Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915): Germany’s first female doctor of chemistry

Clara Immerwahr was broken by the misogynistic scientific system and by her marriage to the famous chemist Fritz Haber. After the birth of their son, she felt compelled to abandon her Career in research. At the age of 44, she took her own life.

Clara Immerwahr was born on 21 June 1870 as the youngest of four children of the chemist Philipp Immerwahr and his wife Anna on the Oswitz estate in Polkendorf in Lower Silesia (now Wojczyce, Poland). Her father ran the estate and experimented with artificial fertiliser.

In summer, the Immerwahrs lived on the country estate, where the children received private tuition. In winter, they lived in Breslau, 25 kilometres away, which at the time was the third-largest city in the German Empire, with 240,000 inhabitants. Here, the three daughters attended a girls’ secondary school. Its liberal headmistress recognised Clara’s talent for the natural sciences, encouraged her interest in chemistry and gave her a specialist book entitled “Conversations on Chemistry”. Immerwahr initially obtained the highest educational qualification available to women, qualifying as a teacher, and worked for a time as a governess, since it was scarcely possible for women to enter the domain of science at that time. Even the Abitur and university study were regarded as male privileges.

But with her intelligence and moral courage, tenacity and diligence, Immerwahr prevailed. As an auditing student, she attended the University of Breslau. A physics professor made it clear that he had “no time for intellectual Amazons”, but he could not deter Immerwahr. She concentrated on chemistry and gained access to the laboratories in order to conduct experiments there. The Breslau professor Richard Abegg (1869–1910), a chemist and pioneer of valence theory and the octet rule, recognised her abilities. He became her scientific mentor and later her doctoral supervisor. At first, Immerwahr assisted him with his experiments. After passing the Abitur as an external pupil at a boys’ grammar school in 1897, she was permitted to enrol as a full-time student. Three years later, at the age of 30, she received her doctorate in physical chemistry, graduating magna cum laude. The Breslau “Provinzial-Zeitung” reported on 22 December 1900: “Our first female doctor. At noon on Saturday at 12 o’clock sharp, the graduation of Miss Immerwahr took place in the Leopoldina Hall of our Alma Mater.” Immerwahr was the first German woman chemist to receive a doctorate—although not the first woman chemist to be awarded a doctorate in Germany. The Russian chemist Julia Lermontova (1847–1919) had already received her doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1874.

After completing her dissertation, Immerwahr initially took up an unpaid assistantship. She had once rejected a marriage proposal from her former dancing-class friend Fritz Haber (1868–1934). But when she met Haber again—he had also studied chemistry in Breslau—he asked for her hand once more. This time Immerwahr accepted, and the two married in 1901. They dreamed of a marriage modelled on that of Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867–1934) and her husband Pierre Curie (1859–1906), who researched and lived together in Paris.

Their enthusiasm for chemistry was not the only thing Immerwahr and Haber had in common. Both came from Jewish Breslau families, but had converted to Protestantism before their wedding. At the time of their marriage, Haber was teaching and researching as an associate professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Immerwahr worked in his laboratory until their son Hermann was born in 1902. While Haber continued to devote himself entirely to science, Immerwahr felt confined by her role as a housewife, mother and professor’s wife expected to perform representational duties. In 1909, she wrote to her doctoral supervisor Abegg: “What Fritz has gained in these eight years, that—and more—I have lost, and what remains of me fills me with the deepest dissatisfaction.” Her hopes of becoming more involved in her husband’s research were not fulfilled.

In 1910, the family moved from Karlsruhe to Berlin-Dahlem, where Haber became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for physical chemistry and electrochemistry. After the outbreak of the First World War, he began experiments with chemical warfare agents and played a key role in planning their use as weapons of mass destruction. Immerwahr, by contrast, publicly described the development of poison gas as a “perversion of science”. The marriage fell into an ever-deepening crisis, until the once so self-confident and assertive chemist could see no way out. On 2 May 1915, Clara Immerwahr shot herself in the garden of the villa in Moltkestraße with her husband’s service pistol. In January 1937, her son Hermann had her urn reinterred in his father’s grave at the Hörnli cemetery in Basel. Fritz Haber, who had received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, had emigrated to England in 1933 and died of heart failure in a hotel in Basel in 1934 while en route to Israel.

Although Clara Immerwahr adopted her husband’s name after their marriage, she is referred to in the Literature—and therefore also in this text—by her maiden name. She became known to a wider audience in 2014 through the ARD television film “Clara Immerwahr”, which traces her life story and focuses in particular on misogyny in science at the beginning of the 20th century.

Literature

G. von Leitner: Der Fall Clara Immerwahr. Leben für eine humane Wissenschaft, Beck Verlag, München, 1994, 2. Auflage

S. Friedrich: Immerwahr, dtv, München, 2007

German Chemical Society (GDCh): Chemikerinnen – es gab sie und es gibt sie, Broschüre 2003, S. 11