a young chemist

Every picture tells a story, No. 12

Richard was behind the camera in the last instalment, now here's the photographer himself, from the same stash of negatives, so presumably also from the time between 1930 and 1933. Not quite sure what's happening here, but he seems to be conducting chemical experiments at home. He was studying chemistry, maths and physics for a teaching degree. He appears to be having a good time, too. And a sense of mischief. (And no safety specs. Don't do that, kids!)

Another photo of a simlilar home-experimenting situation, this time looking more serious:

He went on to marry Ruth from episode 11. Although they took geographically very different routes before doing their last terms of university at Bonn, they were both born in small towns in Lorraine, and three of their four parents had lived in Alsace. (As Nazism got from bad to worse, they visited Strasbourg in the spirit of "while we still can".) And they each had one railway grandfather.

This photo is also on flickr (and a few others, too).

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth
12. a young chemist

Twitter thread

elusive memories

Impressions of

Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue
Patrick Modiano

Rummaging around the library I inherited I discovered a few books by the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature Patrick Modiano, including this one both in the French original and in a German translation:

I loved the French title and the German cover art, so went on to read the original. It is very short, with chapters from different perspectives describing the comings and goings of people who remain enchantingly mysterious, plus, it’s Paris shrouded in darkness and a haze of nostalgia, so what’s not to like. I disapproved of the ending though. And I'm wondering if, by not saying much at all about the characters, the author lets me do all the work. I mean I do love his elusive protagonist, Jacqueline, but I realise that I may be projecting my own expectations onto a blank canvas here.

After enjoying the misty mysteries of this one, I also read Du plus loin de l’oubli, which turns out to be very much the same, with some of the characters possibly overlapping (hello again, Jacqueline!), except that now part of the story (?) is moved to London, which somehow put me off a bit. So I guess I know the pattern now, and I don’t have to read the third one I found, which is called Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier.

Hanna and Ruth

Every picture tells a story, No. 11.

Ruth Düsselmann, the little girl on the steps of shop in Luisenthal grew up, and here she is in her student days in Bonn, sharing a giggle with her friend Hanna Dissmann (left). The photo was taken by fellow student Richard Groß, who may have known Hanna before he met Ruth, but he ended up marrying Ruth. Both Richard and Ruth were studying natural sciences for a teacher degree, so I'm guessing Hanna did too, but not sure. I did meet her once or twice half a century later, but didn't ask her any personal questions. Ruth arrived at Bonn University in the summer of 1930, Richard in the winter before, and they both graduated in 1933 (in a hurry as they were worried that their favourite profs would be chased away by the Nazis), so I am guessing the photo dates from between 1930 and 1933.

In these last five years, as various forms of 21st century fascism began to spread and eat away the progress we made over the previous decades, I often thought of my grandparents and what it must have been like for them, in their 20s, to see their world being pulled away from under their feet. I'm looking at these photos for a glimpse of who they were before shit happened - all I got to know as a child was the version after shit happened.

Richard was a keen photographer and left mountains of photos and negatives when he died. This is one of a bunch of photos I found as negatives of which I made small prints back then, in the late 1980s, so this is now the second time I am attempting to rescue this from oblivion. Here is another one from the same film, now trying to look serious:

There will be more photos from his vaults to be rescued for sure.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth

Twitter thread

citizen science then and now

Back in the happy days before Brexit and Trump became a thing, I regularly attended Earthwatch events and wrote stories about their exciting research projects around the world which are made possible by recruitment of volunteers who pay for the privilege of taking part. That activity faded away as the relevant contacts at the organisation kept being replaced by new people, and I lost touch at some point. Towards the end of the phase, I suggested writing a book to be released on the 50th anniversary of the organisation, splashing out on all the wonderful work they are doing around the world. Strangely I never got anywhere with this idea. Emphasis at the organisation shifted away from the volunteer-paid research expeditions and towards partnerships with corporate sponsors as well as more affordable activities closer to home, so that may have been one reason why I didn't get much response re the history book.

The 50th anniversary happens to be now, and as there have been a couple of new developments in citizen science, I have taken the opportunity to wrap up the 50-year history of Earthwatch in a feature on new trends in citizen science more widely. Ironically, one of the trends is to get rid of the citizen scientist altogether and just use their social media posts to algorithmically identify species observations.

The resulting feature is out now:

New avenues for citizen science

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 21, 08 November 2021, Pages R1403-R1406

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Earthwatch Institute started out organising international research expeditions with volunteer helpers, but now also offers science projects closer to home. (Photo: John Hunt, Earthwatch.)

Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann

Every picture tells a story, No. 10.

