Kunst der Benennung

In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Hitler waged a very personal battle: the fight for the shrew. Biologists who dared to give the erroneously labeled "mouse" a different name were threatened with forced labor on the Eastern Front. The struggle for the correct names in nature has always been a topic of contention, albeit less dramatically. Contrary to the sophisticated systematics of animal categorization, the naming itself is subject to the freedom of the discoverer and is correspondingly artistic as well as controversial. But how does this align with the precision claims of the natural sciences? In an entertaining expedition through the history of natural science, through museums and wilderness, Michael Ohl opens up to us a peculiar and fascinating world of language, ranging from folk names to Linnaean systematization and genetics.