Weischet,Wolfgang b. January 21, 1921; Solingen (Rhineland), Prussia d. January 13, 1998; Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurttemberg
German geographer who produced a scientific political-regional geography of Chile. Weischet studied meteorology at the University of Berlin from 1939 until 1942 and then underwent civil service candidate training in Metz and Insterburg.
He then worked at the Agricultural Meteorological Service in Berlin-Lindenberg as well as at the Marine Weather Office in Hamburg and with the Aviation Weather Service in Frankfurt am Main before being deployed as a soldier with the weather staff of the Luftwaffe. After World War II he reentered the university to study mathematics, physics, and geography at the University of Bonn. Initially interested in becoming a high school teacher, Weischet, influenced by Carl Troll, changed his professional career and made geography his major. In 1949 Weischet received his doctorate from the University of Bonn. Starting in 1949 as an assistant to Herbert Louis, first at the University of Cologne and then at the University of Munich, he worked on a terrain-climatological study of the lower Rhine bay. This study became his second doctoral dissertation (Habilitation), which he defended in 1954.Beginning in 1955 he was a guest lecturer in Chile and thereby worked in a country that, with its 4,300-kilometer (2,700-mile) longitudinal extent, included almost all of the climatic zones of the earth and so offered a geographer trained in meteorology favorable research conditions. With works on the morphology of Ultima Esperanza in Patagonia and on glacial forms of the southern Chile longitudinal depressions on both sides of the Osorno, he quickly gained a reputation as an expert on Chile. From 1959 until 1961 he was even entrusted with directing the Instituto de Geografia y Geologia (Institute of Geography and Geology) in Valdivia. In 1961 Weischet became director of the Institute for Physical Geography at the University of Freiburg, where he taught until his retirement.
Further stays in Chile in the 1960s yielded new research results, among others, on the structure of the southern Chile quar- tenary period (Geomorfologia glacial de la Region de los Largos [Glacial Geomorphology of the Largos Region], 1964) as well as on the geomorphology in the arid SubTropics of the Small North. The main work resulting from Weischet’s employment in the Andean country is a scientific political- regional geography of Chile (Chile—seine landerkundliche Individualitat und Struktur [Chile: Its Regional Geographical Individuality and Structure], 1970), which was expanded by a study published in 1974, on Agrarreform und Nationalisierung des Kupferbergbaues in Chile (Agrarian Reform and Nationalization of Copper Mining in Chile). It was greatly affected by the political change in Chile under the presidency of Salvador Allende.Ute Wardenga
See also Chile
References and Further Reading
Endlicher, Wilfried, and Hermann Gossmann, eds. Beitrage zur Regionalen und angewandten Klimatologie. W Weischet zum 70. Geburtstag. Freiburg im Breisgau: University Department of Geography, 1991.