Fritz Müller was one of the most important natural scientists of the 19th century and led a modest life as a dropout. He discovered a new form of mimicry that has occupied biologists to this day. A portrait.
The learned pastor’s son Fritz Müller built his first hut in the jungle of southern Brazil from split palm trunks. The bare earth was the floor, zinc boxes the furniture. When he had completed the dwelling on August 27, 1852, Fritz Müller wrote to his friends in Germany: “Anyone who wants to settle in the jungle must know how to do without all European comfort, all European pleasures, for years. Isn’t it terrible? And yet, despite all this, we are all very cheerful and in good spirits and, for all the world, we don’t want to go back from our jungle to civilized Europe.” The scientist and doctor Fritz Müller had emigrated with his wife Karoline, their little daughter Anna and his brother August and his wife to the newly founded German colony of Blumenau, because he could no longer stand it in narrow, strict Germany. He was a dropout.