Book Review: Adolf Miethe's Autobiography, Adolf Miethe (1862–1927): Lebenserinnerungen

Abstract

ADOLF MIETHE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY Adolf Miethe (1862-1927): Lebenserinnerungen. Edited by Helmut Seibt (Acta historica astronomiae, xlvi; Verlag Harri Deutsch, Frankfurt aM, 2012). Pp. 350 + 16 colour plates. euro32 (paperback). ISBN 978-3-8171-1891-5.Adolf Miethe is known among experts in scientific photography as a pioneer of true three-colour photography and as the second professor for photochemistry and spectral analysis at the polytechnic university in Berlin-Charlottenburg. For historians of astronomy, he might also still be remembered as the founder of a small observatory there specializing in lunar and planetary astrophotographyThe present book is essentially a transcription of Miethe's hitherto unpublished autobiography, supplemented by a nearly complete bibliography of his publications and listings of printed postcards and Stollwerck images collected by Miethe. Brief appendices offer a chronology of the Miethe telescope in Charlottenburg from 1909 to 1945 (compiled by Gebhard Kuhn) and describe Miethe's links with Potsdam (collected by Klaus ArIt). The autobiographical text, unearthed by accident in 2007, is neither commented upon nor annotated. But it is well illustrated with 74 images of houses, persons or objects mentioned therein, selected by the editor.Miethe had started to write this text during the First World War and continued to embellish it in 1924/25, ending with a typescript of 245 pages. As the handwritten emendations on one facsimile page of his foreword shows, he continued to reformulate the text, but the published transcript only gives the final version intended by the author plus a few of the more important deletions and changes, indicated in editorial footnotes. The intended readership may not have been a scientific audience but rather family members and friends, since the preserved notes focus less on details of scientific procedures and research than on personal memories, anecdotes and curious side-issues which he seems to have initially recorded in some kind of diary. The result is a highly personal account of his life, far away from the usual vain self-admiration usually engulfing such autobiographies.Miethe shied away from the temptation to embellish his own career, and rather pointed out his failures. Lasting impressions are created, for instance, of the circumstances of his youth. He was brought up in a rather modest milieu, among the poorer residents along the cholera-ridden waterways of Potsdam and Caputh. His academic studies in mathematics, physics and astronomy at the universities of Berlin and Gottingen do not come across as a happy period of his life, since he was quite isolated, uncomfortably situated between primitive adventure seekers and rich snobs. …