GIt wasn't long before the Obersalzberg was expropriated. Anyone who didn't sell was threatened with a concentration camp. In order to create the “Führer restricted area” near Berchtesgaden, a mountain settlement of the National Socialist elite around Adolf Hitler, mountain farmers who had lived there for generations were expelled, as were owners of holiday homes. What happened back then is well documented in the new documentary Obersalzberg.
And yet the Munich journalist Ulrich Chaussy, who has done exemplary educational work with his decades-long research into the Oktoberfest attack, has discovered an astonishing figure in this cosmos who was only known to one contemporary witness almost forty years ago – Doctor Eichengrün. Arthur Eichengrün, a top Jewish chemist, owned a house on Obersalzberg. Chaussy stumbled upon the name in 1987 and the blank space never left him. He has now compiled the result of his reconstruction in a book, the subtitle of which uses a currently common phrase: “The man who could invent anything but himself”.
Around 1930, Eichengrün was considered the most innovative person in the chemical industry. Three years before the National Socialists came to power, he was ennobled with a detailed entry in the “Reich Manual of German Society”. A brilliant career and many inventions secured him this position.
Maybe the aspirin too
Born in Hanover in 1868 as the son of a cloth manufacturer and raised during the imperial era, the young Eichengrün quickly made a career at Bayer in Elberfeld. As a pharmaceutical chemist, he was part of a laboratory team that developed aspirin in 1897. At the same time, heroin was semi-synthesized there by Felix Hoffmann, who is also credited with synthesizing acetylsalicylic acid. But the same Arthur Eichengrün claimed the idea for himself fifty years later. To this day it is still controversial how it really happened. Chaussy gives his protagonist a larger role than historiography has previously done.
Eichengrün is increasingly shifting his field of work towards plastics; he is developing material for the traveling photography and film industries, including flashlights. The cellon he developed, a flame-retardant mixture, was used to paint the coverings of zeppelins and airplanes. The First World War made chemists like Eichengrün important experts in the war effort.
The mountains, the women
His Judaism does not seem to have particularly concerned him and he did not attempt to convert to the Christian faith. Eichengrün sees himself primarily as a German inventor who has his eye on the international market with his many patents. From today's perspective, it's easy to diagnose that he wasn't sufficiently interested in politics. His weakness for the mountains went hand in hand with an even greater weakness for women. The successful manufacturer with a stately villa in Grunewald had various wives, affairs here and there, his family tree branched out considerably, and the number of his children and grandchildren was large.
He tirelessly invents new products: gold foil for wrapping cigarettes, an elastic sound foil that can be played on the gramophone. Chaussy searched for these “imprintable speaking machine records” for years, partly because he hoped to hear Eichengrün’s voice on them – but in vain. Which is why he resorts to the trick of borrowing Eichengrün's voice: he corrects the biographer in italicized passages as if from beyond the grave. The author calls this a “fictional means of questioning” his perspective. Rather, it shows how deeply Chaussy was personally involved in this research. It doesn't necessarily serve the cause.
With Göring in the elevator
Because Eichengrün's life path is exciting enough. And closely interwoven with contemporary history. In the midst of Aryanization, he lives at Kaiserdamm 34 in Berlin; Hermann Göring lives in the apartment below him. The former flying ace knows the chemist and is aware of his role in aircraft construction. Only years after the seizure of power, Göring is said to have said to Eichengrün in the elevator: Doctor, why don't you emigrate? Didn't Göring know that Eichengrün's application to leave for London had been rejected?
Eichengrün is stuck while his family scatters to the four winds, loses his factory, his real estate, his money, is picked up by the Gestapo, and ultimately ends up in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944 – as one of two hundred celebrities to whom the SS granted better prison conditions. In the fall of 1945, his last apartment in Berlin burned out, he filed a criminal complaint against the Nazi officials who had prevented him from leaving the country – of course without results. In 1947, Eichengrün collected “What I owe to the Nazis” on three typewritten pages – to whom it may concern. The Technical University of Berlin awarded him an honorary doctorate on his eightieth birthday. This helps to restore his forgotten reputation, but Eichengrün is old, penniless and at the end of his strength. He ends up stranded in Bad Wiessee, where he dies the day before Christmas Eve 1949.
To the biographer's chagrin, Arthur Eichengrün kept his private life to himself and did not testify about his emotional states. And yet Ulrich Chaussy's research leaves the impression that the man did have the gift of adapting to the outside world through many skin changes. However, he seems to have been so focused on his self-image as a scientist and entrepreneur that he missed what he should not have overlooked.
Ulrich Chaussy: “Arthur Eichengrün”. The man who could invent anything but himself. Herder Verlag, Freiburg 2023. 368 pages, illustrations, hardcover, 26 euros.
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