Fonds SN101 - Koernicke, Max

Max Koernicke (1874-1955), botanist<lb/><lb/>Maximilian Walther Koernicke (actually Körnicke) was born on 27 January 1874 as the son of Bonn botany professor Friedrich August Körnicke (1828-1908) and his wife Agnes Maria Elise. Kloss born in Bonn.<lb/>After attending the Königliches Gymnasium (Beethoven-Gymnasium), 'Max' Koernicke enrolled in the summer semester of 1893, initially to study medicine at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. In the following winter semester, however, he switched to the natural sciences and the field of botany, within which Koernicke moved to a broad area between classical museum botany and modern cytology, represented by botanists Eduard Strasburger, Fritz Noll, Heinrich Schenck and Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper. The first opportunities for the practical and scientific implementation of this interdisciplinary approach were offered by an assistant position at the Botanical Museum of the University of Göttingen (summer semester 1896) and finally a longstanding assistant position at the Botanical Garden of the University of Bonn from 1896 to 1908. Koernicke worked here as a doctoral student for the Bonn cytologist Eduard Strasburger (1844-1912), for whom he received his doctorate in 1897 with a thesis on research into the number of wheat chromosomes. The findings in the field of nuclear and cell studies gained during a guest stay in Kiel with Walther Flemming were also the subject of Koernicke's postdoctoral thesis submitted at the end of 1901 and of his Bonn trial lecture "Über die Centrosomen im Pflanzenreich" ("On the Centrosomes in the Plant Kingdom"). With the recognition of his habilitation by the Agricultural Academy or Bonn-Poppelsdorf University of Applied Sciences, Koernicke received a private lecturing position as professor of botany there from 1902. <lb/>After gaining experience with the working methods of the renowned plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer in Leipzig in the winter semester 1903/04, Koernicke followed the call of the Agricultural Academy in Bonn-Poppelsdorf in 1908 as professor and director of the Botanical Institute, which his father had already headed between 1867 and 1898. In the following years, the institute underwent considerable expansion and improvements. Thus in 1913/14 a third floor was built on the natural science teaching building on Meckenheimer Allee, the greenhouses were extended and the area of the agricultural botanical garden was extended. At the same time, teaching material and collections, working materials, library and herbaria could be expanded and completed. Quite a few collection objects and illustrative materials came from Koernicke himself, who had brought them with him from his research trips. Between 1906 and 1953 Koernicke undertook a total of four trips to the tropics. In 1906/07, the Buitenzorg Scholarship of the R e i c h s k o l o n i a l a m t opened a journey for the first time to Java, the southern Moluccas, Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) and Singapore. On this journey, during which Koernicke acquired his first detailed knowledge of overseas flora, he also acquired the eight coloured lithographs of Indonesia from drawings by the botanist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, which are still in his estate today. In 1910 he visited Ceylon again and also travelled to southern India and Egypt. In 1933/34 Koernicke undertook his most comprehensive research trip with the help of the Arthur von Gwinner Foundation to the Malay Archipelago via Java, Bali Celebes (now Sulawesi), the Moluccas, Sumatra and the then active Anak Krakatau. Koernicke used the return journey to spend several weeks in Egypt. Among the collection objects brought along was the tuber of Aracee Amorphophallus titanum, the titanium root that Koernicke brought to Bonn from the island of Sumatra. On April 21, 1937, the 181 cm tall plant blossomed in the greenhouse of the Botanical Garden, admired by the public in Bonn. Koernicke undertook his last tropical trip to Indonesia in 1953 as President of the German-Indonesian Society with a delegation from the association founded three years earlier. Koernicke's travels and research work were also financed and promoted by private individuals, for example by the entrepreneur Carl Duisberg (1861-1935), general director of the Leverkusen-based chemical company Bayer, and by Hugo Thiel (1839-1918), who, as ministerial director in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, Domains and Forestry, strove for developments in the field of German seed breeding. Koernicke also undertook several trips to Italy, which he used primarily for his acclimatization work. The acclimatisation experiments on agricultural crops, especially on protein-containing soybeans, which had already been carried out at the Bonn Agricultural University before the First World War, were continued in the Second World War in the service of politics and the war economy, such as the experiment under Koernicke's aegis and financed by the Reich Research Council to cultivate winter-hardy olives for German cultivation conditions. In fact, on the basis of these experiments, which continued beyond the Second World War, it was possible to obtain some breeds adapted to the Western European climate. Max Koernicke received job offers from abroad very early on, even before he was valued as a proven connoisseur of tropical and South-East Asian plants in particular, but he rejected all of them. As early as 1905, the Peruvian government offered him the opportunity to found a natural science museum in Lima. This was followed in 1907 by an offer from a German banking group to travel to Brazil to investigate the cultivation conditions for tannin plants and, in the same year, an enquiry about the management of the experimental stations and the Botanical Garden in Victoria (Cameroon). After the death of his teacher Eduard Strasburger in 1912, Koernicke took over the publication of the "Botanical Practical Course" (the so-called "Bonner Lehrbuch", also called "Strasburger" or "Viermännerbuch"), a series of textbooks and manuals established under Strasburger and three of his colleagues and still considered today to be the standard botanical textbook. <lb/>1922 Koernicke married Hildegard Charlotte Maria née Cichorius (1898-?), daughter of the classical philologist and Bonn professor and later university rector Konrad Cichorius (1863-1932). The marriage produced three children, Charlotte (born 1923), Hans Günther (born 1924) and Hildegard (born 1929). After Koernicke had already been appointed a full professor in 1919 and had been an honorary professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Alma Mater in Bonn since 1923, he was finally elected rector of the Poppelsdorfer Hochschule in 1930, which was integrated into Bonn University as the new Faculty of Agriculture four years later. Until his retirement in 1939, Koernicke was director of the Botanical Institute and head of the Botanical Garden in Bonn, in addition to his Bonn professorship. On 4 March 1955 he died at the age of 81 in Bad Honnef. Max Koernicke's research achievements are not limited to the fields of cytology and microscopic technology. He was one of the first to attempt to determine the chromosome number. Today's findings on biological dosage are based not insignificantly on Koernicke's experiments on the effect of radium and X-rays on the growth and development of plant cells. He has also comprehensively investigated the utilization of electricity in horticulture (electroculture processes), for example in his experiments on the soy plant. LITERATUR Kausch, Walter, Max Koernicke 1874-1955, special print from the reports of the German Botanical Society (2nd General Assembly Booklet) Vol. 77 (1964), pp. 249-254 (with picture and list of writings). - Ders., Art. "Körnicke, Max", in: New German Biography 12 (1979), S. 392f.

Personal papers, scientific correspondence - also of his father Friedrich Körnicke [sic!] (1828-1908), also professor of botany in Bonn, as well as documents of his father-in-law Conrad Cichorius - expeditions, lectures, speeches, manuscripts, numerous private and professional photographs

Bonn City Archive

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