Georg Zundel
Georg Zundel (born May 17, 1931 in Tübingen ; † March 11, 2007 in Salzburg ) was a German physicist , entrepreneur and philanthropist involved in peace politics .
Georg Zundel was born in 1931 as the only son of Georg Friedrich Zundel and Paula Zundel . He embarked on a career as a physicist and gained an international reputation , particularly in hydrogen bond research . He founded companies and has always been committed to agriculture and forestry. Georg Zundel was particularly active in peace politics by founding the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Research , for which he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2003 . Zundel was married and had three children. He lived with his family in Salzburg until his death in 2007. His grave is in Haisterkirch near Bad Waldsee .
Adolescent years
Georg Zundel spent his childhood and youth on his parents' estate, the "Berghof" near Tübingen , and on the family's farm in Haisterkirch, Bad Waldsee . His appreciation of agriculture stems from this experience in times of food shortages. At the same time, Zundel was confronted at a young age with an environment that was characterized by political and economic tensions through his parents' house. His mother Paula Zundel was the daughter of the entrepreneur Robert Bosch . The father Georg Friedrich Zundel was married to the women's rights activist Clara Zetkin for the first time . As a painter of large-format worker portraits, he had caused a sensation at the turn of the 20th century. Due to the war, Georg Zundel was only able to take his Abitur in 1952, after which he began studying physics at the University of Munich . Before and during his studies he toured Italy and Greece on a motorcycle in 1951 and 1952. In 1955 he and a friend made a nine-month trip from Stuttgart via Afghanistan to India and back in a converted Unimog .
Scientific career
After interrupting the physics studies he had begun in Munich in 1955/56 for a study visit to Frankfurt am Main , Zundel received his doctorate in 1961 at the University of Munich. There he received his habilitation in 1967 and was appointed university lecturer in 1972. From 1974 to 2006 he was an adjunct professor for biophysical chemistry at the University of Munich. During this time he accompanied 39 doctoral students.
As a scientist, he made a contribution to hydrogen bond research, with the “Zundel cation ” H 5 O 2 + being one of his most famous discoveries. His scientific work includes over 300 publications in international journals on topics of physical chemistry and biophysics . The focus is on hydrogen bonds and their investigation using infrared spectroscopy . Depending on the binding strength of the acceptor and donor side, such bridges show a continuous absorption in the infrared spectrum over several hundred wave numbers (3500 to below 650 cm −1 ) or between wavelengths of 2.7 and over 10 micrometers. It is attributed to the fact that the bridge protons, caused by the easy polarizability of the charge between the donor and acceptor side, cover a broad spectrum of absorption frequencies in the fluctuating environment in the infrared wavelength range. The absorption is observed both in aqueous acid solutions, wherein the forming H 5 O 2 + ions are the basic unit, and in liquors, which are the charge fluctuations in the H 3 O 2 - are structures. In addition, continuously absorbing bridges are also observed in biological systems, in which proton donor and acceptor can exist in different forms, for example between the nitrogen atom of an amine group and the oxygen atom of a phosphate group.
Zundel always saw science as a universal task beyond the borders of the Cold War. In the early 1960s, he was one of the first exchange researchers to work at a science institute in Moscow . Soon after, his habilitation thesis “Hydration and Intermolecular Interaction. Infrared Investigations with Polyelectrolyte Membranes ”in both English and Russian. At the beginning of the 1970s he pushed for intensive cooperation, especially with Polish colleagues, for which he was made an honorary member of the “Polish Chemical Society” in 1985.
Entrepreneurial activity
As an entrepreneur, Zundel became involved by founding the "Physikalisch-Technische Laboratorium Berghof GmbH" in 1966. Its aim was to make economic use of the research results in the fields of electrochemistry , membrane filtration and plastics technology . The company became the nucleus of the Berghof group of companies. Many years of innovation and development resulted in a wide range of products in the fields of automation and environmental technology . The Berghof Holding today comprises five companies with locations in Eningen , Tübingen , Ravensburg , Mühlhausen , Chemnitz and Leeuwarden in the Netherlands .
Zundel also broke new ground in agriculture and forestry. In the Carinthian Maltatal he acquired a forest enterprise of around 3000 hectares. The development and intensive afforestation of this high mountain forest represented a new challenge for him. Experiments were made with the introduction of North American Douglas firs , which also produce growth in locations above the existing tree line.
The “St. Georgshof ”in Haisterkirch near Bad Waldsee , an arable and dairy farm, modernized Zundel. He recognized the importance of alternative energies early on and set up the first biogas plant on the farm as early as 1981 , which now generates an output of 50 kilowatts of electricity. With this in mind, Zundel got involved very early in the field of solar energy in a variety of ways .
Philanthropic activities
His family background made it possible for Zundel to realize charitable projects.
In the mid-1960s, against massive opposition, he had a student residence built in Tübingen in order to remedy the acute housing shortage of the students at the time.
The foundation of the Kunsthalle Tübingen, which opened in 1971, by his mother Paula and his aunt Margarete Fischer-Bosch was also important to him.
Zundel made the most significant philanthropic contribution through his commitment to peace and conflict research . In his childhood and youth he was directly confronted with the horrors of war and the National Socialist dictatorship, which led him to seek ways of non-violent conflict resolution. In 1949, Zundel was politically active against the rearmament of the Federal Republic . In the years 1958–1961 he took part in protests against the discussed armament of the Bundeswehr with nuclear weapons.
In 1966 he was involved in founding the Society for Responsibility in Science .
A decisive milestone in his commitment, however, was the establishment and sustained support of the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Research in 1971, which Dieter Senghaas chaired for thirty years . Through his foundation, Zundel became the most important private sponsor of this then still young branch of research. The most important projects of the foundation include the Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, founded in Berlin in 1993 as a branch of the Munich Foundation, and the Institute for Peace Education in Tübingen (founded in 1976, since 2002 in the Georg-Zundel-Haus ), which has been receiving increasingly sustainable funding since 1977 . Thanks to Zundel's continuous and flexible support, both institutions were able to gain a national and international reputation.
His commitment to peace was honored in 2003 with the award of the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany under Johannes Rau .
Fonts (selection)
- “A lot has to be done!” - memories of a scientist committed to peace politics. With a foreword by Hans-Peter Dürr . Publishing house for scientific and regional history Dr. Michael Engel, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-929134-50-0 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Georg Zundel in the catalog of the German National Library
- Website about Georg Zundel and Georg Friedrich Zundel
Individual evidence
- ↑ "Project" according to the website of the Projects Foundation : Berghof Conflict Research ( Memento of the original from March 17, 2011 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. actually more of an institution
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Zundel, Georg |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German physicist, entrepreneur and philanthropist involved in peace politics |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 17, 1931 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tübingen |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 11, 2007 |
| Place of death | Salzburg |