Konrad Lorenz let goslings imprint on him, and carried a darker past
Konrad Lorenz became famous as the man followed by a line of greylag goslings, which bond with the first moving thing they see after hatching. He shared a Nobel Prize for founding the science of animal behaviour. He had also joined the Nazi Party, a record historians have kept uncovering since his death.
Lorenz was born on 7 November 1903, the son of a wealthy Viennese surgeon and a physician mother, and grew up between a Vienna apartment and a large estate at Altenberg. He credited his career to tolerant parents and to Selma Lagerlöf's Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which made him fall for wild geese. His father steered him into medicine, first at Columbia in New York and then in Vienna, where he qualified as a doctor in 1928 and added a zoology doctorate in 1933. As a student he kept a menagerie in his parents' flat that included a capuchin monkey called Gloria.
In 1936 he met Nikolaas Tinbergen at a symposium on instinct, and the two shaped ethology into its own branch of biology. Lorenz distrusted laboratory studies, preferring to watch animals across their full range of natural behaviour, and borrowed Jakob von Uexküll's idea that each species lives in its own perceptual world. Tinbergen summed up his achievement as making behaviour part of an animal's evolutionary equipment.
The war years are harder to tell. Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938, wrote that his science served its ideas, and worried in print that domestication was degrading civilised humans much as he thought it degraded hybrid geese. Drafted in 1941, he was assigned as a military psychologist to a racial study in occupied Poznań, though how much he took part is unclear. Captured on the Russian front in 1944, he spent four years as a prisoner in Soviet Armenia working as a medic, and came home with a book manuscript and a pet starling. He later said he regretted his party membership, and his memoirs' account of those years does not match what historians have documented.
From 1958 he worked at the Max Planck institute in Seewiesen, and in 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. Books such as King Solomon's Ring brought his animals to a wide public. He died at Altenberg on 27 February 1989.
Source: Konrad Lorenz
