Mathilde Hertz

Mathilde Carmen Hertz (born January 14, 1891 in Bonn , † November 20, 1975 in Cambridge , England) was a biologist who researched in the field of animal psychology and sensory physiology of animals. They explored the sensory perception of such diverse species such as corvids , cabbage butterflies, brittle stars , bees , flies and hermit crabs .

Youth and Studies

Mathilde Hertz was the second daughter of the physicist Heinrich Hertz (* January 22, 1857 - † January 1, 1894), the discoverer of electromagnetic waves, and his wife Elisabeth, née. Doll (1864--1941). Due to the early death of his father, Hertz grew up in difficult economic circumstances. In spring 1910 she passed the Abitur at the Bonn Realgymnasium. She then took up a degree in philosophy, but soon broke it off in order to complete artistic training at the art schools in Karlsruhe (1910–1912) and Weimar (1912–1915).

From 1915 Hertz worked as a sculptor in Weimar , Berlin and Munich . Mathilde Hertz created several busts of her father. One of them has stood in the courtyard of the main building of the Technical University of Karlsruhe near the historic Heinrich Hertz lecture hall since 1925 . In the autumn of 1918 Mathilde Hertz was given a position in the library of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, for which she worked until 1923. As part of this activity, she was also entrusted with the reconstruction of fossil teeth. The paleontologist Ludwig Döderlein , who noticed the quality of her work, encouraged her in 1921 to enroll at Munich University as a doctoral student, which she did in the winter semester of 1921/1922.

Research work

Mathilde Hertz completed her doctorate, which she was working on parallel to her employment, finally in February 1925 with a thesis on prehistoric mammal dentition supervised by Richard Hertwig . In this paper she investigated the question of whether a connection can be recognized between the progressive development of the mammalian dentition and the way of life of mammals. In doing so, she put forward the thesis that the development of the mammalian dentition, which progresses in the same direction, must be based on a uniform cause. As a result, she determined that mechanical pressure that acts on the teeth during chewing activity is the evolutionary cause of the typical development of individual dental features in mammals.

After completing his doctorate, Hertz turned to the new research area of ​​animal psychology. From 1925 to 1929, her work was financed by a grant from the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft. At first she worked as an assistant in the zoological collection in Munich, then from 1927 as a visiting scientist in the department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin headed by Richard Goldschmidt . In April 1929 she received an assistant position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Her research focus during this time was the optical abilities and performance of animals, which she examined in particular from a perceptual psychological point of view. Due to the potential of her work, she was given a building of her own, suitable for experimental investigations, in which she could research independently.

Hertz submitted her habilitation thesis to the Berlin University in November 1929. This was assessed by Richard Hesse and Wolfgang Köhler .

In May 1930 Hertz was awarded the Venia legendi for zoology at the Philosophical Faculty: As a result, in addition to her research work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, she held lectures at this university until 1933. In 1931/1932 she spent a few months at the Laboratorio Biológico-Marino on Mallorca .

emigration

When the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Hertz was marginalized within the academic community because of her - according to National Socialist definition - Jewish descent: On September 2, 1933, the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Education informed her that her teaching license was withdrawn on the basis of Section 3 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933 with. Her research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute she could, although she was also dismissed in accordance with the professional civil service law from this, due to an exemption, they thanks to the intercession of Max Planck was to continue for the time being: After the Institute it under pressure from the Ministry 31 December 1931 had to give notice, due to Planck's ongoing commitment to their benefit, a special permit was issued by the Reich Minister of the Interior on January 3, 1934 to keep Hertz in the service of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. The basis was a regulation that allowed the Reich Minister of the Interior to allow exceptions in individual cases if “urgent needs of the administration so require”, to which Planck had invoked, arguing that “urgent considerations by the administration” would make Hertz's retention necessary, because the animal psychological work she plowed could not be carried out by any other party.

In 1935, Hertz decided to move to Great Britain, although her position in Berlin was initially secured for an indefinite period. Since November 1935 she stayed in London and Cambridge . She received six-month transition funding from the Academic Assistance Council . Her mother and sister Johanna Sophie Elisabeth Hertz (1887–1967) caught up with her shortly afterwards.

From January 1936 Hertz did research in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University . Like her mother and sister, she was financed by a Hertz fund that British radio companies had created in memory of Heinrich Hertz at the request of leading scientists. Despite these comparatively favorable conditions, Hertz's scientific creativity soon decreased considerably, which in the literature is attributed to health and family problems (death of the mother, mental illness of the sister), as well as the stressful situation of displacement. Around 1939 she completely stopped her research work and did not take it up again later.

In the post-war period, Hertz lived in poor conditions. Thanks to the advocacy of physicist Max von Laue , she was granted a modest pension in the mid-1950s and a retirement pension in 1957. The latter was awarded to her as part of a reparation procedure in which it was established that she would have obtained at least one extraordinary professorship under different political circumstances in Germany. Mathilde Hertz never took British citizenship. She died in Cambridge in 1975 and, as requested, was buried at the side of her father Heinrich Hertz in the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg .

Fonts

• Mathilde Hertz: observations on primitive mammalian bites . In: Journal for Morphology and Ecology of Animals . Springer, Berlin 1925, OCLC 72887346 , p. 540-584 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00408467 .
• Mathilde Hertz: Perceptual psychological investigations on the jay . In: Journal of Comparative Physiology . Berlin 1928, doi : 10.1007 / BF00340832 .
• Mathilde Hertz: The organization of the optical field in the bee . In: Journal of Comparative Physiology . Berlin, OCLC 4668081152 (The habilitation thesis was published in three parts: 1929 ( doi: 10.1007 / BF00340937 ), 1930 ( doi: 10.1007 / BF00339073 ), 1931 ( doi: 10.1007 / BF00338008 )).
• Heinrich Hertz: Memories, Letters, Diaries = Memoirs, letters, diaries . 2nd Edition. Physik Verlag, Weinheim 1977, OCLC 10023246 (compiled by Johanna and Mathilde Hertz, all texts in German and English).

literature

• Regina A. Kressley-Mba and Siegfried Jaeger: Rediscovering a Missing Link: The Sensory Physiologist and Comparative Psychologist Mathilde Hertz (1891–1975). In: History of Psychology. Volume 6, No. 4, 2003, pp. 379-396, doi: 10.1037 / 1093-4510.6.4.379 , full text (PDF) .
• Siegfried Jaeger: About the explainable but unexplained termination of a career. The animal psychologist and sensory physiologist Mathilde Herz (1891–1975) . In: H. Gundlach (Ed.): Studies on the history of psychology and psychotechnology . 1996, pp. 228-262. ISBN 3-89019-397-8 .
• Reinhard Rürup : Mathilde Carmen Hertz. Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, Berlin Dahlem. In: Ders .: Fates and Careers. Memorial book for the researchers expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society by the National Socialists. 2008, pp. 221-223.