Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

P. HANELT
of the Institute. After the supply situation had improved to some extent, he made no
more use of this privilege. Mansfeld was among the few people I have known, who
thought that their salary was unjustifiably high. He therefore put larger sums into the
construction of his department and he bought the first desk lamp which I had in my
work room. When in the same year a photo-laboratory was created in the Department,
the equipping of this was likewise paid from his own pocket. He handled state
funds exceptionally thriftily. This behaviour also shaped his colleagues at that time,
and if today we still use pencil stubs down to a length of 3 cm, that is due to Mansfeld’s
influence! He was probably also very economical with his family budget and I
can imagine that this was not always received enthusiastically by his sons, when they
compared their situation with the conditions of the children of other leading colleagues
of the Institute.
Mansfeld was a nomenclatural expert. He had already been given responsibility for
this speciality by L. Diels, Engler’s successor in Dahlem. Early in the 1930s, after
almost a century of effort, the formulation of the world-wide accepted International
Code of Botanical Nomenclature was drawn up, which ended the schism between
American and European nomenclatural procedures. This code was published in
1935. Mansfeld was chosen for the international nomenclature commission at that
time and then again after the war, in 1950. He fulfilled all requirements on this matter
very conscientiously and invested very much time into answering appropriate questions
and cooperation in the commissions mentioned. In connection with necessary
name changes he endured much hostility, at its worst in a hearing by the Gestapo.
This was because he had been denounced for correctly recognising the priority of
some scientific names created by foreign colleagues from enemy states, in preference
to later synonyms from German authors. He wrote in 1941, for the German
Botanical Society, a nomenclature of the vascular plants of Germany (the forerunner
of the standard list of Wisskirchen and Haeupler, published in 1998) and his introduction
to questions of scientific nomenclature (MANSFELD 1949) I hold to be the best
presentation of these problems in the German language in book form.
Mansfeld was not a traveller: before the war he visited only Vienna and the International
Botanical Congress in England. Mansfeld was accustomed to a very regular
life, which preferably was limited to his house and the Department. However, in the
Gatersleben period he took part in an important six-month Chinese-German biological
expedition to the north and north east of China, as temporary leader of the German
team (when H. Stubbe was not present). The many irregularities during this
collecting expedition, the frequent programme changes, the evening discussions with
local authorities or institutions which often dragged on for a long time, extensive receptions
with the strange Chinese cuisine (for us younger ones a source of pleasure),
were for Mansfeld a torment, and he was no doubt glad in September 1956
when he could return again to his homely Gatersleben.
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