Doris Schachner

Doris (Elfriede) Schachner , née Korn (born May 30, 1904 in Bockwa near Zwickau , † April 1, 1988 in Heidelberg ) was the first female German professor of mineralogy and honorary senator at RWTH Aachen University .

Live and act

After graduating from the Liselotte-Gymnasium in Mannheim , Doris Korn studied mathematics , physics , chemistry and philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg , Freiburg and Innsbruck from 1923 and graduated from these subjects in 1928 with her state examination for higher education and her doctorate. phil. from. In the same year she received her doctorate as Dr. rer. nat. at Ludwig Rüger in Heidelberg in the subjects of geology, mineralogy and chemistry with the subject of tectonic and structural analysis investigations in the basement of the Böllsteiner Odenwald. She then moved to RWTH Aachen University, where she received an assistant position at the Mineralogical Institute under Paul Ramdohr . From then on she remained scientifically connected to the field of mineralogy and completed her habilitation in this field in 1933 with the topic of structural studies of ores, which was then published in volume 1 of the textbook ore microscopy by Paul Ramdohr and Hans Schneiderhöhn . After the chemist Maria Lipp and the social scientist Gertrud Savelsberg , Doris Korn was only the third female person to have qualified as a professor at the TH Aachen.

Doris Korn initially continued to occupy a scheduled assistant position before she was taken on as a private lecturer in 1939 due to a lack of male applicants and received an official teaching position for the areas of education and evaluation for the mineral deposits. In the same year she married Benno Schachner , the holder of the chair for technical construction , who was immediately transferred to the Technical University of Brno to take over the chair for building construction . In addition, she was commissioned to take over the provisional management of the institutes for mineralogy and deposit theory as well as for geology and paleontology , since the respective directors Hans Ehrenberg and Karl Rohde had been called up for military service. After the mineralogist Ehrenberg was released from military service in 1941 and appointed rector of the RWTH, but at the same time the mineralogy department was temporarily suspended, Schachner followed her husband to the Technical University of Brno, where she was the only female employee to receive a teaching position at the mineralogical institute there . Their daughter Melitta Schachner was born here in 1943 , who later became Professor of Neurobiology at the Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg at the University of Hamburg .

Shortly before the end of the war, Doris Schachner fled with her daughter from the invading Russians from Brno - her husband could only follow later - and returned to Aachen . Here she was commissioned by the rector Paul Röntgen , who is now at RWTH Aachen University, to rebuild the Institute of Mineralogy and the corresponding teaching operations. To this end, she was appointed associate professor and acting director. Finally, on June 1, 1949, she was given a full professorship and she was officially appointed head of the Chair of Mineralogy, Petrography and Deposits, making her the first female professor in Germany with this department. Here she taught and researched until her retirement in 1972 and was promoted to director of "her" institute at the Faculty of Mining , Metallurgy and Geosciences from 1958 . In addition, she was a member of the Senate from 1958 to 1959 and, from 1962, chairwoman of the Senate Commission for the Academic Foreign Office, where she particularly advocated the interests of foreign students and tried to intensify the foreign relations of the TH Aachen. Furthermore, on her initiative, the Institute for Crystallography at RWTH was founded in 1963 - as one of the first of its kind in Germany. In 1968, together with her husband and many other professors from RWTH Aachen University, she was one of the signatories of the “ Marburg Manifesto ”, which formed an academic front against the emerging co-determination at universities.

Doris Schachner was considered to be the founder of modern ore structure with her structural analysis approach to research, especially on ores and because of the methodological foundations she developed. In this field she published numerous papers on the genesis of ore deposits, the formation of metamorphic ore structures and the deformation mechanism of individual minerals. In addition, it was named after the mineral schachnerite , which was first discovered in 1972 by E. Seeliger and Arno Mücke near Obermoschel in Rhineland-Palatinate .

Schachner was a member of numerous domestic and foreign scientific societies. For many years she was a member of the deposit committee of the Society of German Metallurgists and Miners and of the Senate Commission for Geosciences of the German Research Foundation , for which she also worked as a sought-after reviewer. In 1981 she was made an honorary member of the German Mineralogical Society.

On January 20, 1984, she was awarded the honorary senator status of RWTH Aachen University in "recognition of her great services to the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, in particular the training and promotion of students and young academics as well as the intensification of academic exchange and international relations" . She was again the first woman and RWTH professor to receive this honor at RWTH. A street was named after her in the area of ​​Campus Melaten in Aachen.

Works (selection)

• Tectonic and structural analysis investigations in the basement of the Böllsteiner Odenwald. (= Diss.) Heidelberg 1928.
• A metamorphic ore structure. In: Mineralogy and Petrology. Volume 1, No. 4, Springer-Verlag, Vienna 1928.
• A growth and a recrystallization structure of galena from a Rhenish deposit. In: Mineralogy and Petrology. Volume 4, No. 1–4, Springer-Verlag, Vienna 1954.

literature

• Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933–1945) . Verlag Mainz, Aachen 2003, ISBN 3-86130-181-4 ( Aachen Studies on Technology and Society 4), also: Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2003), pp. 500 ff., [1] .

Web links

• For the 100th birthday of Doris Schachner , accessed on July 19, 2015
• Pioneers of Science , accessed September 3, 2012
• Biography article on Doris Schachner from RWTH Aachen University

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wording and list of signatures of the manifesto against the politicization of universities ( memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: Blätter für German and international politics , born in 1968; Issue 8 
2. ^ Marburg Manifesto , in: Der Spiegel of July 22, 1968