Julius Düsselmann opens a new shop at Luisenthal near Saarbrücken, around 1911. He is seen in the door without a hat, the child in front of him is my grandmother. On the side wall you can read (maybe, I'm struggling a bit with deciphering):

Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
Billige Einkaufsquelle für Lebensmittel und ... waren
Kurz-, Wirk- und Wollwaren und Arbeitskleider (?)
Weine & ...

So I reckon you could buy food and wine and clothes there. The carriage looks like he even did home deliveries.

Looking for other examples, I found a photo using similar choreography, around the same time and same area, here.

Julius's (very) extended family hailing from Krefeld is here. His maternal family is the Imig clan from Simmern.

Julius (1883-1950) had a life of many ups and downs. After an apprenticeship as a Kaufmann, he allegedly wanted to fly Zeppelins, which didn't work out. Instead he served in the colonial war in 1904/05, about which I have another picture to share some other time. He came back with health problems, married his cousin Helene Kauer and settled for a life as a shopkeeper. First as an employee in the shop of a mining company in Merlenbach in Lorraine (today Freyming-Merlebach) then from around 1911 onwards, running his own shop in Luisenthal, near Saarbrücken. Today part of the town of Völklingen, this place is also characterised by mining and steel industry. The name is associated with a severe mining accident in 1962.

This shop seems to have gone well, as he also set up a second branch, managed by his sister in law. In 1918, however, as the Saar area came under French occupation, he retired from business on health grounds - a heart problem possibly caused by the tropical disease he caught in Africa (possibly typhoid fever), and retired to the countryside, always a bad idea if you ask me. Economic crises and hyperinflation of the 1920s forced him to go back into business, which led him to Rheydt, Königsberg and finally Bad Nauheim, all of which I have covered in my #lostcities series.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann

Twitter thread

how to become a station master

Two of my four railway ancestors were station masters at very modest stations, so I am on a quest to find out more about their role. First stop, a book meant to help candidates prepare for the exam to become as station master, by J. Wetter, second edition published by Baedeker at Elberfeld in 1889: "Die Prüfung zum Stationsvorsteher und Güterexpedienten, sowie zum Stationsassistenten im Deutschen und insbesondere Preussischen Staats-Eisenbahndienste" Now available at Google Books and in print from forgottenbooks – both use the same scan, which unfortunately has a few pages missing in random places.

By today’s (or even 20th century) expectations, the didactic value of the book is close to zero. The larger part is made up of mock exam questions and suggested answers, quite a few of which can be paraphrased as: Which rules apply to situation X? The applicable rules of the rulebook. I’m exaggerating only slightly. Moreover, some of the information would have been presented much better with the help of graphics, of which there are precisely none. Especially, presenting the geography of Germany and neighbouring countries in text form is a bit silly. The shorter second part is made up of mock exam essays on selected topics, including, hooray, the role of the station master (pp 298-303).

In this chapter and scattered across the rest of the book there are intriguing glimpses at what the station masters did, and what their working lives must have been like. Obviously there were vast amounts of workforce involved in everything. Guards along the tracks, signal operators, brake operators, workers, telegraphists. As this was before the telephone, every station used telegraph to communicate any problems down the line and to regional admin offices.

Passenger accommodation came in four classes. Complimentary travel for station masters was first class, for workers fourth. A station master moving station could claim two waggons for his belongings free of charge. Non-smoking as well as women-only compartments were to be offered in every class. Pipe smokers had to have a lid on their pipes. Children under four travelled free (but couldn’t claim a seat), aged four to ten they paid half price.

There are numerous rules on transporting animals, including horses, livestock, even wild carnivores, and how to label the cage if you ship a tiger or a whole menagerie by rail. I suppose circuses may have used the service back then. In other news, hopefully unrelated, we also get a whole chapter on rules around transporting dead bodies. Rules also for explosives, flammable liquids etc. It almost sounds as though the station masters lived dangerously with all these things travelling in and out of their stations.

There's way too much about book keeping and admin for my tastes, this must have been a nightmare. It's more fun to read about what to do after an accident. One ordinary person dying in circumstances not too spectacular doesn’t call for a big fuss. Any nobility being involved in or near an accident does, however.

The book doesn’t cite many references, but towards the end it mentions several times this “railway geography” by national economist Max Haushofer:

Eisenbahngeographie: Eine Darstellung des modernen Weltverkehrs mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Eisenbahnen (1875), which also looks interesting. Available on Google Books.

Seen on a recent visit to Minden - sheds at the station Minden Oberstadt, close to Minden Stadtbahnhof which was my greatgrandfather's domain for several decades. (own photo)

a bakery at Lorsch 1900

Every picture tells a story, No. 9.

