Willi Hennig at 100
From Taxonomy to Phylogenetics – Life and Work of Willi Hennig. By Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Netherlands, 2013. xx + 208 pp. US $132.00 Hardback, ISBN 978-90-04-21928-1; e-book ISBN 978-90-04-21929-8.
2013 was the centenary of Willi Hennig's birth, and several commemorative symposia and publications marked the event (e.g. our society's meeting in Rostock, Wheeler et al., 2013). Michael Schmitt, coleopterist at the University of Greifswald and former curator at the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig, has clearly invested significant effort to unearth obscure Hennigiana, ranging from personal letters and family snapshots to Hennig's dossier from the Stasi archives, resulting in a timely, attractive, and detailed biography of the man, with commentary on his researches and intellectual legacy.
The book consists of eight chapters (two long and six quite short), and contains an extensive list of documents examined and references, and in particular a comprehensive list of Hennig's works. Chapter 1, “Introduction”, is just three pages long, and serves as the author's preface.
Chapter 2, “Willi Hennig's biography”, at 99 pages, represents the bulk of the text and illustrations, and presents a fascinatingly detailed view of Hennig's personal and scientific development. He was born near Dresden in eastern Germany to a working-class family at the outset of World War I. As a youth, he was bookish, and had the benefit of progressive schools and influential teachers who introduced him to natural history museums, where he rapidly developed an interest in entomology. He attended Leipzig University on scholarship, where he earned his doctorate in 1936, by which time Schmitt reports he had “already published eight scientific papers with more than 900 printed pages”.
By 1937, Hennig had obtained a systematic entomology postdoctoral-type position at the Deutsches Entomologisches Institut in Berlin, where he continued to work, despite interruption from World War II, until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. During the War, Hennig was initially an infantry soldier in a reserve unit, but he was involved in fighting on several fronts and badly wounded by shrapnel in Russia in January 1942. After that, he served in Italy and elsewhere as a medical entomologist attempting to control malaria. Schmitt documents that Hennig was already at work on his first theoretical book (Hennig, 1950) during the war years (a period throughout which he was remarkably productive, publishing 30 articles on various dipteran taxa). He apparently wrote the first draft while a prisoner of war interned with the British in 1945.
After the War, Hennig enjoyed 15 more fruitful years living in West Berlin and commuting daily to the DEI in East Berlin. Hull (1988: 134) says that in 1961 Hennig was “in the midst of fleeing from East to West Germany”, but in fact his flight meant merely changing jobs, as he was never an East German citizen. With the help of the West German government, he quickly found a professorship at the University of Ludwigsburg. There he worked until his death in 1976, of a heart attack, perhaps brought on by the virtually ubiquitous cigarettes revealed in candid photos throughout the book.
Chapter 3, “Willi Hennig's personality – the shy revolutionizer”, evidently adapted from Schmitt (2010), is a short discussion focused on Hennig's introverted nature. He did not enjoy public speaking, and was not comfortable communicating in languages other than German. Chapter 4, “The Taxonomist”, briefly summarizes Hennig's immense contributions to dipterology, which Schmitt has exhaustively studied. In addition to his phylogenetic insights, Hennig evidently described 80 genera and more than 750 species of flies (Thompson and Pape, 2013).
Chapter 5, “The Systematist”, is the other substantial section of the book. Here Schmitt discusses the chronological development of Hennig's phylogenetic worldview and the evolution of the terminology that he invented to describe it, through not only his major works but also in less well-known articles. Hennig apparently wrote all his contributions in German, and any published translations were done by others. For example, his 1965 Annual Review of Entomology paper was translated by G. C. D. Griffiths, and his 1975 Syst. Zool. reply to Ernst Mayr was translated by Griffiths and Gareth Nelson. Schmitt argues that Hennig (1966), translated by Dwight Davis and Rainer Zangerl, does not misrepresent Hennig's ideas, despite Hennig's own misgivings. Discussing works that remain untranslated, Schmitt's text alternates back and forth between sections of Hennig's German, Schmitt's English translation, and Schmitt's interpretation of what Hennig's words mean. Sometimes it is difficult to tell whose voice one is reading.
English translation of Hennig's work has clearly enhanced its impact. Schmitt notes that according to Google Scholar, Hennig (1966) is cited over 4000 times, while Hennig (1950) is cited fewer than 1000 times. As English becomes more and more the lingua franca of science, the value of translations can only become more significant. With this in mind, there are apparently several potentially important theoretical works by Hennig that remain published only in German. Schmitt notes a glossary in the Taschenbuch der Zoologie (Hennig, 1957) with clear definitions of many of Hennig's neologisms, and a posthumous booklet (Hennig, 1984) with pertinent discussion of Hennig's views on homology. English translations of both of these could clarify ongoing controversy over the meanings of some of Hennig's more complex and cryptic ideas (cf. Nixon and Carpenter, 2011, 2012; Brower and de Pinna, 2012, in press).
The last three chapters, “The Philosopher”, “The ‘Hennigian Revolution’ ”, and “Willi Hennig – Man of Order”, include just six pages of text. Schmitt concludes that Hennig was eclectic in his philosophical scholarship, that although the man was quite conventional and conservative (an anti-communist, but not a Nazi), his strict definition of monophyly, emphasis on synapomorphy, and focus on relationships among more inclusive taxa really were radical with respect to the Mayr-dominated “new systematics” of the 1950s and 1960s. Further discussions of Hennig's theoretical contributions are given by Dupuis (1984), Richter and Meier (1994), Schmitt (2003), and Rieppel (2006, 2007, 2009).
The book is attractively bound, and includes many reproduced photographs of Hennig that I had not seen before, as well as a number of images of his various relatives, colleagues, dwellings, workplaces, and manuscripts. Quite a few are in colour, and appear to be printed with inkjet-type technology that is not as crisp as might be desirable. The linguistic style of the writing is generally good, although the book appears to have been translated from German, and there are a few awkwardly phrased sentences here and there and a few misspelled words. It is short enough to read in an afternoon, and well worth the effort for those interested not only in Hennig, but in the functioning of German science in the mid-20th century.
