refugees in the family

In my Every Picture series, we met Luise Faust from the East Prussian patchwork family as a young woman in 1925 and then later in life meeting up with her sisters Auguste and Hanna in Luise's garden at Lippstadt. We didn't know anything about her life other than that she had a husband and three children.

Looking up an address book of Lippstadt from 1951, we now found out that we had Luise's married name wrong, it was Hieske (not Hießke). The addressbook lists her husband Adolf Hieske as a pensioner.

With this additional information, some googling revealed that the Hieske family did not move westwards in the 1920s like the other two sisters did. They stayed in East Prussia and had to flee from there at the end of the war, which is why we find them in a refugee camp in Copenhagen in 1946. This lovely handwritten list notes that their son, Herbert Otto Hieske was born 15.4.1932 in Klein-Nuhr, Kr. Wehlau, Ostpreussen, baptised at an unknown date in the same place, and received confirmation 10.11.1946 in the refugee camp. There is a whole database of names of refugees in Denmark here.

Reading up on the little-known history of these refugee camps (eg here), we found out that at the time of Germany's capitulation there were some 250,000 refugees (plus 300,000 soldiers) in Denmark. The Allies allowed the soldiers to return to Germany but not the refugees - they were detained in camps and many of them remained stuck for several years, with the last ones returning in February 1949.

From 1946, the British Occupation Zone in Germany allowed refugees from Denmark in if they had family members livingin the zone already, which was the case for Luise (as both her sisters lived in Duisburg-Hamborn, having migrated westwards in the 1920s). Still, it appears she and her son (and possibly her husband too) were still in Denmark in November 1946. According to her nephew, Luise also had another son and a daughter, but we know nothing else about them.

I think we don't have any other photos of Luise apart from the three I've already used in the blog entries linked above, but I've made a new edit of the portrait of young Luise, improving the contrast and the crop:

Update 25.1.2026: I created a new portal to navigate family history blog entries in the shape of a permanent Who Is Who page. This is because the old webpage at michaelgross.info will go offline on February 2nd.

bike to work

lots of European countries have programmes encouraging people to cycle to work, like for instance:

Austria: Radelt zur Arbeit

Denmark: Vi cykler til arbejde

Germany: Mit dem Rad zur Arbeit

Netherlands: Fietsen naar het Werk

Norway Sykle til jobben

To find similar campaigns near you (even a few small ones in the UK), check:

Bike 2 Work

Speaking of bicycles, our tandem, which served us faithfully from 2005 to 2014, has now left the premises, donated to a community bike workshop where it will be restored hopefully find a new lease of life.

another old bloke with a genome sequence

I was intrigued to find out from the article featured on the cover of Nature this week that the ninth man to have his complete genome sequence published (we’re still waiting for the first woman) has been dead for some 4,000 years. A lock of hair conserved in permafrost in a Greenland location inhabited by the Saqqaq culture had kept the DNA well enough to do a proper sequencing (20fold coverage) of most of his genome.

To be fair to the researchers, they didn’t know they were looking at a male genome until they read out the results, so it isn’t their fault if we get another old bloke. What’s also interesting is that this work appears to have been inspired by the sequencing of the woolly mammoth genome a couple of years ago, which demonstrated that frozen hairs are a good source of relatively pure DNA for sequencing. By contrast, Egyption tombs would yield more samples, but the DNA would be less well preserved and more likely to be contaminated with DNA of other species and indeed of modern humans.

Studying the SNPs (one-letter variations) of the individual in comparison with the spread of SNPs today, the researchers found he was most closely related to people living in Siberia today, pointing to an additional migration event that hadn’t been on record before. They also obtained genetic clues to his looks, from his hair and skin through to the shape of his teeth, hence the fairly detailed portrait that graces the cover.

As genome sequencing is likely to become a lot cheaper and faster still, we can look forward to other ancient genomes from frozen or indeed museum specimens (eg the genome of Tycho Brahe might cast an interesting light on Danish history and the rotten affairs that possibly inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet). The ethical side of sequencing long-dead people will be tricky though, especially if there may be an impact on our understanding of their biographies.


Reference:
Morten Rasmussen et al.
Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo
Nature 463, 757-762 (11 February 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08835;
full text (appears to be open access)

copenhagen countdown

Six days to go until the big COP15 meeting at Copenhagen. Quite curious what will come of it, after so much debate beforehand.

In my view, the big problem is that people still don't understand that unlimited economic growth is not compatible with a planet of limited resources. So as long as governments give the environment with one hand and take away with the other in the name of stimulating the economy (UK government approved new runway for LHR airport while pretending care about CO2 emissions!), we're not going to be able to fix things. An economy that only works when it grows like a tumour isn't working at all.

Also, as Naomi Klein pointed out in Rolling Stone Magazine recently, there is much too little appreciation of the fact which she calls the "climate debt", i.e. that the rich countries caused most of the excess CO2 we have, while the poor countries will suffer most from its effects (on both sides of the equation, "most" means over 90%). So the billions due to be paid for climate mitigation aren't aid or charity, they are just fair compensation.

Anyhow. Time to stop ranting and sit back for the final show. In my last pre-Copenhagen piece on climate, out in today's issue of Current Biology, I've tried to make sense of the various political wrestlings surrounding the Barcelona negotiations in November:

Climate jostlings intensify
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 22, R1009-R1010, 1 December 2009
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.004
abstract and restricted access to PDF file

the magic circle

Review of

The mercurial emperor – the magic circle of Rudolf II in renaissance Prague

by Peter Marshall

Pimlico Paperback 2007

Imagine the most powerful political leader in the world decides he’s not interested in politics and wars and all that and prefers to dedicate most of his time to collecting art and dabbling in science. Amazingly, it really happened: the leader in question was the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II, who presided over the Holy Roman Empire in the twilight years before central Europe drowned in the Thirty Years War.

