Otto Liebknecht

August Wilhelm Otto Eduard Liebknecht (born January 13, 1876 in Leipzig , † June 21, 1949 in Berlin ) was a German chemist . Among other things, he developed a successful process for the production of the bleaching agent sodium perborate . As chief chemist at Degussa , Liebknecht attracted attention to synthetic processes with a total of 58 patents . As a result, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Berlin and was a well-known representative of organic chemistry in research and teaching during the first half of the 20th century.

Due to Liebknecht's family (prominent socialist ) origins and his associated indirect involvement in the socio-politically changing periods of his life in Germany ( empire , republic , Nazi dictatorship , war and occupation ), he was not spared the associated breaks in his career .

Origin and studies (until 1900)

Otto Liebknecht was the third born of five sons of the socialist and SPD co-founder Wilhelm Liebknecht and his second wife Natalie (née Reh). Unlike his father and his two older brothers, KPD co- founder Karl Liebknecht , who was murdered in 1919, and the last USPD chairman Theodor Liebknecht , Otto Liebknecht was not active in party politics, although he too was a member of the SPD for many years and supported the party outside of party politics Labor movement began on a company basis. He received his doctorate in 1899 with Arthur Rosenheim at his private scientific-chemical laboratory Berlin N with a thesis "About oxygen acids of iodine" . His party membership initially made it difficult for him to pursue a scientific career in the Wilhelmine era of the German Empire . At the turn of the century it was not easy for social democrats to gain a foothold in the scientific and academic career of the senior service in view of the anti-social democratic policy of the monarchy prevailing at the time.

Career and research at Degussa (1900 to 1925)

It took about a year before Liebknecht got a job in July 1900 in the research laboratory of the Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheideanstalt ( Degussa ) in Frankfurt am Main, where he worked, for example, on a process for the preparation and purification of indigo . In scientific circles, however, Liebknecht became known primarily for his research into the production of sodium perborate , an automatic bleaching agent . Although the French François Jaubert had already registered a patent for this nine months before him, Liebknecht developed a more effective and successful synthesis process that helped his employer company to achieve long-term success. With the development of this method, it is regarded as one of the inventors of the detergent Persil ^® (derived from Per borate Sil icate as a connection between the bleaching agent sodium perborate and the blasting agent sodium silicate ). This up to the present known product in 1907 as the first self-acting detergent from the Düsseldorf-based company Henkel on the market brought.

Despite its prominent position in the Degussa he sat for the interests of the less privileged operating workforce and in 1920 by the socio-political changes following the end of the First World War and the founding of the Weimar Republic as chairman of the first council elected Degussa.

Eventful years in Berlin (1925 to 1949)

In 1925 there was a break with Degussa. Disputes with the company management led to a judicial dispute about the quality of his work, which ended in a settlement after his termination . Liebknecht moved to Neubabelsberg near Berlin to a villa near the Griebnitzsee . In Berlin he worked from 1925 to 1939 as chief chemist at Permutit AG . Between 1931 and 1935 he also taught at the later Humboldt University in Berlin Unter den Linden. From 1943 he worked as a freelance scientific advisor to Th.Goldschmidt AG in Essen .

During the dictatorship of National Socialism Otto Liebknecht lived with his wife Elsa (née Friedland) until 1945 in his house on the Griebnitzsee. That he and his wife, despite their Jewish origin survived the anti-Semitic Nazi regime relatively unscathed, Liebknecht probably his for the National Socialists owe hardly dispensable services and its importance as a chemist. Nonetheless, he was taken by the political rulers because of his prominent socialist family of origin and his relatives who were still living, some of whom were in exile - such as his brother Theodor who emigrated to Switzerland in 1933 , his son Kurt, who had lived in the Soviet Union since 1931, or his nephew Robert (son Karl Liebknechts, who had made a name for himself as an artist) - eyed suspiciously and repeatedly interrogated by the Gestapo . He was banned from teaching in 1935. The Liebknechts only had to leave their house after the Second World War, as the Soviet occupying forces requisitioned all the villas around the Griebnitzsee for their own purposes.

Due to his origins and the connection between his names, he was sponsored by the new political leadership in the Soviet occupation zone , the SED , with two of the most famous protagonists in the history of socialism in Germany . At the suggestion of Wilhelm Pieck , who later became the first (and only) President of the GDR , Otto Liebknecht was appointed professor of organic and inorganic chemistry at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, located in the eastern sector of the city, at the end of his life , which was held in Humboldt in 1949 -University was renamed.

Liebknecht succumbed to cancer a little later, in 1949, at the age of 73.

His son Kurt Liebknecht (1905–1994), who holds a doctorate in architecture, was President of the German Building Academy (DBA) in the GDR from 1951 to 1961 .

literature

• Birgit Bertsch-Frank: A somewhat unusual career. Otto Liebknecht ; in Mechtild Wolf (ed.): Always an idea better: Researcher and inventor at Degussa ; Frankfurt am Main, Degussa AG 1998 (pp. 54–75)

Web links

• Evonik history portal: The arguable researcher: Otto Liebknecht (with photo)

supporting documents

1. ↑ Arthur Rosenheim and Otto Liebknecht, On the knowledge of iodic acid and overiodic acid in Justus Liebig's Annalen der Chemie 308 , 40 (1899).
2. ↑ Biographical dataset on Kurt Liebknecht , online on the website of the Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship (stiftung-aufverarbeitung.de/wer-war-wer-in-der-ddr), accessed on August 4, 2012.