Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

Recollections of Rudolf Mansfeld 1
P. HANELT 2
P. HANELT
Please allow me - as one of the few people here who actually knew Rudolf Mansfeld
- to present some personal memories of him, which are vividly remembered by me as
his former co-worker. When I began my service as a trainee in the then Department
of Systematics and Cultivated Plant Collection (the present Genebank) of the Gatersleben
Institute in 1949, Rudolf Mansfeld, the Director of this department, was ill with
jaundice. In the first days of my service here, all possible opinions and prejudices
against my chief were rumoured: he could be moody, mean, not artistically inclined,
dreary, and a woman hater, all of which however very soon turned out to be false.
From the first visit to his sick-bed I got to know him as an extraordinarily understanding
man, with whom, as it soon turned out, one could co-operate very well, provided
that one showed interest and commitment in the work: if this interest was missing, he
could certainly be very reserved.
Rudolf Mansfeld could never hide his Berlin roots. It was his home city and for more
than 20 years he was a collaborator in the world-famous Systematics School of Adolf
Engler in the Botanic Garden and Museum of Berlin-Dahlem, where he had made a
name for himself as an expert on various, mostly tropical, plant families, such as the
Orchidaceae and Euphorbiaceae. His career as curator at this institution was interrupted
suddenly when the greater part of this collection, the largest in Germany, was
destroyed by several bomb raids in 1943 in the second World War. Mansfeld also
suffered at that time severe personal losses: his manuscript of a monograph of the
Orchidaceae for Engler’s most famous work “Die Pflanzenfamilien” (The Plant Families)
was burned as well as his manuscript for a revised new edition of the wellknown
“Flora von Deutschland” of Garcke (which was published only as the overdue
revised 23 rd edition in 1972!). Mansfeld never got over the loss of the Dahlem herbarium
collections: he spoke of it again and again and his installation of a fire prevention
system for the developing archive collections in the Gatersleben Institute was
the direct consequence of this. Mansfeld was called up into the armed forces in the
same year (1943) and served as an ‘Obersoldat’ (senior soldier) in a medical corps
for the diagnosis of malaria. (He thought he might have been the only member of the
armed forces to whom this obscure rank was awarded.)
1 Translated by R.N. Lester
2 Siedlerstr. 7
D-06466 Gatersleben, Germany
1