Josef Poelt
German-Austrian botanist and university teacher (1924-1995)
Josef Poelt was a botanist, bryologist and lichenologist. He held the chair in Systematic Botany and Plant Geography at the Free University of Berlin (1965–1972) and then was head of the Botanical Institute and Botanical Garden of Graz University, Austria (1972–1990).
Early life and education
Josef Poelt was born in 1925 in the village of Pöcking in Bavaria, Germany, where his parents ran a guest house. He began to study botany at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but he joined the German army and was assigned to an intelligence unit in Russia due to the start of the Second World War. After illness and time as a prisoner of war of the British, he returned to university study in 1946 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in natural sciences in 1950. Poelt was influenced by a botanist, H. Paul, to study non-flowering plants. He made use of the lichen herbarium at the university's botanic garden which contained nineteenth century specimens collected by Ferdinand Arnold and August von Krempelhuber. He later completed both his PhD (1950) and habilitation (1959) there.
Career
He became an assistant at the botanic garden in Munich and from 1954 was curator of the cryptogam herbarium at the Botanische Staatssammlung München. In 1965, Poelt was appointed to the chair in Systematic Botany and Plant Geography at the Free University of Berlin to lead a new research institute.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3184048. VIAF identifies the subject as 93337766. The Library of Congress control number is n84179718. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 1972, 1990 and 1925.
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This entry incorporates text from “Josef Poelt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.