Introduction: historiography of disciplines and women in science

In 1914 the first Institut für Vererbungswissenschaft (Institute for Heredity Research) in Germany was founded in Berlin as part of the Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule (Agricultural College). Erwin Baur (1875–1933) was appointed director. The majority of his scientific staff was made up of women: Gerda von Ubisch, Elisabeth Schiemann, Luise von Graevenitz, Emmy Stein and Paula Hertwig.Footnote ¹ The only male staff member who worked at the institute for a considerable period was Hans Nachtsheim. In 1930, ‘thanks to the efforts of Baur and his colleagues the Dahlem Institute had reached a position of world renown’.Footnote ² In this period genetics developed from a new and vulnerable field of research into an established and accepted discipline in Germany. Women scientists were largely responsible for this development.

From the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly through the establishment of the research universities, scientific knowledge increased enormously, and that growth was by and large canalized by the emergence of so-called ‘scientific disciplines’. Recent scholars have tried to explain that a disciplinary division of knowledge was by no means ‘natural’, but developed in the course of time and was influenced by interdependent scientific, social, economic and national factors.Footnote ³ In their accounts, disciplines are not monolithic structures but are best understood as heterogeneous families of disciplinary programmes, which can be characterized by distinct social, organizational, and scientific–technical practices in various places and at different times.Footnote ⁴ Notwithstanding these insights, most disciplinary histories confine themselves largely to the content of the discipline or occasionally institutional factors. The study of social and human factors – if undertaken at all – is mostly focused on a few pioneers or participants who are considered to have opened up new horizons within the discipline. Little attention is usually paid to the large number of researchers who, by their joint efforts, ultimately shaped the discipline.

We want to contribute to social and human factors of disciplinary historiography by discussing the role of women researchers at the first German institute for genetics. The emergence of heredity as a scientific discipline can be located relatively precisely in the time between 1900 and 1930. During this period, parallel processes took place in various countries. Journals were set up, national societies were founded, institutes dedicated to the study of heredity were established and international conferences were held. The first histories of genetics were written in the 1960s by geneticists who did not pay significant attention to these institutional factors. Instead, they mainly restricted themselves to scientific concepts, to the importance of the experimental character of the new study of heredity, to Mendel, to the rediscoverers, and to a few other pioneers.Footnote ⁵ These histories reflect the naive idea that science is a mechanical fact-gathering exercise instead of a human activity, and in so doing serve the purpose of legitimizing both the discipline itself and the professional identity of its practitioners.Footnote ⁶ Disciplinary histories canonize what belongs to the discipline, which predecessors must be considered the founders, and what must be considered its heart and what the edges. Various factors play a role in such a legitimization: the existence of an undisputed founding father, and in the case of genetics undisputed ‘rediscoverers’, and undisputed demarcations with other knowledge fields. These histories in general pay attention to only a few very prominent researchers, and disregard the social context and the networks on which these ‘captains of the discipline’ depended.

A second generation of (professional) historians highlighted many of these early histories’ deficiencies, in focusing on a founding father (Mendel) and his ‘independent rediscoverers’. Robert Olby was prominent amongst these, giving shrewd accounts of early priority debates and interpretations of Mendel as reputational and discipline-building moves.Footnote ⁷

What of women in these two generations of genetic historiography? During the period when the first histories were written, the dominant attitude was that women played at best a supportive role in the scientific enterprise, and accordingly they mention women contributors rarely and cursorily in their heroic narratives.Footnote ⁸ The historiography, in this sense, reflected the prejudices of many of its subjects, as is illustrated by the case of Theodor Roemer. Sounded out as a potential successor to Baur at the Berlin Institute, Roemer expressed distaste for its substantially female workforce, calling it a Damenstift; that is, a convent for noblewomen.Footnote ⁹

Although the second generation of historical studies approached the history of genetics more broadly, the women factor still did not receive attention.Footnote ¹⁰ However, this situation has started to change. In 2007 a thematic issue of the Journal of the History of Biology was dedicated to the role of women in the formation of the discipline of genetics and a few other articles have also paid attention to this topic.Footnote ¹¹ Efforts have been initiated to draw more general conclusions about the role of women in the field of genetics.Footnote ¹² The contributions of women in several countries, such as Britain, Norway and the Netherlands, have been evaluated, but Germany has not yet received the attention it deserves.

The history of scientific disciplinarity is in large part the history of universities, since, in the course of the nineteenth century, university departments and academic institutions became the main sites of scientific research. Universities’ inaccessibility to women therefore adds another aspect to the history of women's participation in science.Footnote ¹³ Universities in most countries had opened their doors to women by the end of the nineteenth century, but when, and to what extent, varied from country to country. In Germany, university access for women was introduced relatively late and was dependent on the state where a university was located: in Berlin (which was in Prussia) women only gained the right to study at university after 1908.Footnote ¹⁴

Gaining an academic degree was one thing; finding academic employment often turned out to be much more complicated.Footnote ¹⁵ By the early twentieth century, however, universities were expanding at unprecedented rates and this meant that there was a growing demand for qualified staff. As a result, several modes of academic employment became available for women. One of these was the emergence of ‘female’ disciplines. Home economics emerged in the USA in the late nineteenth century and women had the opportunity to reach its highest ranks.Footnote ¹⁶ A second possibility for women was to accept ‘unattractive’ jobs in traditional disciplines. A well-known example was the calculators in astronomy. This work, which involved precise calculations and was rather invisible, required great patience. Women often stayed in such jobs for many years. Another example was the workers in US fruit fly research that took place between 1934 and 1970. In this period the workers involved were mostly non-faculty staff members and the percentage of female non-faculty members was much higher than the percentage of females in the faculty.Footnote ¹⁷ How widespread this practice was is difficult to assess because non-faculty staff members are usually not mentioned in the available sources.Footnote ¹⁸

