Who was this «German Darwin», the scholar whom particularly conservative circles and the Catholic Church criticized for his evolutionary theory and insulted as the «Ape Professor»? The man who coined the term Oecologie in 1866? Due to whom biology lessons were altogether banned by law from classrooms in Prussia? Who was proclaimed «antipope» at an international congress of freethinkers in Rome in 1904? Who wrote in Magnus Hirschfeld’s magazine for sexology about human hermaphrodites? Whose ideas even left-wing circles were interested in, but whose writings on «eugenics» and »racial hygiene» were later appropriated by the Nazis, and who posthumously became a progressive inspiration for «real existing socialism» in the German Democratic Republic?
→ “Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834–1919): draftsman, physician, zoologist, philosopher, and freethinker”
