Otto Franzius

Otto Franzius (born May 30, 1877 in Bremen , † March 29, 1936 in Hanover ) was a German civil engineer for hydraulic engineering and 1933 to 1934 rector of the Technical University of Hanover .

Life

Otto Franzius was a nephew of Ludwig Franzius . He studied at the TH Berlin , Munich and Dresden, among others with Hubert Engels , who in turn had previously worked for his uncle. In 1903 he received the Schinkel Prize for his design for a transporter ferry across the Kiel Canal near Brunsbüttel . In 1904 he became the Prussian government master builder for hydraulic engineering at the Rathenow hydraulic engineering inspection . In early 1906 he moved to the Kaiserliche Werft Kiel , where he was appointed naval port builder in 1907.

From 1909 he worked as an assistant at the TH Berlin. From April 1, 1913, he was a state building officer in his native Bremen, until November 1 of that year he was appointed professor of hydraulic engineering at the TH Hannover, whose rector he was from 1933 to 1934. In 1933 Franzius joined the NSDAP . Because of good relations with the party leadership, he was admitted retrospectively to January 1, 1929 ( membership number 114.614). As rector, he was jointly responsible for the deletion of Gustav Noske as an honorary citizen of the Technical University of Hanover, the relegation of the student Kurt Otto for political reasons and, ultimately, the expulsion of the honorary professor Hugo Kulka from the university for racist reasons. Like all professorial colleagues at the TH Hannover, he was also one of the signatories of the professors' commitment to Adolf Hitler at German universities and colleges in November 1933.

In 1935 , however, he made negative comments to Karl von Terzaghi , who visited him for Christmas, and considered a war with the Soviet Union to be inevitable due to the armament policy . The conversation was one of the reasons that Terzaghi turned down an offer from Fritz Todt for a professorship in Germany.

Otto Franzius has shaped the cityscape of Hanover to this day through a technical solution: In September 1925, the newly elected Lord Mayor Arthur Quantity commissioned Franzius to work out a project for the construction of a Maschsee together with the city planning authority - a project idea that came up shortly after the turn of the century. Franzius was responsible for the hydraulic engineering and water management part, the city planning office under the direction of Karl Elkart for the urban planning. In January 1926, the city's magistrate granted 14,000 marks to attempt sealing. These were necessary because the project first brought up the idea not to dig the lake into the machine and to feed from the flowing line . Rather, the Maschsee should be built like a bowl on the Masch and thus above the level of the Leine and fed by a pumping station. This also solved the problem of the threat of silting up the lake due to suspended matter carried in the river water. With this, Otto Franzius ultimately created the design that turned out to be viable and affordable, even if the first groundbreaking did not take place until March 21, 1934 and the lake was inaugurated on May 21, 1936.

In 1930 he traveled to China for seven months on the recommendation of his former teacher Hubert Engels and continued his research on hydraulic models for the Yellow River , the Huai He and the Imperial Canal .

In 1933 he became the founding president of the Rotary Club of Hanover.

Franzius was a member of the German Research Foundation for Soil Mechanics (Degebo).

Awards

• 1931: Honorary doctorate for Dr.-Ing. E. h. at the suggestion of the civil engineering department of the TU Braunschweig
• 1903: Schinkel Prize in the hydraulic engineering category for the design of a transporter bridge over the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal
• Name of the Franziusweg in Hanover-Nordstadt near the university
• 2008: Naming of Otto-Franzius-Straße in Hildesheim for his proposal from 1918 to route the Mittelland Canal so that Hildesheim could be connected by a branch canal.

