Margot Becke-Goehring

Margot Becke-Goehring (born June 10, 1914 in Allenstein , East Prussia ; † November 14, 2009 in Heidelberg ) was a chemist and the first female rector at a West German university.

Life

Becke-Goehring was born as the daughter of Martha and Albert Goehring. The father was a career officer who worked in the Gera pension fund after the First World War . Becke-Goehring made 1933 High School in Erfurt and studied against the wishes of her father, who looked to study chemistry as physically hard for a woman in Halle and Munich chemistry . In 1938 she received her doctorate from Hellmuth Stamm as an academic student . Due to the shortage of men during the Second World War, encouraged by the later Nobel Prize winner Karl Ziegler , she was able to quickly expand her research results into a habilitation after her doctorate in 1944 .

After the Second World War, Becke-Goehring was briefly interned by the US occupation forces. Their preoccupation with deuterium oxide led the occupying powers to wrongly believe they were involved in the German nuclear program. In 1946 Becke-Goehring became a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg and in 1947 an extraordinary professor for inorganic chemistry. In 1955 she met her future husband, the industrial chemist Friedrich Becke. In 1959 she became a full professor and in 1961 dean of the natural science faculty. In the same year she received the Alfred Stock Memorial Prize .

In 1966 Margot Becke-Goehring took over the rectorate of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and was the first woman rector of a West German university. Your rectorate fell into the troubled time of the 1968 student unrest. In 1968 she voluntarily gave up her position and in 1969 became director of the Gmelin Institute for Inorganic Chemistry of the Max Planck Society in Frankfurt. In the following years she devoted herself to updating the Gmelin manual , in which the entire state of knowledge of inorganic chemistry was collected. In 1979 she retired, but until recently published works on the history of science. She had been an elected member of the Leopoldina since 1969, and a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences since 1977 .

One of her doctoral students is Ekkehard Fluck , who was her successor at the Gmelin Institute and with whom she published a book on quantitative analysis in 1961.

Fonts (selection)

• The kinetics of dithionic acid (dissertation 1938)
• About sulfoxylic acid (Habilitation 1944)
• Brief Guide to Qualitative Analysis (1961)
• Qualitative Analysis Internship (1967)
• Complex Chemistry (1970)
• with Ekkehard Fluck: Introduction to the theory of quantitative analysis , 6th edition, Darmstadt: Steinkopff 1980 (first 1961)
• Margot Becke-Goehring, Dorothee Mussgnug: Memories - almost blown with the wind. University of Heidelberg between 1933 and 1968. Verlag Dieter Winkler, Bochum 2005

literature

• Henrik Eberle: The Martin Luther University in the time of National Socialism. Mdv, Halle 2002, ISBN 3-89812-150-X , p. 412
• Ekkehard Fluck: Margot Becke: June 10, 1914 - November 14, 2009 (obituary), in: Annual Report of the Max Planck Society 2009 (enclosure), pages 18–19.

Web links

• Literature by and about Margot Becke-Goehring in the catalog of the German National Library