Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

Recollections of Rudolf Mansfeld
After a short time as a prisoner of war, in 1946 he acceded to a request by Hans
Stubbe, the first director of the Gatersleben Institute, to work together in Gatersleben.
At first he was employed as a laboratory technician with a very low salary, but before
he could be established as a scientific assistant he had to undergo a de-nazification
programme, in 1948. (To make the museum politically secure, the younger employees
in Dahlem had been recommended by their superiors to enter branch organisations
of the NSDAP - National Socialist German Workers’ Party). In 1949, after the
departure of W. Rothmaler to Halle, Mansfeld was appointed as director of his Department,
and later, by the German Academy of Sciences, as Professor and Director
at the Institute: these appointments he held until his death.
Mansfeld never had ambitions for an university career, and he therefore had not
qualified as a university lecturer like many other curators; nor did he feel any urge to
undertake lectures. However he loved to discuss problems of his special field with
small groups or with individuals and so pass on his decades of experience in this
area of systematic botany. He hated hasty conclusions and was very balanced in his
arguments. Although his lectures were not brilliant as regards rhetoric (as for instance
with Kurt Mothes, the director at that time of the Chemical-Physiological Department
in Gatersleben), they captivated his audience by their objectivity and logical
structure and in this way they resembled the lecturing style of H. Stubbe, the Director
of the Institute. He spent much time in personal discussions and thus exercised on us
younger ones a gentle formative influence, so that we can rightfully call ourselves his
pupils. He agreed to share problems in his special field with representatives of other
disciplines, which was of great importance in the Gatersleben Institute with its heterogeneous
staff.
In his method of work Mansfeld needed to reorient himself again completely in
Gatersleben. Previously a classical herbarium systematist, here he had to deal with
collections of living plants, and systematic problems which occurred especially at the
lowest levels, mostly within species, rather than at the family level. Little known is the
fact that his Department was also included in the programme initiated by H. Stubbe
to examine the postulates of Lysenko biology, concerning the relations between embryo
and endosperm. (The conversion of one species into another, by the influence
of the endosperm on the developing embryo, had been postulated with wheat-maize
grafting. However the apparent development of “maize seedlings from wheat embryos”
turned out to be due to production of twin embryos in the maize ovules, the
second of which had not been removed).
Rudolf Mansfeld was very modest and undemanding - his life being dedicated to
work, and he rarely took holidays. He never took advantage of his position and he
had an outspoken aversion to privileges. An impressive example is his speedy refusal
of the ‘Deputatschwein’ (payment-in-kind-pig), which in the post-war years was
fattened annually for the heads of departments in the then Department of Agriculture
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