Adam Eberle (1863-1938) was born almost exactly a century before me, in the village of Ober-Mumbach in the Odenwald (today in the southernmost tip of the state of Hessen). He did an apprenticeship as a baker, went on the Wanderschaft as far as Metz, on his return married his cousin Anna Barbara Schütz (1860-1934) from nearby Nieder-Liebersbach and set up a bakery in the house Bahnhofstraße 27 in the small but historically important town of Lorsch. (The address doesn't quite make this another railway family, as the road named after the station runs orthogonally to the rail line and number 27 was in fact a few hundred metres away from the station. Passengers wouldn't normally have picked up their bread rolls for the journey at Eberle's bakery.)

The photo from around 1900 shows the house, with Adam, Anna Barbara, and one of the three daughters, probably the oldest, who was also called Anna Barbara, born 1893.

Let's have a zoomed in version too:

If the mother is pregnant in the photo, this is the last child on the way, Peter, who was born in 1900.

The bakery business wasn't all that successful, but it survived until 1930. Spartan living became a habit in the family. Troubles were sometimes linked to the protestant family from the hinterland not being accepted in the very catholic town. This was also discussed in the context of all three daughters remaining unmarried. However, the latter problem also had to do with World War I. Born in 1893-1897, the young women saw many of their male contemporaries going to war and not coming back.

The daughters kept the house (and the Spartan lifestyle) until 1973, when the last surviving daughter sold it to the town, which had it demolished to build an access road for a school, allegedly. The satellite view right now just shows a car park in the gap between numbers 25 and 29. The only place it could have given access to is the Nibelungenhalle. Anyhow, the baker's house has stayed in the family for over 80 years, which is good going.

UPDATE 13.11.2021 I just discovered a new upload of genealogical data on GedBas that includes our baker Adam Eberle. Although his wife is not named, as they are cousins it is easy to find her parents. Highlights:

• the ancestry line Rettig goes back to a Johann Rettig born 1396.
• first evidence of migration into the Odenwald families. Like elsewhere in my family (in the Kraichgau), there are people coming in from Switzerland (the Bitsch family from the eponymous place) after the 30-years war, but also:
• a vicar from Creuzburg, Thuringia (Adam Getrost), who married a Bavarian woman from Eschau, then settled down at Rimbach, Odenwald.

An interesting family tree to compare and contrast to this is the maternal side of Grace Kelly - much of it is from the same corner of Germany and linked by names such as Treusch, Griesser, Eberle(in).

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900

Twitter thread

keeping cool

Six days to go until the start of COP26 at Glasgow, so today's feature has a climate focus. I looked into the spread of air conditioning as a way of "adapting" to rising temperatures, which is, of course, one of many feedback loops making things worse, and at other good or bad ways of adapting to climate change, partially inspired by the book Great Adaptations, which I read for review recently.

So here are some things we can and some we shouldn't do as the climate catastrophe accelerates:

Keeping cool in a warming climate

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 20, 25 October 2021, Pages R1363-R1365

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my twitter thread listing all the 2021 features in Current Biology as they move to the open archives.

If the response to rising temperatures is the installation of more air-conditioning units, this will add to carbon emissions and thus accelerate the climate catastrophe. (Photo: Kars Alfrink/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

bei Wilhelm Geppert

Let's have some bakers and shopkeepers now to continue the series Every picture tells a story.

The photo shows a baker's shop and family in Dörndorf, Kreis Frankenstein, Schlesien, around 1918. Today the place is known as Powiat Ząbkowicki in Poland. They are Wilhelm Geppert/Göppert (1877-1952), Martha nee Stephan (1887-1968), and their children Hedwig, Emma and Wilhelm Karl. The sign reads in full: "Bäckerei, Mehl- Specerei- Taback u. Cigarren-Handlung, bei Wilhelm Geppert". Meaning that it was a bakery also selling flour, spices, tobacco and cigars. I'm loving the Pipi Longstocking vibe radiated by the oldest, Hedwig, who postumously became my grandmother in law.

I also shared this photo on flickr earlier this year.

PS: See also this postcard of the village, with one of the panels showing the bakery.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert

Twitter thread

views of ships and cities

This blog's favourite industry painter, Alexander Calvelli, is opening his next exhibition this coming Sunday at Elmshorn (Schleswig-Holstein):

Schiffsblicke und Stadtsichten
opening Sunday 24.10. at 11am (until Nov 14)
Kunstverein Elmshorn
Torhaus Probstendamm 7
Elmshorn

more info (in German)

Here's a glimpse at a ship from the prospectus:

railway families

Four separate lines of my family tree involved a family kept alive by a railway job in the late 19th and early 20th century. The four railway employees were from wildly different geographic areas and never met each other, but they all benefited hugely from the opportunities provided by the railways and there are intriguing parallels in their lives.

