As a student he showed interest in the natural sciences, and started collecting specimens for his herbarium.
In 1892 Zschake became a secondary school teacher (for mathematics and natural sciences) in Hecklingen and from 1898 in Bernburg.
After becoming seriously ill, he was transferred to Switzerland in 1916 for therapy; this change of locales later led to Zschake writing a thesis on the lichen flora of the Davos valley.
Parts of the collections that he had made in Corsica before his arrest were confiscated and published in 1926 by the French lichenologists Jacques Marie Albert Maheu and Abel Gillet – without contacting him (as Zschack bitterly noted in 1927).
[5] Zschake died in Bernburg on 19 September 1937, from health problems resulting from his war-time experiences.