Willstatter, Richard memoirs

Willstatter, Richard, From My Ufe, The Memoirs of Richard Willstatter. Translated by Lilli S. Homig. New York W.A. Benjamin, 1965. This is the Enghsh translation of the autobiography of the famous German organic chemist. 

The Willstatter controversy began four years after the end of the war, when Arthur Stoll, a chemist living in Switzerland, edited and published the memoirs of his former teacher and colleague Richard Willstatter. Richard Willstatter had been one of Germany s most celebrated and influen-... 

While Hitler s armies ravaged Europe, Richard Willstatter wrote his memoirs from a refuge in Switzerland. As he struggled to make sense of the history he d witnessed, Willstatter s thoughts turned to the earlier war in which he and Haber served. He searched for explanations for that disaster and eventually settled on society s inability to properly harness the power of technology, what Willstatter called the machine. The machine, he wrote, has sped up the pace of history. It has placed demands on the abilities of humans that humans are not equipped to satisfy. Willstatter wondered, and doubted, if humanity s ethical and moral leadership could keep pace with its technical achievements. 

Harold Hartley (1878-1972) was educated at Dulwich and Oxford, and studied chemistry with Richard Willstatter in Munich, before graduating from Oxford in 1900, and becoming a Fellow of Balliol. In 1915, he was sent to France as Chemical Adviser, Third Army. In 1917, he became Assistant Director of Gas Services at GHQ, and in 1918, transferred to the Ministry of Munitions as director of the Chemical Warfare Department. In 1919, the department was transferred to the Artillery, and he returned to Oxford. In 1921, he helped set up the Research and Development Establishment of the War Office, and served on its Chemical Warfare Board until the 1950s. See Biog. Memoirs, Fellows of the Royal Society, 19 (December 1973), 348-373, esp. 356-357. 

Cf. Richard Willstatter, From my life The memoirs of Richard Willstatter, trans. Lilli Hornig from the 2nd. German edn. [Weinheim, 1958] (New York, 1965), 310. 

In October of 1949 Horlein sent a letter to Richard Kuhn to discuss the Willstatter autobiography. A number of passages, complained Horlein, were inaccurate and potentially damaging to the reputations of Bayer and the chemical industry. The first concerned two pharmaceuticals for which Willstatter had partially held the patent, Willstatter complained in his memoirs that in the 1920s Bayer had prematurely removed the drug Voluntal from the market in favor of other, less effective sleeping aids. Bayer had... 

Richard Willstatter, in fact, was careful throughout his memoirs to avoid such generalizations. 

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