A third way of finding an academic position was to look for work in a new field. Newly established areas have no established positions. Their prestige is often lower than that of established disciplines, and as a result they are frequently avoided by more ambitious scientists. In turn, these new disciplines benefit from the eagerness of new participants to make contributions. Thus, when the first academic women sought opportunities in science, many entered disciplines in this early stage of development. Radioactivity, biochemistry, ecology and the study of heredity were all such areas in the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁹ For genetics an additional factor must be mentioned. Originally, most geneticists were educated as botanists, and botany was a field of knowledge that had attracted and admitted women since the first half of the nineteenth century, because it was considered more suitable for women than most other fields.Footnote ²⁰

As a relatively large number of women researchers was incorporated in the discipline of genetics, the question can be asked, what was their role? The answer seems to be that it was restricted to what the sociologist Timothy Lenoir has characterized as ‘technoscience’; that is, research that meets criteria of scientificity and hence publishability. But this, as Lenoir goes on, is only the first step in a truly successful career. To become an acknowledged authority in a field, institution-oriented activities are also necessary: such as institution building, founding a journal or a scientific society, or organizing a conference.Footnote ²¹ In the early twentieth century, women could not engage in institution-oriented activities, even in new disciplines.

With these considerations in place, a number of questions arise that will be discussed in the remainder of the paper. The sympathies of institutional directors seem intuitively relevant to the matter under discussion. Several examples can be given. As one of us has previously discovered, the head of the zoological laboratory of the University of Oslo, Georg Ossian Sars, was a supporter of women, actively arguing for the appointment of the later geneticist Kristine Bonnevie, against a background where, in his words, ‘it is still far more difficult for women than for men to reach an independent position in society’.Footnote ²²

In this article it will become clear, however, that an institute or laboratory director with a clearly positive attitude towards women was not necessarily a prerequisite for women to be employed at such a place. Although we do not know of explicit statements by Baur on the women question, his behaviour suggests that he was not supportive of the women's movement, even though his Institute for Heredity Research was dominated by women staff members. The important point for us is that human and institutional factors in building genetic disciplinarity are best traced through action and event. The outstanding questions are as follows: first, what role did women play in the development of genetics as a discipline; second, was it limited, as Lenoir suggests, and if so what consequences did this have – for the discipline (sui generis and as a historical entity), for their own careers, and for the careers of their male superiors?

The study of heredity in Germany

In the early twentieth century, it was not obvious which part of the previous and multivalent study of heredity would become part of the new discipline of genetics, and which would not.Footnote ²³ Heredity originally was taken to include not only the transmission of characters from parents to offspring, but also the development of a fertilized egg into an embryo and into an adult organism, and included physiological investigations conducted to support theories of this type. By the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain, various theories of the transmission of heredity had been formulated, all of them quite speculative. It resulted in two conflicting statistical approaches, and ultimately one of these, Mendelian genetics, became the dominant form of genetics at the expense of the biometrical approach.

In the case of Germany, Jonathan Harwood has distinguished two traditions between 1900 and 1933: a ‘comprehensive’ and a ‘pragmatic’ one, each with its own style of scientific thought.Footnote ²⁴ The most important concentration of researchers in the comprehensive tradition could be found in Göttingen, notably the zoologist Alfred Kühn and the botanist Fritz von Wettstein. These viewed Mendelian and Morganian genetics (the pragmatic tradition), of which the Baur school was the most dominant representative, as much too narrow, because it did not take the development of an organism into account. In addition, the comprehensives thought that concentrating on the cell nucleus and ignoring the influence of the cytoplasm could not result in a comprehensive theory of inheritance. They found that in Mendelian genetics there was too much emphasis on overly specialist experiments; the problems that were studied seemed simply irrelevant. Nor did they like the quantitative and statistical approach connected with Mendelian and Morganian genetics.Footnote ²⁵ Mendelians originally did not pay attention to the physiological basis of heredity; they collected mainly quantitative data from hybridization experiments.Footnote ²⁶

Another factor in the development of German genetics was the potential applicability of the new science. The new discipline was expected to help increase agricultural yields, make nicer and better gardens, and improve the quality of the human race.Footnote ²⁷ In Germany the first genetics institute was founded at the Agricultural College in Berlin in 1914. The promise of the applicability of the results of genetics in agriculture was explicitly stated as an important reason for this establishment. In Britain the similarly intended John Innes institute was in 1910 privately funded by horticultural and agricultural entrepreneurs. In the Netherlands and in the US, a promising applicability to agriculture was also important, and in Norway and the US eugenics played a role in the foundation and development of genetics.Footnote ²⁸

The fact that the first German institute for genetics was established at an agricultural college must also be understood against the background of a hierarchy in institutions of higher education in Germany at the start of the twentieth century. The universities were the most prestigious, followed by the technical colleges, and at the bottom were the agricultural colleges and other specialized institutions. The first genetics institute belonged to an organization of higher education with relatively low prestige. Moreover, between 1900 and 1930 there were no institutes or chairs exclusively devoted to genetics in German universities. The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Biologie (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, KWIB, f. 1914), was until about 1933 the only other major institution, besides Baur's, to carry out hereditarian research. Two of the five divisions of the KWIB focused on genetics: Carl Correns (1864–1933) was head of plant genetics and Richard Goldschmidt (1878–1958) headed research into animal genetics. Some of the members of the protozoology division of Max Hartmann (1876–1962) were also working on questions of heredity. Although some of the staff in this institute were working within the Mendelian and Morganian framework, the dominant approach was the comprehensive one.Footnote ²⁹ Like Baur's Agricultural Institute, the KWIB employed female staff.Footnote ³⁰ The genetics institute of the agricultural institute, however, was the only German genetics research centre that consistently had an almost exclusively female staff.

