The Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam - Triumph and Tragedies

This book describes the 110 years of the Astrophysical Observatory in Potsdam (AOP) as the cradle of European astrophysics up to its disappearance in the 1980s. The first part consists of reviews on the work of the leading astronomers before the Academy reform, while the following part also contains memories of the author until the end of the Akademie der Wissenschaften and the end of the entire GDR as well as the formation 1991/92 of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) on the grounds of the Sternwarte Babelsberg in the course of the German unification.
The history of astrophysics on Potsdam's Telegraphenberg includes triumph and tragedies. It began with Hermann Vogel's discovery of the spectroscopic binary stars, Spörer's discovery of the Maunder Minimum of solar activity and Hartmann's clever argumentation on the existence of interstellar gas. Schwarzschild wrote from the war front to Einstein that gravitational waves should exist and Grotrian revealed the secret of the red corona line; later the dynamo theory of the origin of cosmic magnetic fields will migrate worldwide from here.