Gedenkbaum für Prof. Dr. Walter Riegel

Remembering decades of research in Schöningen
Schöningen, 26 May 2025: Christine Eichler-Riegel, her son Leonhard and his partner were recently joined by numerous scientists in Schöningen's official garden for a very special occasion. In memory of her husband, father, colleague and friend Prof. Dr Walter Riegel, who passed away in April 2024, they visited the memorial tree planted in his honour.
Walter Riegel was a regular visitor to Schöningen for decades to carry out geological research in the open-cast mine. Over the years, he was accompanied by numerous colleagues. Among them was his long-time companion and friend Dr habil. Volker Wilde, who was also the initiator of the memorial tree.
Walter Riegel died in Göttingen on 28 April 2024 at the age of 91. Born in Sommerhausen near Würzburg in 1932 and strongly influenced by the war and post-war period, he began studying geology and palaeontology in Würzburg after graduating from high school in 1952. His scientific orientation can be traced back to his time studying in Bonn and Cologne, where the courses on the geology and palaeontology of coal deposits had a lasting influence on him. After graduating, he moved to Pennsylvania State University (USA) as a research assistant, where he was able to broaden his horizons considerably in these specialised fields. His field work on understanding the relationships between vegetation and peat formation in young deposits in the Florida Everglades, which formed the basis of his dissertation in 1966 and several subsequent publications, had a lasting influence on him. Walter Riegel then worked as an assistant and senior assistant at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen and habilitated in Göttingen at the beginning of 1976 with a pioneering thesis on spores from the Devonian of the Eifel.
Initially a private lecturer and associate professor at the University of Göttingen, Walter Riegel was appointed professor of "Palaeobotany, Palynology and Geology of Fossil Fuels" in 1983. This position allowed him to establish his own working group, in which he was able to express the diversity of his interests in terms of phytogeology. By this term, which he himself liked to use, he meant the holistic consideration of sedimentary sequences under the most diverse aspects of vegetation and ecology. In addition to a considerable teaching and examination workload, the remarkable number of 64 diploma theses, 17 dissertations and one habilitation were written under his supervision between 1977 and 2001 during the period when student numbers were at their peak. The basis for this proved to be above all the wider surroundings of Göttingen and the opencast lignite mines of Hesse, Lower Saxony, the new federal states and Greece.

After retiring in 1998, Walter Riegel intensified his research activities in the Helmstedt district in Schöningen, which he pursued until the last days of his life, and was appointed an honorary employee of the Senckenberg Nature Museum and Research Institute. His multifaceted life's work was finally honoured in 2020 with the DGGV's Rolf and Marlies Teichmüller Prize.
In addition to his academic work, Walter Riegel always cultivated his artistic, philosophical and political interests, the latter two of which led to many a stimulating discussion.
"In Walter Riegel, the professional world has lost a cosmopolitan, thoughtful but critical and very versatile scientist and extremely pleasant fellow human being who will be greatly missed," says Volker Wilde about his mentor and friend.
In the heart of Schöningen, an amber tree, as Walter Riegel knew it from his time in North America, is now a reminder of the special scientist whose research work had repeatedly brought him to Schöningen.

Press contact City of Schöningen
Anke Grundmann, Phone 05352.512 196, Mail: anke.grundmann@schoeningen.de