Friedrich Schmidt-Ott

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Friedrich Schmidt-Ott
Grave site, Königin-Luise-Straße 55, in Berlin-Dahlem

Friedrich Gustav Adolf Eduard Ludwig Schmidt-Ott , until 1920 Schmidt (born June 4, 1860 in Potsdam , † April 28, 1956 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer , politician and science organizer.

Life

Friedrich Schmidt-Ott was born as the son of Albrecht Schmidt and Emilie Schmidt. He attended the Königliche Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Berlin from 1866 to 1873 and the Kassel Friedrichsgymnasium from 1873 to 1878 , which he left as Primus Omnium . From that time on he became friends with Prince Wilhelm, who later became German Emperor Wilhelm II , who also attended this school.

He studied from 1878 to 1881 in Berlin, Heidelberg, Leipzig and Göttingen Jura , among others, Heinrich Brunner and Rudolf von Ihering . From 1881 to 1884 he was a trainee lawyer . During this time he also served as a one-year volunteer in the Guard Rifle Battalion in Berlin. Later he was a reserve officer in the Brandenburg Jäger Battalion No. 3 in Lübben .

After studying law and doing his doctorate , he became a civil servant in the higher administrative service and in 1888 worked for Friedrich Althoff in the Ministry of Spiritual and Educational Affairs (Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs), whose successor he became Ministerial Director of the Education Department in 1907. Schmidt-Ott worked in numerous areas of science and cultural policy, such as the Prussian museums and libraries or the establishment of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society since 1909. In 1902, Wilhelm II entrusted him with the selection of the German Rhodes scholarship holders . From August 6, 1917 to November 1918, he was the Prussian minister of education.

In 1920, Schmidt-Ott, together with Fritz Haber , initiated the establishment of the Emergency Association of German Science and became its first president.

As a monarchist, he was initially aloof from the Weimar Republic and its parliamentary democracy. In 1927 Schmidt-Ott's advocacy of continuing the promotion of mathematics professor Theodor Vahlen, who was also the National Socialist Gauleiter of Pomerania and who had lost his position at the University of Greifswald due to demonstrative rejection of the democratic state, became a scandal in the daily press and also in the Reichstag . The Notgemeinschaft only withdrew the funding after newspapers, parliamentarians, ministers and party leaders protested and the Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun threatened to stop funding the Notgemeinschaft (Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, p. 78f., 1999).

Schmidt-Ott was elected honorary member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in 1930 . He had been an honorary member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences since 1914 . From 1921 to 1937 Schmidt-Ott was a member of the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society , after which he was an honorary senator. From 1929 on, he succeeded Wilhelm von Bode as chairman of the board of the "Kaiser-Friedrich-Museumsverein Berlin". In 1933 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .

On May 17, 1933, Schmidt-Ott resigned together with the other members of the presidium of the emergency community after Vice-President Fritz Haber had resigned a few days earlier. The main committee of the emergency community followed the decision of the presidium a little later. At the request of the Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick , Schmidt-Ott temporarily continued the business of the emergency community. During this time, the emergency community dismissed a Jewish employee in view of the law for the restoration of the professional civil service ; Jewish employees were no longer promoted. Nevertheless, Schmidt-Ott remained suspicious to the National Socialists. He was seen as a representative of the old system, which had already behaved as an opportunist in 1919 (Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, S, 110-131, 2008). Winfried Schulze, DFG laureate and chairman of the Science Council, judged despite a benevolent appreciation of the “designer of the German science system”: “In this critical phase, one misses his clear advocacy for the Jewish members of the scientific community [...]. One must assume that Schmidt-Otts inclination towards state power and his basic conservative attitude did not put any insurmountable obstacles in the way of working with the National Socialists. ”(Schulze, Selbstbild, p. 7f.) 

On June 23, 1934, Schmidt-Ott was dismissed as president of the emergency community by the newly appointed Reich Minister Bernhard Rust . The physicist Johannes Stark became Schmidt-Ott's successor .

