• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Memorial to Roland Brinkmann 1889-1995 FRANZ KOCKEL Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources Stilleweg 2, D-30115 Hannover, Germany Roland Brinkmann died April 3, 1995, at age 95 in Hamburg. German geology lost with him a great scientist and an extraordinary teacher who influenced more than one generation of geologists. Brinkmann was born January 23, 1898, in Hagenow, in Mecklenburg. He remained a Mecklenburgian despite his extensive worldwide travels and studies. He spoke English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish, as well as fluent Turkish, with the guttural accent of the Baltic coast. His parents moved to Bad Doberan, as his education could not be continued in Hagenow. As a pupil he came to know Eugen Geinitz, professor of geology at Rostock University, as an early mentor, and in 1918 he published his first paper on the Pleistocene geology of Bad Doberan. Brinkmann studied in Freiburg im Breisgau and completed his Ph.D. thesis, “The Subdivi­ sion of the North German Quaternary,” in 1921. Between 1921 and 1933 he was assistant to the great German geologist, Hans Stille, in Gottingen. In 1923 at age 25, he qualified as a professor with a paleontological-biostratigraphical-paleogeographical study on the Middle Jurassic and Oxfordian in the German Baltic coastal region and in Lithuania. He revised the taxonomy of the Cosmoceras group, using additional faunas he collected in the British Peterborough district. These fauna collections were his database for statistical research on the term species and the phyllogeny of the Middle Jurassic ammonoids. In 1929 he became an associate professor. He had married Margarete Schnepfer, a mineralogist, in 1923, and by 1937 they had six children, three girls and three boys. Stille was more interested in global tectonics than in paleontology and had some of his scholars working in Spain. Brinkmann joined them and mapped for the first time waste areas in the then nearly unknown border region between the Celtiberides and the Betides. We younger ones cannot imagine what it meant to work in an area with a nearly medieval infrastructure and with donkeys for transport. During his Gottingen days, Brinkmann also published on general geologic processes such as bedding in sediments, sedimentary bodies, the sedimentary record of epirogenic movements and pebble and heavy mineral determinations as a means of deciphering paleogeography. In 1933 Brinkmann became full professor of geology and paleontology at the University of Hamburg. His scientific interest turned to Alpidic problems, to nappe structures and paleogeog­ raphy of the Cretaceous in the Austrian Alps. But he did not forget his early fascination for pale­ ontology and reviewed the Leymeriella group of ammonites in the North German Albian. In his student courses he first used the later famous paleogeographical sketches of Europe. His time as a professor in Hamburg ended rather suddenly. Very early on he was very skeptical about the Nazi rulers, and he did not conceal it. A colleague who was interested in his chair denounced him, and Brinkmann was removed from the civil service and the university in 1937. Geological Society of America Memorials, v. 27, December 1996 55 56 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA He found work with a Spanish-German company prospecting for tin and tungsten in the Iberian Peninsula. Free from teaching obligations and administrative work, he had time to write the first volume of his most famous book, the sixth, completely revised edition of Abriß der Geologie. This two-volume textbook of general and historical geology was his masterpiece. It was re-edited 13 times, and several generations of German geologists have been brought up with it. At the time it was published it was very modem, directed toward explaining geologic pro­ cesses on the basis of natural sciences. The second volume, first published in 1948, contained numerous stratigraphical tables from all over the world, and the now-famous paleogeographical maps. It showed Brinkmann’s extraordinary receptivity to international literature. The company Brinkmann worked with was combined in 1939 with the State Geological Survey (Reichsamt für Bodenforschung), and in 1940 he was sent to Warsaw as head of the sur­ vey’s outpost in occupied Poland. His attitude and relationship to his Polish colleagues, recruited by force, was positive, and he learned to speak fluent Polish. After the war, Brinkmann became professor of geology in Rostock in 1946. The depressing circumstances in the destroyed city under Russian occupation did not demoralize him, but on the contrary, the end of Nazi rule increased his creative power. In 1948 the German Geological Society honored him with the Hans Stille medal. His time in Rostock also ended earlier than he expected. Again, politics interfered with his personal and scientific life. The Polish government, looking for war criminals, had everyone who had been in leading positions in Poland during the war arrested by the Russian allies in 