Hertha Sponer at Göttingen

If you’ve ever looked at the (former) Franck Collection in the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, you may have noticed a little note at the end of the description of some of the photos indicating that the photo came from “Hertha Sponer’s Göttingen album.”

As it turns out, all the photos in the Franck Collection are from Sponer’s photo album. The original album is housed at the University of Chicago, along with the rest of James Franck’s personal papers, but a duplicate set was deposited at AIP’s Niels Bohr Library & Archives by Franck’s daughter Lisa.

Hertha Sponer married James Franck in 1946, after both physicists had moved to the United States and were well established in their careers. However, as often happens with women scientists , her independence was muted in the historical record when her photo album was included as part of Franck’s papers, even though her personal papers are archived at Duke University, where she taught for nearly 30 years. A downstream effect of that placement was AIP’s decision, at the time of accessioning, to label this collection the “Franck Collection,” after James Franck. As her supervisor at the University of Göttingen and her close friend, it is natural that Franck would feature heavily in the album, but the photos are ultimately a record of Sponer’s time at Göttingen, not Franck’s.

The effects of considering the album to be a record about James Franck rather than Hertha Sponer rippled out: Images that don’t feature anyone were given Franck’s name for the identification, as was standard practice at the time of accessioning. There were several images where Sponer is present but not identified. Her handwritten captions were not transferred into the descriptions, and the order of the photos was lost when they were digitized and uploaded to our online repository. These decisions culminated in many missed opportunities over the years to educate researchers about Sponer and her contributions to science .

I recently completed a project to reassert Hertha Sponer as the creator and focus of this collection. As part of that project, we officially renamed the collection the Hertha Sponer Collection . Sponer’s birthday is September 1, so for this month’s Photos of the Month, let’s take a tour through Hertha Sponer’s Göttingen album.

Original caption: Gottingen (Goettingen) Institute of Theoretical Physics

Sponer’s caption: Das Physikalische Institut, Göttingen 1926 (mit erstem Anbau) [translation: The Physics Institute, Göttingen 1926 (with first annex)]

Let’s start off with the first photo in the album, a wide shot of the Göttingen Physics Institute. With this image, Sponer situates us in Göttingen and tells us what the album is going to be about – her time at the Physics Institute.

Sponer originally met James Franck at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, where she was working after she obtained her doctorate in 1920. When Franck was recruited to lead the new Second Institute for Experimental Physics at Göttingen in 1921, he hired Sponer to accompany him as an assistant. Her job responsibilities included running the spectroscopy lab, managing staff, and teaching lab courses, along with conducting molecular spectroscopy research.

Original Caption: Group of Physicsts [sic] Pose for Photo.

Sponer’s Caption: Cario, Kornicke, Mannkopff, Hanle, Holland, Stuart, Ramsauer, Rupp, Oldenburg, Franck, Schmidt, Kopfermann, Donat

One of the earliest photos in the album, taken in November 1923, is of Sponer with Franck and the rest of his lab. This photo is emblematic of the gender dynamics at Göttingen, where so often she was the only woman in the room. Günther Cario, on the far left of the photo, was Franck’s other lab assistant; the rest of the people pictured are most likely Franck’s graduate students who would have worked with and under Sponer.

The original record did not include any context about who the physicists were, other than their names. This is an example of where understanding the provenance of the album helps us understand the photos in it.

Original Captions: Cario Sits by Equipment; Portrait of Franck, Informal portrait of Hertha Sponer-Franck

Sponer’s Caption: P. I. 1924. Aufnahmen von [single caption on the page; translation: Photographs of...]

This triptych of Franck and his two assistants (Cario and Sponer) were grouped together on a single page in Sponer’s album. The three photos were separated when they were scanned and uploaded to our repository, so the grouping was lost. As you can see, Sponer’s photo was also the only one described as an “informal” portrait, despite all three sitting in similar poses.

I re-sorted the photos in the collection online so that these three images would appear in order. I also added notes to each image to clarify that the three images originally belonged together. Finally, in every photo in the collection that identified Sponer as “Hertha Sponer-Franck,” I removed the hyphenated surname to reflect her name at the time: she was Hertha Sponer, and even after they married, she continued to be known professionally by her maiden name.

Original caption: Paul Ehrenfest’s visit with Galinka (daughter) at James Franck’s house

Sponer’s caption: Ehrenfest besuch mit Galinka bei Francks P. I. 1925. [original caption is a close translation]

James Franck and his first wife, Ingrid, hosted regular get-togethers while at Göttingen, which often included visiting scholars. Paul Ehrenfest, a theoretical physicist who taught at the University of Leiden, pops up in a few places throughout the album; this photo is part of a series of three photos taken at the same picnic at the Francks’ house.

