Ferdinand Karsch

Ferdinand Karsch: The Curator Who Catalogued Desire

In 1877 a twenty-four-year-old naturalist published three public lectures under the title *Naturgeschichte des Teufels* — a natural history of the Devil. The same year he produced *Revision der Gallmücken*, a sober taxonomic revision of gall midges. The pairing was not an accident of youth. For six decades Ferdinand Anton Franz Karsch worked both registers at once: the microscope and the polemic, the species description and the argument about what nature actually permits.

Münster to the Friedrich Wilhelm

Karsch was a Westphalian, born in Münster on 2 September 1853, and he took his university training at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, the institution that would later carry Humboldt's name. His thesis work on gall wasps appeared in 1877. Alongside it he had already begun something slower and less rewarded: a catalogue of the spiders of Westphalia, compiled in instalments between 1873 and 1893. Twenty years on a regional arachnid inventory is the sort of labour that never makes a career but quietly underwrites one. It taught him the discipline that would define his professional life — the patient, unglamorous business of deciding what counts as a distinct kind of thing.

Forty-Three Years Behind the Berlin Cases

In 1878 Karsch was appointed curator at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. He held the post until 1921 — forty-three years in the same building, through the founding of the German colonial empire and its dismantling.

The job put him at the receiving end of an entire era of exploration. Crates arrived from Africa, China, Japan and Australia, packed by explorers and colonial officers whose names now survive chiefly in the titles of Karsch's papers. Premier-Lieutenant Morgen shipped orthopterans from Kribi. Dr Paul Preuss sent bush-crickets gathered at the Barombi station in German West Africa in 1890. There were insects from the highland landscape of Adeli in the Togo hinterland, dragonflies from Victoria in Cameroon, hawkmoths and mantids and skippers from across the Ethiopian region. Karsch opened the boxes, sorted the contents, and gave them names. It is worth being precise about the moral texture of this: the specimens reached Berlin on the infrastructure of empire, and the science was inseparable from it.

Naming the Spiders

His arachnological output was concentrated and consequential. In roughly fifteen years of publication he erected ten tarantula genera — *Chilobrachys*, *Heterothele*, *Hysterocrates*, *Pelinobius*, *Phoneyusa*, *Phrixotrichus*, *Psalmopoeus*, *Schismatothele*, *Sericopelma* and *Sphaerobothria* — with type localities spread across ten countries, along with eleven species. He also named *Misgolas* in 1878, *Holothele* and *Linothele* in 1879, and the jumping spider *Portia schultzi*, a member of a genus now celebrated for behaviour that looks uncomfortably like planning.

These are not dead names. *Pelinobius muticus*, the king baboon spider, still bears his authority, as do *Sericopelma panamanum* and *Sphaerobothria hoffmanni*. A genus erected in the 1880s that still stands after a century and a half of revision represents a judgement about deep structure that turned out to be right.

The Insects of Two Hemispheres

His entomology ranged wider than his spiders. He worked the dragonflies hard — *Neue Aeschniden der indo-australischen Region* in 1889, *Ueber Gomphiden* in 1890, *Odonaten von Victoria in Kamerun* in 1893. He described new African hawkmoths in 1891, five new African mantids in 1892, a West African webspinner in 1900, and in 1895 published on Ethiopian butterflies. The breadth is the striking feature: most museum men specialise downward. Karsch kept adding orders.

The Second Signature

Around 1905 a new byline began to appear in a different literature: Karsch-Haack, the surname extended with his mother's maiden name. The subject was human sexuality.

He had already published in Magnus Hirschfeld's *Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen* in 1903, and his work connected him to the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, the first organisation anywhere to campaign for homosexual emancipation. In 1905 came *Beruht gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe auf Soziabilität?* — does same-sex love rest on sociability? In 1906, *Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Ostasiaten*, on East Asia. In 1911, the large comparative study of same-sex life among what the period called *Naturvölker*, drawing on African and indigenous societies.

The method was recognisably the one he had spent thirty years practising in the museum. Gather the reports, compare across populations, and ask whether the variation is pathology or range. Applied to beetles this was ordinary science. Applied to human beings in Wilhelmine Germany it was an argument.

Uranos

From 1921 to 1923, with René Stelter, Karsch edited *Uranos: Blätter für ungeschmälertes Menschentum* — pages for an undiminished humanity. He lived his later years in Berlin as an openly homosexual man, at a moment when the city briefly made that survivable. A further body of essays on homoeroticism in Arab culture, written between 1921 and 1928, waited until 2005 to be collected.

Why Ferdinand Is Called a Genius

The honest case rests on transfer, not on depth. Karsch's distinctive capacity was to carry a method intact across a boundary almost nobody was crossing: he treated the comparative, cross-population survey — standard equipment for a taxonomist deciding whether two beetles are one species — as the right instrument for a question the medical establishment had defined as one of individual pathology. That reframing, arrived at through the habits of the specimen drawer rather than through theory, is genuinely original thinking, and it took nerve to publish under any name at all.

The counter-case is substantial and should not be softened. No major figure appears in the accessible record calling Karsch a genius; the word is not his contemporaries'. His zoological work was descriptive rather than theoretical — he named and sorted, he did not reshape the conceptual foundations of arachnology as a Darwin or a Hennig did. His sexological volumes compiled ethnographic reports written by other people, many of them colonial observers whose reliability was poor and whose categories, including the *Naturvölker* framing he adopted wholesale, are now indefensible. He was a first-rate cataloguer with unusual peripheral vision, working two fields at a high level. That is a real and uncommon distinction. It is not the same as the word.

The Erasure and the Slow Return

Karsch died in Berlin on 20 December 1936, three years into the Nazi regime. The state's repression of homosexuality did not merely end his second career; it eclipsed the first as well, dragging the entomology down with the sexology. For decades he survived mainly as an authority abbreviation after a spider's name.

He is being reassembled now, catalogued across the German National Library, the Library of Congress and Wikidata, claimed simultaneously by arachnologists tracing type material and by historians tracing the origins of sexology. Both hold a real part of him. He was always two scientists, and he never pretended otherwise.

Achievements

• Held posts at Agricultural University of Berlin and Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science
• Educated at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Fields of research: entomology and homosexual behavior in animals