← Back to Articles | Original (German)
In the guest blog, geologist and librarian Thomas Hofmann and archivist Martin Krenn look at the career of geologist Franz X. Schaffer at the museum and during the Nazi era.
Franz 60 years later he retired from the Natural History Museum as a well-travelled man. In 1941, the busy researcher joined the NSDAP. In 1943, ten years before his death on April 12, 1953, he published a "Geology of the Ostmark" with co-authors.
Back to his beginnings. He had been at the Natural History Museum since 1900, then still k. k. natural history court museum, busy. Even back then, the list of his travel destinations was impressive. While still a studious, he visited Piedmont, Liguria, Sicily, Lyon, Paris, Switzerland, northern Germany and Russia for "scientific purposes". There were also Asia Minor and northern Syria, European Türkiye, Algiers and Tunis. Schaffer wanted to correlate the deposits of the Tertiary period, i.e. the last 66 million years of Earth's history, across countries. His dissertation topic with the doyen of Austrian earth sciences, Eduard Suess (1831 to 1914), was: "Contributions to the parallelization of the Miocene formations of the Piedmontese Tertiary with those of the Vienna Basin".
Far from home, Schaffer found two previously unknown mountain peaks in the Turkish Taurus Mountains. He immediately knew what to call them. On the one hand, he immortalized his teacher Suess, and on the other hand, Nikolaus Dumba (1830 to 1900), the president of the Society for the Promotion of Natural History Research in the Orient in Vienna, on whose behalf he traveled. In 1898, as a student, Schaffer had already named a new species of mussel, Pholadomya fuchsi, after Theodor Fuchs (1842 to 1925), the master of paleontology at the museum, and thus secured initial sympathy at Haus am Ring.
However, Schaffer was not only a well-traveled and well-traveled researcher, but also an excellent networker who also managed to bring his research to a wider audience and adapt to the general conditions during the Nazi era by omitting the deposits of raw materials in the monograph "Geology of the Ostmark".
Vienna and its surrounding area, namely the Vienna Basin, were his most important research area. An early focus was the city's Ice Age terraces. He named the highest one Laaerbergterrasse. The lowest would be the Prater terrace. At the ninth International Geological Congress, which met in Vienna in 1903, he and Theodor Fuchs led groups of international colleagues to brick pits in Vienna, as well as to Atzgersdorf, Baden and Vöslau. This was followed by a three-volume Geology of Vienna (1904 to 1906) including a geological map on a scale of 1:25,000. In doing so, he impressively surpassed his teacher Eduard Suess, who had published a small book on the geology of Vienna in 1862. Publication after publication followed. In the fall of 1906, Schaffer wrote the foreword to an excursion guide for Vienna and the surrounding area, which was published in 1907. What was new was the handy format (10 x 15 cm) from the Berlin-based Bornträger Verlag, ideal for your pocket. This was followed in 1908 and 1913 by further ribbons for the wider area around Vienna and the Vienna Basin. He gave the layperson a vademecum, the geological object lesson (1912). He knew how to explain geological phenomena in understandable language: "The layers here are bent over, folded, we call such a bend a fold. The two stacks of layers that are inclined towards each other are called the legs, the bending point is called the vertex."
But for Ernst Kittl (1854 to 1913), who had been his superior at the museum since the end of 1904, all of this seemed too little. Or was he jealous that the "assistant Dr. F. Schaffer" with the three-volume geology from Vienna had virtually overtaken him as boss? In any case, on January 16, 1907, Kittl complained to the then 73-year-old General Director Franz Steindachner that "he [Schaffer] refused to allow me [Kittl] to supervise his scientific work." Kittl continued: "He also knew how to arrange it in such a way that I gained no knowledge of his activity of this kind, which was not, by the way, intensive." It is not known whether there were any consequences. The fact is that after Kittl's death on May 1, 1913, Schaffer was entrusted with the management of the "Geological Department" and his career rose steeply. In 1909 the habilitation process at the University of Vienna was successfully completed. In 1910 his scientific magnum opus was published, a two-part monograph on "The Miocene of Eggenburg", which is still valid today. One volume contains fossil sea shells (bivalves), the other contains snails (gastropods).
