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Manfred Eigen - Burying Nernst three times (15/113)

350 views · Published 19 July 2017 · 2:22 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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Manfred Eigen (1927-2019) was a German biophysical chemist, best known for his work on measuring fast chemical reactions called relaxation techniques. He was co-recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [Listener: Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitch; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: Nernst was a very authoritative person. There is a nice story perhaps I could tell. Nernst later was somehow in disgrace with the Nazi system but he died during the war and they forbid to have a big funeral ceremony, but some of the professors went secretly and he was buried at his farm which is east of Berlin. And, among them were Bonhoeffer, Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer, to whom I later came after Eucken, but I will tell later about that, and Richard Becker, whom I mentioned, who was a theoretical physicist in Göttingen. So, they met, but then when the war came to the end that part of Germany was taken by Russian troops and they brought Nernst over to Thuringia, but then it was decided that also Thuringia was occupied by Russian troops and they brought him to Göttingen.

It happened that in Thuringia again Bonhoeffer and Becker went to a little ceremony and finally, when he came to Göttingen, Bonhoeffer founded the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, physical chemistry, and Becker was the Professor of Theoretical Physics. And then it happened at the cemetery that Bonhoeffer said to his colleague, Becker, 'Isn't that somehow funny that we bury our colleague Nernst now for the third time?' And Becker said, 'Oh, you can't do it often enough', because Nernst was such a rough person that they all... but that was a joke of course.

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