Arthur Golf

Arthur Golf (21 July 1877 – 18 February 1941) was a German academic agronomist. A principal focus of his teaching and research was on "colonial agriculture": another was "selective breeding", concentrating on sheep. During his later years he was a professor at Leipzig University where between 1933 and 1935, and again during 1936/37, he served as University Rector.

Life Richard Arthur Golf was born into a Protestant family in Beyersdorf, a rural settlement in the marshy flatlands to the north-east of Halle. His father, Richard Golf, was a "gentleman farmer" ("Rittergutsbesitzer"): He successfully concluded his schooling at the Stadtgymnasium (principal secondary school) at Halle in 1896 and went on to work as an agricultural apprentice on at least two working estates in Saxony. During 1897/98 he undertook his military service as a volunteer in an artillery regiment in Breslau (as Wrocław was known at that time). He went on to study agriculture at Breslau and Halle, After that he worked as an assistant to Julius Kühn at the Physiology Laboratory of the Agronomy Institute at Halle.

That same year he was commissioned by the Imperial Colonial Office to undertake an expedition to South and Southwest Africa. This was followed by similar trips to East Africa, Central Asia and Scandinavia (and other places). After that, in 1912, he was appointed to a permanent extraordinary professorship at Leipzig with a teaching contract that covered colonial and foreign/tropical agronomy. For many years Golf also ran the "Zeitschrift für Schafzucht" ("Journal for Sheep Husbandry"). During the later 1920s and early 1930s Golf was also able to undertake further research expeditions, both to South West Africa, where many farmers of German origin still lived and worked despite the political changes and, during the first part of 1928, to what was at that time Soviet Central Asia. It was among the most prominent of various organisations that emerged as a reaction to the disaster of the First World War along with the unfolding economic, social and political crisis of the early 1920s. Because of the extent to which its beliefs were adopted and then integrated into government policy by the Nazi Party after 1933 the DVSTB acquired a retrospective significance that might well have surprised observers fifteen years earlier.

The Invasion of Poland in September 1939 marked the return of war, and his energies were devoted increasingly to the simple business of keeping the university's research and teaching activities going. Golf died at Leipzig on 18 February 1941.

Publications (selection)

Untersuchungen über die natürlichen Grundlagen der nordamerikanischen Bewässerungswirtschaft. Doctoral dissertation. Univ. Halle 1903. Die Technik der künstlichen Bewässerung in Nordamerika. Habilitation dissertation. Univ. Halle 1907. Ackerbau in Deutsch=Südwestafrika. Das Trockenfarmen und seine Anwendung in D.S.W.A. Wilhelm Süsserott (publisher) Berlin 1911 = Koloniale Abhandlungen Issues 47/50. Die Kartoffelbestellung. Berlin 1916 = Arbeiten der Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Baues und der wirtschaftlich zweckmäßigen Verwendung der Kartoffeln Issue 7. Die Sowjet-Agrarreform und der Landwirtschaftsbetrieb in Russisch-Mittelasien. E. Chr. Seyfert (publisher) Leipzig 1929 = Arbeiten der Leipziger Oekonomischen Societät. Schafzucht. In: Handbuch der Landwirtschaft. Herausgegeben von F. Aereboe, J. Hansen und Th. Roemer. Verlagsbuchhandlung Paul Parey Berlin 1929, vol. 5, pp. 265–335. 60 Jahre landwirtschaftliches Institut der Universität Leipzig 1869-1929. Produced by the Landwirtschaftlichen Institut der Universität Leipzig 1930.