Bernhard Mrowka

Bernhard Mrowka (born May 3, 1907 in Königsberg (Prussia) , † March 5, 1973 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German physicist .

Life

Bernhard Mrowka was one of three children of the East Prussian middle school teacher Friedrich Mrowka, who died in 1914 in the first weeks of the First World War . From 1913 to 1915 Bernhard Mrowka attended the Königliche Friedrichskollegium in Königsberg, from 1916 to 1925 the Humanist Reform High School in Lyck . He began studying mathematics, physics and chemistry at the University of Marburg in 1925 , which he continued in the summer semester of 1927 at the University of Munich . a. with Arnold Sommerfeld , then at the University of Königsberg , where he became a student of Richard Gans . In 1931 he received his doctorate at the Second Physics Institute of the University of Königsberg bei Gans on the subject of "On the theory of spectral line broadening according to wave mechanics" and was his assistant until 1934. During his time as assistant, several articles on the polarizability of the hydrogen atom and the hydrogen molecule as well as on diamagnetism were published , which were published together with Gans.

In 1934 Mrowka went to Friedrich Hund at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Leipzig . During the time of National Socialism , his university career was interrupted there because he refused to join the Nazi lecturers' association. In 1936 he moved to the AEG research institute in Berlin-Reinickendorf as a research assistant . At that time it was headed by Carl Ramsauer , who opposed the loyal academic movement of ' German Physics ' from there . Mrowka's former teacher Richard Gans, who was of Jewish descent and had to give up his professorship at the University of Königsberg in 1935 due to the Nuremberg race laws , had found a job in the same institute . (Gans had been employed in the private defense technology development laboratory Dr. Schmellenmeier in Berlin-Lankwitz from 1943 to 1945 and emigrated to Argentina in 1946, where he had previously worked as a university lecturer.)

Mrowka was drafted into the army at the beginning of the Second World War . Around this time he married his wife Monika, née Bergius, with whom he had two children. In 1940 he moved to the Kriegsmarine, where he was assigned to minesweeping troops. He was taken prisoner by the British, but was released into the German minesweeping service in Kiel in 1945. He has u. a. helped to clear the Ems from mines.

In 1946 Mrowka became Erwin Madelung's assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Frankfurt am Main . From 1947 he represented Madelung in lectures on mechanics and electrodynamics. In 1948 he completed his habilitation with the thesis "On the theory of anisotropic thermal electron emission". In the summer semester of 1949, Mrowka was additionally entrusted with the representation of the Marburg chair for “Structure of Matter” by Siegfried Flügge when Flügge was in the USA. Around this time, Mrowka's illness was announced: In the winter semester of 1948/50 he had to cancel his representation at the University of Marburg for health reasons.

In 1952 Mrowka was promoted to diet lecturer in Frankfurt, after two more years in 1954 he was appointed adjunct professor for theoretical physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He gave lectures in the fields of theoretical physics , solid state physics and field theory . After Friedrich Hund's appointment to the University of Göttingen , Mrowka was acting head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics from the winter semester 1956/57 to the summer semester 1959. In 1966 he was appointed Scientific Councilor and Full Professor.

Severe physical ailment had already made itself felt in the 1950s, which Mrowka later increasingly forced into the wheelchair. On May 5, 1973, shortly before he could retire, Bernhard Mrowka died after a serious illness.

Publications

Cf. u. a. Richard Gans' list of publications .

Web links

• Dieter Langbein: Bernhard Mrowka 1907–1973 . In: Klaus Bethge, Claudia Freudenberger (Ed.): 100 Years of Physics at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main: 1914 - 2014 . Frankfurt Academic Press, 2014, ISBN 978-3-86983-010-0 ( archive version of an earlier version (2007-11-13) ( memento of November 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive )).
• Literature by and about Bernhard Mrowka in the catalog of the German National Library