17 Facts About Otto Finsch

Friedrich Hermann Otto Finsch was a German ethnographer, naturalist and colonial explorer.

Otto Finsch is known for a two-volume monograph on the parrots of the world which earned him a doctorate.

Otto Finsch wrote on the people of New Guinea and was involved in plans for German colonization in Southeast Asia.

Otto Finsch was born at Bad Warmbrunn in Silesia to Mortiz Otto Finsch and Mathilde nee Leder.

Otto Finsch's father was in the glass trade and he too trained as a glass painter.

Otto Finsch went to Budapest in 1857 and studied at the Royal Hungarian University, earning money by preparing natural history specimens.

Otto Finsch then spent two years in Russe, Bulgaria on an invitation from the Austrian Consul and gave private tutoring in German while exploring the birdlife of the region.

Otto Finsch published his first paper in the Journal fur Ornithologie on the birds of Bulgaria.

Otto Finsch resigned as curator of the museum in 1878 in order that he could resume his travels, sponsored by the Humboldt Foundation.

Otto Finsch's proposal was to obtain as many artefacts as possible with the claim that native cultures, fauna and flora were fast vanishing.

Otto Finsch found no support for contemporary ideas on race with neat categories and found instead a continuum of variations in the human form.

Otto Finsch returned to Germany in 1882 and began to promote the creation of German colonies in the Pacific along with the South Sea Plotters, an influential group led by a banker Adolph von Hansemann.

Otto Finsch was instead offered a position as station director which involved menial administrative tasks that would come in the way of his plans to explore and study the region.

Otto Finsch returned to Germany and spent much of the subsequent period without formal employment.

Otto Finsch had been married to Josephine Wychodil from around 1873 but they divorced around 1880.

Otto Finsch did not enjoy this period, noting that life for him, his wife and daughter Esther, felt like living in exile.

Otto Finsch wrote several articles on his past work Wie ich Kaiser-Wilhelmsland erwarb and Kaiser-Wilhelmsland.