Wichard von Moellendorff (engineer)

Wichard von Moellendorff

Wichard Georg Otto von Moellendorff (born October 3, 1881 in Hong Kong ; † May 4, 1937 in Berlin ) was a German engineer and economic theorist. He became known to the public for his economic and political activities during and after the First World War . Before and after, he worked very successfully in materials research .

Life

Wichard von Moellendorff was the son of the German zoologist and consular interpreter (later consul) Otto von Möllendorff (from the noble family Moellendorff ) and his wife Betty, née Blau. He attended high schools in Görlitz and Tilsit and studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Charlottenburg near Berlin (today TU Berlin ) from 1901 to 1906 . In 1902 he married Elisabeth (Lis) Erdmann. The marriage resulted in the daughter Hedda in 1904 and the son Wichard in 1919. The marriage ended in divorce in 1934. In 1935 Moellendorff married Erika Tuesday. A few days after her suicide in 1937, he too committed suicide. Moellendorff was buried in the Onkel-Tom-Strasse municipal cemetery in Berlin-Zehlendorf . The grave no longer exists today.

Started as an engineer and essayist

During his studies Moellendorff had contact with the time-critical journalist Maximilian Harden , in whose magazine Die Zukunft he published several articles. Through Harden he was introduced to Walther Rathenau , who held managerial positions in the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft AEG founded by his father . Rathenau hired the young engineer in 1906 at the AEG cable works Oberspree ( Oberschöneweide near Berlin ) and became an admired role model for Moellendorff.

From 1908, Moellendorff built and managed a central metal laboratory at the Oberspree cable works, which was then the largest metal processing factory in Germany. The organization of this laboratory with three departments (one mechanical, one chemical and one metallographic ) became for some time the model for similar facilities in other companies. Here, analogous to Walther Rathenau during his orientation time in Bitterfeld, he worked on, in addition to routine material tests and development tasks, also basic problems, in particular the plastic deformation of metals, which was theoretically not understood and seemed to contradict the crystal nature of metals. By means of careful experiments he succeeded in refuting the industrial engineer the ideas put forward by the important Göttingen physical chemist Gustav Tammann .

Economic politician and theorist

From the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Germany's opponents of the war hindered the import of raw materials, on which Germany was dependent for supplies and warfare, through blockade measures. Moellendorff pointed out the expected consequences for the industry to Walther Rathenau and suggested that state raw material management should be encouraged. Rathenau obtained the establishment of the War Resource Department in the Prussian War Ministry shortly afterwards and took over its management. Moellendorff moved there with him as head of the chemistry section and soon acquired additional skills. From August 1915 to April 1916 he was director of the war chemicals company, then secret commissioner for the Reichsstickstoffwerke, from July 1916 Reich commissioner for calcium cyanamide, from September 1916 technical assistant to the head of the weapons and ammunition procurement office (WUMBA), which was created within the war raw materials department was. During this time he also wrote a memorandum “German Community Economy”, which presents a compromise model between a capitalist market economy and a socialist planned economy (see also community economy ). According to this vision, an equal system of councils and specialist committees should steer the economy through plans in order, for example, to avoid the "frictional losses" caused by competitive behavior; However, industrial private property was to remain possible, because Moellendorff considered entrepreneurial initiative to be indispensable as the driving force behind the economy.

In April 1918 Moellendorff was appointed to a full professorship for economics and finance at the TH Hannover. However, as early as November 1918, after the revolution and the proclamation of the republic, the social democratic politician Rudolf Wissell brought Moellendorff as undersecretary of state to the Reichswirtschaftsamt in order to realize the common economic ideas with him. The proposals were controversial. In a cabinet meeting in 1919, Wissell (now Minister for Economic Affairs) presented the concept that had been developed, but all the other ministers rejected it; The planned economy went too far for the bourgeoisie, while the Social Democrats demanded major nationalizations . Wissell and Moellendorff then resigned from their government offices.