In his very readable biography of the ruler who couldn’t be bothered to rule, Peter Marshall follows the interests of his subject by dedicating only a little bit of space to the politics, and focusing on the art and the science instead. To get the politics out of the way first, many have slated Rudolf as a hopeless leader, but Marshall tends to support the view that his inaction and openness for divergent opinions (especially on religion, where he refused to support hardline Catholicism) quite possibly delayed the inescapable disaster by several decades.

Rudolf’s credentials are much clearer in art and in science. His support for the most exciting astronomers of the day brought together the last and greatest naked-eye observer of the heavens, Tycho Brahe, and the best theoretician of the time, Johannes Kepler. Without Rudolf’s patronage, the movement of the planets (Kepler’s laws) might have remained unsolved for much longer.

Astronomers of the day still very much believed in astrology, or at least used it as a welcome source of income, so we’re looking at an important junction between the medieval world views we now call superstition and the emerging modern science. Thus there are also alchimists and magi like the Briton John Dee populating the pages of this book.

In art, Rudolf supported many great artists, including Arcimboldo, who famously portrayed the emperor as a jigsaw made of vegetables. Marshall says that Rudolf often left important political figures waiting for an appointment, as he preferred to spend his time in the workshops of his artists, discussing their current work.



Of equal importance, though, was his unprecedented activity as a collector. He sent expert buyers including Jacopo Strada and his son Octavio to Italy, to buy art of what we now call the late Renaissance and bring it to Prague, the city which owes the time of its greatest glory to him.

With chapters dedicated to subject areas (magic, art, old astronomy, new astronomy) and the key figures representing them, Marshall’s book is a very accessible read. Minor moans from my part include the fact that the Strada family have not been given a whole chapter as they would have deserved (I have a vested interest here, but I think it’s fair to say that they are at least as important for Rudolf’s circle as the visitor John Dee). I would have also wished the author to be more aware of points where the textbook history may be wrong: He uncritically refers to “Juana la loca” (Rudolf’s great grand-mother in two lineages) as having been mad, and to a strained bladder as the cause of Tycho’s death. In both cases, I would rather take side with the alternative views explained here and here, respectively.

The failure to acknowledge the possibility of Tycho’s murder is especially unfortunate as Marshall reveals further links between Tycho and Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The astronomer, whose research centre at Uraniborg was within eyesight of Hamlet’s Elsinore, had cousins named Rosenkrantz and Guildenstierne. Which rather fits in nicely with the murder case that Peter Andersen makes and that Shakespeare may have known about. As the bard said, there are more things in heaven and on earth …

Copenhagen conference reframed

As I mentioned earlier, I learned lots of interesting things at the Copenhagen conference on Framing Research.

Some of it I reframed as a news feature for Current Biology, which appeared last Tuesday and is available here (restricted access, but email me if you want a copy).

Another item published while I was away is my review of:

A short guide to the human genome,
by Stewart Scherer

This is in Chemistry & Industry, issue 13, 13.7.2009, page 30

Snippet:

In his “short guide”, Stuart Scherer has addressed around 80 such questions, using the available database tools and the published literature to give today’s best estimates, pinning the genome and its proteins down as precisely as possible. Regarding the number of genes in our genome, his answers range from 18,357 to 25,685. Each of these “genome FAQs” is addressed in a very short chapter of just one to four pages, often presenting the answer in the form of a table or graph, together with an explanation of how the results were obtained and what factors still limit their precision.

copenhagen

I learned some very interesting things at Copenhagen last week, regarding how public debates can be distorted by "framing". As I am hoping to place a story or two about this, I won't reveal more for the time being, but watch this space.

My own contribution was a look back on the changes in science reporting I experienced in Germany and in the UK over the last 16 years or so. A version of these thoughts was published here.

With the short stay and appalling weather conditions in the middle of a low pressure system that seemed to be sweeping up all the humidity over the North Sea and Baltic and tipping it down on Copenhagen, I haven't seen much of the sights, and had to make do with a replica of the mermaid sitting at the airport:



Fortunately, there was enough time to explore the beer, which was very good:

changing world of science reporting

Based on last year's opinion piece

Is science reporting turning into fast food?

I've been invited to speak at the forthcoming Danish Science Journalists Association Spring Conference 2009, Framing Research, to give comments on the landscape of science journalism.

The conference sounds interesting, and I do believe that it is important to discuss how the dramatic change in communications across society affects the communication and public understanding of science. I will report when I'm back.

murder most foul

I just finished a short piece about the suspected murder case Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), which has a new suspect in the shape of the (distantly related) Swedish count Erik Brahe. (See, for example this article from January.) Intriguingly, the story has lots of resonances with Shakespeare's Hamlet, written in the year of Tycho's death.

During my research, I contacted Peter Andersen, who discovered and is now analysing Erik Brahe's diaries, and casually mentioned my research into the Strada family who, like Tycho in his final years, were also at the court of Rudolf II at Prague. Turns out that Octavio Strada actually met the murder suspect a couple of times. Money changed hands, and one of the entries was encrypted in Erik's secret code.

Watch this space, as the murder plot thickens ...