See also: David G. Smith and Inci A. Bowman "The Long
Journey of Curt Kosswig," Ichthyology & Herpetology 110(1), 174-185,
(28 March 2022). https://doi.org/10.1643/t2021064
Published: 28 March 2022
Kurt Kosswig's scientific achievements were broad and deep. While researching the various cancer indicators found in a given species of fish, he created a taxonomic approach to zoology and encouraged its use and expanded applications. A geneticist and zoologist, his most important scientific contributions were in mechanisms of sex determination, carcinogenesis, regressive and constructive evolution, genetics of domestic animals, faunal history, zoogeography, and systematics. Kosswig’s ideas and concepts as well as the results of his research were of crucial importance to biological systematics. Professor Nazlý Özdemir of Ege University , in Izmir , Turkey, stated in a recently created web site dedicated to the memory of Kurt Kosswig: Meeting with the Haymatloz.
Specialist in genetics, Zoology Professor Curt Kosswig who escaped to Turkey in 1937, is known by everybody who is interested in this field. He founded departments of biology in Turkey . He educated hundreds of students and scientists in Turkey . He discovered the Manyas Bird Heaven with his wife Leonore whom he kept always by his side in his travels in Anatolia and who always had his ear. After it was designed as a National Park on the 15th of March, 1976, the shelter received the European Certificate of the European Council for many years as the best nature reserve. He established the Hydrobiology Institute in Baltalimaný on the Bosphorus. When he returned to Hamburg to work at the university, he brought his German students to Turkey and introduced them to Anatolia . Leonore Kosswig wrote the first history book of Turkish fauna. Her older son Kurt Kosswig had given this book to me so that I could read it. Curt and Leonore Kosswig now lie at the Hisar overlooking the Bosphorus. Even death could not separate them from Turkey where they arrived as Haymatloz and the country became Haymat to them. For additional reading on Kurt Kosswig's Turkish exile see Arnold Reisman TURKEY'S MODERNIZATION: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision 2006 http://www.newacademia.com/turkeys_modernization/
SEE ALSO: Beyond the Euphrates The photography of Cafer Türkmen[*]
The expeditions undertaken by Curt Kosswig and photographed
by Cafer Türkmen provide the first views of Turkey’s eastern frontierland,
which, for security reasons, had been hidden from outside view from 1914 until
1950. The moment that the curtain was lifted, this remote, dramatic country
with a profoundly ancient culture immediately began to lure travellers,
historians and scientists such as Kosswig, who undertook two small but
ground-breaking expeditions, in 1952 and 1954.
Until 1950, no travellers were permitted to cross the
Euphrates. Southeast Turkey was simply out of bounds. Among the first to visit
when restrictions were finally lifted was a photographer, the late Cafer
Türkmen. Travelling by train, truck, Jeep and mule, he discovered a place of
dramatic beauty and a way of life barely changed for thousands of years.
Türkmen’s pictures of this remote land, to which Cornucopia devotes thirty pages, are all
the more poignant because roads would soon be built and villages of stone and
adobe would vanish beneath concrete. He was the official photographer for two
expeditions, led by the great German zoologist Curt Kosswig, in pursuit of two
ancient species – a saltwater fish in the hills above Lake Van and the fabled
bald ibis of Birecik.
[*] Cafer Tayyar Türkmen (1920–2007) was the much loved tutor of Cornucopia’s publisher and cookery writer, Berrin Torolsan, at the Academy of Fine Arts. He also taught the photographer Zafer Baran.
Curt Kosswig (sometimes spelled "Koßwig") (30
October 1903, Berlin – 29 March 1982, Hamburg) was a German zoologist and
geneticist, who spent most of his career at the University of Istanbul
(1937–1955) and Hamburg University (1955–1969). Curt Kosswig is known as the
Father of Turkish Zoology.
Curt Kosswig was born in Berlin, German Empire. He attended
Berlin's Schöneberg Hohenzollern School (Hohenzollernschule),graduating in
1922. Afterwards, he studied Zoology, and Genetics in the Faculty of Natural
Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he completed his PhD in
1927.
In 1930, he married Leonore (1904–1973), who was also a
biologist. They would become acclaimed as a husband and wife research team in
Turkey. They had two sons, the older of whom is named Kurt Kosswig (Kurt with a
'K' rather than his father's 'C') who became a chemist.
