Senator e.h. Dr. Dr. h.c. Eiselen

Hermann Eiselen, born in Nagold in 1926, studied economics in Stuttgart and Heidelberg and received his doctorate in 1951 in Göttingen. After a 9-month stay in the USA, he joined the family business ‘Ulmer Spatz Vater und Sohn Eiselen’ as managing partner in 1954. Shortly before the company was sold in 1980, it employed nearly 500 people. Together with his father, he founded the non-profit Father and Son Eiselen Foundation Ulm in 1978, which he led as a board member until June 2001. In numerous essays, lectures and statements, he devoted himself to questions of corporate governance and increasingly took up issues of world nutrition, food security and overcoming poverty.

The research funding of the Father and Son Eiselen Foundation (including funding for diploma students, science prizes, project funding) and the private commitment (Visiting Professorship for Development Research) of Dr. Eiselen amount to a total of more than 10 million €. For many years, the Eiselen Foundation was the only foundation in Germany dedicated to improving world nutrition and reducing hunger in the world. Dr. Eiselen's interest was in modern plant breeding, especially green genetic engineering and its effect on world nutrition, emphasizing the outstanding role of agricultural research in reducing hunger and poverty in developing countries. Throughout his life, he remained true to his principle ‘Freedom and food is a basic human right!’

Together with his wife Edith-Karla, he went on long trips abroad to various places in the world that seemed important to him for his cause and to meet people there who thought and acted like him. He also traveled to various countries in Southeast Asia and supported agricultural research, especially at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. Dr. Eiselen and Mrs. Eiselen recognized the urgency of the poverty problem, especially in the mountainous regions of Thailand, and therefore, in addition to initiating the establishment of DFG Collaborative Research Center 564 (‘Uplands Program‘), they supported research to improve rural water supply with private funds.

For more than 50 years, Dr. Eiselen developed and designed the ‘Museum der Brotkultur’ in Ulm. Throughout his life, he remained a passionate art collector, but always under the premise of increasing the quality and expressiveness of the collection.