← Back to Articles | Original (German)
When passionate scientists are on vacation for the summer, their research usually continues - even though they would actually be on vacation. “There will be few professors who will put their hands on their laps during the long ‘holidays’,” says zoologist and Nobel Prize winner (1973) Karl von Frisch (1886–1982). For many, these weeks mean: finally time for research. "For us, they are the main time for academic work, which is severely hindered during the semester by the obligation to attend lectures and courses, by supervising student work and, in a large institute, by a lot of administrative work." His groundbreaking work on the behavior of bees was created in Frisch's summer retreat at Lake Wolfgangsee.
New impulses often arise from summer stays in a different environment, away from the urban hustle and bustle. This was the case with Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), the geophysicist and meteorologist who came from Germany to accept a professorship in Graz in 1924. In the summer of 1925 he took measurements of solar radiation on the Stolzalpe (Styria).
In 1960, Else Wegener, the wife of the researcher Alfred Wegener, who died in 1930 at the age of 50, wrote a biography with the simple title: "Alfred Wegener: Diaries, Letters, Memories". Here you can find insights into their first summer in the Styrian Murtal.
Wegener, born on November 1, 1880, wrote scientific history with his theory of continental drift and created the foundations for plate tectonics. His lecture "The Origin of Continents" on January 6, 1912 before the general meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt am Main caused debate among his colleagues. Else, whom he married in 1913, looking back: "It [the lecture] caused a storm of indignation! The listeners in Marburg were more understanding, where he spoke on January 10th at the Society for the Advancement of All Natural Sciences on the same topic under the title: 'Horizontal shifts of the continents'."
Wegener worked as a university lecturer in Marburg from 1909 to 1919, followed by a few years in Hamburg before he went to Graz as a full professor. Here he accepted a professorship in meteorology and geophysics at the university on April 28, 1924. On May 10th he gave his inaugural lecture on "The development of the astronomical world view up to the present". The Wegeners found a place to stay at Blumengasse 9 (today Wegenergasse 9 with a memorial plaque). Else, who describes the time in a separate chapter as "The happy years in Graz 1924-1930", describes the beginnings: "Our first summer in Austria was the most romantic. We had no money for a summer vacation because we wanted to get our house in order. We painted the doors and windows ourselves, Alfred took over the very complicated shutters. When the last window was hanging on its hinges again, the last shutter was drying in the garden house, we traveled to the upper one Murtal."
The Wegeners' summer vacation in 1925 came about through the mediation of Felix Maria Exner (1876–1930), the then director of the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (today: GeoSphere Austria). Else Wegener remembers: "Professor Exner was with us over Pentecost and told us about the Stolzalpe solar sanatorium, where he had once taken solar radiation measurements and lived with his family for free." Wegener initially had a distant relationship with Exner. The reason was that Exner had viewed Wegener's work "Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere" (1911) rather negatively. But later they found each other, as Else emphasizes: "The stay together in Norway with its lively scientific discussions and getting to know each other personally made the two colleagues friends." No wonder that Exner Wegener, who even became an Austrian citizen through his professorship in Graz, helped to gain a foothold in his new homeland.
Exner arranged for the Wegeners to stay on the Stolzalpe, where the “Sonnenkinderheim Stolzalpe” was opened in the early 1920s. "He also arranged for us to stay there in a burnt-out farmhouse that belonged to the institution. The management had us put in the necessary beds with straw sacks, as well as a table and two wooden benches; we had to bring everything else with us ourselves." For Else it didn't seem so bad: "That was a fun house!" Alfred also worked here as a craftsman. He made a "large mask out of bark, which he placed over the front door; braids made his hair and beard." The comfort wasn't far off. "We had to get water from a spring." But at least food was brought from Murau in the prison car. As was the case years before, when Exner stayed here, Wegener also had to take solar radiation measurements on “very nice sunny days” in return for his stay.
Thanks to the resulting publication, “Measurements of solar radiation at the Stolzalpe Sanatorium,” which appeared in the Meteorological Journal in 1926, we know when these “really beautiful sunny days” were: on August 10th, 17th and 18th under cloudless skies. Wegener measured the roof of the new sanatorium building, which opened on October 24, 1924.
