Termite hill / Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has published “The Social Politics of Karl Escherich’s 1933 Inaugural Presidential Lecture” in Journal of the History of Biology.
The essay analyzes “Termite Craze” (Termitenwahn), the inaugural presidential lecture given by Karl Escherich (1871-1951) at the University of Munich in late 1933. One of the world’s leading entomologists, Escherich was the first German university president to be appointed by the new Nazi regime rather than elected by his faculty peers. Drawing on his extensive research on eusocial insects, he used the lecture to speculate whether and to what extent the new National Socialist state could (or should) emulate the alleged perfection of a termite colony.
