Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915): Germany’s first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry #

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

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

In summer, the Immerwahrs lived at the country estate, where the children received private tuition. In winter, they lived in Breslau, 25 kilometres away. At the time, with 240,000 inhabitants, it was the third-largest city in the German Empire. There, the three daughters attended a secondary school for girls. Its liberal headmistress recognised Clara’s aptitude for science, fostered her interest in chemistry and gave her a specialist book entitled “Conversations on Chemistry”. Immerwahr initially obtained the highest educational qualification available to women, as a teacher, and worked for a time as a so-called governess, since it was almost impossible for women to enter the domain of science at the time. Even taking the Abitur and going to university were considered male privileges.

But Immerwahr prevailed through her intelligence and courage, perseverance and diligence. She attended the University of Breslau as a guest student. A physics professor made it clear that he thought “nothing of intellectual Amazons”, but he could not put Immerwahr off. She focused on chemistry and gained access to the laboratories to carry out 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 academic mentor and later her doctoral supervisor. At first, Immerwahr assisted him with experiments. After passing the Abitur as an external candidate at a boys’ grammar school in 1897, she was allowed to enrol as a full-time student. Three years later, at the age of 30, she was awarded a doctorate in physical chemistry magna cum laude. The Breslau “Provinzial-Zeitung” reported on 22 December 1900: “Our first female doctor. On Saturday at 12 noon s. t., the promotion of Fräulein Immerwahr took place in the Leopoldina Hall of our Alma Mater.” Immerwahr was the first German woman chemist to earn a doctorate, though not the first woman chemist to receive one in Germany. The Russian chemist Julia Lermontova (1847-1919) had already received her doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1874.

After completing her dissertation, Immerwahr initially took up an unpaid assistantship. She had once turned down a marriage proposal from Fritz Haber (1868-1934), a friend from her dancing lessons. But when she met Haber again, after he too had studied chemistry in Breslau, he asked for her hand once more. This time Immerwahr agreed, 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 families in Breslau, but had converted to Protestantism before their wedding. At the time of their marriage, Haber was teaching and carrying out research as an associate professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. Immerwahr worked in his laboratory until their son Hermann was born in 1902. While Haber continued to immerse himself in science, Immerwahr felt constrained by her role as a housewife, mother and professor’s wife expected to perform a social role. In 1909, she wrote to her doctoral supervisor Abegg: “What Fritz has gained in these eight years, I have lost — and more besides — and what little 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 major role in planning their use as weapons of mass destruction. Immerwahr, on the other hand, publicly called the development of poison gas a “perversion of science”. The marriage fell into an ever-deeper crisis, until the once so confident and assertive chemist could see no way out. On 2 May 1915, Clara Immerwahr shot herself in the garden of the villa on Moltkestraße with her husband’s service pistol. In January 1937, her son Hermann had her ashes 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 synthesising 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 took her husband’s name after they married, she is referred to in the literature — and therefore also in this text — by her maiden name. She became known to a wide 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, Munich, 1994, 2nd edition

S. Friedrich: Immerwahr, dtv, Munich, 2007

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