Clemens Schmeck

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Clemens Schmeck (born May 25, 1918 in Essen ; † February 28, 1984 there ) was a German doctor and is considered a pioneer of air pollution control in Germany.

Family and education

Schmeck was born in Dellwig as the youngest of five children of family doctor Ewald Schmeck (1875–1942) and his wife Bernhardine . In 1899, his father had set up his own practice at Dellwig train station, which had been built eight years earlier, which the family continued for three generations and which was converted into the Essen-Nord-West Medical Care Center (MVZ) at the Essen Catholic Clinic in July 2009 . After school education Clemens Taste studied medicine at the Universities of Hamburg , Leipzig , Freiburg and Wuerzburg and was there in 1942 with contributions [n] to the clinic of eczema and the constitution of eczema patients for Dr. med. PhD .

Professional and voluntary commitment

After the death of his father, Clemens Schmeck took over his family doctor's practice in the same year and practiced there until his own death in 1984. From 1951 to 1974 he was chairman of the citizens and tourist association for the districts of Dellwig and Gerschede . In this role, he particularly supported the reconstruction of the residential areas in the north-west of Essen, which were badly damaged during the Second World War .

The struggle for air pollution control

Above all, Schmeck was concerned with improving the living environment, including in particular air pollution control in the Ruhr area , which at the time was still polluted by extremely high pollutant emissions from heavy industry . He first gained notoriety when he filed a criminal complaint with the Duisburg public prosecutor's office in June 1959 against the management of Hüttenwerk Oberhausen AG for bodily harm . The background was his experience as a doctor, who found increasing health impairments in his patients. In children in particular, he recorded a worrying increase in conjunctivitis as a result of air pollution . Schmeck blamed the five Thomas steel converters at Oberhausener Hütte for this, each of which released a ton of dust into the atmosphere every hour. However, because the prosecution found industrial air pollution inevitable, the case was dropped. Even an advance at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in Düsseldorf did not initially bring any tangible success, since those responsible in the industry had exhausted all currently available technical possibilities. The publication of a study by the Oberhausen Health Department and the Gelsenkirchen Hygiene Institute at the beginning of 1961 on the number of lung cancer deaths in men brought the subject to a nationwide public. The WDR television reported on February 17, 1961 about the problem of air pollution and had the head of the Oberhausen health department, Medical Director Klaus Peter Faerber, explain the results of the study. Promoted by these events, among other things, the politicians took on the topic, and on April 28, 1961 , Willy Brandt coined the phrase, which at the time seemed utopian, The sky over the Ruhr must turn blue again in the Beethovenhalle in Bonn, when his party's election manifesto was presented .

IG air pollution

In order to put his efforts on site on a broader basis, Schmeck founded the “ Interest Group against Air Pollution Damage and Air Pollution ” in January 1962 together with over a hundred Dellwig citizens - a name that Frank Uekötter disparagingly referred to as “tumb” in 2004 - which, however was one of the first citizens' initiatives and environmental protection movements in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the following years, the members of this environmental protection initiative were recruited from all over Germany, and only after environmental protection had become common property in Germany did the interest group disband in 1992.

Further commitment

After the establishment of the "IG Luft pollution" , Schmeck was appointed by Konrad Grundmann , the North Rhine-Westphalian minister of labor and social affairs, to the state advisory board for pollution control , which was also established in 1962 .

Honors

  • Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon (1968)
  • Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class (1982)
  • In 1985, a memorial stone with a bronze plaque was erected in Essen on Haus-Horl-Straße in memory of Clemens Schmeck.
  • By resolution of the City Council of Essen on September 17, 1986, a street in the Essen district of Dellwig was named after Clemens Schmeck.

See also

Radio documentation

literature

  • Air purification. To blue skies , Der Spiegel 33/1961 of August 9, 1961, 15th JG, pp. 22–33.
  • Jürgen Remy: Chronicle of the Borbeck Doctors , Publishing Group Beleke / Nobel Essen 2002, ISBN 3-922785-77-8 .
  • Ralph Eberhard Brachthäuser: From environmental pioneer to the medical care center of the Catholic Clinic in Essen. The doctor Dr. Clemens Schmeck , in: Gesund in Essen , issue 4, 2015/16, p. 13.

swell

  1. ↑ How new are the New Social Movements? Revisionist remarks against the background of environmental historical research. in: Bulletin of the Institute for Social Movements , Issue 31/2004 pp. 115-138, here p. 133.
  2. ↑ Written communication from the Ordenskanzlei in the Office of the Federal President of April 23, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Taste it, Clemens
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physician and environmental pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1984
Place of death eat