I've made separate blog posts about each of them already, but here comes the masterpost bundling the key information for the complete quartet, so I can draw comparisons and have all the links in one place. Arranged chronologically by date of birth we have:

1. Johann Anton Lütkemeyer 1843-1887 from Schwaney
job: railway worker in 1872 / railway guard in 1877, Gütersloh, presumably active from 1860s until he became ill with tuberculosis of which he died aged 44.
family: married Johanna Catharina Charlotte Kosfeld, born 1854 in Gütersloh. Five daughters and two sons born within 12 years of marriage, five children survived him. First son died within three months of his birth, not sure which child was the second to die early, as data are missing on several siblings.
blog entries: the Gütersloh connection; a village becomes a city

[ No family portrait known. ]

2. Christoph Gottlieb Kauer 1845-1909 from Simmern
job: severely injured in the war of 1870/71, joined new Alsace railways as compensation, moving frequently (children born in Mulhouse, Morhange, Fontoy). Final stop and career step: station master in Adamsweiler from mid 1890s to his death aged 64.
family: married Margaretha Imig, born 1847 Simmern Five daughters and two sons. Both sons died in early childhood, all five daughters lived to ages ranging from 73 to 87.
blog entries: greetings from Adamsweiler; finally, the Kauer clan; Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich

The station master's family outside the station at Adamsweiler, around 1900. The daughters, left to right: Helene, Kätha, Johanna, Auguste, Anna.

3. Richard Groß 1852-1913 from Breslau (today: Wrocław, Poland)
job: railway (office) assistant active in Neurode (Silesia) 1880. Zella St. Blasii (Thuringia) 1882, Stendal-Tangermünde 1886 until his death aged 60.
family: married Maria Louise Mentzel, born 1844, twice widowed; one daughter, one son. Wife also had a son from a previous marriage.
blog entries: Tangermünde railway station 1889; a railway man; once there were emperors

Railway parents seated in the middle, the young folks around them are left to right: their son, Max Heinrich Groß, his fiancee Maria Pfersching, his step-brother Arthur Reim, and his sister Gertrud Groß. Presumably taken on the occasion of Heinrich and Maria's engagement in 1904 (they married in 1908).

4. Heinrich Nagel 1879-1952 from Neesen, today part of Porta Westfalica
job: joined Minden district railways as an assistant around 1900, rising through the ranks to become station master at Minden Stadt by 1914, serving until retirement in 1944. Housed in railway company courtesy flats near that station from 1914 to his death at age 73.
family: married Catharine Luise Lütkemeyer, born 1880, one daughter. Wife was the daughter of 1., but her father was long dead at the point when she found herself a new railway man.
blog entries: railway memories; finding Minden

Heinrich Nagel with his first wife Luise Lütkemeyer and their daughter Frieda.

Patterns and similarities

The first two families both had five girls and two boys each, each lost two children in the early years, at least three of the four casualties were boys. Not sure about the fate of the fourth boy, but there's a real possibility that all four boys died in early childhood and all ten girls survived, which would be a bit spooky.

In contrast, the other two couples only had two children and one child respectively. Each produced a professional musician (Heinrich and Frieda), which is the connection that motivated me to dig deeper into the railway families.

Number 2 and 4 became station masters with very modest stations under their command, but this would still have involved a number of workers to boss around. The status of that job is reflected in the fact that both families bought a massive 17 volume encyclopaedia (Pierer and Brockhaus, respectively). If you're wondering how to become a station master on the Prussian / German Empire railways, Google Books has a scan of the book: "Die Prüfung zum Stationsvorsteher und Güterexpedienten, sowie zum Stationsassistenten im Deutschen und insbesondere Preußischen Staats-Eisenbahndienste."

With an average lifespan of 60 years, I guess they fared about normally for their times, but not better. Note that only number 4 got to enjoy a period of retirement and significant overlap with grandchildren (one great-grandchild even).

All of them had an opportunity boost that has to count as social mobility, compared with their backgrounds. All except number 4, who only moved from his village to the nearest town, also achieved significant geographic mobility, with 2 and 3 ending up hundreds of kilometres away from their respective birthplace.

The wives of 1 and 2 also had railway employees among their brothers and nephews who were perhaps inspired by the precedents. As these two had very modest jobs, I don't think they had any real power in providing jobs for the extended family.

Bottom line, as one of my four grandparents and three of my eight great-grandparents were children of railway families, that makes me a 1/4 + 3/8 = 5/8 railway descendant.

brief history of conservation

This week's issue of Current Biology is a biodiversity special issue, see cover below, and I was asked to cover the history of biodiversity conservation. I haven't read anybody else's history of this field, so my selection of highlights may be eclectic, but it struck me as an enlightening thread that the introduction of agriculture was all about reducing biodiversity in our habitat, and that it took humans a long time to realise that biodiversity is actually good for us too. Hence the title:

Learning to value biodiversity

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 19, 11 October 2021, Pages R1146-R1148

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my twitter thread listing all the 2021 features in Current Biology as they move to the open archives.

Cover of issue 19.
Table of contents.