IDENTITY STATEMENT
Reference code(s): GB 1556 WL 1527
Held at: Wiener Library
Title: Hecht, Selig (1892-1947): correspondence regarding anti-semitism in German universities
Date(s): 1933
Level of description: collection
Extent: 1 file
Name of creator(s): Hecht | Selig | 1892-1947 | bio-physicist
CONTEXT
Administrative/Biographical history:
Selig Hecht, American biophysicist, was born in Glogow, Austria (now Poland) in 1892. He moved to the United States in 1898 and graduated from the College of the City of New York (BS, 1913) and from Harvard (PhD, 1917). After organising the laboratory of biophysics at Columbia University, he was Professor of Biophysics there from 1926. He pioneered the application of physiochemical principles to sensory physiology and is known for his determination of minimal quantal requirements at the threshold of vision and for his successful laboratory regeneration of visual purple. An advocate of popular scientific education, he wrote Explaining the Atom, 1947 and died in the same year.
CONTENT
Scope and content/abstract:
Papers of Selig Hecht, 1933, consist of two letters written by Selig Hecht, on a visit to Europe. The first, a letter to a colleague back home, outlines the problems facing Jewish academics in Nazi Germany, and introduces the second which is a much more detailed picture of the privations suffered by Jewish academics and also the indifference of the non-Jewish population, and the culmination of a latent antisemitism in the profession that had long pre-dated the Nazi seizure of power. The latter is addressed to Alfred Cohen. Others mentioned include Willstaetter, Fajans, and Alfred Wiener in his role as Syndikus or Director of the Organisation Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger Juedischen Glaubens.
ACCESS AND USE
Language/scripts of material: English
System of arrangement:
Arranged in chronological order.
Conditions governing access:
Open
Conditions governing reproduction:
Copies can be made for personal use. Permission must be sought for publication.
Finding aids:
Description exists to this archive on the Wiener Library's online catalogue www.wienerlibrary.co.uk
ARCHIVAL INFORMATION
Accruals:
Archival history:
Immediate source of acquisition:
Deposited by Mrs Baer.
ALLIED MATERIALS
DESCRIPTION NOTES
Archivist's note: Entry compiled by Howard Falksohn.
Date(s) of descriptions: March 2008