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Born in Estonia Wolfgang Kohler
was only five years old when
his family moved to Northern
Germany. He went
to Tubingen, Bonn, and Berlin,
and obtained his PhD from the University
of Berlin in 1909 (Schultz
& Schultz,
2004).
In 1913,
Kohler was invited by the Prussian Academy
of science to study chimpanzees in Tenerife. While in Tenerife,
World War I had started, and Kohler stated that he could not leave Tenerife. That started rumors that he might
be a German
spy and his research facility was a cover for espionage
activities.
The rumors were started that he was a German
spy based on his idiosyncratic interpretation of historical data.
It was also stated that he had a powerful
radio transmitter in the attic of his house which he used to tell about
allied
ship movements. This information was
never found to be credible and was challenged by Kohler’s followers and
by
historians. For the next seven years he
studied the behavior of chimpanzees. His
work was published in The
Mentality of
Apes (1917). He found his
research
to be interesting, but soon found himself getting bored with working
with
animals (Schultz & Schultz, 2004).
In 1920, he
returned to Germany
and decided to sell his chimpanzees to the local zoo, but unfortunately
due to
the climate change the chimpanzees died. After Kohler returned to
Germany,
he replaced Stumpf as professor of psychology at the University
of Berlin. Kohl published a
book
called Static and Stationary
Physical
Gestalt (1920), which he
suggested that Gestalt theory was a
general law of
nature that should be extended to all sciences (Schultz & Schultz,
2004).
In
1925-1926, Kohler lectured at Harvard and Clark University. In 1929, he published Gestalt
Psychology, which talked about
the Gestalt movement. Kohler criticized Germany’s
government, and even had a group of Nazi invade his lecture hall to try
to get
him to stop. He even wrote an anti-Nazi
letter to the Berlin
newspaper
talking about Jewish professors who had to give up their jobs because
they were
Jewish. He was never arrested by the
Nazi police. In 1935, he finally decided
to leave Germany
and went to the United
States
(Schultz & Schultz, 2004).
Kohler was
the only non Jewish psychologist who ever protested against Germany
and the Nazis. He was not afraid to make
his thoughts about them very public which could have cost him his life
at a
very early age. He was lucky that he was not thrown into a prison and
killed
off for the things he said about Germany
and the Nazis (Schultz & Schultz, 2004).
In the United
States, Kohler taught at Swarthmore
College in Pennsylvania,
and published a few books. He was also
edited the Gestalt journal Psychological
Research. In 1956, he
received the
distinguished scientific contribution award from APA and in 1959,
became
president of the APA (Schultz & Schultz, 2004).
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