It was a Grey November Afternoon in Berlin

1987

It was a grey November afternoon in Berlin. 1987. The city was divided. The world, too. West and East. I studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt, then still called Technische Hochschule. This was West Germany and I was blessed to be free to choose where to go. I was in the middle of my fifth term, just before getting the “Vordiplom,” something not so different from a Bachelor’s degree. I knew that I wanted to become a naval architect, possibly a yacht designer, a perspective that drove and still drives many students in Europe to enroll for naval architecture and ocean engineering.

I had traveled to Berlin a day or two earlier, checking the options to change to the Technical University Berlin for the so-called “Hauptstudium,” comparable to graduate studies. In Darmstadt there were 400 fellow students in lectures such as mathematics and thermodynamics. The closest that I had come to meeting a real professor was from the twenty-third row of the auditorium maximum with the exception of the mechanics professor for whom I worked as a student assistant for statics and dynamics and with whom I had shaken hands once when starting the job.

In Berlin that day I had run around the whole morning, visiting TU Berlin’s main building on Straße des 17. Juni and the not quite so glamorous buildings at Salzufer where the then Institute of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering was located. The student advisor whom I had talked to in the morning, following an appointment I had made in advance, encouraged me to check with fellow students and, possibly, other professors while being in the city so as to get a good overall impression. To be honest, I was a bit dubious about knocking at the door of an unknown professor. What could I say? I am 21, will get my Vordiplom soon and would like to see if I should study at TU Berlin? It seemed a bit “thin” for starting an ad hoc conversation with people that usually had very little time and were devoting their brainpower to solving complicated problems. So, I gathered my courage and knocked at the door to Prof. Nowacki’s office.

One of his secretaries opened. Friendly smile. Come in, please. What can we do for you? I would like to talk to the professor of ship design, please. Not sure if he is available but let me check. A person emerged from the other office, the connecting door being open. Can I help? A man in his fifties with a friendly smile and an open face, extending his hand to greet me, was standing in the doorway. Do you have five minutes, perhaps, to talk with me about studying here, I asked. Sure, come in and sit down, was the inviting answer, indicating a low couch in which to sink. And here he was, Prof. Dr.- Ing. Horst Nowacki, a man a bit older than my parents at that time and, interestingly, just a little younger than I am now (2023) myself. He listened. And then answered. And you could tell here was a person that loved what he was doing, that would encourage a student to pursue their dream, that would ask for a lot but was willing to give the same in return. I had planned for five minutes but stayed for 30. I entered with doubts about the choice where to go and left with the feeling of having found where to try my luck.

Four months later I sat in a small rental truck, hauling my bicycle, books, a mattress and some of my meager belongings via the transit route through East Germany to West Berlin, March 1988. I had enrolled at the Technical University Berlin. And to this day I stayed. I studied naval architecture as planned and, thanks to an exchange program that Prof. Nowacki had set up with the University of Michigan, I received a scholarship to spend a year in Ann Arbor, USA, so as to get a Master’s degree, focusing on Computer Aided Design. From 1992 to 1998 I had the pleasure of working closely with Prof. Nowacki, having become one of his teaching assistants. He supervised my PhD thesis, listing and suggesting, correcting and challenging my work, guiding and encouraging me. I spent many hours on the couch on which I first met him, back in 1987.

Dario Fo, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997, once said:

I had the pleasure and the fortune to learn from a real master of his profession. And, I am well aware that I continue to benefit from that. And I would like to say thank you very much, dear Prof. Nowacki, for having shared your knowledge and for having broken the ground for others to go one step further – for, to me, this is the role model of being a true scientist.

Ihr Stefan Harries