[1][2][3] Ernst Schmutzer was born in 1930 in a small village in western Bohemia, which at that time had been part of Czechoslovakia for slightly more than a decade.

[1] From 1968 till 1990 he was in charge of the "Relativistic Physics" field at Jena, serving between 1974 and 1978 as Dean of the Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Engineering faculty.

[5] This invokes five space-time dimensions including a massive supplementary scalar field which, according to Schmutzer, can serve as an explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe identified in the 1990s (as a candidate for dark energy) and for the Pioneer effect.

[7] Politics was peripheral to Ernst Schmutzer's career, but in the German Democratic Republic it was hard to entirely ignore the country's ruling Socialist Unity Party.

[11] In Jena he created a School of Gravitation Physics, members of which include Hans Stephani, Dietrich Kramer and Eduard Herlt, and which has established a name for itself, most notably, with investigation of precise solutions for the Einstein field equations.

[14] In Jena Ernst Schmutzer was an honorary member of the Burschenschaft Arminia auf dem Burgkeller (Arminius Student Fraternity of the City [hostelry] Cellar).