Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915): Germany’s First Woman to Earn a Doctorate in 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 give up 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 managed 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 aptitude 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 so-called governess, since it was barely possible for women to enter the domain of science at that time. Even the Abitur and university studies were regarded as male privileges.

With her intelligence and moral courage, and through perseverance and hard work, Immerwahr nevertheless prevailed. As a guest student, she attended the University of Breslau. Although a physics professor made it clear that he had “no time for intellectual Amazons”, he was unable to discourage Immerwahr. She focused on chemistry and gained access to the laboratories, where she conducted experiments. 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 experiments. After taking the Abitur in 1897 as an external pupil at a boys’ grammar school, 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 with magna cum laude. The “Provinzial-Zeitung” of Breslau reported on 22 December 1900: “Our first female doctor. At 12 noon sharp on Saturday, the promotion of Fräulein Immerwahr took place in the Leopoldina Aula of our Alma Mater.” Immerwahr was the first German chemist to hold a doctorate – although not the first female chemist to receive a doctorate in Germany. The Russian chemist Julia Lermontova (1847–1919) had already received her doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1874.

After her dissertation, Immerwahr initially took up an unpaid assistantship. She had once rejected a marriage proposal from her former dancing-class companion Fritz Haber (1868–1934). But when she met Haber again, who had also 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 researching as an extraordinary 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 in the role of housewife, mother and professor’s wife expected to represent her husband socially. 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 is left of me fills me with the deepest dissatisfaction.” Her hopes of becoming more involved in her husband’s research again 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, 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 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 1934 at a hotel in Basel while travelling to Israel.

Although Clara Immerwahr took 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, 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