Kurt Kosswig

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[i] dedicated to the memory of Kurt Kosswig: Meeting with the Haymatloz.[ii] 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/