In the following parts of this paper, a narrative of the Institute for Heredity Research, from its inception until the departures of Baur in 1929 and Schiemann in 1931, is constructed and discussed (Figure 1). Special attention is paid to the scientific staff members and their work, with the aim of uncovering the role of gender in this history. Additionally, the Institute for Heredity Research will briefly be compared with its ‘sister’: the John Innes Horticultural Institute.

Figure 1. Timeline of the Institute for Heredity Research of the Agricultural College in Berlin (1911) 1914–1933, prepared by Janneke M. Ravenek.

The Berlin Institute for Heredity Research: early years

It took Erwin Baur longer than he had hoped to establish his own genetics institute.Footnote ³¹ He was educated in medicine and gained his doctoral degree in 1900, but he had been interested in botany from early on (Figure 2).Footnote ³² In 1904 he came to Berlin to work as a first assistant at the Botanical Institute of the Friedrich Wilhelm University (now the Humboldt University of Berlin). He looked for a research area of his own and he realized that he might be able to occupy the as yet (in Germany) rather empty niche of Mendelian genetics. He began to do hybridization experiments with snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus), an established model plant in evolutionary and hereditary studies in Britain. He established a private allotment in Friedrichshagen in the east of Berlin. In addition to snapdragons, he grew and hybridized grains, potatoes and cabbage. In 1905 he began to offer a course on Mendelian genetics at the University of Berlin. In 1908 he was the main founder of the Zeitschrift für inductive Abstammungs- und Vererbungslehre (Journal of Inductive Science of Descent and Heredity), which can be considered the first journal of genetics (William Bateson (1861–1926) would follow in 1910 with the Journal of Genetics). In 1911 Baur's textbook Einführung in die Experimentelle Vererbungslehre (Introduction to the Experimental Science of Heredity) was published and would be reprinted several times.Footnote ³³

Figure 2. Demonstrations of the botanical work by Erwin Baur at the Berlin International Congress of Genetics, 1927. Hans Nachtsheim, Verhandlungen des V. Internationalen Kongresses für Vererbungswissenschaft Berlin 1927 Band, Leipzig: Verlag von Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1928, p. 79.

In the same year, 1911, Erwin Baur was appointed professor of botany at the Agricultural College in Berlin and his remit was to focus on heredity (see Figure 1). He was promised his own institute with an official assistant. Before this was realized, in 1912 he appointed his first scientific worker, Gerta von Ubisch (1882–1965). She came from an intellectual Jewish background; her father was an art historian. After attending a girls’ school, from which she graduated with a Gymnasium diploma, she became one of the first female physics students in Germany. She first attended the university in Heidelberg but then moved to Freiburg, because, according to her, ‘at the universities in Baden the conditions for women studying were the most favourable’ – and then to Berlin.Footnote ³⁴

Gerta von Ubisch eventually decided that she was not really talented in physics, so after her PhD in 1911 she moved into botany and was advised to go to Baur.Footnote ³⁵ ‘Baur was full of enthusiasm for his field’.Footnote ³⁶ He welcomed her, promised to teach her botany and said that once the official position of assistant in genetics became available, she would be appointed. For the time being he gave her an agricultural allowance for the study of grains.Footnote ³⁷

Contrary to his promises, Baur did not make her his official assistant. He said, whether by way of reason or excuse, that ‘the Agricultural College found it important that the assistants were from an agricultural background with a diploma in breeding theory’.Footnote ³⁸ He therefore advised her to accept the position of assistant that was being offered by Correns at the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, which at the time was located in Münster. In the spring of 1914 she moved to this institute, where Hans Kappert, whom we shall meet again, was very helpful to her.Footnote ³⁹ Because, according to von Ubisch, Correns was afraid that Baur would lay claim to her work, she did not get the opportunity to do her own research.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1915 she decided to leave the institute and she accepted various jobs in the private plant-breeding sector.Footnote ⁴¹

In the meantime, in 1914, the Prussian parliament had made funding available for the establishment of the Institute for Heredity Research at the Agricultural College.Footnote ⁴² Baur appointed Elisabeth Schiemann (1881–1972) his scientific assistant.Footnote ⁴³ She also came from an educated background, the daughter of Theodor Schiemann, a professor of east European history at the University of Berlin.Footnote ⁴⁴ She became a teacher, which at the time was one of the few professional opportunities open to women. In 1906, she became an auditor in the natural sciences at the University of Berlin. She could not become a regular student, as women were not yet admitted. Baur directed her attention to genetics. According to her later pupil Herman Kuckuck, Baur drew Schiemann ‘entirely under his spell’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1912, supervised by Baur, she earned her doctorate at the University of Berlin with a thirty-five-page paper on mutations.Footnote ⁴⁶ And in 1914 she received the job that was originally promised to von Ubisch.

When the war broke out, Baur had to join the army as a physician and all efforts related to acquiring premises for the institute came to a standstill. In 1915, however, the Agricultural College acquired a plot of land in Potsdam. Baur's institute was given part of it and under the supervision of Schiemann provisional facilities were built where plants as well as animals could be investigated. These premises developed into a fruitful place for research.Footnote ⁴⁷ For the time being the research was largely but not exclusively restricted to plants. Baur also worked with rats, dogs and rabbits.Footnote ⁴⁸