The magazine in question was published at the time by Felix Maria Exner for the Austrian Society for Meteorology and Reinhard Süring (1866–1950) from Potsdam for the German Meteorological Society. On January 26, 1926, Süring, who had critically read Wegener's manuscript of the work, wrote to him: "Your work on radiation measurements on the Stolzalpe caused me some concern. The actual measurement is quite important, but do the further considerations really bring much new to anyone who has studied radiation for even a short time?" A few lines further he suggests a revision: "Under these circumstances, shouldn't it be possible to shorten the manuscript?" Ultimately, he asked Wegener to review a book by Rudolf Meyer (1880–1966) about halo phenomena (atmospheric light effects), noting that Exner thought this was "quite desirable." Wegener promptly agreed, as evidenced by a handwritten note dated January 23, 1926 on Süring's letter, which is in the German Museum in Munich.
Charles V. Frisch was born on November 20, 1886 in Vienna as the youngest of four sons of the doctor Anton Ritter von Frisch (1849–1917) and his wife Marie. Marie, née Exner, comes from a renowned Viennese scholarly family. She had four brothers (Adolf, Karl, Sigmund and Franz Serafin). Sigmund, a doctor by profession, was the father of two sons. The younger one was the above-mentioned meteorologist Felix Maria, who became Wegener's sponsor. So much for a bridge from Frisch, via Exner to Wegener.
The Exners had been familiar with the Salzkammergut summer holiday destination since the 1863s. They came to St. Wolfgang, but also to Mondsee. In 1882, at the urging of his wife Marie, Anton Exner bought an old mill in Brunnwinkel in the northeast of Lake Wolfgangsee near St. Gilgen. Over the years, additional surrounding buildings were acquired. They are now family owned. Under the title “Five Houses by the Lake” (1980), Karl v. At the age of 94, the history of the family home is rich in detail, including anecdotes.
Important scientific works by Frisch, who held professorships as a zoologist in Munich, Rostock, Breslau and Graz - details of his career were highlighted by Klaus Taschwer in STANDARD - were created in Brunnwinkl, including the classic "From the Life of Bees". As volume 1 he founded the series “Understandable Science” (Springer). He wrote the little book in a few weeks in "Brunnwinkl, Easter 1927". It reached numerous editions, most recently in 2019 by Czernin-Verlag.
The Frisch family, who settled in Brunnwinkl in 1882, had a prominent neighbor in the shape of the surgeon Theodor Billroth, who had a stately villa built in the immediate vicinity in 1884, complete with his own "Billroth" train station. From 1889 onwards, Marie Ebner von Eschenbach also stayed at Lake Wolfgangsee in nearby St. Gilgen for ten summers. People visited each other, joked and had a good time. Karl remembers: "On one of Frau von Ebner's birthdays [September 13th], the four boys gave her a morning serenade. We secretly gathered in the next room and played the Andante from Haydn's Imperial Quartet."
The Brunnwinkl was primarily a research site for Frisch's experiments on bee behavior. "During the long summer holidays at the university, the Brunnwinkl was a place of work that I couldn't have wished for more suitable. The area provided the opportunity for a variety of experimental arrangements. When helpers were needed, suitable and willing relatives were found, from my own children to the grey-bearded learned uncles or students." One of the later helpers was his great-nephew, the geologist Wolfgang Frisch, who spent a few summers as a raw materials geologist in Greenland in the late 1960s and early 1970s before accepting a full professorship in geology in Tübingen in 1981.
No matter where Frisch stayed, Munich, Rostock, Breslau or Graz, there was only one destination in the summer: Brunnwinkl. From the Bavarian metropolis he was able to get to Brunnwinkl, his “favorite place of work”, in “less than 3 hours from Munich”. “The journey from Breslau to Brunnwinkl [more than 600 km] wasn’t too far for us for the summer holidays,” says Frisch. "In September 1924 I drove from there to Innsbruck for the 88th meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors." Here he gave a lecture on the “language” of bees on September 23rd. His remarks were very well received. "The final effect was a film of dancing bees - an unusual means of demonstration in scientific lectures at the time."
When Munich was bombed in July 1944, Frisch moved his job. "In Brunnwinkl I was able to continue the investigations with the majority of my colleagues, only hindered by the increasing food shortage, which forced us to devote part of the day to purely farm work." So the summer resort was forced to become a branch of the University of Munich.
It is not surprising that Frisch not only wrote the classic "From the Life of Bees" in Brunnwinkel in 1927, but also his "Memoirs" (1st edition 1956). However, the circumstances were unusual. The Austrian Academy of Sciences, of which he had been a member since 1938 and which made him an honorary member in 1954, demanded an autobiography. Although he initially disliked this work, when he finally started writing, instead of just a few pages, he created a book that was extremely worth reading, which he dedicated to the Academy and saw the third edition in 1973. (Thomas Hofmann, August 15, 2025)