Biography Spiess
After studying chemistry, Irmgard Spiess initially worked as an assistant at Heidelberg University and then in BASF’s patent department. In 1927, she joined her husband’s family chemical business. She ran it for decades and continued to visit the company regularly even at the age of 100.
Irmgard Spiess, née Hogrefe, was born on 31 August 1898 in Wesel on the Lower Rhine. At the age of 18, she began studying chemistry at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg, where she received her doctorate summa cum laude in 1921. Her doctoral supervisor, Emil Knoevenagel (1865–1921), was a pupil of the renowned chemists Ludwig Gattermann (1860–1920) and Viktor Meyer (1848–1897), and gave his name to the Knoevenagel condensation, well known in specialist circles and an important reaction for forming carbon–carbon bonds.
Spiess was the first woman to receive an official assistant’s post at Heidelberg University. She then worked for almost two years in BASF’s patent department, where she was also given library duties. After marrying Paul Spiess, she moved to Kleinkarlbach in the Palatinate. There, the Spiess family owned a paint and varnish factory founded in 1861 by Paul Spiess’s grandfather, Carl Friedrich Spiess, at the instigation of Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), whose niece the company’s founder had married. In 1925, the factory began producing plant protection products, initially for viticulture and later for the agricultural sector as a whole.
After the birth of her two sons, Spiess joined the family business in 1927 and built a career there unlike that of almost any other woman in the chemical industry. The entrepreneurial couple, the Spiesses, developed the company together. When her husband was called up for military service in 1939, Irmgard Spiess steered the company single-handedly through the turmoil of war and the post-war years. After her husband was released from captivity, the couple resumed running the business together. When Paul Spiess died in 1963, his wife continued to run the company, at times with support from her sons. She remained active in the business for over 70 years, many of them as managing director, and continued to visit the company regularly at the age of 100. She is said never to have relinquished the company’s management until the end of her life. In recognition of her life’s work, she received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, First Class, and the Order of Merit of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate. Irmgard Spiess died at her home in Kleinkarlbach on 28 January 1999, aged 100.
The career of the chemist Spiess is unquestionably remarkable, but from today’s perspective at least one product her company once traded in is cause for concern. A key factor in the company’s success was the licence it acquired in 1943 for the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, which had been used on a large scale as a contact and stomach poison since the early 1940s. Because of its toxicity, persistence in the environment and accumulation in the food chain, the use of DDT was banned in most Western industrialised countries in the 1970s. Today, the chemical is approved worldwide only for controlling disease-carrying insects such as the malaria mosquito.
Literature
G. Oberste-Lehn: A company legend from Kleinkarlbach. Dr. Irmgard Spiess. The “grande dame” of the Palatinate economy, in: Heimat Jahrbuch 2001 Landkreis Bad Dürkheim
Authors
Prof. Dr. Eberhard Ehlers
Prof. Dr. Heribert Offermanns
Editorial work
Dr. Uta Neubauer
Project management
Dr. Karin J. Schmitz (GDCh-public relations)
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