Two new members were added to the staff during the war, again women (Figure 1). Luise von Graevenitz (1877–1921) joined the institute in 1915 and Emmy Stein (1879–1954) in 1917.Footnote ⁴⁹ Luise von Graevenitz was educated at the Horticultural School for women in Marienfelde near Berlin, where she met Emmy Stein in 1904. They became lifelong friends. Emmy Stein came from a family of wealthy industrialists in Düsseldorf, which made her independent throughout her life.Footnote ⁵⁰ After Marienfelde, von Graevenitz and Stein went to the Botanical Institute of the University of Berlin, where they met Baur and prepared themselves for a journey to the tropics. In 1906–1907 they stayed in the Dutch East Indies and visited Japan. On their return they studied botany in Zurich. Both gained their PhDs in botany in 1913 in Jena.Footnote ⁵¹ During the war von Graevenitz worked at Baur's newly established institute and did ‘a very promising study on potatoes’.Footnote ⁵² She was not employed by the Agricultural College, but was modestly paid from other sources.Footnote ⁵³ In 1917 Emmy Stein became a volunteer assistant, which meant a low salary or no salary at all. In 1918 Gerta von Ubisch returned to Baur's institute. Baur had obtained funding to work on plants used for making fabrics, because during the war and its aftermath it was difficult for Germany to import foreign plants like cotton and sisal. Von Ubisch also continued work on barley. She characterized her work with Baur as a ‘sweet and valuable cooperation’.Footnote ⁵⁴

During this period a couple of research lines can already be detected. Baur intended to do the research on snapdragons as a botanical parallel to the work on fruit flies by Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) and his co-workers in the USA.Footnote ⁵⁵ He became interested in the relevance of mutations for evolution and for eugenics.Footnote ⁵⁶ At Baur's initiative, Emmy Stein was one of the first to study the effect of radiation on plants, which was possible because of the availability of an X-ray machine acquired with the help of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Council for German Science).Footnote ⁵⁷ She studied irradiated snapdragons and discussed various aspects of irradiated tissue that became affected by cancer.Footnote ⁵⁸ In addition, Mendelian genetics was considered promising to produce useful applications in agriculture. When Baur's institute was established the board of the Agricultural College insisted that he work with agriculturally interesting organisms. Baur cherished his good relationship with agricultural organizations in Germany. They made funds available for this kind of research, which Baur farmed out to his assistants. Von Ubisch's and Schiemann's research focused on Mendelian factors by hybridizing barley varieties. Schiemann tried to find a winter-hardy variety.Footnote ⁵⁹

That von Ubisch and Schiemann did similar research resulted in a difficult relationship between the two. According to a recent biographer of von Ubisch, ‘An agreement with Miss Schiemann … to wait with publication until Ubisch had completed her work on barley was not fulfilled by Miss Schiemann, and therefore both scientists published their work at the same time’.Footnote ⁶⁰ According to the biographer, von Ubisch concluded in 1921 that she had to abandon ‘the cooperation with Baur which was so dear and valuable’ to her.Footnote ⁶¹ She went to Heidelberg where she taught genetics.Footnote ⁶² As she was Jewish, she was dismissed in the Nazi period. She travelled to Brazil in 1935, had various jobs in genetics and biology, and returned to Heidelberg in 1952 where she had to accept jobs outside biology. She died in 1965.Footnote ⁶³

In 1919, after the war, Baur started to lecture again and Schiemann prepared the practical parts.Footnote ⁶⁴ Four scientific assistants were working at Baur's institute, all of them female (see Figure 1). This composition was unusual and their positions were weak. In a list of the salaried official assistants of the Agricultural College from 1920, Schiemann was the only female on the list.Footnote ⁶⁵ Her salary was RM 3,900, almost the lowest on the scale of salaries.Footnote ⁶⁶ In a list of the paid assistants of the Agricultural College, there were eight assistants who were partly or entirely remunerated from external funds and three of these were women. It is interesting to note that of these assistants, the only two who had a doctorate were female: von Graevenitz and von Ubisch.Footnote ⁶⁷ They were apparently overqualified. During this period Baur wrote a letter to the rector, in which he stated that his fund assistants did the same work as the regular assistants and therefore should earn the same salary.Footnote ⁶⁸ He asked for financial compensation for von Graevenitz and von Ubisch.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1924 he stated that it was unacceptable that his assistants were only employed for short periods of time, because their research would become ‘entirely invalid’.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is thus clear that Baur employed these women in temporary and lower positions and at a lower salary than they should have had in view of the work they did. Stein was not mentioned, because she did not have an appointment, but her case was of course even more compelling. Unfortunately, in 1921 von Graevenitz died of diabetes; this affected the whole institute but in particular Emmy Stein, with whom she lived as well as worked.Footnote ⁷¹

Right from the start, Baur decided that the work at the institute should not be restricted to plant genetics. In 1921 two zoologists, Hans Nachtsheim and Paula Hertwig, became attached to the institute. Hans Nachtsheim (1890–1979), the first male assistant, came from a relatively intellectual background, as his father was a geheimer Justizrat (privy counsellor).Footnote ⁷² Nachtsheim studied at the universities of Bonn and Munich. His thesis of 1913 and his Habilitationsschrift discussed the cytological characteristics of the sex differences of bees.Footnote ⁷³ Between 1915 and 1919 he was in the military, but this did not prevent him from accepting the position of assistant at the Zoological Institute of the University in Munich in 1916. Here he worked under the directorship of the professor of zoology, Richard Hertwig (1850–1937). In 1919 he became a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) in zoology, and while in this position he came into contact with Erwin Baur and learnt about Morgan's school of fruit fly research.Footnote ⁷⁴ He then published a long overview article on the heredity of fruit flies and the German translation of Morgan's famous book.Footnote ⁷⁵

