The letter from Curt Teichert to Professor R. Kräusel mailed in 1951

The letter from Curt Teichert to Professor R. Kräusel mailed in 1951

The letter (aerogramme) was sent from the University of Melbourne in Australia, to Professor R. Kräusel (Kraeusel) from Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt am Main in Germany (American Zone).

The address on the front side: Professor R. Kräusel Senckenberg-Museum FRANKFURT a.M. Germany American Zone

The address of the sender on the reverse side: The Geology School University of Melbourne Carlton, N.3 Victoria AUSTRALIA

Following World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones. Frankfurt am Main was located in the American Zone, as indicated on the front of the aerogramme.
In 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was established from the American, British, and French zones, while the German Democratic Republic emerged from the Soviet zone. In 1990, both states were reunified to form the modern Federal Republic of Germany.

The reconstructed postmark - click on it to see the original.

According to the postmark situated on the upper-left portion of the front side, the letter was processed at 3:15 AM (03:15) on 23 May 1951 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The continuous wavy lines extending across the face of the aerogramme indicate that it passed through a high-speed mechanical mail-sorting center, where the cancellation hub struck the left side while the machine lines cancelled the printed 7d stamp on the top-right. The imprinted stamp on the aerogramme is 7d (Seven Pence) Australian postage stamp featuring King George VI.
The reverse side of the aerogramme contains the following warning: "If anything is enclosed, letter will be sent by ordinary mail".

The letter

The letter highlights how mid-20^th-century geological research relied on the physical exchange of fossils and scientific literature, illustrating how scientific knowledge circulated between Europe and distant regions of the world long before the advent of electronic communication.
Teichert apologizes for the delay in sending the box of fossil plants and encloses additional reprints on Western Australian stratigraphy and paleontology, while requesting Kräusel’s latest papers on Paleozoic floras.
He also notes that one of Kräusel’s books had recently arrived at the University of Melbourne and was already being used by a postgraduate student studying Jurassic floras in Victoria.

from Curt Teichert to Professor R. Kräusel mailed in May 1951.

21st May, 1951.
Dear Professor Kräusel,

Unfortunately there has been considerable delay in the shipment of the box with fossil plants. The specimens were packed at the University under my supervision and the box was sent to the office of the Bureau of Mineral Resources in February. I expected it to reach you in April or May. To my surprise an officer of the Bureau rang me about a month ago and told me that there was a box bearing your address in his office and what I wanted to have done with it. The possibility that it should have been shipped to you did not seem to have occurred to anybody. There were some further delays and superfluous correspondence, but I believe that the box is now on the water at last. I suppose that Government departments work at a synchronized speed the world over.
I am sending you a few additional reprints on Western Australian stratigraphy and palaeontology and would be very glad to receive any of your papers, particularly on Palaeozoic floras.

Your book "Paläobotanische Arbeitsmethoden" has recently been received by the Department and was particularly appreciated by one of our post-graduate students who is working on Jurassic floras of Victoria.

With kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
[Signature: C. Teichert]
C. Teichert.Senior Lecturer.

---

The personalities

The sender, Curt Teichert, was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and consultant to the Australian Bureau of Mineral Resources.

The recipient, "Professor R. Kräusel" (Richard Kräusel), was the head of the Department of Paleobotany and Botanical Paleontology at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt am Main.

Curt Teichert - the sender

Curt Teichert (1905–1996) was a German-American paleontologist and geologist, known for his work on Paleozoic stratigraphy, cephalopods, and global correlation of sedimentary rocks. His career spanned Europe, Australia, and the United States. Teichert was born on 8 May 1905 in Königsberg, East Prussia. He studied geology at the universities of Munich, Freiburg, and at Albertus University in Königsberg where he received his Ph.D. in 1928.

Palau 1988, Souvenir Sheet, MiNr: Block 13; Scott: 203. This philatelic issue focuses on the endemic cephalopod Nautilus belauensis. The top-left stamp illustrates a morphological comparison between a fossil ammonite and the internal chambered cross-section of a modern nautilus shell. This anatomical relationship reflects Teichert's research methodology, which utilized living nautiloids as modern analogues to reconstruct the shell geometries, buoyancy mechanisms, and paleoenvironments of extinct Paleozoic lineages.

In 1930 he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, allowing him to study early cephalopods in Washington, D.C. This one-year experience brought Curt international recognition for his research on cephalopods and led to a position as geologist on a Danish expedition to Greenland in 1931–1932.
The rise of the Nazi regime forced a dramatic turn: because his wife Gertrud Kaufmann was Jewish, Teichert was advised by the University to divorce her. Instead, the couple fled to Copenhagen in 1933, where Curt received a small stipend in a temporary position as a research paleontologist.
A Carnegie Foundation grant enabled the Teicherts to move to Australia in 1937, where he had been offered a position at the University of Western Australia in Perth and where he became the only paleontologist in a vast, largely unexplored region. He conducted major studies on reefs, sedimentary basins, ammonites, and the Great Barrier Reef.

In 1949 he was invited by Raymond C. Moore from the University of Kansas to help compile the cephalopod volume of the monumental "Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology", a project that would define much of his later career.

In 1951, Curt Teichert was in the final phase of his Australian career, based in Melbourne, and was simultaneously becoming deeply involved in the international effort to produce the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology.
At that time he served as Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, a role he held from 1947 to 1952 and consultant to the Australian Bureau of Mineral Resources during this period (1948–1952).

Professor Richard Kräusel - the receiver

Richard Kräusel (1890-1966) was a German paleobotanist. He studied botany and geology at the University of Breslau. From 1920 to 1952 he worked as a lecturer and professor at the University of Frankfurt. He was also associated with the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, where he served as head of the department of paleobotany.


By the 1930s and 1940s, Kräusel was internationally recognized as a leading authority on fossil plants of the Permian.
During his career, he travelled worldwide in his investigations of fossil plants. On his later journeys, he conducted research on the flora of Gondwana and collected fossil specimens to replace those that were destroyed during World War II, including through exchanges with other paleontological and geological museums and institutions around the world, such as the School of Geology at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
In Europe, he carried out studies of Mesozoic flora of southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

In 1951, Richard Kräusel was at the height of his scientific productivity and institutional influence. At that time, he was the head of the Department of Paleobotany and Botanical Paleontology at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt am Main, where he was responsible for paleobotanical collections, research programs, and international correspondence. He retired from teaching in 1952, but continued his work with the Senckenberg Society.

References:

• Curt Teichert (1905–1996):
  Wikipedia, Geological Society of America.
• Richard Kräusel (1890–1966):
  Wikipedia (in German), Frankfurter Personenlexikon (in German), researchgate
• Senckenberg Nature Research Society:
  official website.
  • Johann Christian Senckenberg (1707–1772):
    Wikipedia.
• Aerogramme:
  Wikipedia.