The Godfather

The Godfather

It was around 1973 that I met Prof. Nowacki for the first time when he “re-appeared” at the Technical University Berlin. I was an assistant there. The word was out that he was contemplating to leave the University of Michigan to join the department of naval architecture at TU Berlin. I asked him downright if I had a chance to work for him. Unfortunately, he could not say anything about that at the time.

Subsequently, Prof. Söding called me, who had not been a professor at the Technical University of Hannover for very long. He asked if I knew of an assistant that could join his team. I knew one, that is, I went to Hannover.

Then, when my doctorate with Prof. Söding was coming to its final stage, Söding said to me, “Don’t we want to invite Professor Nowacki to join the examination?” I thought that was good, of course. The two of them were, after all, the beacons of maritime IT in Germany by then. It was not until many years later that I learned I had been Prof. Söding’s first doctoral student.

During the doctoral examination two worlds met. At TU Hannover, something like this had apparently still largely been done in the style of a diploma exam until then. And so two of the five professors present asked me elaborate questions from their lectures that I, as a doctoral student who had come from Berlin, had never heard. One of them was called “the pastor” by the students because of his diction. That nickname was so apt that it has stuck with me to this day. The fifth professor, an electrical engineering expert, asked off-the-wall questions whose meaning – at least in my opinion – probably didn’t quite make sense to anyone present.

But Prof. Söding and Prof. Nowacki, who had been invited by him, brought the discussion to a sound scientific level and gave the whole event a higher quality in a beautiful way. This seemed to me like an impulse to broaden my view for coming tasks. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Nowacki for this.

Uwe Rabien