Moellendorff's relationship with Walther Rathenau was now distant. While the public identified the public economy concept with Moellendorff, Rathenau (correctly) described himself as the originator of many of the underlying ideas. Moellendorff, on the other hand, emphasized that Rathenau did not act according to these ideas himself, but rather wanted to return to the prewar private capitalist economy. A dispute as to which of the two originally initiated the war raw materials management at the time led to final estrangement in 1920.

You can recognize the engineer in Moellendorff's economic lectures and writings. To evaluate economic policy measures, for example, he used the concept of efficiency and, whenever possible, never relied on assumptions, but on observed facts. As an improved database for economic policy considerations, he wrote an "elementary economic comparison" between different countries based on his own extensive surveys. Even after the end of his short political career, he remained a sought-after expert in economic matters, held various supervisory board mandates and, from 1926, was a member of the mixed economic sub-committee of the preparatory disarmament conference of the League of Nations in Geneva. Excerpts from his scattered economic and socio-political writings were later published in the book “Conservative Socialism”.

Materials Testing Office and Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Metal Research

In 1923 Moellendorff became head of the Prussian State Materials Testing Office in Berlin (today the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing ) and shortly thereafter - without additional salary - also took over the management of the Institute for Metal Research of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society , which he moved into the premises of the Materials Testing Office recorded. In doing so, he saved the institute, which was financially endangered by inflation , and even used the “ symbiosis ” of the two institutions to set up a new department for structural research with X-rays, despite the scarce resources . In the years that followed, this did important work to elucidate the plastic deformability of metals, i.e. in the area that Moellendorff had already been particularly important in his AEG laboratory. The collaboration of Michael Polanyi , who belonged to another Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, with the X-ray department of the metal research institute contributed to Polanyi's final interpretation of plasticity through the mechanism of the step dislocation . Although this was published in writing only in 1934 - at the same time as two other, independent discoverers - Polanyi presented it to a conference in 1932.

In 1927 Moellendorff became vice president of the International Association for Metal Testing. He was also a member of the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society from 1927, even after he had resigned from the management functions of the materials testing office and the institute in 1929.

National Socialist rule

In May 1933 Moellendorff offered Max Planck , the President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, to give up his Senate seat. In the summer of the same year he also announced his resignation from society and wrote to Planck: “I do not want to remain a member of society, because as a 'conservative socialist' I am associated with some ideas that have become modern today, with certain ones that are gradually becoming known to me But rape, which has nothing to do with the German or the scientific matter, disagree and may not even seem. "

Moellendorff also withdrew more and more from all other functions and activities. Shortly after the suicide of his second wife in May 1937, he ended his life with his own hands.

Fonts

• German public economy . Berlin 1916
• Conservative Socialism (Ed. Hermann Curth). Hamburg 1932

literature

• David E. Barclay:  Moellendorff, Wichard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 632 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Dieter Schmid: Wichard von Moellendorff. A contribution to the idea of ​​economic self-government . Dissertation FU Berlin 1970
• Klaus Braun: Conservatism and Public Economy. A study on Wichard von Moellendorff . Dissertation at the University of Duisburg 1978; Duisburg University Contributions 11, ISBN 3-87096-147-3

Mainly through engineering activities:

• Jürgen Evers, Ulrich von Möllendorff, Ulrich Marsch: Wichard von Moellendorff (1881-1937). Material tester, metal researcher, economic politician. History of technology Vol. 71 (2004) pp. 139–157, ISSN  0040-117X .
• J. Evers, L. Möckl: With logical sharpness and systematic inflexibility - Wichard von Moellendorff. Chemistry in Our Time Volume 49 (2015) pp. 236–247

Web links

• Ulrike Triebs: Wichard von Moellendorff. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. LeMO at the German Historical Museum
2. ↑ ^{a b c} TU-Berlin -Universitätszeitung TU-intern, May 2007 edition, article Ich warne! I am a Prussian. A reminder to Wichard von Moellendorff ( Memento of the original from January 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.