Heinz Schönfeld

Heinz Werner Schönfeld (born September 30, 1908 in Dresden ; † May 5, 1957 in Karlsruhe ) was a German electrical engineer and university professor .

Life

Heinz Schönfeld lecture hall of the TU Dresden

Heinz Schönfeld was born in Dresden as the son of an elementary school teacher.

"Even in my childhood and early youth, my father showed me the admirable occurrences in nature, be it playing with the electrifying machine, be it tinkering with telegraph equipment and the like. Unfortunately I lost my father when I was seventeen, and because of this and the previous inflation, the serious side of life came to me. I had to contribute to the maintenance by giving private lessons. "

- Heinz Schönfeld

After attending the Reform Realgymnasium Dreikönigschule until 1928, he began to earn money for his studies through forestry work. A scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes because of very good performance relieved him of his financial worries during his studies. From 1928 he studied technical physics at the TH Dresden and finished his studies in 1932 with a diploma thesis "on wave mechanics via electron diffraction on copper". From 1933 he worked for a year as an internship and lecture assistant with Heinrich Barkhausen at the Institute for Weak Current Technology and in 1934 wrote his doctoral thesis on discontinuities in re-electrification .

From 1934 to 1945 he worked in development in the central laboratory of Siemens & Halske in Berlin, but completed his habilitation in 1944 at the TH Dresden with the thesis The electrical altimeter for aircraft . Until the end of the war he worked for Siemens & Halske, which was outsourced to Upper Silesia. In Silesia he lost all property after the end of the war and returned to Dresden at the end of 1945 to start over. On January 1, 1946, he was employed as an assistant at the Institute for Telecommunications Systems and Acoustics and on May 1 of the same year as a lecturer for telecommunications technology at the Faculty of Communal Economics at the TH Dresden, where he held lectures in the field of telecommunications technology. In 1946 he also worked as a professor with a teaching assignment and in 1947 was appointed full professor for general and theoretical electrical engineering at the newly opened TH Dresden. He also became director of the Electrotechnical Institute. In 1951 he became dean of the Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. When the independent faculty of electrical engineering was founded a year later at his suggestion, he was appointed its vice dean.

The GDR superiors had been suspicious of Schönfeld for a long time, so in 1952 he received a summons to report to the police headquarters on Schießgasse. Reasons were not given. Neither queries to the responsible minister nor a complaint to the rector of the TH Dresden, Kurt Ernst Koloc, brought an explanation, so that Schönfeld lived in constant uncertainty about his fate and that of his family. Because "in the end it is well known that not all people who go to Schießgasse return from there." In the same year Heinz Schönfeld left the GDR and then worked in Nuremberg as development manager at the Süddeutsche Apparatefabrik. In 1956 he became a full professor for basic areas of electrical engineering and control engineering at the TH Karlsruhe and died a year later.

His textbook The Scientific Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering from 1951 is regarded as the standard work. Since April 6, 1994, the large lecture hall in the Barkhausen building of the TU Dresden has been named Heinz Schönfelds.

Works (selection)

• 1944: The electric altimeter for airplanes (Habil.)
• 1951: The scientific foundations of electrical engineering
• 1953: About the necessity of theoretical investigations in control engineering

literature

• Klaus Lunze : Appreciation from Professor Heinz Schönfeld . In: Scientific journal of the Technical University of Dresden . Volume 45, Issue 3, 1996, pp. 74-78.
• Schönfeld, Heinz. In: Dorit Petschel : 175 years of TU Dresden. Volume 3: The professors of the TU Dresden 1828–2003. Edited on behalf of the Society of Friends and Supporters of the TU Dresden e. V. von Reiner Pommerin , Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-412-02503-8 , pp. 860-861.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus Lunze: Appreciation from Professor Heinz Schönfeld . In: Scientific journal of the Technical University of Dresden . Volume 45, Issue 3, 1996, pp. 74-75.
2. ↑ Klaus Lunze: Appreciation from Professor Heinz Schönfeld . In: Scientific journal of the Technical University of Dresden . Volume 45, Issue 3, 1996, p. 75.
3. ↑ Schönfeld in a letter to the rector of the TH Dresden Kurt Ernst Koloc, quoted in after Lunze, p. 77.