Otto Krayer

Otto Hermann Krayer (October 22, 1899 in Köndringen, Baden – March 18, 1982 in Tucson, Arizona) was a German-American doctor, pharmacologist and university professor.

He was the only German scientist who refused on moral grounds to succeed a colleague who was dismissed from his professorial chair by the National-Socialist government for anti-semitic reasons. Krayer voiced his opinion publicly and aggressively. The medical historian Udo Schagen entitled his historical analysis of Krayer: „Widerständiges Verhalten im Meer von Begeisterung, Opportunismus und Antisemitismus“ or ‘Resistant Behaviour in a Sea of Enthusiasm, Opportunism and Antisemitism’.[1]

Life

Otto Krayer’s parents were the council scribe Hermann Krayer and his wife Frieda (née Wolfsperger), who made a living from the ‘Rebstock’ restaurant in Köndringen, Baden. Otto Krayer’s education in Emmendingen and at the Rotteck-Gynasium in Freiburg was disrupted by the First World War: he was wounded on the Western Front. From 1919 to 1924 Krayer studied medicine in Freiburg, Munich and Berlin. In 1925 he interned for Paul Trendelenburg at the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In 1926 he graduated as a medical doctor with his thesis: ‘The Pharmacological Characteristics of Pure Apocodeine’[2] and finally he became a scientific assistant at the University of Freiburg.

In 1927 both Krayer and Trendelenburg transferred to the Pharmacological Institute at the University of Berlin, where Krayer qualified as a university lecturer in 1929. From 1930 to 1932 Krayer was managing director of the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Berlin, during Trendelenburg’s severe illness and continuing after his subsequent death in 1931. In 1933 the Jewish pharmacologist Philipp Ellinger (1887-1952) was relieved from his post as a professor at the Düsseldorf Medical Academy (now part of the University of Düsseldorf) and Krayer was appointed as his successor. Krayer initially rejected his post verbally, as the new director of the Berlin Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Wolfgang Heubner, recounted in his diary entry from the 14th of June 1933: ‘<Krayer came> to me in person at around midday to tell me that he had seen Principal Achelis to voice his personal reservations about replacing a man who, in his opinion, had been removed from office for no good reason. With this, he rejected the position and told the Principal to look for someone else. Magnificent!’[3]

On the 15th of June 1933 Krayer’s position as an opponent of the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Culture (now the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture) was unmistakably spelled out in writing. His letter, along with the Ministry’s response, has been reported by Udo Schagen and also on the website of the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Freiburg.[4][5] Krayer writes, amongst other things, (original orthography by Schagen):

"Apart from unimportant factual considerations, the main reason for my reluctance is that I feel the exclusion of Jewish scientists to be an injustice, the necessity of which I cannot understand, since it has been justified by reasons that lie outside the domain of science. This feeling of injustice is an ethical phenomenon. It is innate to the structure of my personality and not something imosed from the outside. Under these circumstances, the acceptance of such a representation as the one in Düsseldorf, would mean to me mental stress which would make it difficult to me to take up my work as a teacher with the joy and dedication without I cannot teach properly. […] I would rather refuse to achieve a position which corresponds to my inclinations and abilities than to decide against my conviction; or the fact that I encourage the realization of an opinion about myself which does not agree with the facts by remaining silent at wrong place. "

The State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Wilhelm Stuckart, imposed a ban on German universities on Krayer, which included the use of public libraries.[5] After a stay as a Rockefeller Fellow at the Department of Pharmacology of the University College London in 1934, he led the Department of Pharmacology of the American University of Beirut ( Lebanon ) from 1934 to 1937 and was then Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmacology at Harvard University in Cambridge ( Massachusetts ) until 1939. Wolfgang Heubner reported about a meeting in his diary in July 4, 1935:[6] "On the way I spoke with Krayer who justified his refusal to return to Germany with the impossibility of taking the Hitler oath." In 1938 Krayer was offered a chair of Pharmacology of Peking University. From 1939 to 1966 he led the Department of Pharmacology at Harvard University. Still living in the United States, Krayer rejected the Nazi ideology a second time but this time regardless of racism. At the annual meeting of the German Chemical Society in 1937, the president, Alfred Stock described the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky as a slap in the face of every German. According to him, it was understandable that both the government and the people were angry and didn't want anything to do with the Nobel Prize. "The crime of the Norwegian Parliamentary Committee is deeply regretted by the society of science."

