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Biography

Early life

Max Clara was born on February 12th, 1899 in South Tyrol, at that time part of the Habsburg Empire. His father, Dr. Josef Clara graduated with honors from the University of Innsbruck and started working as a general practitioner. Max(imilian) Josef Maria Clara was born as the first of three sons: his younger brothers Josef “Sepp” Franz and Oswald were born on August 18th, 1900, and July 12th, 1902, respectively. Their mother died very young on August 5th, 1903, of a severe illness. After that, Josef Clara moved his residence and the seat of his surgery to the village of Blumau, where he built a sanatorium at the Brenner road near the train station. Max Clara graduated from the Franziskaner-Gymnasium in the nearby city of Bozen on February 26th, 1917.

Militar career

Max Clara's examination record at the University of Innsbruck

Right after, he participated in World War I on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a one-year volunteer in the k.k. Gebirgsartillerie Regiment Nr. 203. He was promoted to the position of ensign after having been awarded the Bronze Medal for Bravery and the Karl Troop Cross.

Education

In October 1918 Clara began his medical studies at the University of Innsbruck and spent one academic year (1921−22) in Leipzig. He probably went to Saxony’s most significant city as it had one of the leading Institutes for Anatomy and Histology since the famous anatomist and embryologist Wilhelm His headed it. According to Farner, he completed his studies with “summa cum laude” (highest honors) on May 5th, 1923, but according to his examination record at the university archive Innsbruck (Universitätsarchiv Innsbruck), he graduated with ‘sufficient’ grades (genügend).

Political activity

Map of Tyrol and Trentino after World War 1

During his entire life, Max Clara has been an active in politics: his political involvement was connected to the troubled history of his homeland, the South Tyrol. It has been a part of the Austro-Hungarian territory until its official unification with the Kingdom of Italy in 1919, thanks to the “Treaty of Saint Germain en Laye”. King Victor Emmanuel III tolerated a certain autonomy of these regions especially for language (most of Tyrol citizens spoke German). The same behavior was not adopted during the Italian fascism; with the strong nationalistic ideas diffused by Mussolini, an “Italianization” of those places occurred and made illegal even to speak or teach German in schools.

Corps Gothia experience

Max Clara tried to assert his German origins by becoming in 1919 a member of Corps Gothia and then of the German Tyrolean nationalism. The corps Gothia counted in its members also his brothers, Sepp and Oswald Clara. Besides that, Clara actively participated in several initiatives taken by the corps: after an illegal referendum in 1921, the members of Corps Gothia removed the borders between Bavaria and Austria, demonstrating Tyrol’s belonging to Germany. Thanks to the corps Clara became closer to the National Socialist ideology and after the joining of the 74% of Gothia members to NSDAP, Clara met the so-called “Max” de Crinis, a professor at Charite Medical School, centrally involved in SS activities.

Clara may have applied for membership in the ruling National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) in 1932 when admission was possible again after some years of suspended admittance.

The relationship with Nazism

Some sources prove that his career reached its apex during his adhesion to the Nazi party, from 1935 to 1942; his friendship with de Crinis became closer, and started to support the Nazi establishment, including SA. While the content of Clara’s scientific publications did not contribute to a racist or anti-Semitic ‘‘pseudoscience’’, he actively participated in university politics, which included providing politically biased appraisals for scholarships. Clara wrote an introduction to a national academic directory in 1942, in which he stated ‘‘with pride that science has contributed to the great plans of the Fu¨hrer’’ and called for scientists to submit to the reigning ideology and to be ready to secure the German claim to European leadership ‘‘intellectually as much as by the politics of force’’. In 1939, he and the outspoken National Socialist Eduard Pernkopf, formed half of the four-member executive committee. Although Clara’s career was so close to the NSDAP, he was ostracized in German post-war academia.

The denizification

The controversial post-war denazification process classified Clara as a Mitla¨ufer (follower) in June 1947 but cleared him upon appeal the following year. Clara had successfully argued that his quarrel with the Gauleiter had been an act of ‘‘active resistance’’ against party leaders, which had eventually led, against his wishes, to his posting to the Chair of Anatomy in Munich in late 1942. This version of the facts is, however, unlikely. Anyhow, the Denazification Tribunal did not refer to the existing proof and by that time, acquittals by such tribunals were already very common.

Career

His career started right after his graduation in 1923. He became an assistant at the Institute of Histology and Embryology at Innsbruck University, but a few months later he had to leave to take over the position of his father in Blumau, who had suddenly passed away in 1923. Throughout his time there, he continued his research on histological topics, started giving lectures at the Histological Institute at the University of Padua and received in 1929 the “libera dozenza” in Histology and Embryology from the Ministry of Public Education in Rome. He was then recruited by Tullio Terni, director of the Institute of Histology and General Embryology of the University of Padua, in 1929 as Assistente Volontario. In 1929 he was also joined Anatomische Gesellschaft, a Germany based international association of anatomists. In 1930, Clara received a highly prestigious appointment as a member of the German elite scientific society Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina on the recommendation by Hermann Stieve, then director of the anatomical institute in Halle, whom already supported Clara by providing him specimens from most likely executed men for a study on the interstitial Leydig cells.

Right after becoming a member of the Nazi Party in 1935, he became the director of the Institute of Anatomy in Leipzig. In 1936, he became the leader of the local Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund (National Socialist German University Lecturers League) at Leipzig University. In 1937 he described a new secretory cell type in the human bronchial epithelium, which later was designated as the “Clara cell”. 

The material on which the study was taken from executed prisoners and between 1935 and 1945 he published 9 papers using these tissues. On the other hand, it is also known that Clara experimented with living prisoners: in 1943 he asked the Munich Stadelheim prison to receive the bodies of the executed prisoners and to clandestinely mix four times a day for five days Vitamin C into the food of prisoners who were to be executed.

In 1942 he was recruited to Munich also as director of the Institute of Anatomy and held this position until the end of the war.

After the war, he could not find a job in Germany anymore so he decided to move to Istanbul. In Istanbul the new government was interested in the scientific and social progression, so during the second world war accepted 88 exiled Jewish German professors. In 1950 the faculty of the Institute of Histology and Embryology of Istanbul University accepted Max Clara as professor with at first a two-year contract.

Clara cells

To our knowledge, the first to use the eponym, in its French version ‘‘cellule de Clara’’, was Policard in 1955 in an ultrastructural description of the bronchioles of the rat. It seems that the eponym was then promoted, at least in Germany, by Erich Schiller, a pupil of Clara. This term is associated with the Nazi regime and it is the only “Third Reich Eponym” that is clearly still linked to the Nazi system. Due to this historical background, Clara cells are now called “club cells” since 2013.

Pubblications

During his stay in Istanbul, Clara published 34 journal articles, 28 in German and 6 in Turkish, but only four of the 34 journal articles were co-authored by young Turkish colleagues. Most of the articles he wrote during his stay in Istanbul were based on human and some animal materials histologically prepared before 1949, while he was still in Germany. Thus it is likely that he waited to be affiliated with a university again to publish his results.

He also published:

• Das Nervensystem des Menschen. Lehrbuch für Studierende und Ärzte that he plagiarized from the corresponding volume of the Braus/Elze textbook Anatomie des Menschen

• The embryology book Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen was another book that he had plagiarized, this time from Alfred Fischel’s Grundriss Der Entwicklung des Menschen.

After Clara’s death, Professor Erbengi published a histology atlas in which Clara was mentioned as one of the authors.