Marianne Baudler's passion belonged to non-metals. The former director of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cologne was particularly interested in phosphorus compounds.

Marianne Baudler was born on 27 April 1921 as the daughter of the factory owner Fritz Baudler and his wife Clara in Stettin in West Pomerania. She completed her A-levels there at the age of 19 and then moved to Dresden to study chemistry. Her diploma thesis, for which she received an "Excellent" grade, provided a solid foundation for her academic career. For her doctoral thesis, the young scientist joined the working group of the Hungarian-German chemist Franz Fehér (1903-1991) at the Georg August University in Göttingen. He was a recognised expert in the chemistry of non-metals and had a decisive influence on Baudler's life as a researcher.

After completing her dissertation on polyhydrogen sulphide in 1946, Baudler worked as a research assistant for her doctoral supervisor in Göttingen until 1949. When Fehér accepted an appointment to the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cologne, she followed him. Baudler habilitated at the University of Cologne in 1959 with a thesis on diphosphoric acids and was appointed associate professor in 1963. A few years later, she turned down an appointment at the TU Berlin. She was not to regret this decision: In 1968, she was appointed full professor and director of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cologne. Her final appointment as a full professor followed in 1969.

Baudler remained loyal to non-metals, especially phosphorus, until her retirement in 1986. She was particularly interested in phosphanes and other compounds with at least one phosphorus-phosphorus bond. In order to characterise the substances, she used all available spectroscopic methods, from IR and Raman spectroscopy to NMR measurements and mass spectrometry.

Baudler received several awards for her scientific work. She has been a full member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 1982. In the year of her retirement, the GDCh awarded her the prestigious Alfred-Stock Memorial Award. After Margot Becke-Goehring (1914-2009), she was only the second woman to receive this honour. Marianne Baudler died in Davos on 5 March 2003 at the age of 81.

In December 2022, the Board of Directors of the GDCh decided to name the GDCh Prize for Inorganic Chemistry (formerly the Alfred-Stock Memorial Award) after Marianne Baudler in future.

Sources

J. Hahn, Nachrichten aus der Chemie 51, 2003, p. 955
Universitätsarchiv Köln, Zug. 631, NL Prof. Dr Marianne Baudler