Current assessment: reinterpretation of the Franziusweg

In 2014, the city of Hanover appointed an advisory board made up of experts to check whether people who gave their names to streets “had active participation in the Nazi regime or serious personal actions against humanity”. He suggested the renaming of the street named after Franzius. As an advocate of Nazi ideology, Franzius had dismissed unpopular people from the university:

In 1957, the Franziusweg was laid out in the northern part of Hanover, which at the time was named “after the founder of the research institute for hydraulic engineering”, Otto Franzius. Due to the NS past of the namesake, around the turn of 2018, the residents of the street were written to, the majority of whom voted for a reinterpretation of the street name and for Ludwig Franzius : The city district council then unanimously decided on the new meaning of the street name through a separate legend table on Point out street sign.

Fonts (selection)

• Together with the naval port builder Heinrich Mönch, Franzius published a description of the construction of the new dry docks at the imperial shipyard in Kiel around 1905 .
• Draft for making the Leine navigable from Hanover to Northeim: On behalf of the Verein für die Leineschiffahrt. Göhmann, Hanover 1919.
• with Hermann Proetel : The water management expansion of the Rur (Roer) in the northern Eifel. Hamel, Düren-Rhineland 1927.
• The foundation. Using an initial processing by O. Richter. Springer, Berlin 1927.
• with Wilhelm Buchholz and Karl Heinze: The waterways of Lower Saxony. Hanover 1930.
• The Huangho and its settlement. Part 1. In: The construction technology. 9 (June 12, 1931), No. 26, pp. 397-404.
• The Huangho and its settlement. Part 2. In: The construction technology. 9 (July 10, 1931), issue 30, pp. 450-455.
• The regulation of the Hwai Ho, the Emperor's Canal, etc. In: Die Bautechnik. 11 (September 19, 1933), No. 40, pp. 568-578.
• The return to the national culture. Reprint from the monthly Volk und Reich. 1933, No. 8, pp. 690-699.
• Expert opinion on the Pein box sheet pile wall. Ilseder Hütte, Dept. Peiner Walzwerk, 1933.
• National Socialism, a Weltanschauung? In: Hannoversche Hochschulblätter. (March 1934) No. 6, pp. 77-78.
• The hydraulic engineering: A hydraulic engineering manual for study and practice. Springer, Berlin 1927, in English translation Waterway Engineering. Cambridge 1936.

literature

• Paul Trommsdorff: The faculty of the Technical University of Hanover, 1831-1931. Library of the Technical University, Hanover 1931, p. 77.
• Alfred Steck: Obituary for Professor Otto Franzius. In: Structural Engineering. Vol. 14, issue 19, May 1936, ISSN  0005-6820 , pp. 263-264.
• Eduard Hünerberg: Leftover collection Prof. Otto Franzius, Hanover. A considerable East Asia collection. Hünerberg art auction house, Braunschweig 1963 (auction catalog).
• Helmut Weihsmann: Building under the swastika. Architecture of doom. Promedia, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-85371-113-8 , p. 507.
• Dirk Böttcher , Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein, Hugo Thielen : Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2002, ISBN 3-87706-706-9 , p. 120.
• Michael Grüttner : Biographical lexicon on National Socialist science policy. Synchron - Wissenschaftsverlag der Authors, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 ( Studies on the history of science and universities. 6).
• Susanne Kuss: The League of Nations and China. Technical cooperation and German consultants 1928–34. LIT, Münster u. a. 2005, ISBN 3-8258-8391-4 ( Berlin Studies on China. 45; also: Dissertation, University of Freiburg 1998).
• Michael Jung: Professors for the party . In: University of Hanover. Festschrift for the 175th anniversary of the University of Hanover . Volume 1. Hildesheim 2006.
• Michael Jung: Our hearts beat with enthusiasm towards the Führer. The Technical University of Hanover and its professors under National Socialism. BOD, Norderstedt 2013, ISBN 978-3-8482-6451-3 , pp. 55, 57f., 91, 115–125, 214–220, 242, 256.
• Michele Barricelli , Holger Butenschön , Michael Jung, Jörg-Detlef Kühne , Lars Nebelung, Joachim Perels : National Socialist Injustice Measures at the Technical University of Hanover. Disabilities and privileges from 1933 to 1945 . Published by the Presidium of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hanover. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2016, ISBN 978-3-7319-0429-8 , passim ; completely as a PDF document

