4 a Patchwork Institute

4 A Patchwork Institute I came to Dahlem as the brief and, for the Dahlem Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, very painful period of the Russian occupation of the district had just ended. Before me, the Nazi Director Prof. Thiessen was charged by the Russians with the administration of the Institute. Thiessen, who had promised to go with his institute to Russia, led the thorough and methodical transport of all the valuable equipment in the Institute to Russia. So I was presented with a bleak picture at the beginning of my commission. The Institute was completely plundered, even the switch panels and wiring were removed for the most part. Only a few scientists remained in Berlin.1 The foregoing is from a report by Robert Havemann, written in the summer of 1947 while he was recuperating in Switzerland. Two years earlier, the government of Berlin, in the person of Otto Winzer, communist Head of the Department of Public Education, had appointed Havemann “Head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Soci- ety.” His appointment was a political decision made against the background of the division of Berlin into four sectors in preparation for the Potsdam Conference in July of 1945. For the communist-oriented Berlin government and the Soviet military administration the appointment of Havemann was a fait accompli; still, Havemann was the ideal man for the office. On the one hand, Havemann was a communist and had proven his integrity to more than just the Soviet occupying forces through his antifascist resistance activities, for which he was sentenced to die in 1944. On the other hand, as a fully-qualified colloid chemist, Havemann had at his command scientific credentials that earned him marked respect in antifascist scholarly circles, particularly those close to the communist party, although the latter were not yet so common. Furthermore, he was already familiar with the Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, having done his doctoral research there under George Ettisch. In conjunction with his “Presidency” of the KWG, he returned to the Institute, took over its management and built up a division for colloid chemistry. The Institute would also be his main residence for the next five years, during which he occupied rooms in Haber Villa.2 Havemann’s enthroning as the President of the Berlin KWG elicited vocifer- ous protests from established representatives of the KWG. A group of directors and leading coworkers from the Berlin institutes made clear their opposition to the appointment in a letter dated 7 July 1945, arguing that the “official right” suspended during the Third Reich “to appoint the President and other leading fig- ures by free choice of the Senate and of the scientific advisory board,” was once 1 R. Havemann: Bericht über meine Tätigkeit als Leiter der Verwaltung der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute in Berlin-Dahlem. St. Gallen 16. August 1947, ARHG. 2 Hoffmann, Havemann. 4 A Patchwork Institute Fig. 4.1. Robert Havemann with the colorimeter he designed. again valid and in full force. In addition, the Göttingen-based General Administra- tion and the acting KWG President, Max Planck, both spoke energetically against the appointment and wanted it to be restricted to the Soviet occupied zone, if it remained valid at all. A grinding struggle for power and prestige ensued between the Göttingen General Administration and the “Havemann opposition government,” during which, as a sign of the accelerating Cold War, Havemann’s position was increasingly marginalized and his activities ever more tightly constrained. Among the few effective measures initiated by Havemann and actually carried through were the appointment of a scientific advisory board (wissenschaftlicher Rat) for the Berlin KWG institutes, a form of corporate representation of the Scien- tific Members of the KWG that was first established in 1928, with considerable help from Haber. Similar to a university faculty, it was intended to give the relevant scholars a say in the governing of the Society. Under the Third Reich, this organ for the quasi-democratic distribution of power had been suspended. In the first years after the war, the Scientific Advisory Board, on which served the heads of the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm institutes, contributed substantively to the stability of the institutes in Dahlem and their ability to develop new research profiles. Another of Havemann’s initiatives in the immediate post-war years related to the introduction of denazification measures; questionnaires were developed that had to be filled out by all staff members, on the basis of which former National Socialist party members were dismissed. Among the scientists still present there were relatively few former active Nazis, since the majority had either settled in western or southern 132 4 A Patchwork Institute Robert Havemann (1910–1982) Robert Havemann’s mother wasanartistandhisfather a teacher and later a jour- nalist. Havemann started his study of chemistry at Munich in 1929 and switched to Berlin in 1932, where he wrote a thesis under Georg Ettisch in Herbert Freund- lich’s Department of the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. The Nazi usurpation of power in Germany resulted in the termination of Havemann’s fellowship at the Institute and led him to become involved in the antifascist resistance. His activities within the Socialist fringe group “New Beginning” remained undetected, so he was able to defend his thesis at the Berlin University and graduate in the Spring of 1935. Subsequently, he held research positions at Berlin hospitals and in 1937 became assistant at the Pharmacological Institute of the Berlin University. During this time he made a name for himself in the fields of colloid and protein chemistry. He constructed analytical apparatus (the Have- mann colorimeter) and carried out research on blood and hemoglobin, as well as the biochemistry of poisoning and protein chemistry. In the summer of 1943 he received his habilitation, which marked the culmination of his research work. Only a few weeks later, Havemann was arrested as a member of the resistance group “European Union,” which not only produced anti-Nazi leaflets but also helped hide Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. Havemann was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for treason. However, his colleagues from the Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt) were able to reclaim Havemann for “important war research,” so that his execution was postponed from month to month. From his imprisonment until his release in April 1945, Havemann worked on poison-gas and poison-gas filter research in a laboratory set up especially for him in a Brandenburg prison. His resistance activities and his aid to those persecuted by the Nazi regime would earn Havemann posthumous recog- nition as one of the “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of WWII, Havemann was commissioned by the Soviets to admin- ister the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. In addition he set up a laboratory at the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in which he resumed his research on col- loids and dyes. As an overt Communist and opponent of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Havemann’s simmering conflict with the West-Berlin authorities culminated in 1950, at the peak of the Cold War, in his dismissal. As a result, he relocated to the GDR, where he carried on with his research on proteins and photochemistry, as professor at Hum- boldt University and director of its Institute for Physical Chemistry. In addition to his research, he was also active politically, e.g. as dean of student affairs, pro-rector, and 133 4 A Patchwork Institute a member of the GDR Parliament (Volkskammer). Havemann’s career as a Stalinist functionary and scientist came to an end in the early 1960s when, encouraged by the Soviet thaw, he articulated doubts about the omnipotence and omniscience of Communist power and ideology in the GDR and subsequently fell out of favor with the GDR’s power elite. His 1963-64 lecture series, later published as “Dialectics without Dogmatism,” marked the final breakdown of his relations with the authorities, which was followed by his dismissal from the university and, in 1966, an expulsion from the Academy, in contravention of its statutes. Thereafter, the authorities, who repeatedly brought trumped up criminal charges against him, banned him from public life in the GDR, a restriction that remained in place until his death in 1982. Nevertheless, through his writings, published in the western parts of Germany, Havemann became one of the most significant and outspoken critics of the regime in the GDR and one of its best known political dissidents, whose activism advanced the formation of independent ecology, peace and human rights movements in the country. He thereby paved the way for the revolutionary changes that took place east of Germany’s inner border in the year 1989. Germany or gone to the Soviet Union, like Thiessen. By Havemann’s own account, the case of the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research, Ger- hard Eitel, gave Havemann the most trouble, as Eitel ranked among the especially active Nazis and “since 1933 [had] behaved very evilly” but, on the other hand, was also a well-renowned scientist. Through Havemann, Eitel was removed from his position as Institute Director, but he was allowed to continue his theoretical research. By order of the American military administration, however, he was dismissed in 1946, and a criminal investigation was initiated against him. During the Cold War he emigrated to the US, and in 1966, the Freie Universtät Berlin awarded him an honorary doctorate. The resumption of research at the Institute and beyond proved uncommonly difficult since scientific activities were halted by Allied decree until 1946; even the resumption of the traditional Institute Colloquium was forbidden.

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