By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Richard Martin Wilstätter was born in Karlsruhe on August 13, 1872. His father was a cloth merchant. In From My Life Wilstätter writes about his origins: “My forefathers were Jews. They had made their home in Karlsruhe since 1720. […] Rabbis, teachers, and a physician were among my ancestors.” Since childhood, he has been fascinated by the natural sciences: “At the age of twelve, I had decided on chemistry and natural sciences in general.”
Antisemitism haunted him from childhood: “In my native city there were always gangs of street urchins who yelled invective and threw stones at any child, Jewish or one they thought to be Jewish, who walked alone.” Richard attended elementary school in Karlsruhe and then transferred to a real gymnasium in Nuremberg. This is how he recalls the new city: “The mood of the city was poisoned by antisemitism to a far greater degree than in Karlsruhe. It manifested itself not in the behavior of street gangs as in Karlsruhe but in middle-class circles and my classmates, many of whom were sons of tradesmen and small businessmen.”
In 1890, Richard entered the University of Munich, where, under the supervision of Adolf von Bayer, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, he defended his doctoral thesis in 1894, in which he deciphered the chemical structure of cocaine.
Two years after his defense, he had this conversation with his supervisor, in whose laboratory he had successfully worked. Bayer said: “Now you are in, but you must let yourself be baptized.” Richard was confused and indignant: “The connection with a career was repugnant to me. Coming from the great man whom I could not suspect of opportunism, the suggestion was in comprehensible to me. […] Baptism removed the barriers in society and to a career as judge, government official, scholar, and even officers. Baptized Jews and their descendants, and those whose origins were in mixed marriages, shared and took considerable part in the culturally leading circles of Berlin. […] I came from a smaller, socially limited provincial circle which was liberal in religion but conservative in its adherence to Judaism.”
As a continuation of his collaboration with Bayer, Wilstätter became associate professor of organic chemistry at the University of Munich and in 1905 was appointed professor at the Institute of Technology in Zurich – ETH.
During his time in Zurich, Wilstätter received many invitations from universities in Germany and Austria. He accepted an offer from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the University of Berlin and began working there in October 1912. In Berlin he completed the studies on the chemical structure of chlorophyll begun in Zurich. His results were published in 1913. In 1915, Wilstätter received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his research on the coloring substances of the plant world, especially chlorophyll.”
In Berlin, he received the honorary title of Privy Councilor. Wilstätter worked in Berlin for 20 months, where he was caught by the First World War. The end of his fruitful work in Berlin was caused by a prestigious job offer at the University of Munich: “Around Easter I moved to Munich. […] When I accepted the appointment to the Munich professorship, the Bavarian Ministry considered it important to advance me from Privy Councilor to Privy Court Councilor even nine months before the actual move. […] My appointment as full professor at Munich and director of the State Chemical Laboratory took place on September 4, 1915.” This laboratory was named “Chemical Laboratory of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.” The document appointing Wilstätter and establishing his laboratory was signed by King Ludwig III. While signing this document, the king said to his minister, “This is the last time, though, that I will approve a Jew for you.” He was right: in November 1918 he was overthrown by the leader of the socialist revolution, the Jew Kurt Eisner.
On April 22, 1915, the Germans used chemical weapons against French soldiers. It was the first use of a weapon of mass destruction in history. The creator of this weapon and chief of the chemical service of the German army was Wilstätter’s friend Fritz Haber, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, a baptized Jew. Scientists from the Entente countries strongly protested against the Swedish Academy’s decision to award Haber the Nobel Prize. They declared that he was a war criminal. Chlorine gas, used by Haber’s chemical service, led to the suffocation of five thousand French soldiers, ten thousand other soldiers were disabled. For this act, he was promoted from non-commissioned officer to captain by the Kaiser himself – the rarest case of production in the officers of a man, by age not listed as a conscript.
One of Haber’s important coworkers was his friend Wilstätter. The latter’s view of the war was identical to Haber’s patriotic zeal: “The professors were convinced that Germany bore no responsibility for the war and that war had taken it by surprise. […] The war appeared to us to be a defensive one. […] Much later when the torch of war dazzled even the blind the question of guilt arose. The convenient answer of many people was that it had been the Kaiser’s fault.”
After the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles to end World War I by Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy in 1920, the Entente countries presented a list of “war criminals.” Among the 895 names was the captain and Privy State Councilor, Professor Haber. Wilstätter created a three-layer filter for German gas masks. More than 30 million of these gas masks were manufactured. For this work, Wilstätter was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. Despite Germany’s apparent aggression in the war Wilstätter collaborated with the “war criminal” Haber and called his activities “the gas defense work.”
Like the writer Thomas Mann, who also lived in Munich during the revolution and met the scientist at the home of his wife’s parents, Wilstätter condemned the socialist revolution in Bavaria. He was particularly frightened by the active role of the Jews in this coup: “Munich became the capital of the Communist movement. The period of terror lasted until the city was conquered by the Free Corps. […] Panic ruled at the University. […] There was a terrible, ingrained bitterness about the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movement. It was easy and convenient to ascribe the responsibility to them, first for the downfall of the monarchy, then for Ebert’s and Scheidemann’s seizure of power in the Reich, and particularly the guilt for the exhaustion of the army. […] One of my colleagues, a classical scholar and historian of great repute, was of the opinion that “We owe the revolution to the Jews.”
The revolution stimulated antisemitism in Munich, where a Nazi party was established. The university stopped employing Jews. In protest against antisemitic policies, Wilstätter resigned in 1924.
On November 10, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo tried to arrest Wilstätter to send him to Dachau camp. However, he managed to hide with the help of his faithful housekeeper in his huge house. In the spring of 1939, he emigrated to Switzerland. In his memoirs, written in the late 1930s, Wilstätter writes at length about his attitude toward the Jewish question. After historical excursions and reasoning, he arrives at a solution to the Jewish problem by assimilation and criticizes the revival of the Hebrew language: “It seemed to me the weakness of obstinacy to cling, as if this were the essential point, to the old religious customs which in part have forfeited their validity in the cultural changes over millennia, a weakness dangerous to the continued existence of Judaism in highly civilized countries, more dangerous than a liberal evolution. The retention and further development of the Hebrew language, too, seemed retrogressive to me.”
Richard Wilstätter died on August 3, 1942, in Muralto, Switzerland.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.