From 1914 to the summer semester of 1933 he gave lectures on "Geology of Sediments" and "Historical Geology" at the University of Vienna. In 1916, Emperor Franz Joseph awarded him the title of a.o. University professor. In 1923 and 1924 he was "chairman or first director" of the museum and was responsible for its overall management. He formally retired in 1936, but continued to work.
The years between the world wars were among Schaffer's most productive. Like no other, he knew how to draw the public's attention to the museum, which had to struggle with all sorts of hardships as a "state museum" after the collapse of the monarchy.
Schaffer got inspiration for the museum from his numerous extensive trips, which often lasted several months and took him around the world, in the truest sense of the word. The first trip around the world lasted from March to December 1925, the second from June to December 1927, during both of which he stayed in the USA for a long time. He also stayed in the United States in 1929 and 1937 and gave lectures in Berkeley, Los Angeles and Claremont. On November 9, 1929, he delivered a ten-page report to the Ministry of Education about his 1929 trip, which is now kept in the state archives. Schaffer visited the Peabody Museum in New Haven (Connecticut): "In the stairwell, as in other natural science museums, the Foucault pendulum experiment is in action. The rotation of the earth around its axis is very clearly demonstrated on a long string pendulum."
In New York his path took him to the Museum of Natural History. He was fascinated by the high importance of "popular education": "A separate staff of academic and assistant staff is intended to carry out the popular education courses and exhibitions right down to kindergarten object lessons." Today we would say museum education. His enthusiasm for dioramas cannot be overlooked: "There are also numerous dioramas set up in a way that goes far beyond what you usually see in Europe. And these have the greatest attraction for the public because they largely replace a zoo." Finally, he summed up: "Museums with a global reputation like ours cannot have enough international connections, whereby personal acquaintance with foreign specialists is of crucial importance." He scattered roses to Theodor Fuchs, himself a traveling networker. His former boss got off less well: "Under his [Theodor Fuchs] successor, Ernst Kittl, all of these connections were lost, and the department was discredited and isolated due to his narrow-mindedness towards all experts."
What Schaffer had seen in the USA was not long in coming in old Europe. As early as March 1930, the "Neue Wiener Journal" (March 16, 1930) had the headline: "Sensation of science. The visible rotation of the earth. - The great pendulum experiment in Vienna".
At the beginning of 1932, Schaffer's Dolomite relief (today room eight of the museum) made headlines again. "The Dolomites in the showcase. Important new display in the Natural History Museum. - The largest alpine relief in the world. - The face of the earth's crust." ("Reichspost", January 19, 1932). One sentence is enough to shed light on his position and position in public at the time: "The head of the geological department, Professor Dr. Franz and will gradually find its way into all other geological schools and museums in the world."
Schaffer's travel experiences provided material for numerous articles, radio broadcasts and well-attended photo lectures. Wherever he was, no topic was foreign to the geologist, there was no doubt about its authenticity: "The dances of the girls from Rorotonga are attractive, among which there are many pronounced beauties in the European sense. [...] There is the Poipoi, a group dance in which the girls stand in three to four rows behind each other, and the canoe dance. But they also know the modern European dances and I danced the shimmy with them excellently." ("Neues Wiener Journal", December 22, 1927).
The busy jack-of-all-trades also had weak points; he had gone too far when it came to oil reserves. He publicly expressed his opinion that no oil would be found in the Vienna Basin in the media in the late 1920s; but things turned out differently. In 1932, Austria's first usable oil discovery was made with the Gösting 1 well in the Vienna Basin. In 1949 the Matzen field was developed as the largest closed oil field in Central Europe.
Schaffer's active era at the museum came to an end with his retirement in 1936. Five years later he joined the NSDAP. It is interesting that in the "Geology of the Ostmark" he published in 1943, which was written by a collective of authors, most of whose contributions were already available in mid-1938, raw materials are not a topic. When describing the Vienna Basin, whose rich oil deposits were important for warfare, oil is excluded. You only read about the age of rock layers encountered by individual drillings and about geological structures. Raw materials and petroleum deposits that are important for the war are not mentioned on the 599 pages or are only vaguely mentioned through references to older literature.
Since the 1990s, the Natural History Museum (NHMW), in collaboration with the Austrian Commission for Provenance Research, has been dedicated to researching problematic acquisitions during the Nazi era. In this context, restitution was carried out to the rightful owners or their descendants. (Thomas Hofmann, Martin Krenn, May 25, 2023)