A document written by Nachtsheim in 1929 makes clear that it was difficult for Baur to recruit suitable personnel. The way Baur tried to employ this zoologist reveals to what lengths he was willing to go.Footnote ⁷⁶ In January 1920 Baur sent Nachtsheim a letter saying that he was looking for a head of the zoological department at his institute.Footnote ⁷⁷ He asked whether Nachtsheim was interested, but also pointed out the risks involved in accepting such a position: Nachtsheim should take into account that a position at the Agricultural College would diminish the chance of an academic post at a university. Moreover, he would have to specialize in a field in which professorships were not yet available. In a subsequent letter Baur stated that he could offer him a permanent job with a salary of between about RM 8,000 and 9,000. In March, Baur informed Nachtsheim that the position needed final approval by the Prussian parliament. In a letter in June Baur wrote that everything would be settled before the winter semester. The salary of a head of department would start at RM 18,000.Footnote ⁷⁸ This was apparently so attractive that Nachtsheim resigned from his position in Munich. In early September, however, he received a telegram from Baur telling him to stay on in Munich until spring. But Nachtsheim's former position had already been offered to someone else. Fortunately he could be reappointed, albeit in a lower position. In November 1920 Baur once again asked Nachtsheim to join his institute and become head of department. Nachtsheim hesitated, but Hertwig advised him to go ahead, because it would improve his position.Footnote ⁷⁹

Finally, in 1921, Nachtsheim began work in Baur's institute. He acted as the head of the zoological department but his appointment was that of an assistant. The position of department head appeared not to exist. Nachtsheim ‘felt paralysed’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nachtsheim later commented that the discrepancy between his position and Baur's promises had soured the years that he spent at the institute.Footnote ⁸¹ That Nachtsheim felt badly treated did not prevent him from making important contributions to the institute's activities. In 1928 he published an account of his experiments on the topography of the X-chromosome of the fruit fly.Footnote ⁸² He also initiated new research lines that strengthened the focus of the institute on the study of agriculturally interesting organisms. He discussed the origin of rabbit races from a genetic point of view and discussed, within the Mendelian framework, the heredity of quality and colour of fur. In 1935 his monograph on the heredity of rabbits appeared.Footnote ⁸³

Paula Hertwig (1889–1983) joined the institute in 1921.Footnote ⁸⁴ She was a daughter of Richard Hertwig's brother Oscar, a professor of anatomy at the university in Berlin. In 1908, the university had just opened its doors to women and she studied zoology, botany, chemistry and comparative anatomy and attended Baur's courses.Footnote ⁸⁵ She worked on cytogenetics at her father's laboratory and collaborated with her brother Günther (1888–1970) on studies of the effect of radiation and chemicals on the division of cells in frog and fish embryos. In 1916 she received her PhD magna cum laude and in 1919 she was the first woman to gain the right to teach in the philosophical faculty of the University of Berlin.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1921 Hertwig was employed at Baur's institute as a supernumerary assistant, which meant no job security and a lower salary than a regular assistant. She began to study the heredity of chickens. In preparation she studied the work of Bateson and his co-workers, amongst others Edith Saunders, and of many others. She completed this research by writing an overview article for a wider audience in 1930.Footnote ⁸⁷ Her research on irradiated mice and rats would become her best-known work.Footnote ⁸⁸ She discussed the influence of radiation on humans and human heredity and concluded that radiation therapy could harm offspring.Footnote ⁸⁹

Although the Potsdam provisional institute became, according to Schiemann, a fruitful place for research in plant as well as animal genetics, Baur put tireless efforts into acquiring new premises.Footnote ⁹⁰ He found that he did not receive sufficient funding. To get his requests accepted he made a variety of threats to the officials of the Agricultural College.Footnote ⁹¹ According to Schiemann in her biography of Baur, ‘And so the years after 1918 became a bitter, often desperate, struggle. The delay of the construction of the Dahlem institute strained Baur's nerves.’Footnote ⁹²

In 1922 Baur convinced the Emergency Council for German Science that he needed new facilities and an impressive institute was inaugurated in Berlin-Dahlem in the summer of 1923 (Figure 3).Footnote ⁹³ Schiemann was involved in the institute's move. The new institute was equipped in the most advanced way and the non-academic staff consisted of one female stenotypist, a female laboratory assistant, three garden workers, five male and four female workers, and one boilerman.Footnote ⁹⁴ By 1925 no fewer than seventy students attended the plant breeding practicals and sixteen PhD students were working in the institute, several of them with snapdragons.Footnote ⁹⁵

Figure 3. Institute for Heredity Research of the Agricultural College, Berlin-Dahlem. Nachtsheim, op. cit., p. 4.

Schiemann developed into ‘something like an older sister to the young co-workers … tireless in helping them to start their own research projects and assisting them with various other problems as well’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1924 she qualified officially as a Privatdozent. She enjoyed international contacts and visited colleagues in foreign countries.Footnote ⁹⁷ To be able to perform interesting hybridization experiments, foreign varieties of cultivated plants were needed and Baur travelled widely to collect seeds. These collections stimulated Schiemann's interest in the origins of cultivated plants and she began to concentrate on morphological, cytological and geographical aspects of grasses and grains.Footnote ⁹⁸ This research encompassed not only genetics, but also aspects of archaeology, history, ethnography and geography, and fitted the comprehensive style of the study of heredity in Germany. She was inspired by the theory on the centres of origin of cultivated plants of the Russian geneticist Nicolai Vavilov (1887–1943). In 1932 Schiemann's monograph on the emergence of cultivated plants appeared, and this became the standard text on the subject for the time.Footnote ⁹⁹ This meant that thanks to her independent mind she managed to step out of the shadow of Baur's research programme and was able to develop a field of research not directly connected to the ‘technoscience’ done at the institute. We shall see what consequences this choice would have for her.