Krayer responded by writing a letter to the office of the company. Due to this remark he felt obliged to demand to be crossed off the list of members. In his opinion it was not right to claim that every German scientist felt offended by the most recent Nobel Prize award. He did not know Ossietzky personally. However, everybody who had impartially observed his life, could not, even as a political opponent, deny the extraordinary personality of this man. Although Ossietzky should not have assumed to find justice by his opponents, turning his words into action was of tremendous importance in his life. What could better promote peace between the nations than the actions of men like these two, who were guided by a feeling of pure and deep responsibility for a higher humane order, than it is represented by that nation, in which Stock and he ("we") were born into.[7]

On behalf of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Krayer lead a 'Medical Mission to Germany' after the war, which aimed at helping to reconstruct fields of training and research in medicine. The 'Medical Mission' recommended that German professors, young scientists and medicine students and German architects visited the USA in order to get to know examples for the reconstruction of war-damaged laboratories as well as to receive material support and to create a German Research Council. Krayer wrote in his report: "There is no sign of a 'lost' generation, who grew up under the Hitler regime and is said to be hopelessly poisoned by the Nazi propaganda. In contrast, many of these young people from the first semesters at university have already become suspicious concerning the doctrine preached by the Nazis, long before its deceptive and fatal nature became clear to the older generation. If they find openness, encouragement and smart leadership at home and abroad, these young men and women will be the best chance for a 'better' Germany.[8]

Krayer spent the summer months of the years 1972 to 1980 as a guest professor at the Institute of Pharmacology at the University of Munich, which was run by Melchior Reiter (1919-2007) who had visited Krayer several times in Boston for research purposes. During this period Krayer worked on a history of the 'Boehmsche Pharmakologenschule', of which he was a member. His teacher Paul Trendelenburg had been Walther Straub's student, who in turn had been Rudolf Boehm's student. Krayer died before the completion of the manuscript but Reiter published it, adding a few supplements.[9]

Research

Krayer’s main area of research was the pharmacology of the human heart and blood circulation. For instance, he pharmacologically characterised the ingredients of the Veratrum plant, such as Veratramine. While working in Berlin, he cooperated with Wilhelm Feldberg to prove that acetylcholine is a transmitting substance for the parasympathetic nervous system in mammals.[10] This research was published in 1933 and that same year both researchers left Germany: Feldberg, who was Jewish, on the 7th July, Otto Krayer on the 31st December.

Honours

Out of all his numerous honours,[5] Krayer’s favourite was the honorary citizenship of his home town of Köndringen. He was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949. In 1964, the German Pharmacological Society bestowed their highest honour on him by giving him the Schmiedeberg badge. In 1962, he became a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Germany’s national scientific academy. In 1965, the Düsseldorf Academy of Medicine offered him an honorary membership. At first, Krayer gladly accepted the honour, but later on laboriously wrote a rejection letter (numerous handwritten drafts have been found): “I have come to the decision that the right thing to do is to reject the honorary membership of the Düsseldorf Academy of Medicine. … By now I have realised that the ethical position I adopted in 1933 does not allow for any kind of external appreciation. … I regret that it took me so long to clearly express my conviction.”[11] In 2001, the University of Freiburg honoured Krayer by naming the building for the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology and the Institute of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry after him.

Otto Krayer House in Freiburg

Udo Schagen concludes:[1] “As far as I know there is no second case where a non-Jewish, not politically active researcher adopted a similarly clear and offensively expressed position with no regard for his own career and for potential political persecution. This is even more striking considering that for Krayer it was the first offer of an academic chair, which could hardly be rejected by researchers according to the conventions of their career.” On the 19th July 1995, Krayer’s actions from the year 1933 first became public when being mentioned in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, an important German newspaper. Ullrich Trendelenburg, who was the son of Paul Trendelenburg and Krayer’s student and friend, closed this article with the following words:[12] “Considering the horrors of the Third Reich, his deeds should be a comfort to us. When looking for a role model for the young generation, it is found in Otto Krayer. May the memory of this one righteous person never fade.”

Literature

References

  1. 1 2 cf. Schagen 2007, p. 223.
  2. ↑ Krayer, Otto (1926). "Die pharmakologischen Eigenschaften des reinen Apokodeins". Naunyn-Schmiedebergs Archiv für Pharmakologie und Experimentelle Pathologie. 111: 60–67. doi:10.1007/BF01934860.
  3. ↑ cited in Schagen 2007, p. 231.
  4. ↑ cf. Schagen 2007, p. 243–245.
  5. 1 2 3 Otto-Krayer-Dokumentation (PDF; 1,9 MB) on the occasion of bestowing the Otto Krayer House to the University of Freiburg on the 29th October 2001, the document can be found on the website for the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Freiburg, accessed on the 20th June 2012.
  6. ↑ Diary in the archive of the "German Society for Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology" in Mainz, transcribed by Erich Muschol.
  7. ↑ cf. Schagen 2007, p. 236–237.
  8. ↑ cf. Starke 2004, p. 88.
  9. ↑ Otto Krayer: Rudolf Boehm und seine Pharmakologenschule. Zuckerschwerdt, München 1998, ISBN 3-88603-635-9.
  10. ↑ Wilhelm Feldberg und Otto Krayer (1968). "Das Auftreten eines azetylcholinartigen Stoffes im Herzvenenblut von Warmblütern bei Reizung der Nervi vagi". Naunyn-Schmiedebergs Archiv für Pharmakologie und Experimentelle Pathologie. 172: 170–193. doi:10.1007/BF01860490.
  11. ↑ cf. Schagen 2007, p. 238.
  12. ↑ cf. Trendelenburg 1995, p. 34.
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