Non-metals were Marianne Baudler's passion. The former director of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cologne was particularly interested in phosphorus compounds.

Marianne Baudler was born on April 27, 1921 as the daughter of the factory owner Fritz Baudler and his wife Clara in Stettin in West Pomerania. She passed her Abitur there at the age of 19 and then moved to Dresden to study chemistry. Her diploma thesis, for which she received the rating "excellent", formed a solid basis for an academic Career. For her doctoral thesis, the young scientist joined the working group of the Hungarian-German chemist Franz Fehér (1903-1991) at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. He was a proven expert in the chemistry of non-metals and had a decisive influence on Baudler's life as a researcher.

After completing her dissertation on polyhydrogen sulfides, which Baudler completed in 1946, she worked as a research assistant for her supervisor in Göttingen until 1949. When Fehér accepted a professorship for inorganic chemistry at the University of Cologne, she followed him. Baudler habilitated at the University of Cologne in 1959 with a thesis on diphosphoric acids and was appointed associate professor in 1963. A few years later, she declined a call to the TU Berlin. She was not to regret this decision: in 1968 she was appointed personal professor and director of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cologne. The final appointment as a full professor took place in 1969.

Baudler remained loyal to non-metals, especially phosphorus, until her retirement in 1986. She was particularly interested in phosphines and other compounds with at least one phosphorus-phosphorus bond. To characterize the substances, she used all available spectroscopic methods from IR and Raman spectroscopy to NMR measurements and mass spectrometry.

Baudler has received several awards for her scientific work. Since 1982 she has been a full member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In the year of her retirement, the GDCh awarded her the renowned Alfred-Stock Memorial Award. After Margot Becke-Goehring (1914-2009), she was only the second woman to receive this honor. Marianne Baudler died on March 5, 2003 at the age of 81 in Davos.

In December 2022, the GDCh Board decided to name the GDCh Prize for Inorganic Chemistry (formerly Alfred-Stock Memorial Award) after Marianne Baudler ( to the Marianne Baudler Prize ).