Heinrich Konen

Heinrich Mathias Konen (born September 16, 1874 in Cologne , † December 31, 1948 in Bad Godesberg ) was a German physicist and CDU politician.

Life

Heinrich Konen was born the son of the high school teacher Heinrich Hubert Konen (1837-1915) and his wife Anna Dengler (1842-1921). He attended the Friedrich Wilhelm High School in Cologne, where his father also taught.

Heinrich Konen studied physics and mathematics at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Bonn from 1893 to 1898 . In 1897 he was one of Heinrich Kayser supervised work Using the spectra of iodine in physics doctorate . After state examination and military service, he was in 1899 Kayser's assistant in the Physics Institute, where he was in 1902 in experimental physics habilitated . In 1905 he accepted an appointment as an associate professor at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster. There he met the judge's daughter Maria Nacke (1882–1962), whom he married in 1908 and with whom he had a son (* 1909) and a daughter (* 1911).

In 1920 he returned to the University of Bonn as Kayser's successor as full professor and director of the Physics Institute.

His scientific field of work was spectroscopy . He is best known for his collaboration on Kayser's handbook of spectroscopy and also wrote several contributions to the handbook of physics and edited the volumes on optics . Wolfgang Finkelnburg is one of Konen's students .

Konen played an important role in science policy during the Weimar Republic . He was involved in the founding of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft and, among other things, was a member of the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society from 1922 to 1933 , President of the German Physical Society from 1927 to 1929 and was on the supervisory board of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt .

From 1929/30 to the summer semester of 1931 he was rector of Bonn University. As a determined opponent of the regime, he was forcibly retired by the National Socialists in 1934 - he refused to display the swastika flags at the university and the Hitler salute - and went into industry, initially to the Ringsdorff works in Mehlem, later at Dynamit Nobel AG in Troisdorf . After the end of World War II, he returned to his chair at Bonn University and the British military government appointed him in 1945 as their first post-war rector . Konen held the office of rector until January 1948. He lived until the end in the Bad Godesberg district of Muffendorf (Klosterbergstrasse 72; later residence of the Syrian ambassador ).

politics

Before the National Socialists came to power, he belonged to the Catholic center , joined the CDU after the war and was Minister of Education of North Rhine-Westphalia in the Amelunxen II and Arnold I cabinets from 1946 to 1947 . Because of the double burden as minister and rector, Konen resigned as minister in 1947. After he was accused of having admitted too many and only negligently checked students, he submitted his resignation as rector in early 1948 under pressure from the British military government and was retired .

In the same year he learned of the death of his son in a Soviet captivity. He died on December 31, 1948 and was honored by the Bonn students with a funeral procession. His grave is in the Poppelsdorf cemetery .

Honors

In 1947, Konen was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Medical Faculty of the University of Bonn. 1992 in Oberkassel (Bonn) , the Heinrich-Konen-street named after him.

Fonts

• Literature by and about Heinrich Konen in the catalog of the German National Library
• August Hagenbach, Heinrich Konen: Atlas of the emission spectra of most elements after photographic recordings with explanatory text . Gustav Fischer, Jena 1905 ( digitized ).
• Heinrich Konen: The glow of gases and vapors . With special consideration of the laws in spectra. Springer, Wiesbaden 1913, doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-663-20190-8 .

literature

• Walther Gerlach :  Konen, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 485 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Heinrich Konen . In: Karin Orth: Expulsion from the science system. Memorial book for the committee members of the DFG expelled under National Socialism, Stuttgart: Steiner 2018 (Contributions to the history of the German Research Foundation; 7), pp. 40-51. ISBN 978-3-515-11953-5

Web links

• Biographical data
• Christian George: Heinrich Mathias Konen (1874-1948), physicist and rector of the University of Bonn. In: Portal Rhenish History. Landschaftsverband Rheinland, November 29, 2011, accessed on February 24, 2018 . 
• Correspondence with Arnold Sommerfeld. Chair for the History of Natural Sciences, LMU Munich, 2002, accessed on February 24, 2018 . 
• Heinrich Konen at the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Against the advice of Wilhelm Wien , Philipp Lenard and others who did not consider Konen to be original and independent enough, cf. BBAW Berlin-Brandenburgische, Wolfgang Neugebauer (Hrsg.): Science policy in the Weimar Republic . Documents on university development in the Free State of Prussia and on selected professorial appointments in six disciplines (1918 to 1933). Walter de Gruyter, 2016 (found at books.google.com ).
2. ↑ Helmut Vogt : Entrepreneurs in National Socialism. The example of Hans Ringsdorff. In: Godesberger Heimatblätter. Annual issue of the Association for Homeland Care and Local History Bad Godesberg eV , Issue 50/2012, ISSN  0436-1024 , pp. 171–192 (here: p. 187).
3. ^ Resident register (address book, apartment book) for the city of Bad Godesberg 1936/37 , J. Schneider, Bad Godesberg 1936, p. 57. ( online )
4. ↑ James F. Tent (Ed.); Tanja Mäurer, Astrid Schmitz: Academic proconsul: Harvard sociologist Edward Y. Hartshorne and the reopening of German universities 1945 - 1946 (= Mosaic: Studies and Texts on American Culture and History , Vol. 5). ISBN 3-88476-321-0 , WTV, Trier 1998, p. 118.
5. ^ Heinrich-Konen-Straße in the Bonn street cadastre