Baur strove for recognition, both in the scientific and the agricultural world, and adapted the institute's research accordingly. Together with Stein, Baur carried out a research programme with the snapdragon as model organism, a botanical parallel to what Morgan was doing with the fruit fly. The problems he studied had no obvious practical application. Stein also worked from a ‘pure’ scientific perspective in her study of irradiated snapdragons. She was not funded by anyone, neither the Agricultural College nor an agricultural agency, and therefore her research was free from the expectations of patrons, at least. All the other staff members of the institute studied the genetics of organisms that were relevant for agriculture or for human heredity. Von Ubisch and Schiemann studied barley and Schiemann also studied other grains and grasses, and tomatoes. Nachtsheim studied the fertility of pigs and the quality and colour of rabbit fur. Hertwig first studied the fertility and the productivity of chickens, and her later shift to irradiated mice was a result of the growing interest in human heredity. Both official assistants, Schiemann and Nachtsheim were apparently able to do some ‘pure’ scientific work in which they could follow up on results published in the international literature. Nachtsheim's work on fruit flies and Schiemann's work on the history of cultivated plants fall into this category. However, this work was of secondary importance during our period of study. The conclusion is that the choice of research topics and organisms of the staff members can be understood against the background of the respective positions they held. And because their positions were not gender-neutral, one can say that there was a connection between the gender of the researcher and his or her research topic, albeit indirect. In turn, these research topics built the discipline of genetics, entraining various degrees of prestige and types of institutionalization in their wake.

The Berlin Institute for Heredity Research: The fifth congress and after

The two years culminating in the Fifth International Congress for Genetics (1927) were a period of activity and success. In 1925 Nachtsheim became an extraordinary professor and was asked to teach the genetics of domestic animals. In 1926 he visited Morgan's lab at Columbia University.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ During this period Hertwig received Nachtsheim's salary and functioned as head of the zoological department. In 1927 she became an extraordinary professor at the Medical Faculty of the Berlin University. From that time on she held seminars and lectured on genetics for students of medicine.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In this period Baur acquired the country estate of Brigittenhof in Dahmsdorf, forty kilometres south-east of Berlin, and was generally present at the institute no more than once a week.Footnote ¹⁰² Baur's frequent absence seems not to have prevented the institute from functioning successfully. Schiemann wrote, ‘For us as members of the institute, the Dahlem period was after all pleasant and rich’. Notwithstanding the tensions between Baur and Nachtsheim, and those between Baur and Schiemann, which we will hear about, the atmosphere at the institute was apparently good on the whole.Footnote ¹⁰³ Von Graevenitz and Stein, for example, were close friends. Schiemann had good relationships with Stein and Hertwig; she went on walking holidays with Hertwig in the mountains on several occasions. The photograph of the Christmas celebration in 1926 also gives the impression of a pleasant and cooperative atmosphere (Figure 4).Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Figure 4. Christmas at the Institute, 1926. Reiner Nürnberg, Ekkehard Höxtermann und Martine Voigt, Elisabeth Schiemann (1881–1972), Vom AufBruch der Genetik und der Frauen in den UmBrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts, Rangsdorf: Basilisken Presse, 2014, p. 390.

The Fifth International Congress for Genetics, held in Berlin in September 1927, was a milestone.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It attracted a large number of participants, and an excursion to the institute's premises and the aquarium was organized.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ All the staff members of the institute contributed to making the conference a success. Both official assistants were deeply involved, but Nachtsheim's tasks were more visible than Schiemann's. As the secretary of the Organizing Committee, Nachtsheim was a central figure in the preparations, and edited the volume of abstracts and afterwards the voluminous proceedings.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He was a member of the so-called Ehrenpräsidium (honorary presidency) (Figure 5). During the excursion, Baur, Schiemann and Stein demonstrated the botanical work and Nachtsheim and Hertwig the zoological work. The whole international community of geneticists could see to what height Baur's institute had ascended. The conference greatly increased Baur's prestige; according to Hans Stubbe, one of his later pupils, ‘he reaped great successes at that time. His name was known all over the world and his voice was heard everywhere’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Figure 5. The conferral of the honorary presidency at the opening ceremony of the Berlin International Congress of Genetics, 1927. Erwin Baur is giving the opening speech. At the left is Hans Nachtsheim, next to him Kristine Bonnevie. Nachtsheim, op. cit., p. 51.

Baur was in the meantime passionately trying, together with leading seed companies, to establish a Kaiser Wilhelm institute for plant breeding research. In 1927 the decision to found such an institute was taken. Schiemann could not understand why Baur wanted this, because she found the institute in Dahlem entirely satisfactory.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Still, she was happy to become the head of a department dedicated to the history and emergence of cultivated plants. But ultimately Baur appointed not her but Klaus von Rosenstiel, who had close ties to the ascendant Nazi regime and later became his son-in-law.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This was a disaster for Schiemann, professionally as well as personally.Footnote ¹¹¹ Discussions of this event do not explain satisfactorily why Baur and Schiemann cooperated smoothly for such a long time, and why this came to an end when Baur moved to the new institute.Footnote ¹¹² Schiemann's own analysis, that Baur used people in his undertakings as long as they were useful to him and dropped them when they no longer fitted in with his plans, seems a plausible explanation. Maybe Baur did not like the fact that she had developed into an independent researcher with her own well-respected line of research and was therefore happy to get rid of her.

