Max Neisser
1869 - 1938

Max Neisser was born Maximilian Neißer in June 1869 in Liegnitz, Silesia (Prussia), the son of the merchant and factory owner Salomon Neißer (1833-1881) and Julie Neißer, née Sabersky (1841-1927). Both parents were Jewish. Max Neisser had four siblings: Luise Neisser (1861-1942), Prof. Dr. med. Ernst Richard Neisser (1863-1942), Karl Neisser (1868-1889) and Paula Katharina Kurlbaum (1875-1918). Max Neisser attended the grammar school in Liegnitz until Easter 1881 and then, due to the Neißer family's move to Berlin, the Joachimsthal grammar school there, where he obtained his school-leaving certificate at Easter 1888.

Max Neisser, who became a Protestant around 1892, married Emma Eleonore Hallgarten, born in Frankfurt on the Main in July 1878, in 1901. She was the daughter of the Jewish patron Charles L. Hallgarten (1838-1908) and Elise Mainzer (1840-1895), who also came from a Jewish family. Emma remained Jewish. According to "Mahlau's Frankfurter Adressbuch" (Frankfurt address book), Max Neisser lived in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen at Städel street 37 in 1901, but moved to Park street 67 in the Westend district the following year.

Max and Emma had three children: the German scholar Elise Charlotte (known as Liselotte) Dieckmann (1902-1994), the businessman Gerhard Ernst Neisser (1905-1984) and the chemist Klaus Otto Alfred Neisser (1911-2003). In the year the third child was born, the family no longer lived in Park street, but at Miquel street 21. In a letter dated March 1933, Prof. Dr. Max Neisser wrote: "Ich bin der Rasse nach Volljude, dem Bekenntnis nach protestantisch. Aber ich bin in erster Linie Deutscher und werde mir das nicht durch irgendwelche noch so hohe Persönlichkeiten bestreiten lassen. Denn väterlicherseits und mütterlicherseits leben wir nachweislich seit Jahrhunderten in Deutschland." (I am a full Jew by race and Protestant by religion. But I am first and foremost German and will not allow this to be disputed by any personalities, however high they may be. Because on my father's and mother's side, we have been living in Germany for centuries.)

Max Neisser began his studies at the University of Freiburg (in Breisgau). He studied natural sciences for one semester and then medicine. His brother Ernst had also studied medicine at the same university. After completing his Physicum in March 1890, he did his military service in the 113th Infantry Regiment in Freiburg. He passed the state medical examination in Freiburg on January 1893. In October of the same year, he received his doctorate in medicine in Berlin with a thesis entitled "Ueber einen neuen Wasser-Vibrio, der die Nitrosoindol-Reaktion liefert". (About a new water vibrio that provides the nitrosoindole reaction.)

From 1894 to 1899, Dr. Max Neisser worked as an assistant to Carl Flügge (1847-1923) at the Royal Hygiene Institute of the University of Breslau (Silesia, Prussia) and habilitated in 1898 with a thesis entitled "Ueber Luftstaub-Infection". He then worked at Paul Ehrlich's Frankfurt Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy. In 1901, Dr. Max Neisser was appointed titular professor and in July 1909 became director of the newly founded Municipal Institute of Hygiene in Frankfurt on the Main. He was co-founder and first chairman of the "Frankfurter Verein für zur Bekämpfung der Schwindsuchtgefahr" (Frankfurt Association for Combating the Danger of Vertigo). In 1914, he was appointed professor of hygiene and bacteriology at the newly founded University of Frankfurt on the Main. His Institute of Hygiene was transformed into a university institute.

Dr. Max Neisser took part in the First World War as a doctor from August 1914. He was deployed in Belgium, Bulgaria, France and Romania and was ultimately a retired colonel's surgeon, stationed in Virton (Belgium). For his military achievements, he was awarded the Austrian Knight's Cross of the Order of St. Francis Joseph in November 1915, the Iron Cross 1st Class in August 1917 and the Bulgarian Order of Alexander in February 1918. In August 1918, Max Neisser, already a Privy Medical Councillor at the time, applied for a longer leave of absence, which was eventually granted. From November 18, 1918, he was back in Frankfurt on the Main at the Institute of Hygiene.

