Lothar Suhling

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Lothar Suhling (born August 1, 1938 in Danzig ; † February 17, 2018 in Egypt ), was a German technical historian and museum director. He became known as a historian of mining and metallurgy and headed the State Museum for Technology and Labor (since 2010: Technoseum ) in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, in its founding and development phase.

family

The family fled to Schleswig-Holstein in 1945 and came to the newly formed state of Baden-Württemberg in 1952 . His first marriage was to a daughter of the German-Austrian chemical engineer and inventor Fritz Stastny and had two sons and a daughter with her. He died on a vacation trip to Egypt on the Red Sea and was buried in the forest cemetery in Hockenheim .

Life

Suhling had attended high school in Itzehoe and Mannheim , which was followed by a scientific and technical apprenticeship in the Waldhof pulp mill . After studying process engineering at what was then the Mannheim State Engineering School, he worked as a designer at BASF in Ludwigshafen am Rhein. He then studied general mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Stuttgart, which was renamed the University of Stuttgart in 1967 , and then as a graduate engineer since 1969 at Armin Hermann's chair in the history of natural sciences and technology. In 1971 he became the first scientific assistant for the history of technology and dealt primarily with the technology of the Kupferseigern, which was the subject of his dissertation on the Seigerhütten process . In the decades that followed, he remained loyal to mining history issues, particularly those of the early modern period , and repeatedly dedicated conference papers and publications to them. After completing his doctorate, he worked at the Research Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology at the Deutsches Museum in Munich before receiving a professorship for the history of construction and technology at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences in 1975/76 .

In 1981 he moved to the project group of the technical state museum planned in Baden-Württemberg and in 1983 took over its provisional management. In 1984 he was appointed the first museum director and professor by Prime Minister Lothar Späth . Since 1985 he has been a director of the Museum Foundation. He carried out these tasks until his retirement in 2002.

Suhling developed a concept, described as a "space-time spiral", for the museum's permanent exhibition, which was presented to the public in September 1990 in the museum building designed and built by Berlin architect Ingeborg Kuhler and which was awarded the European Museum prize in 1992 year garner international recognition.

Suhling dealt several times with the German aircraft engineer and rocket pioneer Julius Hatry and the inventor of Styrofoam Fritz Stastny .

Honors

Publications (selection)

  • Petroleum and Petroleum Products in History. An overview of several millennia of extraction and use of petroleum products in the Middle East and Europe up to the beginning of large-scale industrial production. German Museum of Masterpieces of Science and Technology, Munich, treatises and reports; Vol. 43, 1975, H. 2/3.
  • The Seigerhütten process. The technology of copper seizing according to the early metallurgical literature. Riederer, Stuttgart 1976. At the same time Stuttgart, University, department of history, social and Economics, dissertation, 1974.
  • Unlock, win and promote. History of mining. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1983. Orig.-Edition. (= rororo; 7713: rororo non-fiction book: cultural history of natural sciences and technology). 9-11 Th. 1988. ISBN 3-499-17713-7
  • Becoming and changing technology museums from a conceptual point of view. The new generation of museums using the example of the State Museum for Technology and Work in Mannheim. In: Lothar Hiersemann (Ed.): Contributions to the history of technology and technical education. Volume 8, FH Leipzig 1994, pp. 3-21.

literature

  • Jörg Baldenhofer: The State Museum for Technology and Work in Mannheim. Idea, sponsor, realization, place in the museum landscape . Dissertation Univ. Stuttgart 2015. Computus Druck Satz & Verlag, Gutenberg 2016, ISBN 978-3-940598-29-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jörg Baldenhofer: The State Museum of Technology and Work in Mannheim . Gutenberg 2016, p. 389.
  2. ^ Günter Bayerl u. a. (Ed.): Environmental history - methods, topics, potentials. Münster 1996, p. 332.
  3. ↑ Wolf-Diether Burak (ed.): Stations of the industrial age in the German south-west. A museum tour . Stuttgart 1990.
personal data
SURNAME Suhling, Lothar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German technical historian and museum director
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Danzig
DATE OF DEATH 17th February 2018
Place of death Egypt