One of the attendees, Galinka Ehrenfest, was called out by name in Sponer’s caption – it’s possible that Galinka was the only member of Ehrenfest’s family to join him on this trip. Galinka, the second eldest of Paul’s four children, would have been about 15 years old at the time of this photo; she is seated next to her father and in front of James Franck. Galinka grew up to be a notable Dutch writer and illustrator of children’s books and designer of children’s games. Despite her importance, her name wasn’t recorded as an official subject term in our repository until I updated the record.

Ehrenfest’s other daughter, Tatyana (not pictured here), also became well known as an adult, this time as a mathematician.

Original caption: Group photo after the Nobel prize

Sponer’s caption: Nach den Nobelpreis. Nov. 1926. Kuhn, Oldenberg, ich, Franck, Frau Franck, Cario, Frau Born, Fesefeldt [original caption is a close translation; Sponer also identifies everyone in the photo]

James Franck was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Gustav Hertz for their “for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom.” Due to bureaucratic machinations , they were awarded the prize one year later in 1926. This photo was taken shortly after the announcement of the prize in November 1926.

Ingrid Franck, standing to the right of her husband and looking at Sponer, and Hedwig Born, standing next to Ingrid, were identified as Frau Franck and Frau Born in Sponer’s caption, but they were not identified in the record, even as “wives.” They are now identified in the description and with subject names so that it will be easier to find them across collections.

Original caption: Francks at the Max Planck Institute

Sponer’s caption: Abendeinladung von Francks nach Nikolausberg. P. I. 1927. [translation: Evening invitation from Francks to Nikolausberg]

There are a couple of interesting things about this photo that were obscured by the original description. First, according to accompanying documentation from James and Ingrid Franck’s daughter Lisa, who sent a copy of these photos to AIP, the Francks regularly sponsored group outings like this for the students at Göttingen. Nikolausberg, where this photo was taken, was about 45 minutes on foot from Göttingen and was a regular destination for these kinds of parties.

Second, the original description identified the location as the Max Planck Institute. This error occurred regularly throughout the descriptions and likely stemmed from the “P. I.” that Sponer put at the end of many captions. In fact, the “P. I.” stands for “Physikalische Institut”, the Göttingen Physics Institute where Sponer and Franck worked during this period and the subject of the photo album. Both errors have now been fixed in the repository record.

Original caption: Hertha Sponer-Franck with her vacuumspectrograph

Sponer’s caption: Mein Vakuumspektrograph, 1932 [translation: My vacuum spectrograph]

As another example of how this photo album is about Hertha Sponer and not James Franck, Sponer included a photo of her prized vacuum spectrograph, which she used to conduct her research. By the time this photo was taken in 1932, Sponer was an assistant professor of physics at Göttingen, she had published around 20 peer-reviewed papers, and she had developed the Birge-Sponer method for calculating the dissociation of a molecule with Raymond Taylor Birge of the University of California, Berkeley. Her spectrograph was a key instrument to how she established herself in the field of spectroscopy.

Note that the original caption placed Sponer in the photo, even though she wasn’t actually pictured. This often caused confusion when searching for photos of her.

Original caption: Franck and Unidentified Others at Party

Sponer’s caption: Abschiedsfeier 1933 bei Frau Paquin. [translation: Farewell party at Mrs. Paquin’s house]

Hertha Sponer’s album ends with a farewell party, likely for James Franck, held at Grete Paquin’s house in 1933. Paquin was Franck’s longtime secretary at Göttingen; the album includes a portrait of her at her desk. Franck resigned from the university in 1933 in protest over the dismissal of his colleagues after the Nazis came to power in Germany. He spent a year at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen before emigrating to the United States. He eventually ended up at the University of Chicago, which is where he was when Sponer arrived in the U.S. in 1936 .

Sponer was dismissed from Göttingen shortly after Franck left, in 1934, due to Nazi restrictions on women in academia. She was blocked from working in Germany, so she emigrated to Norway before accepting an offer from Duke University in North Carolina. She was the first woman hired to the physics faculty there and she started their spectroscopy lab. Once in the U.S., she reunited with the Francks. Ingrid Franck died in 1942, but James and Hertha maintained contact and eventually married in 1946.
For a detailed account of Sponer’s life, work, and her journey to the U.S., I highly recommend Olivia Campbell’s 2024 book, Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History .

The reparative changes I made to the Hertha Sponer Collection resituate the photo album as a record of Hertha Sponer’s experience, not James Franck’s. I was also able to name more women than were originally identified, and the added subject names mean those women are more findable across our collections and in web searches.

My hope is that by recentering Hertha Sponer as the subject of this collection, future researchers will be better able to get a sense of what her life was like while at Göttingen. Yes, James Franck is a part of that story, but it is a much more interesting one when you consider what it must have been like to be one of the only women in a physics lab in the 1920s and 30s.

Further Reading

Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History - Olivia Campbell, 2024

Hertha Sponer and the Path from Electron Diffraction to Wave/Particle Duality – Elise Krull, Lyne Starling Trimble Lecture, 2026

The Life and Legacy of Hertha Sponer – Karina Cooper, Ex Libris Universum, 2026