Schiemann eventually discussed this in an extensive obituary. She added that at the beginning of his career Baur was on several occasions accused of interfering in other people's fields, which accusation she thought was not entirely unjustified. Von Ubisch referred to this when she related that in 1914 Correns feared that Baur would lay claim to her work. In addition, Schiemann stated that Baur ‘quickly gained people's sympathies, not only in public life, but also in more intimate personal contact’. Additionally, ‘Whoever was allowed to participate in this work, would sooner or later feel that he became part of it’. Baur was so deeply immersed in his own pursuits that he was not aware of the effect they might have on others; he included people in his own lifework, but when he no longer needed them he dropped them as if they were ‘chess pieces’.Footnote ¹¹³ Schiemann concluded that Baur's behaviour inevitably resulted in conflicts. So

Nachtsheim's account revealed similar aspects of Baur's personality. And in 1959 his later pupil and assistant, Hans Stubbe, in his commemorative speech, would describe Baur's personality in comparable, albeit more guarded, terms.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He related that Baur, because of his fighting spirit, was nicknamed the man with the Löwenmaul (lion's mouth), after his favorite model plant, as Löwenmaul is the German word for snapdragon.Footnote ¹¹⁶

After it was decided that Baur would become the director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Plant Breeding there was a period of transition, during which, in 1928, both Schiemann and Nachtsheim were appointed senior assistants.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Schiemann became, in addition, an extraordinary professor at the Agricultural University in 1931, which was a customary promotion. Baur first tried to combine both directorships, but the Agricultural College found this unacceptable. Therefore someone else had to be found. Neither Schiemann nor Nachtsheim were serious candidates. The fact that Nachtsheim was a zoologist probably prevented him from becoming the new director. The reason why Schiemann was not considered as a potential successor was seemingly her gender, as she clearly possessed the desired profile: she had run the institute in Baur's absence more than once and had developed into a recognized geneticist.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The Ministry of Agriculture started negotiations with Roemer, who was the head of the institute of plant breeding at the University of Halle, but, as already mentioned, did not like the dominance of women on the staff. He declined the position.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The appointment of a young and inexperienced colleague was considered problematic because there were three professors at the institute: Nachtsheim and Hertwig were already professors and an application for Schiemann was in the pipeline.Footnote ¹²⁰ Nonetheless, the position was offered to the relatively unknown Hans Kappert, whom we came across earlier as a staff member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in 1914.

Beyond the Berlin Institute for Heredity Research: its members’ careers

In 1931 Schiemann resigned without having another position to go to. The appointment of a colleague whose scientific standing was far below her own was probably the last straw.Footnote ¹²¹ She then spent a few months at the John Innes Horticultural Institute near London, which had been led by William Bateson until his death in 1926. It was certainly no accident that she went here. This, and her previous base, can be characterized as ‘sister’ institutions, because they had several similar characteristics. Indeed, Baur had taken the John Innes Institute as an example and inspiration for his institute, for ‘external organization as well as for the internal structure’.Footnote ¹²²

The John Innes Horticultural Institute was founded in 1910 as an institute for the advancement of horticulture and was financed by private means.Footnote ¹²³ Expectations of the usefulness of genetics for the advancement of horticulture and agriculture were high at the time. Recall that the Berlin institute (formed a couple of years later) was part of an agricultural college. One similarity was that although the Berlin institute was not a private institute like the John Innes, a great deal of the research that was carried out there was also financed by private means. It is therefore not surprising that the research programmes at both institutes were mixed in the sense that they were partly driven by genetics questions per se and partly by the possible applicability of genetics in horticulture and agriculture. In both institutions a research programme of genetics in the Mendelian framework was carried out.Footnote ¹²⁴ The organisms that were studied in London overlapped with those studied in Berlin. These were mainly horticultural plants. Antirrhinum was studied in both locations, for example. Researchers at both locations also investigated animals such as mice and bees. Both institutions viewed their studies as fundamental for giving the new field of genetics a solid foundation and making it a respected science, beyond the practical desiderata of agriculture.

Beyond the joint interests outlined above, the most obvious similarity between the German and British genetics institutions was the high number of low-paid staff members, mainly women. In both cases the women originated from the middle or upper middle class and had intellectual backgrounds. They often had private means and were single. Both directors were keen to employ these women so that a great deal of research could be carried out by well-educated investigators, but at low cost. Another similarity was that in both cases a good working atmosphere contributed to the success of the institute. In the German case Schiemann referred to the pleasant work environment on several occasions and this was also reported of the English institute. That the directors, who were both dominant and prominent, occasionally organized meetings of students and staff at their properties, will have contributed to the good atmosphere. In both cases guests were cordially received by the staff. There was a gendered element to the work of hospitality; Caroline Pellew at the John Innes Institute and Elisabeth Schiemann at the Berlin institute were noted for their attentiveness to guests.Footnote ¹²⁵

There were, of course, also differences, with respect to both content and context. Bateson was never convinced that genes could be localized on the chromosomes, so the Morgan school's interest in determining the exact location of genes on a chromosome never flourished at the Innes, whereas this topic was taken up at the Baur institute. More generally, it is said that part of the research programme at the Innes in the 1920s lost touch with mainstream genetics, which did not happen at the Berlin institute.Footnote ¹²⁶ Another difference was that Baur had to operate in the organizational context of a larger educational institute, whereas Bateson's institute was independent.

A relevant difference for the purposes of this article was the attitude of the director towards the emancipation of women. From what we know about William Bateson, we may conclude that his attitude was positive. He not only belonged to a family that for generations had had liberal attitudes towards the position and abilities of women, but he also actively promoted their emancipation. Although the passionate discussion on the admission of women to titles of degrees at Cambridge University had, in 1897, resulted in defeat, Bateson was an outspoken supporter and had served as secretary of the committee that had pleaded for it. His sister Anna was a botany graduate of the Cambridge Newnham College for women. She published papers together with him, as well as on her own. He also cooperated with several other women, of whom Edith Saunders was the most important. Although his wife Beatrice Durham never co-authored with him, she was deeply involved in his genetics experiments. Bateson socialized with his male and female co-workers on a relatively equal basis. He extensively referred to the attainments of his female staff in his work on heredity and when giving official speeches among his colleagues.Footnote ¹²⁷ On the contrary, at least as far as we know, his German colleague Baur never expressed himself about the gender question or on the scientific abilities of women, neither pro nor contra, although he knew by experience that women were able to attain the required scientific standards. What we noticed about his attitude is that he viewed the female assistants as instruments, just as he did his male staff members. He never openly praised their abilities. He included them in his enterprise as long as they could contribute to his aims and dismissed them once they were no longer useful. Despite his willingness to make female appointments, there is no indication that Baur was a supporter of the women's emancipation movement.

