Wilhelm Benary

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Wilhelm Benary

John Wilhelm Franz Benary (born May 2, 1888 in Erfurt , † July 31, 1955 in Santa Barbara (California) ) was a German psychologist , publisher and businessman.

education

Wilhelm Benary was a son of the businessman John Benary and his wife Helene, geb. Birkett, and a grandson of Ernst Benary . He attended the Royal High School in Erfurt , which he left with the Abitur in 1907, and then studied medicine in Breslau for a year. After a semester of philosophy at the University of Freiburg, he did military service, then Benary continued his philosophy studies in Wroclaw. After stations in Breslau, Erfurt and Berlin, he presented the first sport psychological dissertation in 1913 under the title The psychological theory of sport in Germany. The doctoral supervisor was William Stern . His doctorate was followed by postgraduate studies in London in 1913/14, after which he set up a private school in his parents' house in Erfurt. In the Frankfurt Ethnographic Museum, he began preparing for an expedition to New Guinea from 1914 on , which may have been inspired by Max Wertheimer's work On the Thinking of Primitive Peoples and Wilhelm Knappe's South Sea Collection. Because of the outbreak of war , which led Benary to Russia as a soldier, this trip never took place. In the museum he met Margot Isbert, who was then employed there as a secretary , whom he married in Hamburg in 1917 and with whom he had a daughter in 1921.

Scientific work

Benary cross

William Stern , who was meanwhile working in Hamburg, brought Benary to his institute in 1917 to develop attention tests for aviation observers. This work was stopped after the end of the war, but gave Stern Benary the opportunity to publish regularly. Benary also became a member of the Society for Experimental Psychology and took part in the Marburg Congress in 1921; however, there was no university career in post-war Hamburg. From 1919 to 1922 Benary worked as a trainee in Frankfurt with the neurologist Kurt Goldstein and examined in particular one case of shape blindness . From 1922 to 1923 he held a position at the psychological institute in Berlin under Wolfgang Köhler , and he was also a regular employee of the journal Psychological Research .

In this phase, he also developed the Benary Cross , with which it can be demonstrated that the same light areas are perceived differently bright when they are assigned to different objects, can be therefore assumed that in the feeling of contrast unless the retina and the cortex does share . The Benary Cross consists of a black cross on a white background. In one of the angles formed by two cross arms there is a gray triangle, another gray triangle is part of one of the cross bars. Both triangles are framed on two sides by the black color of the cross, so that their different perception cannot be explained by lateral inhibition . However, since one triangle is assigned to the light background and the other to the dark cross, the triangle outside of the cross bars appears darker than the one on the bar.

Publishers

1924 founded Benary in Erlangen established the world-Publishing and the publisher of the philosophical academy Erlangen. The publications focused on neo-Kantianism and the philosophy of language , but adventure books were also published at the same time. The authors who published with Benary included Bertrand Russell , Rudolf Carnap , Moritz Schlick and Hans Cornelius , and he also published the writing Geschicklichkeit in Sport und Industrie by TH Pear , which Margot Benary-Isbert had translated. After bankruptcy, Benary and his two publishers moved to Berlin in 1927 without his previous partner Friedrich Krische, where they worked for the Verlag Dr. Wilhelm Benary rose. In 1928 he brought out Rudolf Arnheim's first independent book , Voice of the Gallery .

Work in the family business

From 1929 to 1930 Benary worked as an assistant at the Berlin University. He then returned to Erfurt, where his wife still looked after the publishing house until 1932, which was then dissolved. Wilhelm Benary himself worked in the family business as managing director of the company JC Schmidt, which was linked to the Benary seed shop. Benary, who was considered a half-Jew under the National Socialists, was thinking of emigrating to the USA, but was probably held back by company interests in Erfurt. Shortly before the end of the war he was called up for work, but was able to return quickly. In April 1945 Benary was appointed President of the Erfurt Chamber of Commerce . He remained in this function in Erfurt after the city was occupied by the Russians; He had sent his wife and daughter Eva to a farm near Fulda . But after all the other members of the Chamber of Commerce had disappeared, Benary also fled to the West and settled with his family in Hannoversch Münden , where he helped to rebuild the family business.

Last years in the US

In 1952 the family in Thuringia was expropriated and the more than hundred-year history of the company in Erfurt came to an end. At the age of 64, Wilhelm Benary emigrated with his family to the United States, where he took up work in a flower company until 1955, when the proceeds from Margot Benary-Isbert's books enabled him to move to California. Wilhelm Benary died shortly after the move on July 31, 1955.

A project at the University of Erfurt is currently (as of February 2009) devoted to the creation of a biography of Wilhelm Benary .

Works (selection)

  • The psychological theory of sport , Berlin 1913
  • Sport as an individual and social phenomenon , Berlin 1913
  • Short report on work on proficiency tests for aviator observers. I. Communication , in: Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 15, 1919, pp. 161–192 (reprinted several times)
  • Short report on work on proficiency tests for aviator observers. Part II , in: Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 16, 1919, pp. 250–307 (reprinted several times)
  • Psychological tests of aptitude for occupation , in: Frankfurter Zeitung, March 13, 1920
  • On the question of the methods of psychological intelligence and aptitude tests , in: Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 17 (1/3), 1920, pp. 110-133
  • Psychology and Medicine , in: Frankfurter Zeitung, March 19, 1921
  • Studies on the investigation of intelligence in a case of soul blindness , in: Psychologische Forschung 2, 1922, pp. 209-297
  • Observations on an experiment on brightness contrast , in: Psychologische Forschung 5, 1924, pp. 131-142

Web links

literature

  • Jürgen Court, Jan-Peters [sic!] Janssen, Wilhelm Benary (1888-1955). Life and Work , Lengerich / Berlin / Bremen / Viernheim / Vienna et al. (Pabst) 2003, = Psychology Science 45, Suppl. 4
  • Jürgen Court, Wilhelm Benary: Sport as an individual and social phenomenon (1913) , in: Jürgen Court, Eckhard Meinberg (ed.), Classics and trailblazers in sports science , Stuttgart (Kohlhammer) 2006, ISBN 3-17-018616-7 , Pp. 61-67
  • Jürgen Court, Wilhelm Benary as publisher of Gestalt psychology , in: Gestalt Theory, 25 (4), 307–317.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German-speaking psychologists 1933–1945, 2nd edition, Springer Verlag, p. 30.
  2. ↑ Uwe Wolfradt, Elfriede Billmann-Mahecha, Armin Stock: German-speaking psychologists 1933–1945. ISBN 978-3-658-01481-0 , p. 30 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  3. ↑ http://nwda-db.wsulibs.wsu.edu/findaid/ark:/80444/xv45156
  4. ↑ - ( Memento of October 26, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Illustration of the Benary Cross
  6. ↑ Psychology Science, January 1, 2003, online excerpt ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ http://www2.uni-erfurt.de/sport/seiten/forschung/forschung.html
personal data
SURNAME Benary, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Benary, John Wilhelm Franz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychologist, publisher and businessman
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Erfurt
DATE OF DEATH July 31, 1955
Place of death Santa Barbara (California)