1949. Brinkmann was transferred to Warsaw and was detained in Poland while awaiting trial until 1951. During the trial, Brinkmann defended himself in Polish. In the end, all charges against him collapsed, and he left the court as a free man. The Warsaw court certified that he had been a severe, demanding superior, who was concerned about his employees, cared about their daily needs, and intervened successfully in cases where employees were threatened with arrest by the Gestapo, although he put himself in jeopardy, and that he never had been a German nationalist. Brinkmann regarded this verdict as an honor to himself and to the Polish people. Back in West Germany, Roland Brinkmann became full professor at the University of Bonn in 1952, succeeding the famous geologists Gustav Steinmann and Hans Cloos. In his first years in Bonn, there was little time for his own research. Teaching had to be reformed, the old institute had to be reshaped and the Abriß had to be re-edited, enlarged, and modernized. For many years he edited Geologische Rundschau, the only German geoscientific periodical of international standing, and for three years he was chairman of the Geologische Vereinigung, which awarded him with Gustav Steinmann medal. Brinkmann published Geologic Evolution of Europe in English, and the Abriß appeared in Spanish and Portuguese. His scientific interests in the 1950s and early 1960s comprised a wide spectrum, and much of it is reflected in the theses of his stu­ dents. Spain still fascinated him—the biostratigraphy and paleogeography of the Celtic-Iberian Jurassic and Cretaceous, the diapirism in Cantabria, the nappe tectonics in the Betic Cordilleras. He was interested in sedimentation processes in the Germanic Triassie, and he promoted the application of the l4C-age determinations in soil and ground-water research. Together with physi­ cists, he did research on the effects of stress and strain in rock fabrics, and he introduced the young science of organic geochemistry in Germany. He sent his scholars to the United States to learn this new skill. All the modem developments of science in these years—paleomagnetism, delta formation, flysch genesis, the nature of the mid-ocean ridges, even the first steps in plate tectonics—were incorporated in his lectures and in a new textbook, the three-volume Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Geologie, written with competent specialists and published in 1964-1972. In 1963 Brinkmann retired from his chair in Bonn at the age of 65, but he did not retire from teaching nor from science. He had had to start afresh so often that he could not suddenly MEMORIAL TO ROLAND BRINKMANN 57 break the habits of a lifetime. Without salary or governmental support he went to Turkey and with the help of some of his former Turkish students at the faculty of natural sciences of the University of Izmir he founded a new geological institute. From this institute arose well-trained young Turkish geologists, who today occupy key positions in universities, industry, and admin­ istration of their home country. He also started to explore Turkish regional geology, which until then had been an incoherent conglomerate of contributions by individual research groups of dif­ ferent nationalities. In 1976 he summarized his experiences in the book Geology of Turkey. His last publication was a bibliography on Turkish geology, published in 1981 and 1984. Roland Brinkmann was a Mecklenburgian, which may explain part of his personality. He was very reserved toward students and colleagues. It was difficult to recognize the man inside a grumbling, sometimes rather sarcastic outer shell. He expected from his students what he required of himself: exact observations and display, scientific precision, linguistic discipline, honesty, and physical persistence. His examinations were dreaded, as he chased the candidate through the geology of the entire world in several languages. Many of his students understood what they actually owed to this teacher only years after they had left the university. Sometimes, unexpectedly, perhaps in a shabby room in a Spanish guest house far away in the sierra, Brinkmann would tell of his time in the Polish prisons, funny stories about incredible people he met there, without any hint of bitterness in his voice, as if these were experiences he would not like to have missed in his life. The German geological community has lost one of its really great representatives, who still knew (nearly) everything, who in many disciplines explored new paths, and who handed his knowledge, his capabilities, and his enthusiasm on to the next generations. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF R. BRINKMANN 1918 Beitrag zur Geologie der Umgebung von Doberan: Archiv der Vereinigung der Freunde der Naturgeschichte Mecklenburg, v. 72, p. 1-25 1924 Der Dogger und Oxford des Südbaltikums: Jahrbuch der preußischen geologischen, Landesanstalt, v. 44, p. 477-513. 1926 Tektonik und Sedimentation im Deutschen Triasbecken: Zeitschrift der deutschen geolo­ gischen Gesellschaft, v.

Load more

  4

Copy Link