rehabilitation , which took place in 1991 in an honorary colloquium at the University of Potsdam.

Fonts

• Microscopy of decomposed and fossilized wood. Frankfurt (Main) 1951
• The flora of Brandenburg. Berlin-Kleinmachnow 1955 (Ed.)
• The Asplenietum serpentini and its contact societies on the serpentinite complex in Slavkovský les (Imperial Forest) near Mariánské (Marienbad) in West Bohemia (ČSSR) - (with Miloslav Toman). Feddes Repertorium 94 (9-10): 97-119, 1984
• Water balance and location conditions of Ilex aquifolium in the northwest of the GDR - Archives of the Friends of Natural History in Mecklenburg 27: 54-75 1987
• Plant communities of salt marshes and halophilic bog meadows in Brandenburg - (with Götz, HG): Limnologica 18 (1): 183-224, 1987
• Water balance and location conditions of Sarothamnus scoparius, Genista anglica, Erica tetralix and Calluna vulgaris in the north-west of the GDR - In: Archives of the Friends of Natural History in Mecklenburg 28: 59.79 1988
• Water balance and location conditions of Lonicera periclymenum and Hedera helix in the northwest of the GDR - Archives of the Friends of Natural History in Mecklenburg 28: 29-46 1988
• On the morphology of the oil bodies of liverworts - (with G. Ahrens): Feddes Repert. 101 (9-10): 547-560, 1990
• Vital staining of the oil bodies of liverworts with diachromes and fluorochromes - 1990
• Plant-sociological studies of the deciduous forest societies in the area of ​​Tharandt near Dresden (with Ursula Hartmann-Dick) - Folia Geobot. Phytotax. 27: 1-48. 1992
• Contributions to the ecology of heavy metal plants and their societies - In: Archives of the Friends of Natural History in Mecklenburg, ISSN  0518-3189 , Vol. 32 (1993), pp. 157-187

literature

• H.-D. Krausch: Wolfgang. R. Müller-Stoll and geobotanical research in Brandenburg . In: Gleditschia . tape 7 , 1979.
• R. Mitzner: Laudation for the honorary colloquium as part of the rehabilitation . In: Wiss. Ztschr. Of the Univ. Potsdam . tape 36 , 1992.
• H. Schröder: Professor Müller-Stoll as teacher and leader . In: F. Kössler, E. Höxtermann (ed.): To the history of botany in Berlin and Potsdam . Verlag für Wissenschafts- und Regionalgeschichte Berlin, Berlin 1999, p. 323-332 .
• Ekkehard Höxtermann:  Müller-Stoll, Wolfgang R. . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Harry Waibel : Servant 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 .

Web links

• University of Potsdam on the 100th birthday
• Literature by and about Wolfgang Müller-Stoll in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lemma "Wolfgang Müller-Stoll" in: Harry Waibel : Servant 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 .