Biography Spiess
After studying chemistry, Irmgard Spiess initially worked as an assistant at Heidelberg University and subsequently in BASF’s patent department. In 1927, she joined her husband’s family chemical company. 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 Heidelberg’s Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, where she was awarded her doctorate summa cum laude in 1921. Her doctoral supervisor Emil Knoevenagel (1865-1921) had been a student of the renowned chemists Ludwig Gattermann (1860-1920) and Viktor Meyer (1848-1897), and was the namesake of the Knoevenagel condensation, well known in specialist circles as an important reaction for forming carbon-carbon bonds.
Spiess was the first woman to officially receive an assistant’s position at Heidelberg University. She then worked for just under two years in BASF’s patent department, where she was also assigned library duties. After marrying Paul Spiess, she moved to Kleinkarlbach in the Palatinate. There, the Spiess family owned a paints and varnishes factory founded in 1861 by Carl Friedrich Spiess, Paul Spiess’s grandfather – at the suggestion 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, as hardly any other woman in the chemical industry had done. 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 alone through the turmoil of the war and the post-war period. After her husband was released from captivity, the couple resumed joint management of the business. When Paul Spiess died in 1963, his wife continued to run the company, supported by her sons at times. She remained active in the company for more than 70 years, many of them as managing director, and continued to visit the company regularly even at the age of 100. She is said never to have relinquished control of the company until the end of her life. For her life’s work, she received the Cross of 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 undoubtedly remarkable, but from today’s perspective at least one product her company once traded in is cause for concern. Crucial to the company’s commercial success was the licence acquired in 1943 for the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, which had been used extensively as a contact and stomach poison since the early 1940s. Due to 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 authorised worldwide only for controlling disease-transmitting insects such as the malaria mosquito.
Literature
G. Oberste-Lehn: Firmenlegende aus Kleinkarlbach. Dr. Irmgard Spiess. „La grande Dame“ der pfälzischen Wirtschaft, in: Heimat Jahrbuch 2001 Landkreis Bad Dürkheim
gechem.de/ueber-uns/geschichte/
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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