munich

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of the German physicist Max Planck on 4 October 1947 is to be marked by the Max Planck Society and the German Physical Society with an extensive exhibition describing his life and work.

The exhibition in Magnus House, Berlin, runs from 5 to 30 October. It includes personal items such as Planck's rucksack and icepick — he was a keen mountain hiker — and documents that have not been publicly exhibited before. It will also be the first public showing for his death mask.

More familiar items to be exhibited include the minute books of the German Physical Society which record, for example, the lecture Planck gave to the society in Berlin in 1900 in which he described his law of radiation and introduced for the first time his quantum hypothesis.

Also familiar to Planck aficionados is the 20-minute film commissioned by Joseph Goebbels' ministry of propaganda in 1942, discovered in 1983. The film, which will run continuously throughout the exhibition, features Planck, sitting on a stool, discussing his life. The film was not actually used for propaganda — it was one of a series intended to archive the lives of great Germans.

Magnus House, in former East Berlin, has strong associations with recent German history. The family of Gustav Magnus, the German physicist who in the last century discovered the Magnus effect (the sideways force exerted on a rotating body moving through a fluid), donated the house to the German Physical Society of the former German Democratic Republic in 1958, in honour of the centenary of Planck's birth. After reunification, the house was transferred to the unified German Physical Society.