Academic career
Curt Kosswig was a lifetime academic and scholar, widely
published and well-respected within a wide range of fields but primarily
zoology. Among his important scientific publications were advances in the
understanding of sex-determination systems, carcinogenesis, constructive and
regressive evolution, genetics of house pets, zoological geography, and species
classification.
His research interests and fields of study widened
considerably once he arrived in Turkey, and was able to found an entire
department from the ground up.
Early rise in academia: pre-1927
Completing his bachelor's degree at the University of
Berlin, in the mid-1920s, he began to study for a PhD in genetics under
Professor Erwin Bauer.
Kosswig published his first academic paper in 1925 in the
German Journal for the Study of Animal Breeding and Hereditary Science (German:
Zeitschrift für Tierzüchtung und Züchtungsbiologie). He was only 21 years old
upon publication of his first paper. Another of his papers was accepted for
publication in 1926.
Kosswig was awarded a doctorate (PhD) in genetics on 1 April
1927, at age 23. In this year, he published his doctoral research work as The
Gene in Foreign Genotypes (German: Das Gen in fremder Erbmasse). He had
conducted experiments with cyprinodonts, which were groundbreaking in the field
of genetics, which "anticipated the concept now known as gene transfer in
carcinogenesis."
Additionally, Kosswig published eleven more academic papers
as a young PhD, from 1927 to 1929, for a total fourteen published papers by his
26th birthday.
Early career in Germany, 1927–33
As Germany's situation deteriorated, and the Depression
deepened, Kosswig's academic career soared, with seventeen more papers
published between 1930 and 1933 for a prolific total of 31 papers published
before his 30th birthday in late 1933. (In total, he authored or coauthored 152
papers that were published in journals between 1925 and 1948 alone, with many
more later.)
In 1927, he got a job as an assistant professor at Münster
University in Münster, Germany. Kosswig worker there for six years, starting
the very semester that a Leopold von Ubisch (1886–1965) took over the Zoology
Department. Kosswig would remain loyal to von Ubisch in the 1930s when Ubisch
came under political persecution.
On 1 April 1933, he left Münster to be installed as a
professor at Braunschweig University of Technology. He retained this position
until fall 1937, when he abruptly left for Turkey. The story of his emigration
to Turkey belongs more in the realm of politics.
Involvement in politics and Rassenkunde, 1933–36
Kosswig was not a member of any political party before 1933.
In November 1933, Kosswig joined the SS, an elite branch of the Nazi Party
(NSDAP). His relations with the Nazi Party were never warm, though, as
demonstrated by the events of 1935 in Münster. He supported the principles of
academic freedom and supported all academic non-conformists who came under
political persecution by the state.
While at Braunschweig from 1933 onward, Kosswig came under
the purview of the newly created SS Race and Settlement Main Office (German:
Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS, RuSHA) under Walther Darre. Kosswig was
asked to serve as an educator for this organization. Part of his duties
included lecturing NSDAP party members and groups of interested citizens about
genetics and racial anthropology (called Rassenkunde).
Kosswig preferred the academic world to the political, and
had never registered with any political party in his 20s.[10] In November 1933,
Kosswig joined the SS (see note for possible reasons), an elite branch of the
NSDAP (Nazi Party). His relations with the Nazi Party were never warm, though,
as demonstrated by the events of 1935 in Münster.
The Munster Zoology Department chairmanship crisis, 1934–36
From 1933, the new German government instituted a policy of
encouraging Jewish professors to leave German universities, especially those
seen to be in positions of political importance. The head of the Munster
Zoology Department, Professor von Ubisch, was half-Jewish and seen as
politically unreliable. After a long controversy, Ubisch was finally dismissed
from his post as head of the Zoology Department at Munster University in 1935,
after which he emigrated to Norway. Kosswig, who had worked with Ubisch for six
years at Munster, maintained his support for Ubisch.
Following the dismissal of his former superior, Kosswig was
asked to take up the chair. He declined. The authorities looked for possible
candidates to replace Ubisch, the entire local academic community became
involved, some supporting Ubisch and some opposing him. Ubisch's two assistants
were fired. Kosswig (then an assistant professor at Braunschweig University)
secured jobs for both of the dismissed assistants. This, on top of refusing to
take the seat itself in protest, lost him favor in the eyes of the party. These
are factors which may have contributed to his own decision to leave Germany in
1937.
Emigration to Turkey, 1937
Following the "Ubisch succession crisis" in
Münster, Kosswig left the SS in 1936.
