Ferdinand Karsch

Ferdinand Anton Franz Karsch or Karsch-Haack (2 September 1853, Münster – 20 December 1936, Berlin) was a German arachnologist, entomologist and anthropologist.

The son of a doctor, Karsch was educated at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and published a thesis on the gall wasp in 1877. From 1878 to 1921 he held the post of curator at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Between 1873 and 1893, he published a catalogue of the spiders of Westphalia: he also published numerous articles on the specimens that the museum received from various explorers and naturalists working in Africa, in China, in Japan, in Australia, etc. This publication of others' work sometimes led to disputes over priority and nomenclature, for example with Pickard-Cambridge..

Alongside his zoological activities, he published many works on sexuality and, in particular, homosexuality in both the animal kingdom and in so-called "primitive" peoples, including Das Leben der gleichgeschlechtliche Kulturvölker - Ostasiaten: Chinesen, Japanese, Korea in 1906 on homosexuality in Eastern societies and in 1911 Das Leben der gleichgeschlechtliche Naturvölker. Karsch lived in later life open homosexual in Berlin.^[1] The rise of Hitler to power and Nazi repression of homosexuality led to the eclipse of his reputation.

Some of the Spiders found

• Misgolas 1878 - New South Wales, Australia
• Portia schultzi 1878 — Central, East, Southern Africa, Madagascar
• Holothele 1879 - Venezuela
• Linothele 1879 — South America
• Sphaerobothria 1879 - Costa Rica
• Thelechoris 1881 — Africa, Madagascar
• Tribe Diplocentrini 1880
• Acontius 1879 — Africa
• Heterothele 1879 Africa Congo
• Pedinopistha Karsch 1880 - Hawai'i
• Campostichomma 1891 — Sri Lanka (1 species)
• Corinnomma 1880
• Megalostrata 1880
• Chilobrachys 1891
• Myrmarachne

Literature

• Robert Aldrich, Garry Wotherspoon, Who's who in gay and lesbian history: from antiquity to World War II (2nd ed), Routledge, 2002, ISBN 0-415-15983-0, pp. 281–282.
• Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Man for Man, Suhrkamp, 2001, pp. 410–411.

References

• This article contains material translated from French Wikipedia