We must take into account that when Schiemann went to the John Innes in 1931, Bateson was no longer there; in 1926 the founding director had died suddenly. But the women staff members remained. Only in 1939 would several of them be forced to retire.Footnote ¹²⁸ The John Innes Institute would have been like a safe haven for Schiemann in 1931. She would have known most of the female researchers; six of them had attended the Berlin conference in 1926.Footnote ¹²⁹ In this institution, with its tradition of openness to women, she was amidst researchers with the same scientific interests. She could feel at ease professionally as well as socially. This gave Schiemann time to recover from her disappointment of being bypassed by Baur, and to reflect on how to move on with her professional life.

After Schiemann's return to Berlin, she became an unpaid guest researcher at the Botanical Museum.Footnote ¹³⁰ She was lucky that her specialization, the history of cultivated plants, could be carried out with a minimum of means. In 1939, probably because she distanced herself from the Nazi regime, the University of Berlin turned down the request to turn her position from an extraordinary into a special full professorship, and in 1940 she also lost the right to teach.Footnote ¹³¹ From 1940 to 1943 she was a paid academic guest at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology. Shortly thereafter, in 1943, an Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research) was established in Vienna, mercifully free of the wartime constraints dominating research in Berlin. Schiemann was very happy when she heard that she was appointed head of its division for the history of cultivated plants, which she was able to set up in Berlin. The choice of an independent research line had paid off. After the war this department developed into an independent small institute in the then eastern part of Berlin. Here, Schiemann trained a number of young, often female, co-workers. In 1945 she was appointed ordinary professor at the Humboldt University (formerly the Friedrich Wilhelm University).Footnote ¹³² She remained active until her death in 1972.

After Schiemann's departure from the institute in Berlin, Emmy Stein received her position and salary.Footnote ¹³³ In 1940 Stein also left the institute, because bombs had destroyed her equipment. She became a staff member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem. In 1948 her last important publication appeared and she died in 1954. Nachtsheim remained at the institute until 1941.Footnote ¹³⁴ Then he became the head of the department of experimental hereditary pathology of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics. He subsequently became involved in eugenics experiments on animals.Footnote ¹³⁵ In 1946 he became a full professor of genetics at the Humboldt University. In 1949 he moved to the newly established Free University in Berlin, where he became the head of the newly founded institute of genetics, a position he kept until 1960.Footnote ¹³⁶ He died in 1979.

It is interesting to compare the careers and salaries of the two official assistants Schiemann and Nachtsheim. It is well known, and we detected this already in the cases of the careers of von Graevenitz and von Ubisch, that women have to wait longer to be promoted than their male counterparts, that they earn less in similar positions, and that they need to be more qualified to obtain and keep them. Do these differences also apply to Schiemann and Nachtsheim? Both became senior assistants in 1928, whereas Schiemann had already been an assistant for fourteen years and Nachtsheim had been one for only seven years. Moreover, Nachtsheim became an extraordinary professor in 1925, four years after his appointment, and Schiemann in 1931, seventeen years after her appointment. There were also differences in their salaries; Nachtsheim earned at least twice as much as Schiemann. After the war both became full professors at the Humboldt University. However, Schiemann became director of a small, relatively cheap, ‘niche’ institute and Nachtsheim ended as a professor of genetics and head of an institute for genetics at the then prestigious Free University in Berlin.Footnote ¹³⁷ There were differences between both careers on all fronts, and always favouring Nachtsheim.

Hertwig remained in the institute until 1946. In 1939 it seemed as if her right to teach might be withdrawn because in 1933 she had been a candidate for the Staatspartei, a democratic political party. She mobilized key figures at the university and the ministry and it was concluded that not allowing her to lecture would adversely affect university education. She was then allowed to continue teaching, but without a salary.Footnote ¹³⁸ She became a regular assistant in 1939 and in 1941 she was appointed a senior assistant. After the war, in 1946, she became a full professor in Halle in the former East Germany, thanks to her brother.Footnote ¹³⁹ She took her mutant mice strains with her. She was not only very successful as the only female professor at the Medical Faculty, but also, from 1948 to 1950, its dean.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ She retired in 1960 and died in 1983.

An aspect of this history not yet discussed is that despite the low salaries (if any) on offer, Baur not only managed to attract qualified staff, but also kept them at the institute for a long time: Schiemann seventeen years, Nachtsheim twenty years, Stein twenty-one years and Hertwig even twenty-five years. How can this be understood? As discussed, the field of genetics was new and, as Baur pointed out to Nachtsheim, irrespective of gender there were not many positions in this field. Another reason not to leave was that it was in general interesting and pleasant to work at the institute. The staff members could establish and develop their own research programmes, and use non-scientific staff for the fieldwork that had to be done. They could attend national and international conferences and develop national and international contacts. Moreover, Baur had an enthusiastic, engaging and charismatic personality and the spirit at his institute was in general cooperative and relations were friendly. Staff could support each other professionally and socialize with each other. Friendships were established, at least among the female staff. What also played a role for the women was that Germany was at that time rather hostile towards women workers. There were very few opportunities for women to find suitable positions elsewhere; the women did not leave because they had nowhere else to go.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Of the women it was only Hertwig who left for a better position, and she needed her brother to make that possible. Besides, by then it was already 1946, by which time genetics had developed into a respected discipline. However, it was apparently not easy for Nachtsheim either, the only male, to find a job elsewhere; he had to wait for the Nazi period, with its interest in human genetics and eugenics, to find another position. When he did leave, it turned out to be the first of several successive improvements of his position.