He also started thinking about leaving Germany itself, which
he did in autumn 1937 at the invitation of the University of Istanbul and some
German professors, who were already there. In doing so, he became one of the
190 total German academics, who emigrated to Turkey during the 1930s in
Germany.
Kosswig remained outside Germany during World War II
(1939–1945) and the occupation and reconstruction of Germany (Wiederaufbau)
periods, but retained active contact with his European colleagues, exchanging
materials, information, and research.
Career in Turkey, 1937–55
His output was prolific in his Turkish years, with hundreds
of articles published, and an entire major university department being built
around him at Istanbul. The Zoology Department at the University of Istanbul,
which still exists today, is considered to have been entirely founded by Curt
Kosswig.
Already in 1937, Kosswig was appointed director of the
Istanbul Zoology Museum. He oversaw its expansion and "collected examples
of mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, fish and various invertebrates, which he
brought in the museum contributing to its enrichment."
In these years, Kosswig expanded his field of study to
include mammals, comparative genetics, gender inheritance, tumor genetics, gene
manifestation, Anatolian fauna, and even continental drift theory. He worked
with and encouraged his doctoral students to study, among other things,
hereditary tumors in animals, fish polygenic sex determination, freshwater and
marine fish in Anatolia, animal species systematics, giant chromosome
structure, fish intersexuality, DDT effects, and symbiotic nitrogen fixation in
bacteria.[2]
Kosswig discovered, identified, and named many new species
in this time, including the rare Saz Baligi which means "reed fish"
(Garra kemali) and Gölçük toothcarp (Aphanius splendens). In 1942, a colleague
Dr. Sözer named a new genus of scaleless killifish Kosswigichthys in his honor.
In 1945, Kosswig and this same colleague described a similar genus as
Anatolichthys in honor of their place of origin in Anatolia.
Kosswig continued publishing and research, and even took up
the role of "adventurer" in search of new and lost species. In this
context, in 1950, he became one of the first Europeans allowed by Turkey to
cross the Euphrates into southeastern Turkey, on a voyage he organized and led
"in pursuit of two ancient species—a saltwater fish in the hills above
Lake Van and the fabled bald ibis of Birecik".
Kosswig is also remembered as the founder of the bird
sanctuary at Lake Manyas, now called Lake Kuş (literally "Lake Bird")
in northwestern Turkey, which still exists today[2] In 1959, the area around
the Lake Kuş was declared Kuşcenneti National Park ("Bird Paradise
National Park"), and later a Ramsar site.
Back in Germany, 1955–69
Kosswig returned to Germany in 1955 at the invitation of the University of Hamburg. He worked there for fourteen years until being bestowed the title of Professor Emeritus in 1969. He served as the director of the Zoological Institute and the Zoological Museum at Hamburg University.
Lifetime honors
Honorary Doctorate awarded by the University of
Istanbul,[18] whose zoology department he founded.
In 2003, in honor of the centenary of Curt Kosswig's birth,
the faculties for Natural Sciences and Marine Sciences of the University of
Istanbul and the Zoological Department and Museum of the University of Hamburg
held a joint memorial symposium in honor of his life and work.[19]
Tributes
1942:The monospecific genus Kosswigichthys is named after him. (See above)
1947:The monospecific genus of beetles Kosswigia is named after him.
1955:The smooth newt Lissotriton kosswigi is named after him.
1960:The barb Carasobarbus kosswigi honors Kosswig, because he collected the type specimen of this species among others he collected in Turkey.
1963:The genus of planthopper bugs Kosswigianella is named after him.
1964:The stone loach Turcinoemacheilus kosswigi honors Kosswig, because he collected the type specimen of this species among others he collected in Turkey.
1965:The bristletail Japyx kosswigi is named after him.
1969:A scraper barb Capoeta kosswigi was proposed but later reduced to a synonym.
1971:A barbel Luciobarbus kosswigi was proposed but later reduced to a synonym.
1972:The chub Squalius kosswigi honors Kosswig, because he collected the type specimen of this species among others he collected in Turkey.
2017:The minnow Alburnoides kosswigi honors Kosswig for
being the “Father of ichthyology in Turkey".
Related articles
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/German_Diaspora_in_Turkey
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Atat%C3%BCrk%E2%80%99s_university_reforms
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Higher_Education_in_the_Ottoman_Empire
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/TURKEY_AND_THE_HOLOCAUST
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Istanbul_University
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atat%C3%BCrk
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Turkey
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