Franzius Institute of Leibniz University Hannover

"Franzius Institute" on Nienburger Strasse in Hanover

In 1914 Otto Franzius established the Institute for Foundation and Hydraulic Engineering at the chair of the same name. With the move into the now listed new buildings designed by Franz Erich Kassbaum , the institute was renamed in 1927 as the Hanover Research Institute for Ground Engineering and Hydraulic Engineering. Since 1936 it has had the additional name "Franzius Institute", since 1972 it has been called "Franzius Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Coastal Engineering". One of the professors was Walter Hensen . In the 2000s the university gave the institute the name "Franzius Institute for Hydraulic Engineering, Estuary and Coastal Engineering" and uses the abbreviation "Franzius Institute" on its website. In 2016 it was officially renamed after Ludwig Franzius after a commission concluded that Otto Franzius was involved in National Socialist university policy. The new name is the Ludwig Franzius Institute for Hydraulic Engineering, Estuary and Coastal Engineering .

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Franzius in the catalog of the German National Library
• Otto Franzius: Transporter ferry across the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal (Kiel Canal) near Brunsbüttel. Schinkel competition 1903. Plans on the website of the Architekturmuseum der TU Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ^ Walter Sbrzesny:  Franzius, Ludwig. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 377 ( digitized version ).
2. ^ Rector's speeches in the 19th and 20th centuries - online bibliography: Otto Franzius accessed on March 3, 2010.
3. ↑ Michael Jung: Our hearts beat enthusiastically to the Führer. The Technical University of Hanover and its professors under National Socialism. Pp. 215-218.
4. ↑ Michael Jung: Our hearts beat enthusiastically to the Führer. The Technical University of Hanover and its professors under National Socialism. Pp. 57, 59, 115-125.
5. ^ Richard Goodman: Karl Terzaghi: The engineer as an artist. ASCE 1999, p. 154. Goodman analyzed Terzaghi's diaries.
6. ^ Municipal press office Hanover (ed.): Hanover's Maschsee. At its opening on May 21, 1936. Hannover 1936, p. 19.
7. ↑ The Maschsee. State capital Hanover, archived from the original on May 21, 2009 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 (PDF, p. 7). 
8. ^ Iwo Amelung: The Yellow River in Germany. Sino-German relations in the field of hydraulic engineering in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century. In: Seminar for the language and culture of China at the University of Hamburg (ed.): Oriens extremus: Journal for language, art and culture in the countries of the Far East. Volume 38, Harrasowitz, Wiesbaden 1995, ISSN  0030-5197 , pp. 164f.
9. ↑ Honorary doctorates 1900–1986 alphabetically ( memento from June 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) accessed on March 3, 2010.
10. ↑ 150 years of the Schinkel Competition . Award-winning ideas and projects. Competition winner 1852–2006. ( online ). online ( Memento of the original dated August 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ↑ Three new streets in the Münchewiese industrial park . Press release dated December 19, 2008, accessed March 3, 2010.
12. ↑ Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of October 2, 2015, p. 18
13. ↑ These ten streets are to be renamed in: Online edition of Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of October 2, 2015, accessed on October 3, 2015
14. ↑ Helmut Zimmermann : Franziusweg , in ders .: The street names of the state capital Hanover. Hahnsche Buchhandlung Verlag, Hannover 1992, ISBN 3-7752-6120-6 , p. 81
15. ↑ nrs: Franziusweg: Name is reinterpreted. In: Stadt-Anzeiger Nord (supplement in the Madsack daily newspapers Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung and [[Neue Presse (Presse) |]] ) from February 1, 2018, p. 4
16. ^ Journal of the Austrian Engineer Association , Volume 57, 1905, p. 53; Preview over google books
17. ^ Website of the University of Hanover [1] , accessed on October 1, 2015
18. ^ Communication from the University of Hanover