The members of the "Kaiser-Friedrich-Museumsverein Berlin", to which the majority belonged patrons of Jewish origin, had elected Schmidt-Ott as chairman in 1929. Attempts to bring the association into line by the Reich Chambers of Fine Arts (1933) and the Reich Central for Scientific Reporting (1934) were fought off by Schmidt-Ott. In 1938, too, when he asked Reich Minister Bernhard Rust, he initially informed him that an “exact list of members” could not be drawn up. At the threat of the Reich Minister that he would terminate his membership and also forbid his officials from membership, Schmidt-Ott finally informed the Minister Bernhard Rust that the KFMV “no longer belonged to Jews”, although the membership lists continued to contain Jewish members . The association then continued to exist until the end of the war and remained the owner of the art treasures it acquired.

After the Second World War, Schmidt-Ott became Honorary President of the newly founded German Research Foundation .

In 1895 Friedrich Schmidt married Luise Margarethe Ott, who was nine years his junior. Since the silver wedding anniversary in 1920 he called himself Friedrich Schmidt-Ott.

Schmidt-Ott was buried in the St. Annen churchyard in Berlin .

His cousin was Commerzienrat Gustav Jung .

Awards

Works

  • Friedrich Schmidt-Ott: From the ancestors becoming and experiencing a German town house. 1937
  • Friedrich Schmidt-Ott: Experienced and strived for. 1860-1950. 1952

literature

  • Bernhard vom Brocke :  Schmidt-Ott, Friedrich Gustav Adolf Eduard Ludwig. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , pp. 165-167 ( digitized version ).
  • Robert Volz: Reich manual of the German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 2: L-Z. Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1931, DNB 453960294 , pp. 1665–1666 (with picture).
  • Wieland Schmidt : Friedrich Schmidt-Ott. In: From our school. No. 62, 1957, pp. 13–19, also in: Wieland Schmidt, Konrad Kettig: Kleine Schriften. The university library of the Free University of Berlin commemorates Wieland Schmidt for his 65th birthday. Harrasowitz, Wiesbaden 1969, pp. 265-272
  • Wolfgang Loyalty : Friedrich Schmidt-Ott . In: Wolfgang Treue, Karlfried founder (Ed.): Berlinische Lebensbilder . Volume 3: Science Policy in Berlin . Colloquium-Verlag, Berlin 1987. pp. 235-250, ISBN 3-7678-0707-6
  • Documents on the establishment of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (exhibition catalog for an exhibition in the State Library of Prussian Cultural Heritage in Berlin, 1981, publisher Jost Lemmerich), page 32 ff
  • Bernd Sösemann: In the twilight of bureaucratic "Aryanization". The Kaiser Friedrich Museum Association in Berlin and its Jewish members during the Nazi dictatorship . Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH. Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86965-303-7 .
  • Sören Flachowsky: From the emergency community to the Reich Research Council . Stuttgart 2008.
  • Lothar Mertens : "Only those who are politically worthy". The DFG Research Funding Third Reich. Berlin 2004.
  • Winfried Schulze: '' Self-image and external image. Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, a designer of the German science system. "In:" Research 1 "(2005), pp. 1–8.
  • Folklore studies , presented to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Eds .: Fritz Boehm and John Meier , Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin and Leipzig 1930

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Schmidt-Ott  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Philip Ziegler, Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships . New Haven / London: Yale University Press 2008, p. 47
  2. ^ Friedrich Schmidt-Ott. Member entry at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences , accessed on June 23, 2016 .
  3. ^ Members of the previous academies. Friedrich Schmidt-Ott. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on June 12, 2015 .
  4. ^ Member entry of Friedrich Schmidt-Ott at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 23, 2016.
  5. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 215.
  6. ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 3, No. 250, December 29, 1951.
  7. ↑ http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/digital/3/1082.pdf
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt-Ott, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmidt, Friedrich (maiden name); Schmidt-Ott, Friedrich Gustav Adolf Eduard Ludwig (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German science organizer
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Potsdam
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1956
Place of death Berlin