Friedrich Klemm died in Munich on March 16, 1983, after a brief heart illness. He had been one of the architects who, chiefly in the 1950s, had helped to establish our discipline, the history of technology, in the form in which we know it today. Appropriately, our society in 1975 awarded him its highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal.
Since at that occasion Technology and Culture published an extensive biographical essay on Klemm (vol. 17, pp. 493–98), only a few biographical data should be sufficient here. He was born on January 22, 1904, in Mulda, Saxony; attended secondary schools in Dresden; studied (1925—30) mathematics, physics, and the history of science at the Dresden Technical University; and, after acquiring an additional degree in the library sciences in 1932 (later he also received a doctorate from the Munich Technical University), took a position as librarian at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, where he remained all his life. After more than thirty years as head of the museum’s library, he retired in 1969; thereafter, until a few days before his death, he continued to serve the museum indefatigably as a senior research associate.
Klemm made crucial contributions to the history of technology while always working as a full-time librarian. Thus, over the span of his career, he built the library of the Deutsches Museum from a small museum library into an impeccably managed, imaginatively organized institution of some 750,000 volumes with outstanding rare book and autograph collections.
He was introduced to the history of science and technology by his Gymnasium teacher, Rudolph Zaunick, later well known as a professor of the subject at the University of Halle. Klemm began his characteristically steady output of scholarly publications at an early point; a monograph on the History of the Theory of Emission of Light, for example, appeared as early as 1932. His best-known and most influential book, A History of Western Technology, first published in 1954 and translated into many languages, was long and widely used in the United States as a text for university courses on the history of technology.
Klemm himself began teaching in 1950 at the Munich Technical University. Over the years he developed a four-semester survey course on the history of Western technology that covered the period from Greek antiquity to the beginning of the 20th century. This course, continued for a quarter-century, was remarkable for the breadth of its vision and for the wide range of cultural factors interacting with technology that it considered. Not surprisingly, then, Klemm was often sought out as a supervisor of doctoral dissertations. Not surprisingly, either, his work received much recognition and he himself many honors.
Before attempting to appraise Klemm’s influence on our discipline, we must characterize his personality as a scholar. Klemm was a man of boundless knowledge and was committed to the traditional values of hard work, discipline, and accuracy. Needless to say, he read the principal modern and classical authors in their original languages and expected the same of anyone with scholarly aspirations. His scholarly craftsmanship was always flawless. His historical perspective was the broadest possible. Yet at the same time he showed a curious diffidence, a refusal to fight—even on behalf of unquestionably good causes—which may have been expressions of a life that had witnessed the national defeat in World War I, the disintegration of the traditional political order, the inflation that pauperized an entire middle class, the particularly vicious German version of the Great Depression, the Nazi episode from its initial false hopes to its infinitely shameful end, and finally West Germany’s improbable recovery after 1948. At any rate, Klemm’s responses to professional power plays and to scholarly intrigues were silence in public and wry smiles and gently sarcastic remarks in private. Repeatedly he declined calls to prestigious directorships of large university libraries and to powerful university chairs in favor of the comparatively low profile of his position at the Deutsches Museum. As a historian of technology, accordingly, he founded no school. His university courses were known as enjoyable, if not undemanding, electives. As a dissertation adviser he was a patient critic and an invaluable suggester of little-known source materials, but he was not inclined to interfere directly with the conceptions and structures of another’s research project. His History of Western Technology, without any ambitious theories and without any self-important display of originality, concentrates on the testimony of contemporary witnesses, a feature which has made it enduring and useful.
There was one scholarly skill, however, in which Klemm was unmatched: his knowledge of the literature. Every work of his, especially his main book (although unfortunately only in the German original), is accompanied by bibliographic apparatus of unequalled comprehensiveness and accuracy. (A concise bibliography of his works is included in Friedrich Klemm, Zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik [Munich: Deutsches Museum, 1979], pp. 243–51.) His doctoral dissertation had been on the technical literature of Europe, and throughout his career he had worked to produce a comprehensive book on the literary sources of Western technology. It is a grievous loss to our discipline that this book has not been finished, all the more so since no one is in sight to succeed to the task. Klemm was a friendly and witty man who was, and enjoyed, good company. He did not travel much except to Italy, but he had friends in all parts of the world who would steadily visit him in Munich. He was universally beloved, and his death has been mourned widely and sincerely.
Otto Mayr
Originally published as Otto Mayr, “Friedrich Klemm (1904–1983),” Technology and Culture 25, no. 2 (1984): 377–80. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1984.a890077.
Klemm, Friedrich. Geschichte der Technik: der Mensch und seine Erfindungen im Bereich des Abendlandes. 3rd ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1998.
Klemm, Friedrich. Zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik. Munich: Deutsches Museum, 1979.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 3 (1976): 493–98. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891758.
Klemm, Friedrich. Kurze Geschichte der Technik. Freiburg: Herder, 1961. [3. Ed printed by the