Barbara Ruhemann

Barbara Ruhemann (1905 – April 1976) was a German and British physical chemist, anthropologist and translator.

Early life and physics Barbara (née Zarniko) met Martin Ruhemann while a student in Professor Franz Simon's group at the University of Breslau, and they later married. Kurt Mendelssohn, who had joined Simon's group in 1927, was attracted to Barbara but did not allow feelings to develop for her because of Martin. However, Mendelssohn later met Barbara's youngest sister Jutta and they married in 1932. The Ruhemanns had Communist sympathies.

It was in Kharkiv that Barbara gave birth to their son Stephen. To help with the baby Barbara's sister Fransiska, the middle Zarniko daughter, came to stay with the Ruhemanns in Kharkiv. It was here Fransiska met and later married James Crowther who became one of the founders of science journalism. which was reviewed favourably at the time.

There is evidence that Barbara Ruhemann and Charlotte Houtermans translated contributions from Soviet physicists into German for the journal Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, which became their journal of choice once publication in Zeitschrift für Physik was prohibited when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.

As the Great Purge was gaining momentum in 1937 and the Ruhemann's colleagues were disappearing, The first day focused on Friedrich Engels' works Dialectics of Nature and The Origin of the Family and the second day on concepts first illuminated by Lewis Morgan, who was one of the first to contrast a universal form of society based on clan organization and matrilineal succession as opposed to that of nuclear family. This symposium brought together imminent scientists, philosophers, and communicators of the day including Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, Hyman Levy, Joseph Needham, Alfred North Whitehead, J. B. S. Haldane, George Paget Thomson, and Benjamin Farrington. Haldane responded disagreeing with the characterization of eugenics as pseudoscience, and Ruhemann responds that pseudoscience is not just confined to eugenics but also anthropology. In her correspondence she notes wanting a more scientific approach to biology noting physics approaches to studying light as an example. a task that André Weil, a mathematician, led in parallel on behalf of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss for his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949).

She was one of the translators of Letters of the Young Engels, 1838-1845, and of several volumes of the Marx & Engels Collected Works.