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It often takes decades before the experiences of your time as a student are written down on paper. Often these are retrospectives, memoirs or (auto)biographies published at the end of one's life, in which printed details can be found that were previously only exchanged at graduate meetings or at regulars' tables. These memories are of particular interest when they involve celebrities. Celebrities in a double sense, on the one hand from the perspective of the speakers and on the other hand from the perspective of those who were sitting in the auditorium at the time. Historical daily newspapers can also be found as a source.
If you compare subjectively experienced lectures in the lecture hall of the professors with their scientific work, different worlds often emerge. Here a dazzling personality, there a dry scientific opus - knowing both aspects is certainly enriching.
Theodor Fuchs (1841 to 1925), one of the great and unfairly little-known paleontologists of the Natural History Museum, was one of the early students of the geologist and paleontologist Eduard Suess (1831 to 1914). On the occasion of Suess's 75th anniversary, Fuchs looked back on his first meeting in November 1861 in the rooms of the old university building on Bäckerstrasse (Vienna's inner city). Fuchs wanted to kill time, had no money for the coffee house and happened to walk into the lecture hall where Suess was reading paleontology.
Fuchs wrote in the "Neue Freie Presse" of August 19, 1906. "After a while the young lecturer appeared, a slim man in simple clothes, a somewhat dubious top hat in his hand, in a careless posture, hunched over, narrow-chested, with sunken cheeks and cloudy eyes. 'Poor man,' I thought to myself, 'you would be better too if you had less to study and more to eat.'" When Suess then said When he climbed into the chair, his impression was only confirmed: "The voice sounded weak and veiled, and I thought again: 'Well, the man is just a hectic man.'" As Suess began to recite the material, he increasingly thawed. "The voice rose, it became urgent and energetic. The man went to the blackboard and drew the sketch of an octopus." The 30-year-old Suess now completely convinced the 20-year-old Fuchs: "... the way he drew, the playful confidence with which he seemingly mechanically threw the object onto the board in such a characteristic way, amazed me, I had never seen anything like that before." Suess fascinated his audience, Fuchs was carried away: "And now it went on, the slackness had disappeared, the whole figure seemed to grow, the speech was firm and definite, and when he finished, I was completely under his spell."
Another student, Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg (1871 to 1962), who would later make a name for himself as a botanist, around 30 years later heard Suess, who had also been a politician since 1862, first in the Vienna municipal council and then in the Reichsrat, as an experienced lecturer. "I heard the geologist Eduard Sueß once and a while at meetings. He spoke very beautifully with a lot of pathos, somewhat pastorally."
The said Tschermak-Seysenegg, son of the well-known mineralogist Gustav Tschermak-Seysenegg (1836 to 1927), began his scientific studies in 1891, during which he met numerous, sometimes oddball, professors. You can read about it in his autobiography “Life and Work of an Austrian Plant Breeder” (1958). One of the professors was the botanist Josef Böhm (1831 to 1893). "(He) was an excellent and funny teacher and had a very good academic reputation. His lectures were always very well attended. As a person and as a teacher he was an original." The students followed his lectures with “hooting, clapping and noise,” so that everyone knew: “Böhm is now giving his lecture.” In a word: he was popular and knew how to secure the favor of the students. "Before he began, he recapitulated the content of the previous (lecture) in a few words, or he had diligent listeners recapitulate it, who then received a colloquium certificate without being specifically examined, for which he first asked for the approval of the listeners.
Böhm enriched his lectures with the identification of plants. Many anecdotes have been handed down here. The young Tschermak-Seysenegg remembers: "Identifying plants during the lecture was very funny. For this purpose he sat down next to us in the bench and began: 'So, Mr. Maier, identify this plant for me.' To which the apostrophe replied: 'That's a woodruff.' Böhm: 'Donkey, I would have said soon, is it a bam, is it a shrub or a herbaceous plant? This is how we start. But don't talk so cleverly about it. By the way, it's not a woodruff at all, but a galium (bedweed), you tepp, you!'"
Another teacher of the student Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg was Oskar Simony (1852 to 1915), son of the famous geographer and Dachstein researcher Friedrich Simony (1813 to 1896), who was to become one of his sponsors in later years and attended the then k.k. University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (today: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences; Boku). But "as a teacher, he couldn't inspire us. He wrote his lectures on two or three blackboards with incredible speed and often had to stop while erasing because we couldn't keep up."
Simony was a well-trained ascetic. Tschermak-Seysenegg had his own perspective. "Simony was a strong man who impressed with his strength and often impressed his listeners by lifting benches filled with students, wrestling, bending iron bars, dumbbells and on excursions through dangerous climbing and swimming." He doesn't care much about his appearance. He "often walked through the city without a shirt, only with a plastron attached to a split rope, with worn-out clothes and worn-out shoes, because he almost never used the tram." Regardless, he was a warm-hearted person who did everything he could to support students in need. "He was also the soul of the support association for needy students, constantly collected for it and made many sacrifices for the cafeteria, to which he also left his inherited silver."
Just like the aforementioned Eduard Suess, the physicist Hans Thirring (1888 to 1976) initially succeeded as a scientist at the University of Vienna before making a name for himself as a politician (member of the Federal Council from 1957 to 1964). In his own portrayal, he saw himself above all as a successful scientist. As a measure, he cites the number of high-ranking positions held by his graduates. "So if many of my students enjoyed attending my lectures, this is largely due to the temperament type I was born with (cyclothymic). The result of this is also my productivity in terms of raising academic talent. Around two dozen of my former students have achieved professorships at universities or research institutes of the same rank. This is several times the number of positions in this subject that exist in Austria, so that I have contributed to the large export surplus of academics in my subject. In complete contrast to my fruitfulness as a teacher, my achievements as a researcher are rather meager, although not uninteresting." According to Wissen.de, cyclothymics are described as energetic, rough, humorous, sensual and people-friendly connoisseurs.
Confirmation of his statements can be found in the person of Victor F. Weisskopf (1908 to 2002). Born in Vienna, he was director of the European Research Center CERN in Geneva from 1961 to 1965. During his studies, the young Weisskopf heard "theoretical physics from Professor Hans Thirring, a well-known physicist and excellent teacher."
First, a post script about Hans Thirring, who was not only convincing as a physicist and owner of numerous patents. The subtitle of his biography, edited by Brigitte Zimmel and Gabriele Kerber, reveals his dual talent: "A life for physics and peace." Klaus Ta Schwer summarized his career, which was massively hindered by anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers, in the STANDARD in a compact and easy-to-read format under the title "A physicist as a fighter for peace". Taschwer in the original tone: "In response to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physicist wrote the book 'The History of the Atomic Bomb' in 1946, in which he anticipated the hydrogen bomb and correctly described its detonator." After these details, Thirring focused in the last chapter on the topic of "atomic bomb and world peace", which from then on shaped his life, in which he also became politically active.
But not only Thirring, the aforementioned Theodor Fuchs also thought about disarmament in light of the First World War. This facet of the paleontologist was hardly known until now and is not even found in his obituary. In 1915, Fuchs published “Aphorisms on the Question of Disarmament.” In the final sentence he takes a stand for Europe. He formulates a goal for the "Pacifist Movement" that it "must strive for if it wants to achieve practical success, and this goal is called: 'promoting the European states'." (Thomas Hofmann, December 12, 2024)