After Max Neisser had been Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in 1920/1921, he took over the Rectorate of the University of Frankfurt on the Main for a year in the winter semester of 1921/1922. During this time, he brought the bacteriologist Emmy Klieneberger-Nobel to his institute. In 1930, she was the first woman to be habilitated at Frankfurt University. In June 1929, the Frankfurter Nachrichten newspaper wrote on his 60th birthday: "Seine Publikationen über den Diphteriebazillus und seine Differentialdiagnose ist von allergrößter Bedeutung für die medizinische Praxis geworden." (His publications on the diphtheria bacillus and its differential diagnosis have become of the utmost importance for medical practice.) The Frankfurter Zeitung also published an article on his 60th birthday in June 1929. In it, Prof. Dr. Hans Sachs, a serologist teaching in Heidelberg who fled Germany for Great Britain in 1938, described Max Neisser's esteem as follows:

"Rasche Erfassung und scharfe Durchdringung der Materie, leichte geistige Anpassung an die Forderungen des Tages und der Wissenschaft, stete Bereitschaft zur Beratung und helfenden Fürsorge haben Neißer neben seinem Erfolg in Forschung und Lehre das Vertrauen der Behörden und die Herzen der Schüler, Mitarbeiter und Freunde gewonnen." (Rapid grasp and sharp penetration of the subject matter, easy intellectual adaptation to the demands of the day and of science, constant willingness to provide advice and helpful care won Neißer the trust of the authorities and the hearts of his students, colleagues and friends, in addition to his success in research and teaching.)

He was also an internationally respected physician. In July 1929, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health. In October 1932, he became chairman of the German Microbiological Society. However, his professional situation changed dramatically with the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship: on April 25, 1933, Prof. Dr. Max Neisser was relieved of his duties at the university with immediate effect. This put an end to his work in Frankfurt on the Main.

In 1935, Max Neisser wanted to give a lecture "On microbial symbiosis" in Turkey. He was planning a trip through Greece and Turkey. In response to his request for permission from the University of Frankfurt on the Main in February 1935, the then Rector Walter Platzhoff (1881-1969), who had only been a member of the NSDAP since 1937, asked the Nazi Gauleiter Jakob Sprenger. Platzhoff characterized him as follows: "Geheimrat Neisser ist zwar Nichtarier, ist aber als unbedingt zuverlässige Persönlichkeit anzusehen, von der keine Entgleisung zu befürchten ist." (Although Geheimrat Neisser is a non-Aryan, he is to be regarded as an absolutely reliable personality from whom no derailment is to be feared.) Even if the Gauleiter's reply is not included in the file on Prof. Dr. Max Neisser in the Frankfurt University Archives, it must have been negative. Because in March 1935, Walter Platzhoff asked Max Neisser to refrain from the lecture and signed this letter with the words "In kollegialer Hochschätzung Ihr sehr ergebener Platzhoff" (In collegial esteem, your very devoted Platzhoff.)

Prof. Dr. Max Neisser joined the Frankfurt on the Main section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club in 1920. In March 1933, Max Neisser, together with the Jewish lawyer Dr. Adolf Fuld, recommended the admission of the students Klaus Neisser, his son, and Heinz Alexander, thus promoting the expansion of the Frankfurt student section.

Whether he later left the section or was excluded by the new, National Socialist-oriented section leaders due to his Jewish parents cannot be determined at present due to a lack of sources. As a so-called "Frontkämpfer" (front-line fighter) during the First World War, he would have been allowed to remain a member of the Frankfurt on the Main section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club even after the introduction of the so-called "Aryan paragraph".

Due to his Jewish parents, Prof. Dr. Max Neisser was persecuted as a Jew by the National Socialists. As early as April 1933, he was released from his duties at the university by the Prussian Ministry of Science, meaning that the work he had begun in 1914 for the Institute of Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt on the Main came to an end. The University of Frankfurt's course catalog for the summer semester of 1934 therefore stated on page 7: "Neisser, Max, Dr. med. (Hygiene and Bacteriology). Discharged. - Does not read." In February 1936, like other professors with a Jewish background, such as Karl Herxheimer and Ernst Kantorowicz, his teaching license was revoked, with retroactive effect from 31 December 1935. Max Neisser had previously moved from Frankfurt to nearby Falkenstein in the Taunus low mountain range, where he lived in seclusion at Feldberg street 4a until his death in February 1938. We know from a letter from his wife in the Frankfurt University Archives that his attending physicians included Dr. Emil Liefmann, who was also a member of the Frankfurt section of the Alpine Club.

His son Gerhard Ernst Neisser was able to emigrate to the USA (New York City) and changed his name there to Gerard Ernest Neisser. He died in June 1984 in Larchmont (New York). Emma Eleonore Neisser succeeded in emigrating to her son Gerhard in October 1938, but she died in New York City in November 1939. The second son Klaus Otto Neisser went to Brazil and lived in Sao Paulo. The daughter Liselotte Dieckmann also emigrated with her family via Italy (1933) and Turkey (1934) to the USA in 1938, specifically to St. Louis (Missouri), where she died in 1994, just three days before her 92nd birthday.

Max Neisser's aunt Luise (Lise) Neisser committed suicide together with her brother, Prof. Dr. med. Ernst Richard Neisser, in October 1942 in Ernst's Berlin apartment in Eichenallee in order to escape persecution. While she died immediately, her uncle died a little later in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin.