The German Research Foundation 1920–1970: Funding Poised between Science and Politics 3515101950, 9783515101950

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6 Edited by Mark Walker Karin Orth Ulrich Herbert Rüdiger vom Bruch

Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft

The German Research Foundation 1920–1970 Funding Poised between Science and Politics

Band 6 Franz Steiner Verlag

The German Research Foundation 1920–1970

beiträge zur geschichte der deutschen forschungsgemeinschaft herausgegeben von Rüdiger vom Bruch und Ulrich Herbert Band 6

The German Research Foundation 1920–1970 Funding Poised between Science and Politics Edited by Mark Walker, Karin Orth, Ulrich Herbert and Rüdiger vom Bruch

Translated by Ann M. Hentschel

Franz Steiner Verlag

Übersetzt mit Mitteln der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft Umschlagbild: Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bildarchiv 183-2004-0810-501

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2013 Translated by Ann M. Hentschel, Stuttgart Druck: Offsetdruck Bokor, Bad Tölz Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-10195-0

CONTENTS History, Issues, and Structure of the Entire Project ........................................... Karin Orth

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Foreword: The German Research Foundation and National Socialism ........... 17 Mark Walker I Outlining the Problem “Preserve of Full Professors” – On the History of the German Research Foundation between 1920 and 1970 ............................................................ 23 Patrick Wagner II History of the Institution From “Emergency” to “Alliance” – Researching the German Research Foundation as an Institution ........................................................................ 41 Rüdiger vom Bruch “Tool of German War Strategy” – The Science Policy of the German Research Foundation and the Reich Research Council between 1920 and 1945 ................................................................................ 53 Sören Flachowsky Poised between Science Organizations – The German Research Foundation, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and the Academies of Science 1920–1972 ................................................................................... 69 Peter Nötzoldt From Emergency Association to Service Organization – Guidelines on the Development of the German Research Foundation 1949–1973 .......... 85 Karin Orth The German Research Foundation as a Topic in the History of Science – A Commentary ............................................................................................. 97 Mitchell G. Ash

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Contents

III Natural and Engineering Sciences The Syndrome of Falling Behind – Resource Constellations and Epistemic Orientations in the Natural and Engineering Sciences .... 105 Helmuth Trischler On the Path to Technical Design – DFG-Funded Research in Mechanical Engineering 1920–1970 ...................................................... 119 Mirko Buschmann/Thomas Hänseroth Computers for Science – Scientific Computing and Computer Science in the German Scientific System 1870–1970 ............................................. 135 Ulf Hashagen Thrift Materials, Domestic Materials, and Substitutes – Metals Research in Germany 1920–1970 .............................................................................. 151 Günther Luxbacher The “Four-Year Plan for Chemistry” and “Polymer Science” – The German Research Foundation and Chemical Research from the 1920s into the 1960s ................................................................... 169 Paul Erker Civilian Military Research and the Responsibility of Science – A Commentary ........................................................................................... 187 Ulrich Wengenroth Natural and Engineering Sciences – A Commentary ...................................... 193 Moritz Epple IV History of Medicine and the Biosciences Instrumental Modernity and the Dictate of Politics – Sponsorship of Medical Research by the Emergency Association/ German Research Foundation 1920–1970 ................................................. 201 Wolfgang U. Eckart Faster, Higher, Mightier – Physiological Research Support by the German Research Foundation 1920–1970 ..................................... 221 Alexander Neumann The Plannable Human – The German Research Foundation and the Science of Human Heredity 1920–1970.............................................. 241 Anne Cottebrune

Contents

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Feverish Research? – German Tropical Medicine as Reflected in its Funding by the Emergency Association/German Research Foundation 1920–1970 ............................................................................... 255 Marion A. Hulverscheidt Fragmentation, Cooperation, Institutionalization – German Cancer Research within the Funding Horizons of the Emergency Association/German Research Foundation 1920–1970 ............................ 269 Gabriele Moser Close to the State and Oriented toward the Fundamentals – Research on Radiation and Radioactivity in the Biosciences 1920–1970 ..................... 283 Alexander von Schwerin Enzymes, Hormones, Vitamins – Biocatalytic Research Funded by the German Research Foundation 1920–1970........................................... 299 Heiko Stoff History of Medicine and the Biosciences – A Commentary ......................... 315 Johanna Bleker V The Humanities and Social Sciences Border Guard and Border Crosser of Science – The German Research Foundation and the Humanities and Social Sciences 1920–1970 ............ 321 Patrick Wagner The Will for Relevancy – State-Supported Research on Linguistics 1920–1970 ................................................................................................... 335 Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers Surveying German Volkskultur – The “Atlas of German Folklore” and the German Research Foundation 1928–1980 ......................................... 347 Friedemann Schmoll A Midwife for Science – The German Research Foundation and German Ethnology .............................................................................. 361 Christoph Seidler Transmittals and Transformations – Research on the European East and the German Research Foundation 1945–1975........................................... 377 Corinna R. Unger

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Contents

Agrarian Self-Sufficiency and Rural Order – German Agricultural Research 1920–1960 ................................................................................... 395 Willi Oberkrome VI Science, Science Policy, and the German Research Foundation Sponsorship of Science under National Socialism – An Almost Everyday Story? A Commentary on the Research Program “The German Research Foundation 1920–1970” ...................................... 405 Reinhard Rürup “Mr. DFG” Walther Gerlach (1889–1979) – Physicist, Science Functionary, and Public Representative .......................................................................... 413 Bernd-A. Rusinek The Rules of Science – Science under National Socialism and the Emergence of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge ........................ 431 Ulrich Wengenroth Conditional Upheavals – Thoughts on the Relationship between Science and Politics in the West German Postwar Period ......................... 439 Carola Sachse The German Professor in the Third Reich – Four Biographical Sketches ....... 449 Ulrich Herbert Institutional Abbreviations ............................................................................... 469 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 471 List of Authors ................................................................................................... 513

HISTORY, ISSUES, AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENTIRE PROJECT Karin Orth

The research project on “The History of the German Research Foundation 1920– 1970” was carried out from 2000 to 2008 at the initiative of Professor ErnstLudwig Winnacker during his tenure as president of that funding institution, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). It was directed by Professors Rüdiger vom Bruch (Humboldt Univerity of Berlin) and Ulrich Herbert (Univerity of Freiburg) and was coordinated by the author. It encompassed twenty individual studies, most of which have meanwhile been or will soon be published. Six international symposiums took place that likewise produced detailed collections of essays. The present volume assembles revised versions of the presentations delivered during the research project’s closing convention held in the Harnack House in Berlin in January 2008. The aim of this introduction is to present the project as a whole: its history, its structure, and the issues it broached. It is not solely due to the initiative of the above-named professors that this research project was set up and executed. Rather, it stood at the crossroads between two discourses. On the one hand, the history of science has been experiencing a boom for some time now. Many share the belief that we are living in a “knowledge-based or science-based society” (Wissens- oder Wissenschaftsgesellschaft, Rolf Kreibich), in a “scientific age” (Michael Jeismann). In this connection, curiosity about the historical roots of science and knowledge has been growing for some years, in Germany as well as other countries. On the other hand, particular interest – not exclusive to Germany – in the history of National Socialism remains unabated. Recent professional and public debates have been revolving particularly around the issue of the perpetration or complicity of individual social groups or subsets. And the inquiry goes on. Both of these thematic fields – a consciousness of living within a historically evolved knowledge-based society and an enduring interest in the Nazi dictatorship by historians and the general public alike – converge in the debate over the Nazi pasts of major scientific organizations, such as the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, MPG, formerly called the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), or the DFG. Thus, it is symptomatic of the interest in such questions that two major historical research projects were established at the turn of the last century to illuminate the more recent pasts of both these self-governed organizations of science. At their heart is a (re)determination of the role of scientists and their actions during the Nazi period. This role lies somewhere between recruitment and “self-mobilization” (Herbert Mehrtens). It is also a matter of locating Nazi research, or respectively, science conducted inside Germany under National Socialist rule, within international trends and

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Karin Orth

longer-term developments running from the turn of the century into the 1970s. The research project carried out from 1999 to 2004 by the Presidential Commission on the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism set itself the goal of examining thoroughly the contribution to the Nazi system that can be specifically attributed to the KWG and its scientists. It is to Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker’s credit that such a research project on the history of the DFG was initiated. In the spring of 2000 Professor Winnacker appointed a preliminary Study Group to explore the ways and means of researching the Foundation’s history. Its members were Professors Luise Schorn-Schütte (Univerity of Frankfurt am Main), Rüdiger vom Bruch (Humboldt University of Berlin), Ulrich Herbert (Univerity of Freiburg), Gerhard Oexle (Max Planck Institute of History, Göttingen), and Winfried Schulze (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich). Following this conference, the DFG president asked Professors Rüdiger vom Bruch and Ulrich Herbert to assume the management of the incipient research project. A short while later the author was engaged as the scientific coordinator of the overall project. It became obvious very early on that a thorough survey of the available sources and documents was an indispensable precondition to an informed plan and design of the project. In view of the very problematic state of transmission of the source material, an Archive Study Group was engaged to conduct an immediate survey of the documentation available. It was composed of Dr. Sören Flachowsky (Berlin), Privatdozent Dr. Lothar Mertens (†, Berlin), and the author. Our report about the available holdings served as a basis for drafting the plans for the project’s material and methodological orientation as well as for its central concerns. The entire project followed three basic guidelines. First, special emphasis had to be laid on the Nazi regime without, however, isolating that period of dictatorship. The DFG’s research policy during the Nazi period had to be located generally within longer-term political trends and specifically within research policy. That is why the period under examination stretches from the beginnings of this funding organization in the 1920s (under its former name Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft – Emergency Association for German Science, NG) into the 1970s. Second, the individual research projects supported by the DFG were not to be analyzed primarily along the lines of organizational and administrative history. Our main attention had to be paid to the research activities themselves, their historical contexts in science and science policy, and their importance also with regard to international research trends and standards. Third, it was not a matter of writing a history staked out purely by disciplines. Developments extending beyond individual fields also had to be elaborated; and exemplary scientific projects, approaches, and discourses as well as biographies had to be examined. It would have been impossible to attempt even approximate completeness as regards the fields and disciplines covered. Instead, we focused on expanding on exemplary topics and developments. At the outset it had been determined that the research project should be developed in stages. Accordingly, the first four analyses started in the fall of 2001,

History, Issues, and Structure of the Entire Project

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the last in the fall of 2004. In total the research project comprised eighteen individual studies plus two associated projects. The twenty analysts came from eight universities or scientific establishments and were advised by ten professors. The studies on institutional and political history were conducted under the auspices of Rüdiger vom Bruch and Ulrich Herbert. Professor Wolfgang U. Eckart (Heidelberg) was responsible as a cooperative partner for the history of medicine, and Professors Franz-Josef Brüggemeier (Freiburg) and Clemens Knobloch (Siegen) accompanied the studies on the humanities and social sciences, most broadly conceived (agricultural research was included here for purely pragmatic reasons). Professors Helmuth Trischler (Munich), Thomas Hänseroth (Dresden), and Wolfgang König (Berlin) oversaw the analyses on the technical and natural sciences, and Professors Hans Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin) and Bettina Wahrig (Braunschweig) the work on the biological and life sciences. The following table offers an overview of the individual projects and already published monographs.1 These appeared in the series edited by Professors Rüdiger vom Bruch, Ulrich Herbert, and Patrick Wagner (Halle) entitled Studien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (SGD), published by Steiner Verlag in Stuttgart. Overview of the Individual Areas of Research I. Institutional and Political History (Rüdiger vom Bruch/Ulrich Herbert) Dr. Sören Flachowsky From the NG to the Reich Research Council – Science policy in the context of autarky, armament, and war (SGD, no. 3, 2008) Dr. Peter Nötzoldt

The DFG up to 1945 – Poised between the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the academies of science

Dr. Karin Orth

Research autonomy and planning. The DFG’s strategic policies 1949–68 (SGD, no. 8, 2011)

Prof. Patrick Wagner

General account of the history of the DFG between 1920 and 1970

II. History of Medicine (Wolfgang U. Eckart) Dr. Anne Cottebrune The plannable human – The DFG and the science of human heredity (SGD, no. 2, 2008) Dr. Alexander Neumann

Physiological research support by the DFG 1920–70

Dr. Marion Hulverscheidt

Research support by the NG/DFG for tropical and colonial medicine (1920–70)

Dr. Gabriele Moser

The DFG and cancer research 1920–70 (SGD, no. 7, 2011)

1 Their titles are translated in the table; cf. the bibliography for the available publications.

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Karin Orth

Overview of the Individual Areas of Research III. The Humanities and Social Sciences (Rüdiger vom Bruch/ Ulrich Herbert/Franz-Josef Brüggemeier/Clemens Knobloch) PD Dr. Willi Oberkrome

Order and autarky – The history of German agricultural research, agronomics, and rural social science as mirrored by research sponsorship and the DFG 1920–70 (SGD, no. 4, 2009)

Dr. Corinna R. Unger

Research on the East in West Germany – The inquiry into the European East and the DFG 1945–75 (SGD, no. 1, 2007)

PD Dr. Friedmann Schmoll

Surveying culture – The “Atlas of German Folklore” and the DFG 1928–89 (SGD, no. 5, 2009)

Prof. Bernd A. Rusinek

The physicist and DFG vice-president Walther Gerlach (1889–1979) – A biography

PD Dr. Klaas-Hinrich The will for relevancy. Linguistic research and its supEhlers port by the DFG 1920–70 (SGD, no. 6, 2010) Associated: Christoph Seidler

German ethnology 1920–70 – Continuity and change of a science in the international context

IV. Natural and Engineering Sciences (Helmuth Trischler/Thomas Hänseroth/ Wolfgang König) Dr. Günther Luxbacher

The DFG and research sponsorship in metallic raw and manufacturing materials 1920–70

Dr. Ulf Halshagen

“Computers for science” and a “science for computers” – The NG/DFG and the forming of numerical mathematics, scientific computing, and informatics in Germany

Dr. Mirko Buschmann

DFG-sponsored research on mechanical engineering, 1920–70 – Machine design: somewhere between pathdependence and path-change?

Associated: PD Dr. Paul Erker

Between the “Four-Year Plan for chemistry” and “polymer science” – The DFG and chemical research in Germany from the 1920s into the 1960s

V. Biological and Life Sciences (Bettina Wahrig/Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) Dr. Alexander von Schwerin

Close to the state and oriented toward the fundamentals – The DFG as a biopolitical institution: Biosciences and DFG-sponsored radiation and radioactivity research 1920–70

Dr. Heiko Stoff

Biocatalysts. A history of the science of hormones, vitamins, and enzymes 1920–70 (SGD, no. 9, 2012)

History, Issues, and Structure of the Entire Project

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The chosen interdisciplinary approach posed a challenge and an enriching stimulus from the very beginning. The necessary substantial support in order to be able to meet these expectations came from the Research Unit’s Academic Advisory Board headed by Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Munich). Its members were Professors Helmuth Albrecht (Freiberg), Lutz Danneberg (Berlin), Gerald D. Feldman (†, Berkeley), Lutz Raphael (Trier), Carola Sachse (Vienna), Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach (Hamburg), Margit Szöllosi-Janze (Cologne), Jakob Tanner (Zurich), Mark Walker (Schenectady, NY), Ulrich Wengenroth (Munich) and (as an associated member) Privatdozent Dr. Susanne Heim (Berlin). The Research Unit reported about the progress made in these examinations at the advisory board meetings organized annually in December. Hence, an opportunity always existed for reflection on and readjustment to the research project’s orientation as a whole as well as that of each individual study. The Research Unit met regularly once or twice a year in addition in order to exchange ideas and discuss topical results. Furthermore, close academic contacts with other groups of scholars working on similar issues proved worthwhile. This applied especially to the Presidential Commission on the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism as well as to the Priority Program coordinated by Rüdiger vom Bruch and established in the summer of 2003 on “Science, Politics, and Society. Germany in the International Context in the Late Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century.” Besides supervising these individual studies, the overall project organized a major international symposium every year. The focus topics, of interest to the public at large, intended at the same time to point out how the history of research sponsorship by the DFG falls within the contexts of the general history of science and the individual fields of study. These proceedings volumes appeared in the series Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (BGD), under the editorship of the two directors of the research project, likewise published by Steiner Verlag. The first convention took place from 7 to 9 June 2002 in the Harnack House in Berlin and concerned itself with the Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost) within the context of ethnic cleansing, occupation policy, and science. Professor Isabel Heinemann (Freiburg/Münster) organized the conference and afterwards, together with Patrick Wagner, edited the proceedings volume on “Science, Planning, Expulsion: New-Order Schemes and Resettlement Policy in the Twentieth Century” (BGD, no. 1, Stuttgart 2006). The response to the subsequently developed touring exhibition on “Science, Planning, Expulsion. The Nazis’ Master Plan East” was also great. The opening ceremony took place in September 2006 at the Science Center in Bonn, and it was later shown in more than fifteen other German cities.2

2 The contributors to this DFG exhibition were Isabel Heinemann, Willi Oberkrome, Dr. Sabine Schleiermacher, and Patrick Wagner. Dieter Hüsken (DFG) was responsible for the editing and exhibition design; Dr. Guido Lammers (DFG) was a consultant. An Internet version of the exhibition is accessible at http://www.dfg.de/aktuelles_presse/ausstellungen_veranstaltungen/ generalplan-ost/index.html

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Karin Orth

The second conference was organized by Wolfgang U. Eckart and took place from 9 to 10 October 2003 in the historic memorial building dedicated to Reichspräsident Friedrich Ebert in Heidelberg. The topic was experiments on humans in medical research. The proceedings volume edited by Wolfgang U. Eckart, Man, Medicine and the State. The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Research in the Twentieth Century, appeared in English in March 2006 (BGD, no. 2). The third conference, held from 29 September to 1 October 2004 in Bonn, bore the title “Between Education and Extermination. Research and Policy on Gypsies in Twentieth-Century Europe.” It was organized by Privatdozent Dr. Michael Zimmermann (†, Essen) and Dr. Jörg Später (Freiburg). Michael Zimmermann also edited the proceedings volume (BGD, no. 3), which – tragically – he did not live to see in print. The fourth and last conference, devoted to a single subject, took place from 29 September to 1 October 2005 in Berlin. Organized by Helmuth Trischler and Mark Walker, its chosen topic was “Physics in Germany from 1920 to 1970: Concepts, Instruments, and Resources for Research and Research Support in International Comparison.” The related proceedings volume has already appeared (BGD, no. 5). Two additional conferences served to introduce preliminary and then final results of the overall project. The first conference took place on 16 March 2006 in Berlin in the Harnack House, the closing conference at the same venue from 30 to 31 January 2008. The present volume is based on the presentations and comments made during the closing conference, with subsequent revisions of the talk manuscripts for publication. The original edition appeared in 2010 (BGD, no. 4). Six parts introduce the disciplinary and methodological approaches used to relate the DFG’s history. They also characterize the research project as a whole. “Outlining the Problem” is followed by the sections on the “History of the Institution,” “Natural and Engineering Sciences,” “History of Medicine and the Biosciences,” as well as “The Humanities and Social Sciences.” (In accordance with the general convention adopted by the project, this is where the contribution on agricultural research is inserted.) The last part, under the title “Science, Science Policy, and the German Research Foundation,” makes general observations that resulted from the conference and the research project as a whole. An introductory essay by one of the project heads opens most of these sections, followed by separate studies summarizing the individual research results. An expert commentary by an external scholar closes most parts. For these commentaries I would cordially like to thank, in the name of the Research Unit, Professors Mark Walker, Mitchell G. Ash, Ulrich Wengenroth, Moritz Epple, Johanna Bleker, and Reinhard Rürup. Many people helped to make possible the execution and completion of the research project on the history of the DFG, and many deserve our gratitude. I restrict my mentions here to a few institutions and persons whose support cannot be overrated and are consequently very cordially thanked. First and foremost, the DFG itself. Our thanks go to its President, Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, as well as to his successor Professor Matthias Kleiner, who were both positively disposed toward the project throughout, without intervening in any manner in the substance of the research. Part of this procedure included that the overall project

History, Issues, and Structure of the Entire Project

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as well as each individual study underwent the DFG’s review process and was subjected to the critical scrutiny of a group of peers. These referees – the core of which were Professors Mitchell G. Ash (Vienna), Hans-Ulrich Thamer (Münster), and Jürgen Reulecke (Gießen) – are thanked very much for their constructive critiques and assessments. Finally, the Research Unit also very heartily thanks Dr. Guido Lammers, who always assisted in surmounting bureaucratic and other hurdles. Without him the project could not have been carried out. The Research Unit would also like to thank the many archives, in particular, the Bundesarchiv, for their active support in tracking down archival holdings; Jörg Später for his excellent and competent copyediting of almost all of the project’s publications; Michelle Miles for her thorough copyediting of the English edition; Steiner Verlag in Stuttgart and the publishing director Dr. Thomas Schaber for his uncomplicated collaboration; as well as fellow scholars who were researching similar questions for helping us along with their constructive criticism. In this connection special thanks from the Research Unit go to the members of the Academic Advisory Board for their expert comments and numerous suggestions. In particular, Gerald D. Feldman’s wise remarks have brought the solution to many a problem within reach. His far too early death left a painful gap also in our Research Unit. The present volume is dedicated to his memory. Note to the reader: All sources in the footnotes are given as shortened references. The titles of sources appear in roman type with no further markings. Please refer to the bibliogaphy for complete bibliographical information.

FOREWORD: THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM Mark Walker It was good for the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) to investigate its own history during the National Socialist period, indeed to place it in the longer chronological context from the Weimar Republic to the 1970s. But what should we expect from a history of a scientific funding agency under Hitler? We have several biographies of scientists, physicians, and engineers that place an individual, his or her scientific work, and his or her conduct in the context of the Third Reich, for example biographies of Werner Heisenberg, Lise Meitner, Fritz Haber, Wernher von Braun, and Karl Brandt.1 These biographers investigate what their subjects did or did not do, and whether or not they bear personal responsibility for some of the crimes of National Socialism. This is perhaps best seen in the context of judging whether or not scientists crossed acceptable moral boundaries.2 The next level, the scientific institute, is also well covered, most recently by the Max Planck Society’s (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, MPG) Research Program for the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during National Socialism as well as the Research Unit for the History of the DFG itself. Here the responsibility lies once again first and foremost with the individual research scientists, but as the example of the controversy surrounding Adolf Butenandt shows, it also questions whether a given scientist shares in the responsibility for what someone on his staff does or does not do.3 Scholars have also investigated particular scientific disciplines, including biology, engineering, and physics.4 Professional scientific societies during the Third Reich have been studied, but the emphasis has usually again fallen on the conduct of individuals, here the scientists in positions of authority.5 As the 1

Cassidy, Uncertainty; Lewin Sime, Meitner; Szöllösi-Janze, Haber; Neufeld, Von Braun; Ulf Schmidt, Brandt. All sources in the footnotes are given as shortened references. The titles of sources appear in roman type with no further markings. Please refer to the bibliogaphy for complete bibliographical information. 2 See Sachse/Walker, Introduction. 3 For a list of the publications of the Research Program, see http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg. de/KWG/publications.htm; for Butenandt in particular, see Schieder/Trunk (eds.), Butenandt; for the DFG project, see the rest of this book. 4 Deichmann, Biologen; Hentschel, Physics; Ludwig, Technik. 5 For the German Physical Society, but also including chapters by Volker Remmert on the mathematical and Ute Deichmann on the chemical societies, see Hoffmann/Walker (eds.), Physiker.

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Mark Walker

recent “Peter Debye Affair” has shown, the histories of scientific societies under National Socialism are also dominated by moral questions of collaboration or opposition to Hitler.6 Funding and science policy have usually become crucial for the analysis of science under Hitler for the first time at the level of scientific disciplines. Although studies of an individual scientist might note that he was particularly good at getting funding, for example, they rarely go beyond that to ask how this affected his research or that of his discipline. In the case of science and National Socialism, several scholars have investigated the possible relationship between particular roles in the National Socialist system, for example membership of biologists in the Nazi party (NSDAP), and enhanced success in getting funding from state institutions like the DFG. In general, no one-to-one correlation has been found; mere membership in the NSDAP did not guarantee more financial support.7 Indeed, many of the studies from both the MPG Research Program and the DFG Research Unit make clear that it was more important for a scientist, institute, or discipline to further a particular National Socialist policy, like autarky or racial hygiene, rather than merely to join a political organization – although this could certainly help. These studies also demonstrate that there were many ways for a scientist to connect to the inter-institutional networks that were responsible for harnessing science and technology for the goals of the regime.8 One could go further, however, and follow the example of a study of science in Cold War America, which argues that targeted and generous military funding of science actually molded, if not distorted the discipline.9 Here the emphasis would not be merely on whether or not the DFG funded scientific research into rearmament, autarky, racial hygiene, and medical experiments with human subjects, etc., but rather whether the DFG actually shaped the sort of research German scientists were doing. To put it another way, is the DFG merely responsible for facilitating “nazified” research by providing the funding scientists requested or other state institutions desired, or is the DFG responsible for the scientists doing this type of research? There is some responsibility in all of these cases, but to a different degree. Collectively the contributions to the DFG Research Unit have made a very important contribution to our understanding of science in Germany from the 1920s to the 1970s, and especially to our understanding of the National Socialist period. It should be no surprise that the DFG, the funding arm of the German state for scientific research, funded research that either furthered the goals of the National Socialist regime, or claimed to be able to. It should also be no surprise that institutions and individuals who either claimed to or were clearly supporting these goals and policies were particularly successful in getting such funding from 6

Hoffmann, Debye. Ute Deichmann and her mentor Benno Müller-Hill were among the first to pursue such questions, see Deichmann, Biologen, and Müller-Hill, Wissenschaft. 8 For these networks, see Maier, Forschung. 9 Forman, Electronics. 7

Foreword: The German Research Foundation and National Socialism

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the DFG. Was the DFG merely the tool of National Socialist science policy and the facilitator of scientists able and willing to further these policies, or was it also an actor, which instigated and significantly molded these goals and policies?

I OUTLINING THE PROBLEM

“PRESERVE OF FULL PROFESSORS” – ON THE HISTORY OF THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION BETWEEN 1920 AND 1970 Patrick Wagner In October 1970 the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of its predecessor organization, the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG). Among the chorus of its congratulators, a few audible critical voices also argued for a democratization of the authoritarian and hierarchical university system of full professors or Ordinarien. On behalf of the mid-ranking academic staff, the Federal Conference of Teaching Assistants declared: “All discussions about having a voice in decisions have gone completely unnoticed by the DFG; the more the Ordinarien at universities cannot evade other groups having a say, the more they threaten to misappropriate the DFG as their last preserve.”1 RESEARCHERS AT GERMAN UNIVERSITIES ASSOCIATE In fact, the history of the DFG is, among other things, the history of a social space, within which and by virtue of which a specific type of academic secured for himself over a period of decades material resources, influence, and professional reputation. If the Federal Conference of Teaching Assistants was considering the population of this social space as largely identical to the traditionalist wing of the tenured professoriate at West German universities in 1970, this depiction was insufficient. From the very outset the DFG’s clientele was much larger and more differentiated. Ultimately, in the period between 1920 and 1971, all university researchers with postdoctoral Habilitation degrees became members along with some scientists of equal-ranking status from outside academia. Taking as a basis the voting entitlement of DFG peer reviewers, around 7,000 persons are involved, whether we are talking about 1925 or 1955. 5,500 among them were university scientists. As universities developed, the number of eligible voters grew accordingly, to 12,500 by 1967.2

1 Press statement by the Bundesassistentenkonferenz, 26 Oct. 1970, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), B 227/544. 2 See the voter list for 1922, BAK, R 73/123, fol. 22 f. and the minutes of the DFG Senate, 12 Jul. 1967, BAK, film 1831 K.

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Characterizing the DFG as a “preserve” of full professors fits to the extent that the Wilhelmine Ordinarius incarnated the cultural model that for decades claimed hegemony within the DFG. The predominance of this model was embodied by the members of its top boards – the Executive and Joint Committees (Präsidium and Hauptausschuss) and (since 1951) the Senate – and its commissions and subcommittees, ultimately also its outside peer reviewers. In 1927 the senate of the University of Giessen regarded NG/DFG peer reviewers as “the acknowledged leaders of the individual scientific areas,” and one sociological analysis of those consulted in 1976 noted their significantly over-average scientific productivity and activism in science policy making within the networks of their own disciplines.3 For decades a relatively small group of Ordinarien dominated the DFG’s governing bodies, who were simultaneously particularly influential at their universities, in professional associations, as textbook authors, and heads of academic schools. However, by the end of the 1950s, the scale of this exclusiveness had begun to diminish – and with it the validity of this model embodied by these scientists. Three aspects are characteristic of the residents of our social space, the DFG, in the period under examination. First, we are essentially dealing with professors from German universities. Or, to put it in more exaggerated terms: The history of the DFG is the history of the German professor. Researchers in industry or in state-run departments played only a minor role. Second, researchers at home in the DFG established themselves as an elite with a claim to representing science as such. At the same time they formed a group with specific affective and normative bonds amongst themselves. This constant self-stylization expressed itself in internal allusions to the DFG as the “republic of scholars” (Gelehrtenrepublik), the “reviewer democracy of science,” but above all in the concept of an “association,” a Gemeinschaft.4 By baptizing the original donor organization in 1920 not as an endowment or a union, but instead as an “Emergency Association” – a Notgemeinschaft – the DFG’s founders articulated a particular understanding of themselves as a group, which the contemporary Brockhaus dictionary defined thus: A Gemeinschaft is “a group of people, who through a common way of thinking, feeling, and wanting, feel at one in being and conduct. An association is deemed naturally and organically grown. A commonly binding mentality rules in it, not a rivalry between interests.”5 Third, the central associating practice of the DFG group ideally constituted reciprocal reviewing – the mutual accreditation of members as serious scientists by virtue of their affiliation. Formulating rules, methods, and problems applicable to research was also a part of it as well as their permanent defense against external or internal change within science, if not, indeed, its adaptation. 3 Letter by the senate of the University of Giessen to NG President Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, 7 Dec. 1927, BAK, R 73/125, fol. 43 R; cf. Neidhardt, DFG-Gutachter. 4 DFG reports: Berichte, 1968, p. 7, resp. 1973, p. 11. 5 Original: “eine Gruppe von Menschen, die sich durch die Gemeinschaft des Denkens, Fühlens und Wollens im Sein und Verhalten eins fühlt. Die Gemeinschaft gilt als natürlich und organisch gewachsen. In ihr herrscht die gemeinsam verbindende Gesinnung und nicht der Kampf um Interessen.” Quoted in Ringer, Gelehrte, p. 327.

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If one compares the reviewing practices of the late 1920s against the early and late 1950s and attempts to assess the frequency and valency of the criteria for “good research” mentioned in the referee reports, a remarkable shift tends to emerge: During the 1920s and likewise in the early 1950s, explicit evaluations of an applicant’s character predominate along with how his previous work had been received within a narrower professional community. A typical review of this kind was penned by the biochemist Adolf Butenandt in 1954. He supported a travel grant application, praising the physiologist concerned with the words that he had “great scientific merit” and that “his excellent research” was being consulted “in the whole world.” “One cannot say,” he continued, “what will be the outcome of this specific project; but such is often the case, of course, and one should anticipate that a serious scientific personage is tendering this application, who is sure to bring forth some kind of success.”6 At the end of the decade the weighting shifted for criteria explicitly mentioned in a review. Issues of potential innovativeness, theoretical grounding, and methodological design of proposed projects began to outweigh explicit personalized criteria. Otherwise put, serious scientificness was defined to an increasing degree by scientific practices and to a diminishing degree by scientific persona. The DFG’s reviewers thus responded to a pluralization of scientific styles as they were simultaneously encouraging it. But a declining consensus on the ideal habitus of the university scientist can also be ascertained. “Scientific persona” – as Butenandt understood it – hitherto meant more than professional competence in a given area. It meant, above all, a normative notion of the habitus of a scientist. This normative model was most pronounced and most important in the verdict on applications by or for aspiring scientists. Such reviews included not only forecasts on the future chances of an applicant on the job market, but also explicit formulations of behavioral norms. Whether in 1955 or 1930, a fine balance between compliance and independence was demanded. Creativity was channeled by the mentors and was thereby conformable within the authoritarian hierarchy of the Ordinarien university. Female scientists usually had to meet the additional requirement, in accordance with the reviewers’ image of women, of being neither a complainer nor egoistical. That is, they had to be able to “harmoniously meld into the group of employees” at their institutes, to win “sympathetic support,” and under no condition be “personally problematic.”7 Generally, reviews consequently became an instrument of what the sociologist Jürgen Wilhelm once called the “tribalism” of the Ordinarien university: the strivings of its upper echelons toward habitual homogeneity as a privileged elite.8 The hegemony of a specific normative self-image, an ideal type of the serious scientist, is ascertainable within the social space occupied by the DFG from the 6

Hauptausschussliste 59, 1954, p. 5, BAK, B 227/118. A review from 1959, Hauptausschussliste 32/59, BAK, B 227/115. The expectation to be the kind of person who vanishes behind “the cause” and yet, at the same time, excels noticeably made it particularly difficult for women to find favor among reviewers. 8 Wilhelm, Stammeskultur, p. 479. 7

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1920s up to the end of the 1950s. Many of the inhabitants of this social space did not exhibit all the defining traits; indeed, these were even repeatedly contested expressly in internal debates about the model function of this ideal type. The DFG was precisely a space in which various real types of German university teachers each sought to impose their norms, self-images, and understandings of science on their social environment. Postulating an ideal type accordingly means no more – but also no less – than establishing that a hegemony of a specific type of scientist can be ascertained within the DFG clientele. The ideal type of DFG researcher is characterizable as regarding himself a member of an elite, based not only on achievement, but also on values. He was a tenured university professor (or wanted to become one) and was not an industrial researcher, independent inventor, private scholar, free-lance intellectual, or writer. It was preferable that he regarded himself as a fundamental researcher, not as a protagonist of applied research. This does not necessarily mean that the research he was concretely pursuing had to be nothing less than a quest for knowledge devoid of practical purpose. Walther Gerlach, department head of the wartime Reich Research Council’s (Reichforschungsrat, RFR) physics division, and during the 1950s vice-president of the DFG, took himself to be a basic researcher even while he was engaging in torpedo development during World War II. What, then, did it mean to label oneself a basic researcher? Historians of science have tried, time and again, to distinguish between basic and applied research (Zweckforschung), but with little success. Neither the subject matter and problems examined nor the extrascientific effects of the scientific work bring us closer. The self-labeling as basic researcher says less about the activities of the person concerned than about his subjective self-image, his normative understanding of “genuine” science, and his expectations and hopes of recognition. The American sociologist of science Norman Storer advanced this plausible thesis: A fundamental scientist wants to gain a reputation from his scientific research, primarily, among his fellow colleagues in the field; the applied scientist, on the contrary, aims at reputation and gratification – that is, acknowledgment from an extrascientific audience, such as in industry and in politics.9 This was why German professors were able to dedicate themselves devotedly to application-oriented projects within the context of the promotional organization of the 1920s to 1940s, which aimed at a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, and then a German victory in World War II, and yet still consider themselves basic researchers. Among their own ranks, nationalistic goals were so unchallenged that they could only keep their sights on the target audience of their own research – their colleagues – not the Nazi regime, for instance. For the same reason, as Corinna Unger has shown, from 1949 on, reviewers and review boards of the DFG distinguished between research projects on Eastern Europe either as “politicized research” (meaning unserious) or “pure” (meaning “fundamental research”), on the basis of the audiences they were addressing.10

9 10

Cf. Storer, Aspekte, pp. 85–120, there pp. 91–100. Cf. Unger, Ostforschung, pp. 271–278.

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The ideal type of DFG researcher additionally still considered himself a humanistically educated “scholar,” even though he might be a medical doctor or a scientist. He insisted on the “unity of science,” which in view of the acceleration of scientific specialization the DFG itself was rather inclined to bracket together. In 1959 one technical researcher was still complaining about the preponderance of “humanistically educated persons” on the DFG’s boards. By that he was not referring to a – nonexistent – majority of scholars from the humanities but to the affinities of the influential board members of whatever expertise.11 Within a given discipline the self-image of a scholar meant, on one hand, a link between specialization and a holistic concept of one’s own scientific research and, on the other hand, the conviction that ultimately only the creativity of ingenious individual innovations was productive. That was why the process of project funding attuned to individual support was always conceived as the core of research promotion within the DFG in the period under examination. In the end, the politically specific aspect of the DFG scientist consisted in being aspecific. His localization agreed in tendency with the mainstream of the pertinent Bildungsbürgertum: In 1925 it was patriotic, authoritarian, antirepublican; in 1940 it was even more decidedly nationalistic; and in 1955 it advocated an antitotalitarian, formal democracy. As the Bildungsbürgertum was generally suffering under a permanent state of insecurity and political and wartime setbacks since the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideal DFG researcher likewise cultivated a sense of life under permanent crisis. The founders of the DFG originally named their organization an “Emergency Association for German Science” in 1920 as well as in 1949. Both times there was good reason to mention dire conditions suffered by scientists: wartime destruction, material shortages, fragile order. The founding of the Notgemeinschaft in 1920 was not least an attempt by professors, the majority of whom were antirepublican, to create a social space for themselves under the new political framing conditions that they perceived as dire; a space in which they could maintain their distance from that Republic, conserve their political and scientific orientations, but at the same time exert their influence, maintain their privileged status, and claim state resources. Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, the last royal Prussian minister of culture and founding president of the research foundation in 1920, embodied this ambivalent relationship with the republican state in an ideal way. From this point of view the Emergency Association of 1920 was the answer to a momentary state of emergency (Not). But it is conspicuous that this state of emergency was claimed continuously over the course of decades. The threats that the DFG preserve was supposed to offer protection against may have taken on concrete forms of expression at particular points in time. But it was a recognizable element of an enduring longterm crisis as perceived by German academics, proportionately describable by the secularly sinking status of their research. Not the absolute level but the rela11 According to the engineer Dolezalek in a letter to DFG President Hess, 19 Jan. 1959, BAK, film 1789 K.

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tive stake that universities in Germany held in state research projects had already begun to fall in 1890 when it still held 49 percent. By 1910 it had dropped to 39 percent and in 1920 it reached the erstwhile stable low level of 26 percent. At the same time, emphasis was moving increasingly away from state-financed research and toward commercial research, which in Germany was hardly ever conducted at universities. All in all, it was a long-term phenomenon that the contemporaries reduced to the slogan “research exodus from university” and would only come to a halt in the Federal Republic. Universities regained a portion of state funding of science, exceeding 40 percent in 1965. Statistics attempting to prove the share institutions of basic and applied research held in state research monies show a similar development: declining figures for basic research already during the Kaiserreich, a rise in applied research, and, finally, a financial revitalization of basic research from the 1950s on.12 Ultimately, the most important secular development that the DFG population interpreted as a crisis was the genesis of the “knowledge society” – the Wissensgesellschaft – in Peter Weingart’s interpretation, meaning not just the scientification of everyday society but also the socialization of science: the penetration of politics, the media, and economics into its daily life. Science depends more and more on other subsystems of society, and consequently scientific research is evaluated more and more according to nonscientific criteria and by unacademic authorities.13 The DFG served its population under the catchword “autonomy of science,” on one hand, as a refuge from such impudence by the state, economy, and the public, and, on the other hand, as a mediator and lobbyist for external unacademic interests. Another consequence of a Wissensgesellschaft arose around 1900. Having just replaced religion as the most important agent of authoritative interpretation of the world, the sciences – Wissenschaften – had to contend with rivals in the shape of political ideologies, diverse occultisms, and new forms of religiosity. Max Planck complained in 1922 that a “belief in wonders in the most disparate of forms” was displacing science itself “among wide circles of the educated”; and his colleague Arnold Sommerfeld noted in indignation five years later that in his hometown of Munich more people were living off astrology than astronomy.14 Almost four decades later the DFG’s general secretary, Kurt Zierold, argued that we are living “in a period in which academics of all fields must stick together in countering unscientific approaches and superficial knowledge.”15 A last aspect of the secular sentiment of crisis among German university researchers has been the subject of debate since about 1910 under the “arrears” slogan (Rückstand) in German science. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German scientists could legitimately claim to dominate internationally in almost all the disciplines. Yet the founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1911 had been motivated by the fear that the USA was about to overtake. This 12

Cf. Pfetsch, Datenhandbuch, pp. 114, 181. Cf. Weingart, Stunde, pp. 18 f., 27–34, 327–333. 14 Planck, quoted in Forman, Kultur, p. 71; on Sommerfeld, see ibid., p. 72. 15 Zierold, quoted in the Deutsche Universitätszeitung 1963, reprinted as Zierold, Geisteswissenschaften, p. 61. 13

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dreaded spectre became reality by 1930 at the latest. But only after 1945 did German scientists gradually begin to give up their former claim as a world power and reconcile themselves to the fact that Germany was capable of maintaining international excellence only in a few fields of science, if only due to its limited resources. In others, it had to accept second or third ranking. Only the last of these experiences of crisis listed here was specifically German. The other phenomena occur mutatis mutandis in the other major scientific nations as well. The DFG did not stand alone internationally in the social and institutional fabric of the sciences. Researchers at universities defining themselves as fundamental scientists in almost all the comparable nations regarded the twentieth century as in a permanent “crisis.” Everywhere they established a loss of status and autonomy in their form of science. And the responses followed a similar direction. Basic researchers at universities in the USA created niches and lobby organizations comparable to the DFG: In 1916 the National Research Council was established and in 1950 the National Science Foundation.16 Most of the traits of the DFG “preserve,” the general social developments it responded to, and the form of solutions it offered, agreed with a trend in international development in the institutional and social fabric of the sciences. There was a specifically German element in the history of the DFG as the university professor’s preserve. A first climax around 1920 in the secular sentiment of crisis among university researchers sketched above coincided with a sense of defeat at war and a desintegration of the old order. This coincidence led these actors to interpret the crisis in university research and the crisis of the nation as a single unit. They were inclined to lump together the military defeat with the international demotion of their science. From this perspective a revision of the Treaty of Versailles seemed inseparably linked with mastering the crisis in academic science, and vice versa. At the same time, the military and economic collapse also appeared to offer a chance to upgrade the status of science that had become so precarious before 1914. The president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Adolf von Harnack, pinpointed this as preparations were under way for the founding of the research foundation in 1920. Before the war, Harnack asserted, Germany’s repute in the world had rested on three pillars: the military, industry, and science. But now the only pillar left standing was science. Research alone, the sponsoring association’s Joint Committee declared in 1926, was “the capital the impoverished German nation” still possessed “to a special degree.”17 In sum, from the very outset the DFG population nationalistically stoked its fears of crisis, its interests, and its strategies for protecting them. Conditioned by the military humiliation, it did so in a much more radical form than its parallels in the societies of the Entente.

16 Cf. Kohler, Science. Geiger, Knowledge; idem, Research. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) also distinquished itself in the 1950s and 1960s as a lobbyist of basic research at French universities, see Picard, L’Organisation, pp. 261 f., 268; as well as idem, La république, p. 272. 17 Minutes of the Hauptausschuss, 6 Jan. 1926, BAK, R 73/90.

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Within the areas of medicine and the natural and technical sciences, this led as early as the mid-1920s to a prioritization in grant sponsorship of fields that, according to one physician in the Joint Committee, were useful in “the competition against other countries and America.” Even disguised armaments research was supported, such as the development of high-altitude aircraft engines.18 In the humanities similar Priority Programs occurred in the area of what Frank-Rutger Hausmann has called the “antagonistic humanities” (antagonistische Geisteswissenschaften) – that is, attempts to underpin German claims of dominion over Europe on the basis of historical, linguistic, national, and cultural studies and scientific surveys on the intellectual profile of potential war opponents. According to the DFG report for 1930/31, it was a matter of “the defense of the present and future territory of the German nation.”19 SELF-MOBILIZATION UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM The take-over of power by the Nazis meant significant changes also for the DFG. About one fifth of German university teachers lost their positions – and consequently also their membership in the DFG – within a few years and, in the end, were driven out of the country. Their colleagues greeted the expulsions of Jewish and democratically-minded researchers from the DFG with characteristic deathly silence. They thereby abandoned hitherto central norms of their social space, such as the much-averred “autonomy of science.” When Fritz Haber, one of the association’s founding fathers since 1920 and a long-time vice-president, withdrew his membership on its boards at the beginning of May 1933 because he realized that his Jewish origins would inevitably cause him to be ousted, the mathematician Walther von Dyck, vice-president like Haber, remarked that he “never had” thought Haber’s election had been a “good” idea.20 DFG President Friedrich Schmidt-Ott did not comment at all about Haber’s resignation. He merely informed the Reich Ministry of the Interior (RMI) that the DFG had meanwhile already dismissed their only non-“Aryan” employee. From June 1933 the DFG leadership, at its own initiative, denied approval of stipend applications by Jewish researchers – three months before the RMI ordered them to do so. Political evaluations of applicants were solicited from the local Nazi Lecturers League leaders from the summer of 1934 on.21 There may be multiple reasons for this behavior, ranging from opportunism to conventional anti-Semitism in academia. But, decisively, a growing radicalization of nationalism since the 1920s had developed as an unquestioned component of the obligatory habitus of German university teachers. It was no longer understood as a factor external to academia but as a constitutive element of a specifically German, serious professionality against which such conventional aca18 19 20 21

Notes on the minutes of the Hauptausschuss, 6 Jan. 1926, BAK, R 73/89. Tenth report for 1930/31: Berichte, p. 91. Quoted in Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, p. 113. See ibid., pp. 111–115; Mertens, Würdige, pp. 50 f., 61 f., 147–155.

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demic norms as solidarity within one’s social station or universalism were felt to be subordinate. However, the DFG was able to perpetuate its existing policy of sponsorship as concerned research topics. It had started promoting Cooperative Projects on Race Research as early as 1928. Full professors involved in science policy making within the framework of the DFG probably hoped that the new regime would recognize them as brethren in antirepublican and nationalistic spirit beyond 1933. However, the DFG was quickly swept into the whirlpool of conflicting interests revolving around positions of power, spheres of influence, and conceptions of science policy that generally characterized the academic field during the first three years of the Nazi regime. In June 1934 Schmidt-Ott was compelled to cede the DFG presidency to the physicist, rabid anti-Semitic science policy-maker, and “old fighter” Johannes Stark, who in turn had to make way for the chemist Rudolf Mentzel two years later. In 1937 the DFG was split into two levels. The newly founded Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) took over the promotion of research fields in the natural, agricultural, social, and engineering sciences, deemed of potential use toward achieving the National Socialists’ expansionist and sociobiological goals. The DFG itself continued to exist as an institution, however, conducting the administrative business of the RFR and figuring as a grant organization for the humanities. Mentzel’s position formed a bridge between the DFG and the RFR as a managing director of both organizations. Considered a little more abstractly, the war of words and personal exaggerations of many of the actors, their efforts to form networks and create intrigues to further some individual advantage – such power struggles in and around the DFG and in many universities, in the end, boiled down to a generational conflict. At the beginning of 1933 the DFG and universities were still dominated by the late Wilhelmine Ordinarius type. The DFG’s Joint Committee was already describing itself as the “Hindenburg front of elders” in 1927 in response to criticism by younger scientists. Around 1933 the average age on most of the DFG boards was considerably above sixty.22 By contrast, at the end of the 1930s the top leadership of the DFG and the RFR were conspicuously younger. Of the 18 expert department heads (Fachspartenleiter) appointed between 1937 and 1942, eight were born between 1891 and 1899 and five were born between 1900 and 1907. DFG President Rudolf Mentzel himself was born in 1900; he became a member of the Nazi party (NSDAP) in 1925, was appointed to a leadership position in the SS, and was the central figure in a network of young, highly politicized, but at the same time pragmatically minded, Nazi scientists focused on effectiveness, some of whom knew each other since their “days of combat” together in Göttingen.23 As they were climbing the career ladder, these young scientists and “old fighters” stylized themselves as uncompromising opponents of the “petty bourgeois” Ordinarius culture and legitimated their career demands by their proven role, predating 1933, as protagonists of a National Socialist “combative science.” But 22

Minutes of the Hauptausschuss, 12 Nov. 1927, BAK, R 73/92, fol. 20. Cf. Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 148–154, 235–246, as well as the brief biographies of these Fachspartenleiter in the appendix. 23

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as a rule the activists of this age group, within the context of the DFG at least, followed a modus vivendi that bridged the generational gap as soon as they had established themselves somewhat securely professionally. A consensus was reached with their senior colleagues that the primary goal of a German scientist must be to make some effective contribution toward rearmament for the war effort. In the interest of the greatest possible efficiency, as well as conforming to the norms of the elder Ordinarien, between 1937 and 1945 the new leaders of the DFG and the RFR retained some elements of the association’s traditional corporate identity. Even the highly politicized top functionaries of the RFR and the DFG basically acknowledged that there would be some gain in the efficiency of research sponsorship if grant decisions were not made by authorities outside a particular field but rather along the route of peer reviewing. The majority of the RFR’s expert department heads were therefore professors long since acknowledged as leading figures within their disciplines. They ranged from the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch to the theoretical physicist Walther Gerlach, while Erwin Marx remained the DFG’s most generously funded electrical engineer into the 1960s. Wherever they perceived the need, these expert department heads continued to seek referee reports on individual projects. If they deemed themselves sufficiently competent, they evaluated and decided everything on their own. Measured against the rules established after 1945 in (West) Germany, it is out of the question that this could count as “genuine” peer reviewing. The evaluation procedures practised by the DFG up to 1933 certainly did not adhere to those rules either. Most of the time, the DFG obtained just one expert opinion for each application, and on that basis President Schmidt-Ott decided largely autocratically. As a rule, the reviewers acquired their functions by election. They were nominated by the DFG’s Executive Committee and in each instance were the sole candidate put forward for the position. Measured against this tradition of peer reviewing, the one practised by the RFR from 1937 on could indeed be described as equivalent – namely, as one carried out according to the Führerprinzip (leadership principle). On the other hand, even during the war the Reich Research Council upheld a normative hierarchy of basic research, applied research, and technological development. To its clientele it transmitted the assurance that, as scientists supported by the RFR, they should be reckoned among the actual elite in the scientific field, namely, among the group of basic researchers. For example, as late as November 1944 the Head Office urged one applicant to observe the “boundaries of pure research” and to have this portion financed by the RFR. For the remainder – that is, for the technical development of weapons systems – he should apply to the Wehrmacht.24 This line-drawing was purely symbolic. Within the copious and complex research programs financed by the RFR during World War II, which were aimed at the development of weapons technology, it was not possible to distinguish between basic and applied research or technical development. That it was repeatedly done anyway – purely symbolically – mainly says something about how the scientists concerned wanted to see themselves, irrespective of what 24

Quoted in ibid., p. 309.

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they were in fact doing. They wanted to be regarded as basic researchers, and the RFR did its part to facilitate the retention of this normative self-image. All of this was possible because a solid underlying consensus existed between all the rival factions, personal networks, generations, and types of scientists about what should be funded: any research promoting Germany’s rise as a major power or useful in winning World War II. The concept and model of a “self-mobilization” of science toward the goals of National Socialism, which has largely gained acceptance in recent years at the expense of the notion of an “abuse” of science, also aptly describes the conduct of the DFG as an institution and of its boards or, respectively, its professorial clientele. The DFG and the Reich Research Council became important sources of financing for central projects of Nazi research. The DFG funded, among other things, research by the Ancestral Heritage Foundation (Ahnenerbe) of the SS. From 1940 on it also financed the “war deployment” (Kriegseinsatz) of 600 academics in the humanities, under the direction of the president of the University of Kiel, Paul Ritterbusch, as RFR expert head of the Territorial Research Department (Fachsparte für Raumforschung).25 Monies flowed into the research conducted by notable racial hygienists such as Ernst Rüdin or Ottmar von Verschuer, thereby promoting “basic research” along the lines of the Nazi genetic health policy. The murderous experiments on humans in German concentration camps were also facilitated by funds and apparatus from the DFG and RFR. These included sterilization experiments conducted by Carl Clauberg in Auschwitz, virus research by Eugen Haagen in Natzweiler, malaria experimentation by Claus Schilling in Dachau, and analyses on twins by Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. As Anne Cottebrune has shown, from 1937 on the “criminal biologist” Robert Ritter counted among the most-favored recipients of DFG support. Commissioned by the Reich Office of Health and the Reich Department of Criminal Investigation (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt). He studied “antisocial elements” and “gypsies”, and his classifications of them were partly used as a basis for their deportions to Auschwitz.26 The RFR completely financed the extensive interdisciplinary research connected with the Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost) of 1942. Sören Flachowsky’s study, finally, documents the great scope, intensity, and directedness with which the RFR sponsored and coordinated science and technology of relevance to the war and weapons research. For example, in 1943/44 its Electrotechnical Department funded, among other things, the development of jamming transmitters; research on electronic guiding systems for bombs, rockets, torpedos, and mines; and the development of airplane installations, high-frequency and sighting devices, electronic components for tank motors, and camouflaging processes for submarines. The expert head of this department, Professor Erwin Marx in Braunschweig, managed joint ventures that coordinated researchers from laboratories at universities, in industry, and in the Wehrmacht.27 25 26 27

See Hausmann, Geisteswissenschaft. Cottebrune, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 355 f., 372–375. Cf. Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 306–374; on Marx esp. pp. 319 ff.

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Even so, the role of the DFG and the RFR – that is, the roles of their top officials and head offices – in initiating research or service to the sociobiological and aggressively expansionistic goals of Nazism should not be exaggerated too much. Both institutions offered scientists engaged in these activities conducive framing conditions and services – ranging from funding to registering scientific staff as “indispensable to the war effort” and providing raw materials and equipment and securing communications and coordination between participants. As a rule, the initiative was taken by the scientists themselves or by disciplinary networks of researchers, who then knew how to use to good advantage the resources that the DFG and RFR had to offer. Expert department heads, such as Gerlach (physics), Peter Adolf Thiessen (chemistry), Sauerbruch (medicine), or Konrad Meyer (agricultural science and biology), acted primarily as representatives of their scientific networks and followed their own agendas. For Meyer, for instance, being expert department head essentially meant having unhindered access to a profusely gushing source of funds. Hence, it served as a steering instrument for a field of research that he largely dominated already by virtue of his central position in scientific and political networks. His stack of official functions was correspondingly high. Among other things, he was head of the Main Planning and Land Department under the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood; steward (Obmann) of the Research Service of the Reich Study Teams on Agricultural Science; editor of the magazines Neues Bauerntum, Forschungsdienst, and Raumforschung und Raumordnung; head of the Reich Study Team on Territorial Research; member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences; and holder of the chair for agricultural science and policy at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, as well as director of an institute bearing the same name. Neither Meyer nor his colleagues Gerlach, Thiessen, or Sauerbruch, who were more aloof to the regime, needed to be summoned to join in the war effort for the nation under National Socialism. Financial support was lure enough.28 The true achievement by the DFG and the RFR for Nazism was granting leeway to university researchers to engage their creativity and commitment to the regime and its war goals in a multivocal atmosphere reduced to the scientific, in which the basic political course was deemed acceptable. No more – but also no less – was needed for this than some financial, material, and labor resources as well as a certain amount of protection for scientists working for the regime in this vein against disturbing interference by self-assigned high priests and wardens of “the” National Socialism. That was why DFG President Mentzel, for example, joined the Nazi science politicians defending modern – in other words, effective – physicists among Werner Heisenberg’s circle against the protagonists of the Deutsche Physik movement. If in return the policy-makers at the top of the DFG and the RFR expected scientists to manage the leeway granted them according to the Führerprinzip, this was attached to the notion that a short-term campaign for concrete goals could raise the effectiveness of research. Otherwise, this implantation of the general organizational principle of the Nazi state in research also 28

On Meyer cf. Heinemann, Wissenschaft.

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served to bind scientists structurally within the National Socialist system of control. Such an authoritarian principle was not entirely foreign to the mentality of the average German Ordinarius of 1940. In the internal relations within science, the Führerprinzip was adapted to older norms of the professorial code of conduct. That was why, in retrospect, professors after 1945 viewed the leadership claims of the likes of Rudolf Mentzel as unacceptable interference by the Nazi regime in science, whereas the authoritarian leadership styles that Gerlach and Thiessen had practised during the final years of the war were perceived as welcome “energetic” action in the interest of research. PLURALIZATION AFTER 1949 The total defeat of 1945 radically discredited nationalistically charged science as a norm. However, this does not mean that it was explicitly discussed in communications within the DFG after its reconstitution in 1949. Distancing the organization from this former guiding model was instead done in three indirect ways. First, an inconsistent – if compared to other areas of scientific life somewhat more consequent – denazification was implemented, attempting to distinquish the apparently serious scientists from – using the key concept employed in evaluations from the 1950s -- völkisch “dilettantes.” Second, top panels and reviewers alike established as one criterion for serious research an abstract remoteness to politics, in other words, one not concretely aimed against Nazism. Political engagement in any direction whatsoever, according to an evaluation from 1952, led to the conclusion that the applicant had “given up the independence of autonomous scientific judgment.”29 The third path to distancing oneself from the former model of the nationalistically engaged scientist was downright fervent ideologization of “pure” research, i. e., basic research. This of itself was not new. But its particular verve during the 1950s can only be explained as an implicit distancing from the old model and, at the same time, as its substitute. Another trenchant reorientation from 1949 on concerned the relationship between German science and international science, above all American science. During the 1920s into the early 1940s the foundation’s boards and reviewers considered scientists in the USA as serious, but second-class competitors. Subsequently it was finally admitted that, in order to outdo their excellence, it was first necessary to catch up with them again. In the early 1950s the expert reviewers tried to set down an obligatory normative procedure to follow in dealing with America as the new scientific model. It combined the acquisition of knowledge and the importation and usage of internationally recognized methods with ritualistic signals of critical distancing from that manner of understanding science. The DFG’s expert board for physics granted approval of a betatron for the University of Würzburg in 1952 on the grounds that it permitted Germany to make use of cutting-edge technology developed two decades earlier in the USA. But it 29

Hauptausschussliste 45, 1952, p. 28, BAK, B 227/142.

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cautioned the Würzburg physicists in the future to continue – supposedly unlike their American counterparts – to put less thought into the “technical design of apparatus” than into the basic scientific problems that apparatus were supposed to solve.30 In the same year, reviewers admonished the psychologist Curt Bondy upon his return to Germany from emigration in the U. S. that he abandon the “attitudes about the academic routine” he was bringing back “from the USA.” In other words, he should fall back into line within the hierarchical structure of the Ordinarien university.31 Such attempts to uphold the conventional governing image of the holistic scholar and Ordinarius against gradual integration in the scientific community of the West began to lose strength in the second half of the 1950s. Nevertheless it reflects an overall trend. The social and normative homogeneity within the DFG as a social space was coming apart. A generation influenced by study and research stays in other western countries was beginning to occupy university chairs, and scientific styles were pluralizing. A combination of generational change and rapid expansion at universities eroded the homogeneity of the professorial ranks and altered the distributions of power within the DFG. Between 1955 and 1967 the number of those eligible to vote at the elections of the DFG’s Review Boards increased by seventy percent as a result of the expansions at academic institutions. The number of applications to the DFG rose in parallel. The only way the Head Office could cope with this situation was to rapidly increase the size of its Review Boards and, finally, in view of the growing specialization in research, to solicit more reviews from specialists. As a consequence, more and more power slipped away from the professoriate to the Head Office’s specialist peer reviewers while its remaining influence became increasingly scattered. This effect was augmented further by the rule introduced in 1963 that at each election two thirds of the serving peer reviewers be replaced. This too was an indication of the sinking homogeneity of the DFG’s clientele. In the mid-1970s, 3 percent of all professors in West Germany had sat on a DFG review panel for at least one election term and 34 percent had been activated as peer-review specialists. The establishment of the DFG had noticeably lost its exclusivity.32 In 1970 one commission of the DFG’s Joint Committee retreated so far from the conventional image of the Ordinarius as to recommend electing even mid-level, unhabilitated scientific staff members on the Review Boards. It took the intervention of the Head Office to save the professoriate from being stripped of this privilege.33 Mid-level scientists nevertheless acquired the right to vote for members on expert boards in 1971 – and with it formal integration into the community of serious academic researchers – whereupon the electorate doubled overnight.34 30

Hauptausschussliste 4, 1952, p. 17, BAK, B 227/117. Review by Gustav Kafka, 24 Dec. 1952, DFG Archives, Bo 59, fol. 2787; see my essay on the humanities and social sciences in this volume. 32 See the minutes of the DFG Senate, 12 Jul. 1967, BAK, film 1831 K. 33 See the undated note by the DFG peer reviewer Petersen (1970), BAK, B 227/596. 34 See the election regulation passed on 11 Dec. 1970, ibid. 31

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The loss of a sense of commitment toward conventionally held guiding models within the DFG population did not happen without a struggle – quite the contrary. During the 1960s, a clearly shrinking core group of traditionalist tenured university professors, aware that their position of power was becoming increasingly precarious, attempted to use the DFG as their retreat and tool in defense of their scientific life style. The then serving president of the DFG, Julius Speer, fought with verve against the democratization of universities. He also opposed attempts primarily by the governing Sozialliberale Koalition35 to redefine the decisive criterion for relevant research in evaluations as its utility to society.36 The philosopher Hermann Lübbe joined Speer in 1970 in calling for the DFG to consciously maintain “a certain distance from dogmatic positions” that had become established at universities as a consequence of their democratization.37 Thus the Federal Conference of Teaching Assistants in 1970 justifiably suspected that the DFG might serve as a retreat and refuge. However, the DFG itself had long since become the arena of contentious processes of change, and the claim made by the traditionalistic Ordinarien to leadership was certainly questioned. These generational conflicts within the professoriate since the beginning of the 1960s mirrored those within the DFG’s review panels. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that neither side came away as the decisive victor in the orientational battles waged at the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. The clientele of the DFG expanded socially analogously with the structural changes under way at its base: at universities. Its hierarchical pinnacle grew broader and more pluralistic; its system of norms conformed to the guiding trends of specialization, interdisciplinarity, and methodological plurality. At the same time, however, it preserved traditional elements, such as the DFG’s role as “the” representative of university research or the DFG clientele’s identification with fundamental research. With structural reform and a partial tenacity in mentality standing side-by-side, the DFG’s development was one more reflection of the overall system of science in the Federal Republic of Germany.

35 36 37

Between the working-class Social Democrats and the center-right Liberal Democrats. See, e. g., Speer, DFG, pp. 13 f.; ibid., Geldmittel. Minutes of the DFG members’ meeting on 9 Jul. 1970, p. 13, BAK, B 227/596.

II HISTORY OF THE INSTITUTION

FROM “EMERGENCY” TO “ALLIANCE” – RESEARCHING THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AS AN INSTITUTION Rüdiger vom Bruch “Why so late?” the media keep asking when reporting about research projects, conferences, or exhibitions on the catchy theme “Science and National Socialism.” A noticeable boom in such research, half a century after World War II, does indeed make one stop and think. As a rule, it is not new to study questions of responsibility involving scientists, scientific disciplines or organizations, and an ideologically fixated, criminal regime oblivious of all standards of ethics in science. Such questions include: Was the deployment of scientific resources forced or did it occur voluntarily? What motivations by scientists lay behind their cooperation? The available sources and methodological approaches are generally not new either. What is new is the conspicuous accumulation of such research efforts in the past ten years. Probes were extended in biographical studies on individual scientists; in investigations of individual subfields and interrelated disciplines in medicine, the natural and technical sciences; but also in studies on the “deployment” of the so-called “antagonistic” liberal arts (Frank-Rutger Hausmann) as part of the war effort.1 Scientific institutions, furthermore, have been systematically examined: The Presidential Commission on the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, MPG), in particular, has been in operation ahead of and alongside our researcher group on The History of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).2 Other institutions joined the effort, such as the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin or the German Archaeological Institute.3 There is also a conspicuous abundance of recent anthologies and monographs on the roles of individual universities under National Socialism.4 1

On the role played by the liberal arts, see primarily Hausmann (ed.), Rolle. Among the commission’s numerous resulting publications, see esp. the most recent volume: Hachtmann, Wissenschaftsmanagement. On the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, cf. Maier, Forschung. On the histories of the Universities of Jena and Heidelberg, see Hoßfeld, et al. (eds.), Wissenschaft; Eckart/Sellin/Wolgast (eds.), Universität. The planning centers for the Federal Republic of Germany during the 1960s and the science-policy steering organ of the Council of Sciences and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) is covered, e. g., in Herbert (ed.), Wandlungsprozesse; Fisch/ Rudloff (eds.), Experten; Bartz, Wissenschaftsrat. 3 At the invitation of the institutions concerned, Volker Hess, Annette Hinz-Wessels, Marion Hulverscheidt, and Anja Laukötter produced a volume on the history of the Robert Koch Institute; Christian Jansen worked together with a large group of researchers on the history of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut during the Nazi era. 4 For the research so far, see Bayer/Sparing/Woelk (eds.), Universitäten. 2

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What is the explanation for this significant burgeoning of research? At least three constellations should be regarded: first, public questioning about a past that refuses to pass away; second, a precarious and, of itself, apparently paradoxical temporal distancing from the events; third, a communication between a history of science open to politics and society and a contemporary historiography interested in the effect of science on history. Regarding the first point, I refer to the familiar recent debates over revelations with regard to the Nazi era, accepting responsibility and the consequences of employing forced labor, actions taken by the Wehrmacht, and the criminal abuses of science. But it also concerns the disruption of strategies of silence in commerce and officialdom or in the early biographies of such prominent personalities as Walter Jens or Günter Grass. The assumption of responsibility and gestures of remorse continue to be reduced to symbolic acts, yet the focus is set on specific individuals, with a high level of public participation. This takes us to the second point. The temporal remoteness has already virtually excluded the actors and victims of the period concerned. At the same time, it has strengthened a readiness to reveal everything without restraint, whether or not self-motivated or initiated by outside pressure. The breadth of these expert histories is remarkable, as is an obvious need, which has repeatedly come to the forefront, for discussion and decisions despite objections made with different motives, even though all of these discussions have been carried out by the generation born after Nazism. That is why, for instance, during an emotional event in 2001 with survivors of experiments on twins formerly sponsored by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KaiserWilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), the MPG president, Hubert Markl, urged that an institution like his was obligated to meet its historical responsibility and make a complete disclosure using the tools of science precisely because perpetrators could no longer beg forgiveness of their victims.5 The DFG president ErnstLudwig Winnacker had expressed himself similarly shortly before as well.6 And yet, even in more recent times, the initiative of leading persons was still necessary to open the way for such disclosures. Differing degrees of readiness to support historiographically autonomous reconstructions of the past can be seen not only in scientific organizations and agencies such as the Foreign Office or the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation. It is also relevant for the critique raised within individual fields of a given discipline about the conventions upheld in professional spheres.7 5

Address at the academic symposium Biosciences and Experiments on Humans at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes – The Link to Auschwitz held in the Harnack House, Berlin, on 7 Jun. 2001. 6 Address at the unveiling of the memorial to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia crimes and abusive medical and scientific research, delivered in Berlin-Buch on 14 Oct. 2000. 7 Some disciplines, such as German studies or folklore, have been reflecting on their own disciplinary histories of the Nazi period since the late 1960s, following the lead of certain prominent members, such as Ernst Lämmert or Hermann Bausinger. German historiography itself, however, based as it is on the cultivation of memory (Erinnerungskultur), has only just started to do so on a broad scale since the spectacular convention of historians, the Historikertag in Frankfurt

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Third, complex analyses are now available for the relations between science, politics, and society in the twentieth century, which have emerged from the joint efforts of historiography and the history of science, as the debates over method as well as exchanges between younger populations of researchers have demonstrated.8 Mitchell G. Ash’s ideas about a correlation between scientific change and political upheaval during the twentieth century, based on thorough, more recent empirical studies, were important for our research project on the history of the DFG and have been, in turn, confirmed by our own results. Older, downright stereotypical formulas of a temporary breach of scientific standards during the Nazi period, of a fundmental animosity by the regime towards science, and conversely, the unscathed survival of good science during that period by virtue of its purety – hence those so influential lies lived by many German scientists after 1945 – such formulas are as difficult to uphold today as the argument preferred around 1970 of a science usurped by fascism. The paradigm of historicity compels us to relinquish normative assumptions about scientific developments. Ash emphasizes that the contemporary thesis of the polycratic character of the Nazi state contributed toward “explaining the conduct of scientists and the possibility of entirely innovative scientific developments despite, if not indeed because, the central authorities were weak.” It accordingly becomes clear “that high-quality, internationally acknowledged ‘normal science’ very certainly did exist under National Socialism, despite all the normatively grounded bans on recognizing it.” Latest research has confirmed this to a special degree precisely for such central Nazi projects as the war of conquest and the “cleansing of the national corpus.”9 In view of the prominent importance of the Nazi period in our project overall, these indications are yardsticks for an analysis of the entire period from 1920 to 1970, for the specifics of Nazism can only be determined precisely through a longer-term comparative and orderable perspective. Changes and continuities come to light in the sense of facilitating or obstructive conditions – related either to political revolutions, on the one hand, or to merely relative changes within autonomous science, on the other. Ash remarks laconically: “Changes and continuities both require reflection and explanation; under no condition can they be presumed to be ‘normal’ or obvious.”10

in 1998. In some disciplines a comparable search for traces of Nazism is still unsettling. Relatively early intense inquiries into the history of the field of medicine during the Nazi period is probably primarily indebted to the institutional independence of the history of medicine. Although situated within the academic faculties of medicine, it is largely disconnected from the current practice of medical research, for postwar medical science, particularly at universities, is influenced to a high degree by a continuous chain of teacher-pupil relationships. Cf., e. g., Oehler-Klein/Roelcke (eds.), Vergangenheitspolitik. 8 Vom Bruch/Kaderas (eds.), Wissenschaften. 9 Reinigung des Volkskörpers; Ash, Wissenschaftswandlungen, pp. 34 f. 10 Ibid., p. 37.

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THE DFG AS A TOPIC OF INQUIRY The reflection on and explanation of such changes and continuities are what the research project on The History of the German Research Foundation from 1920 to 1970 is all about. It is an inquiry into the structures and profiles of an instrument of research sponsorship steered by science itself, founded at a time of distress, dating from the early Weimar Republic, persisting through the Nazi period to a centralized federalistic reorientation in the landscape of the research polity of around 1970. Three guidelines structure the whole project. First, special emphasis is given to the Nazi regime, without singling out the dictatorship. The aim of expanding the period of analysis to encompass half a century is not to reduce the relative impact of the Nazi period on the DFG’s history. Instead it should make possible a more precise determination of the foundation’s special personal and professional situation which persisted long into the Federal Republic of Germany. In particular, the fracture zones and continuities in the institution, in its personnel, in the habitus and research strategies followed before and after 1933 and before and after 1945 needed to be clarified. Second, the individual research projects supported by the DFG were not examined primarily with the history of the organization and its administration in mind. The main focus of attention was rather on the research activities themselves, their historical contexts in science and politics, as well as their importance with regard to international trends and standards in research. Third, our aim is not a purely disciplinary historical orientation. Instead, it is to identify a few overarching developments in research in general and to analyze exemplary projects, approaches, discourses, and biographies. This is grounded in the following guiding questions. First, does a comparison of the three political systems the DFG sponsorship experienced yield a DFG-specific research funding? How does it compare with other institutions for the advancement of science, both domestically and internationally? In this regard the following questions arise: Who was supported for what and how much? What were the justifications? What were the goals? How was the research designed? In which disciplinary contexts did it take place? And what were the results? When did academic science dominate in DFG support, and to what extent? What proportion did it have when compared to research not conducted in university institutes? What role did the humanities and the social, natural, technical, and life sciences play in DFG support and how did this compare to other donation sources? Did the proportion of support given to fundamental research and applied science change, and if so, according to what criteria? Can a style of promotion specific to the DFG be identified with regard to guiding ideas in research policy and reviewing practice? Second, how innovative was the research support provided by the DFG? Did the DFG support new research, or subsidize research proposals that would have proceeded anyway? Did DFG support mainly benefit established normal research? Did it create spaces for novel research orientations? To what extent did it stabilize or destabilize reliance on a particular course of research? In a compari-

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son of the support apparatus (Individual Grants, Cooperative Projects, Priority Programs), what frictional losses and what synergetic effects can be established in which research priorities? What importance was placed on infrastructural research promotion, such as its repercussions on universities, whether in the range of generating disciplines (i. e., the Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde), of forming local topical focuses through Collaborative Research Centers, or otherwise? Third, what criteria might be used to measure effectiveness – in the sense of how the means relate to the ends – and how did they change following the controversies over reevaluations of Nazi science policy? Putting it more generally: How did problem-solving research logic perform in relation to research policy based on expectations? How international was research in the various segments during the respective periods? Fourth, did normative values, as they relate to the personal self-image of individual researchers and members of a national culture, influence or change decisions taken by institutions on research policy during the three political systems of the half century under study? What importance was attributed to the noticeably recurrent debates about scientific backwardness within the different political contexts shortly before and shortly after World War I and, respectively, in the Federal Republic? In what way did the emergency rhetoric after both the World Wars mobilize scientific research and its promotion? Taking international comparisons into account, how much did not-specifically-German perceptions of a loss of ground by the scientific elites interlock with a catastrophic economic scenario after World War I to form a uniquely German path? Fifth, how should the two wars themselves, with their special constellations of conduct and resources, as well as the aftermaths subsequently experienced, be incorporated into our analysis of donor policy and research practice? THE DFG AS AN INSTITUTION The founding of the Emergency Association – Notgemeinschaft (NG) – in 1920 had been prompted by the German defeat, change of political system, economic hardship, and international strangulation. The NG was conceived, principally by university research in cooperation with the academies, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG), and scholarly libraries, as a self-governed organization. This founding was facilitated by a sense of insecurity among German professors about their standing in a changed political culture that they rejected. On the one hand, they despised a state democratically governed by parties; on the other hand, they believed that by concentrating on science as the sole remaining resource of the German Empire, they could contribute toward its resurrection. At the same time, the founding of the NG fell into place as a preliminary end point in the structural change that the German scientific system had been undergoing since the 1880s.

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Structural Change in Science The nineteenth century was essentially distinguished by the rise of a relatively autonomous and oligarchic “research university” (Forschungsuniversität). Sociologists of science distinguish the German development from the French model, the “training university” (Ausbildungsuniversität), and the British model, the “educational university” (Erziehungsuniversität).11 Professorial reputation grew out of a combination of a “rigorous” scientific ethos dedicated to the “subject,” recognized research in the field, and a cultivated persona that only holders of university chairs, who had survived the risky passage of private lectureship, were deemed to have. The aim of the so-called “Humboldtian university” was to develop a finished personage within the medium of the search for Truth, and the outcome was the Ordinarius, the tenured professor. The German case thus certified a researcher persona as having climbed up the career ladder. This future civil servant was evaluated for lifetime positions, less frequently for a single research project. The structural prerequisite for this was a relatively closed academic, university milieu. As a rule, state-directed science policy confined itself to offering relevant framing conditions and securing, rather belatedly, the scientific eigendynamics and differentiation of research by establishing supernumerary professorships (Extraordinariate), Ordinarien, and institutes. The research university delegated targeted integrated research to equally autonomous scholarly communities within the scientific academies.12 The characteristic German stimulant for scientific progress up to the threshold of mass industrial society, namely, the Ordinarien university composed of disciplines, subsequently proved capable of becoming a retarding factor, however, and of obstructing innovation. The knowledge-based society in the modern and simultaneously imperialistic state that formed around 1900 needed practical institutional structures for the exploitation and management of scientific resources. This is precisely what the so-called “Althoff system” offered. As Margit Szöllosi-Janze has shown, it was an irreversible counterbalancing of actor constellations in the institutionally composed system of science that characterized the twentieth century.13 The “Althoff system” refers to a modernizing adaptation by state bureaucracy of a university landscape overwhelmed by high teaching loads, limited research funding, and low flexibility in research focus. Its purpose was to satisfy the interests of a competing major imperial power upheld by economic might, social order, and armament. This modernizing adaptation was flanked by research conducted in state and industrial establishments with subsidiary support by private funding sources up to the inflation of the 1920s. The “Althoff system” refers furthermore to a system of custodians who each oversaw entire fields of 11 Cf. on the following Ash (ed.), Mythos; vom Bruch, Prominenz; idem, Qualitätsmaßstäbe. On the habitus of an elite based on common values, see also the research report Jansen, Gelehrtenpolitik. 12 For an overview, cf. the case study on the Berlin development, vom Bruch, HumboldtModell. 13 Szöllosi-Janze, Science and Social Space; idem, Wissensgesellschaft.

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expertise within a close network of privy-councillor excellencies from science and the government under the seal of common responsibility toward the nation. This system cast a long shadow beyond the Weimar Republic into the early Nazi period. It left its imprint on the NG and the early DFG. The authoritarian privy councillor type (Geheimrat) in the governing boards corresponded to the habitus of the Ordinarius type, as the defining clientele of the DFG up to the early Federal Republic. Notgemeinschaft in the Weimar Republic What are the findings for the Emergency Association, the Notgemeinschaft, as an institution during the Weimar Republic? The long shadow of the “Althoff system” must first be emphasized. The authoritarian oligarchic steering of science and the structure of scientific institutions of the prewar Empire survived the transition to Weimarian party democracy. This encouraged the association’s original foundation in 1920, which tended to bind university research altogether within its framework. At the same time, during the early stage, it conferred with the scientific academies and the KWG as a “gentle innovation” (schonende Innovation, Peter Nötzoldt), foregoing the option of conducting research on its own institutional premises. Secondly, the rivalry is important with the scientific academies over political interests along the way to the NG’s preeminence around 1930. It ably manipulated the tensions between the Reich and the individual subordinate Länder to secure its own character as a self-governed administrator of science. Anchored in the imperial budget, the NG acted during the final years of the Republic as a base for its Reichskulturpolitik. The NG, from the outset, beat the drum for the guiding themes of national autarky and patriotic vengeance, with the emphasis placed on application-oriented industrial research. Different from the KWG, no clear boundary existed separating it from the purview of the academies which, considering their long-running loss of influence on research policy, fought all the more resolutely to raise their status. Following the forced rearrangement of political power in the late Republic, new possibilities seemed to open up for the academies in the Nazi system. In the long run, however, they ended up on the margins in German science policy on the cultivation of innovation. The third point appears to be central. The decisive importance of World War I on reorientations in research policy must be pointed out in addition to long-lasting constellations in institutional policy-making. A militarization of science had begun even before the outbreak of that war. This was connected with a scientification of military affairs in a tight interweaving of the state, the military, and the economy with the scientific system.14 Specific collaborative relationships with a high level of self-mobilization by science to further national science policy provided the basic pattern for the NG. This self-mobilization intensified during 14

Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft.

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the war and was centered institutionally on the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for War Technology (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stiftung für kriegstechnische Wissenschaft) founded in 1916. The war motivated similar kinds of innovative institutional policies elsewhere as well, as a glance at Great Britain and the USA shows. However, the catastrophic outcome for Germany influenced the activities of the research system for the next two decades. It favored an effective networking of resources in the “national” interest until the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) reorganized the network of resources in a novel way during World War II to enlist it in a total war. One independent outcome of this reorientation for research strategy – to make the fourth point – was the Cooperative Projects model – Gemeinschaftsarbeiten. After initial plugging of holes, from the mid-1920s, in close collaboration with the KWG and the Army, and in conformance with the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation of 1916, the NG initiated patriotic interdisciplinary projects that united different institutions for the good of the nation. In accordance with the triad of revival, revenge, and rallying around Volkstum, the proposed programs covered a broad spectrum of topics ranging beyond the bounds of armaments research. They included, for instance, a reference work on German culture transgressing country borders: the Handwörterbuch des Grenz- und Auslanddeutschtums. Aside from supporting a wide array of individual proposals and nationalistically charged Cooperative Projects, the NG pursued a policy of support for young researchers. Its specific aim was to help the country catch up with international research, and stipends abroad were not the least of its means to achieve this, for, as Fritz Haber said, human resources took precedence over material resources.

The DFG under National Socialism How did the political turning point in 1933 affect the DFG’s history? Since 1929 on the way to becoming the central pillar of the German science system, the DFG lost its independence more quickly and more radically with the Nazi changeover compared to the academies and the KWG. As a bastion of the Empire’s policy on culture to foil the claims of the individual German states, it was no longer needed when Rust’s ministry was erected. The principle of self-governance was replaced by dirigisme. In the early 1930s the former leadership died off or were ousted. Plans to use the DFG to organize science deteriorated under Friedrich SchmidtOtt’s weak successor Johannes Stark. Between 1934 and 1936 it was at times reduced to little more than rhetoric. The DFG was demoted to a bursar’s and administrative office. After the new RFR appeared alongside the DFG, in practice the latter was reduced to dispensing funds and restricted to the humanities. However, anyone who believes that, because of this institutional weakness, the Nazi period can be suppressed from the DFG’s history fails to see the continuities in the sense of accommodating patterns of orientation and structure. Targets of national policy were remolded to fit the new Nazi prescriptions. Around 1930 many of the research fields supported by the DFG were already na-

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tionalistically and racistically charged and motors of research for the purposes of autarky and rearmament. To the supported scientists it ultimately did not matter who was paying them. The innovation of interinstitutional and interdisciplinary cooperative research specific to the DFG existed beside its Individual Grants Program, which was as dominant as before. Schmidt-Ott’s preemptive obedience in 1933 indicated a basic affinity with the set goals of Nazism as well as with the authoritarian style of leadership, legitimated by professional competence, that was compatible with the Nazi Führerprinzip. Little changed in the way funds were distributed. This was because a statutorily fixed pluralistic reviewing practice had hardly taken place even during the period as a self-governed organ of German science. Disregarding the staffing decisions based solely on politics, the new leading science policy-makers – in addition to agreeing with the political goals of the National Socialist system – were properly qualified by their professional reputations within their fields, as the selection of expert department heads in the RFR in most cases on the basis of scientific competence demonstrates. They were considerably younger than the former expert reviewers and were, in addition, politically adept institutional networkers. Their pathos of radical objectivity, connected with an equally radical völkisch nationalism and a renunciation of the humanistically cultured mandarin expertise in favor of functional expert skills led to scientific inquiries that could culminate in criminal human experimentation or even such genocidal resettlement planning as produced the Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost). This was not DFGspecific, but the open nature of originally self-governed university research appears to have favored state and ideological party influence. Policy driven by irrational ideology was by no means incompatible with scientific efficiency exploited systematically toward the effective implementation of racist and other goals of power politics. The Nazi system was certainly not anti-science. The RFR was reorganized in 1942, not because it had supposedly failed before, but because of rival concepts about science policy. Structural reforms in the departments tended to aim at – to quote the expert department head Walther Gerlach – a “very close link between all agencies of development and research in the Armed Forces and the Reich Research Council.”15 New Founding in the Federal Republic In 1949 the Emergency Association (NG) was founded anew – not refounded.16 As in 1920, in 1949 the participating influential researchers considered themselves as an elite based not only on achievement but on values. As before, networks of personalities with strong leadership skills were formed during the first decade; as before, they took the lead and their professional colleagues conducted evaluations in a lordly manner. The reputation of the applicant within his dis15

Ibid., p. 313. Cf. the chapter by Orth in this volume. On the design options after 1945, see vom Bruch, Traditionsbezug. 16

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cipline was what mattered; the proposal itself counted much less. Yet precisely the main criterion of a strictly scientific researcher persona reveals the difference, for the decisive obligation of science toward the state up to 1945 suddenly terminated after 1945. As for the mandarins of the Wilhelmine period, the guiding image once again became the patriotically aware yet politically independent fundamental researcher. From the perspective of the history of institutional politics, the two foundations of 1920 and 1949 differ from each other in the way the relevant interests reacted and counteracted. During the Weimar Republic, the individual German states, particularly Prussia, had reacted with mistrust and tended to curb promotion of the old NG by the Empire, fearing a tendency toward centralization into a Großakademie and a single Reichskulturpolitik. The new NG formed in 1949, in the midst of a federalistic consensus among the already established Länder favoring decentralized fundamental research. Heisenberg’s rival organization, the German Research Council (Deutscher Forschungsrat, DFR), was also grounded in fundamental research. However, it aimed at planned science within the new federal framing design, with the benefit of Adenauer’s backing. Furthermore, the DFR derived its legitimacy from the prestige of its Nobel laureates, not from a democratic interaction between all certified academic researchers. Heisenberg referred, contrary to the NG, to the more modern variants of national research planning from the interwar period, under changed conditions, of course: Science not in the service of politics, but as the regulative watchman over evolving social and political trends. After the merger in 1951 between the “administratively evolutionary” NG in Bonn and the DFR, committed to the principle of “political planning,” these two previously contrary positions began to approach each other. Priority Programs (Schwerpunktverfahren) had already begun in 1953, although federal policy compelled them. Nevertheless, the regular Individual Grants Program (Normalverfahren) outweighed the other sponsorship programs in financial volume until the addition of Collaborative Research Centers (Sonderforschungsbereiche). This second innovation from 1966 was again the product of external pressure. Its purpose was to group together research capacities at the individual universities in order to strengthen them against competing research conducted outside of universities, which had meanwhile become quite widely established. The Priority Program and the Collaborative Research Center rapidly turned into a trademark specific to the DFG. Yet they rather point to the DFG’s ability to integrate flexibly, reflecting the common sense of its clientele, that is, German Ordinarien. Up to 1973, on the whole, the DFG had been less creative than reactive. In the early stage, clashing fronts between different disciplinary cultures evidently scarcely played a part, because applicants from the humanities mostly regarded themselves as best situated in the Individual Grants Program, and conversely, an influential type of scientist immersed in the humanities – a geisteswissenschaftlicher Mensch – still strongly encouraged proposals by humanists. Does the DFG’s internal history indicate that the German culture of twentieth-century innovative science depended on a particular path marked by reac-

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tions to debates over national scientific backwardness? As early as 1909 Adolf von Harnack had referred in his commemorative article on the founding of the KWG to the challenge posed by new kinds of American research institutions that the traditional landscape of German science could not compete with.17 In 1920 the danger of sinking into scientific provinciality was unmistakable, even though, again according to Harnack, science was the only resource left that the nation could use to climb back up. In 1957 the sputnik shock then evoked the trauma of the Western world technologically and scientifically overwhelmed by communist defiance. At the end of the 1960s, another American challenge dominated the headlines with the catchword “educational catastrophe” (Bildungskatastrophe) and the agenda of finding new ways to guide science policy.18 Does a comparison of these debates, with their differing contexts, in fact yield a specific pattern, or do they instead indicate, when seen in international comparison, typical public mobilizing strategies to augment resources? This certainly cannot yet be answered by this approach alone. An “imitation and catch-up phase” (Karin Orth) is the diagnosis for the decade from 1955 to 1966. It is marked by an accelerated pluralization of research methods, international adaptations, and increased administrative clustering in research sponsorship. Be this as it may, the DFG remained an “insulated barricade of wagons” for Ordinarien, who reacted defensively in a “holy alliance” with the Max Planck Society and the West German Rector’s Conference against the federal policy to increase the authority of the new Federal Ministry for Atomic Issues. The DFG only made peace later with the successor ministries of research and science during the phase of the Grand Coalition. It had to cede such promising key technologies as nuclear research, hydrology, and space science to the federal government. The DFG’s relationship with the initially ridiculed Fraunhofer Society (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft), which was subsequently strengthened by defense research and later by basic financing made conditional on commercial success, proved to be complicated. The last phase under examination, from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, is characterized by a planning euphoria pushed ahead by the Social Democrats at the same time as it was being induced globally. Former boundary lines drawn within the DFG that had divided the state planning prerogative from the right to scientific autonomy were converted into flexible cooperation. Authority previously lost to the federal government could not be regained. However, a clustering of fundamental research within the DFG could be attained. With the increasing popularity of its Priority Programs and helped along by new Cooperative Research Centers, the DFG was able to expand. The lion’s share of research grants was now taken by the biosciences: at 40 percent, against 20 percent each for the humanities, and the natural and engineering sciences.

17 Von Harnack, Denkschrift; on the science policy-maker Harnack, cf. the excellent study by Nottmeier, Harnack. 18 Cf. Divine, Sputnik Challenge; Picht, Bildungskatastrophe; Servan-Schreiber, Herausforderung; Ritter/Szöllösi-Janze/Trischler (eds.), Antworten.

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The DFG, as an actor in the science system of the Federal Republic of Germany, limited itself to familiar proposal and reviewing practices in university research. Friedhelm Neidhardt has noted that self-government can lead to mere self-replication. According to him, a system propped up by established Ordinarien encourages “small advances” but no breakthroughs.19 Yet as a result of the expansion of its electorate and of consulting reviewers equipped with a broader range of methods, during this final phase the DFG represented a pluralistic scientific landscape that was reflected back into its management boards in a gradual shift from individuals to groups. The expansion of the Head Office in 1970 also mirrored this organization’s advance into the services sector. CONCLUSION Let us glance back at the guiding questions mentioned at the beginning. The predominant research sponsorship specific to the DFG during all three political systems was its promotion of university research, albeit in differing proportions of Individual Grants, Cooperative Projects, or Priority Programs. Yet, unlike during the controversies about institutional policy prior to 1945, in the Federal Republic the DFG established itself as a recognized advocate of research in academia. The weightings still need to be clarified here, however. The major foundations promoting science evolved not only by expansion but by competition, such as the one posed by the Volkswagen Foundation (Volkswagen Stiftung) with its initial financial superiority.20 Earlier rivalries with the academies fell away, military and applied research migrated to the new Fraunhofer Society, and the MPG continued to occupy the area of institutional research, as distinct from big-science facilities as well as the research institutes on the official “blue list” of science with potential. A comparative analysis of networks at the leadership level over the entire period remains to be done, but a pattern similar to prior to 1945 suggests itself at least for the Adenauer period: The Holy Alliance seemed to negotiate with itself in the same way as the KWG and the old DFG previously had.

19 20

Neidhardt, DFG-Gutachter. Cf. VolkswagenStiftung (ed.), Impulse.

“TOOL OF GERMAN WAR STRATEGY”1 – THE SCIENCE POLICY OF THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND THE REICH RESEARCH COUNCIL BETWEEN 1920 AND 1945 Sören Flachowsky Germany around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century was one of the leading industrial nations worldwide. At the same time, as a country possessing few natural resources, there could be no doubt about its dependence on imports. The growing international tensions after 1890 led to “a number of carefully gauged measures,” even prior to World War I, to reduce the German Empire’s economic dependence on other countries. They were primarily limited to chemical goods and were conceived “only as strategies for commercial companies.”2 Nevertheless, on the basis of this underlying thinking a complex web of relationships was established between the social subsystems of science, the economy, the state, and the military. They penetrated into each other in many ways and soon merged into what tended to be a “functioning symbiosis.”3 There appeared to be no coyness whatsoever on the part of science toward state, military, or industrial interests. Rather, scientists freely offered their expertise, of their own accord, as problem solvers. The chemist Emil Fischer, for example, advocated exploiting coal as early as 1913 as an improvement on “domestic” fuel processing and considered the possibility of “producing liquid heating fuels, petroleum, benzine, and the like artificially out of coal.” For Germany, Fischer argued, this would be “very important” because it does not possess those natural materials “and in the case of war [the country could] even get into trouble in this regard.”4 Against this backdrop, the joining of forces between science and the military, which also emerged as an institutionalization of research, teaching, and testing facilities of relevance to armament, led to a “scientification of military affairs” as, conversely, “parts of science, in turn, [were being] enduringly militarized.”5

1 Speech by DFG President Rudolf Mentzel: 20 Jahre deutsche Forschung, 1940, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/11065. 2 Marsch, Syntheseindustrie, p. 33. 3 Trischler, Luft- und Raumforschung, p. 89. 4 Feldman, Industrie, p. 664. 5 Trischler, Räumlichkeit, p. 96; for details, cf. Maier, Forschung, pp. 85–138.

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WAR AS MIDWIFE During World War I this relationship not only intensified; it even attained a new level. Problems encountered by a wartime economy motivated the selection of new paths to promote and coordinate research, along which different forms of teamwork between institutes and interdisciplinary research projects were arranged. This development was characteristic of the largest of the belligerent nations. Like Great Britain (with its Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1916) and the United States (with the National Research Council, 1916), Germany also formed with its the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for War Technology (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stiftung für kriegstechnische Wissenschaft, KWKW) a new kind of institution to serve as coordinator and promoter of armaments research. As an “empire-wide platform of problem and knowledge transfer of finalized research,” it signified a “quantum jump” in organized research on armaments and demonstrated the military’s sense of reality and the self-mobilization of science during World War I.6 The KWKW arose out of a joint initiative between the chemical industry, the Prussian Ministry of Culture, and Fritz Haber, the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry.7 It was a “result in science policy of the Hindenburg-Programm” from September 1916, aimed at orienting the German economy and society consistently toward the demands of war and minimizing existing frictional losses in the coordination of arms research.8 Six expert boards headed by esteemed scholars were formed within the Foundation to direct research activities. The topics were conveyed by the Army and Navy via the Ministry of War to these expert board chairmen. They relayed the projects to the board members, most of whom were qualified scientists additionally interlinked by a number of connections with industry and the military.9 Little is known about the KWKW’s research projects. They were, nevertheless, guided by problems of “wartime importance” (kriegswichtig) and aimed at weapons systems optimization and stretching Germany’s thin blanket of raw materials.10 At the behest of the Foundation, scientists were even summoned away from front-line combat.11 Moreover, the KWKW also sent out signals for 6

Maier, Stiefkind, p. 102. Cf. Rasch, Wissenschaft, pp. 73–120. 8 Hachtmann, Wissenschaftsmanagement, p. 91. Emphasis added. 9 For example, Max Rudeloff (head of the Materials Testing Office in Berlin), as member of the KWKW’s expert board for air travel; cf. Rudeloff, Materialprüfungsamt, pp. 14–16. 10 Cf. Albert Vögler’s letter to Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick (with attachments), 19 Oct. 1933. Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB), R 1501/5328, fols. 213–229, 215. Also cf. Rasch, Wissenschaft; Rudeloff, Materialprüfungsamt, p. 16; Eckert/Märker (eds.), Sommerfeld, pp. 568–591. Much documentary evidence exists that members of the KWKW were directly associated with research relevant to warfare and armaments during World War I, which permits possible conclusions about their activities in the KWKW. I refer here only to Friedrich Schwerd, inventor of the German military helmet (Stahlhelm) introduced in 1915; Adolf Miethe, a pioneer of military aerial photography; and Franz Fischer, director of the KWI for Coal Research in Mühlheim; cf. Baer, Stahlhelm, pp. 12–41; Miethe/Ewald, Fliegerbild; Rasch, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut, pp. 63–100. 11 Cf. Flachowsky, Arbeit, p. 161. 7

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the founding of new research institutions. In 1917, for instance, the iron works industry, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), and the Prussian Ministry of Culture called into being the KWI for Iron Research, which in the following years developed into an interface for war-related knowledge production.12 The cooperative relations between science and the military, institutionalized in this way through the KWKW, had long-lasting repercussions. Research of relevance to warfare not only allowed science to approach state and military agencies, but also to lose its inhibitions about being involved in modern war strategy.13 THE EMERGENCY OF NATIONAL SCIENCE Just like the institutionalized research-sponsoring boards, the war economy also impressed itself upon the German scientific system. The orientation became the substitution of needed raw materials. Hiding behind an “autarkic barricade of wagons” (Wagenburg der Autarkie), it disconnected itself from “international synergies.”14 The defeat of 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, the international boycott of German science, and industry’s fear that the Entente would continue their economic war allowed revenge and economic independence to become latent dispositions of state and economic dealings.15 Such kinds of arguments became widely accepted among German scientists as well, however. The metals chemist Rudolf Schenck – formerly a staff member at the KWKW and now serving as head of the Commission for Metals Research in the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) – referred in 1926 to the “political importance of scientific research” and its “extreme material strictures” (äußere Sachzwänge).16 Thus, all in all, his argument employed the rhetorical vocabulary of the dominant revisionistic basic consensus widely in use among “mandarins” before and after 1933: For an intellectually advanced people, whose envious and hostile neighbor scarcely allows life’s necessities, no course remains, in order to make itself independent from the outside world, to protect itself, and to wrest back for itself a suitable livelihood, other than delving into Nature and her laws, and an active will to turn the paucity of the home soil into the opposite by exploiting scientific findings and intense research and thereby make bread out of stones, leading the mind to victory over matter.17

The resolve of the scholarly professions to increase by means of science the advantage and prestige of the nation, to resurrect the German state as a power capable of hegemony in Europe, and, if need be, to achieve this by force in a new 12

Cf. Marsch, Wissenschaft, pp. 339 ff.; Flachowsky, Arbeit, pp. 158 f. Cf. Metzler, Wissenschaft, p. 91. 14 Wengenroth, Flucht, p. 53; see also Marsch, Syntheseindustrie, p. 33; Szöllösi-Janze, Umgestaltung, pp. 69 f. 15 Cf. Marsch, Syntheseindustrie, pp. 48 f. 16 Deutsche Forschung, 1928, p. 27. 17 Ibid. 13

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war remained unbroken. There were many points of intersection here between the political intentions of the German intelligentsia and the goals of National Socialists, which explains the high level of willingness by academics to conform to the Nazi regime. Their voluntary service to the Nazis laid the foundation for far-reaching collaborative relations between the educated well-to-do elites and the regime. These relations were also used by academics to further their own interests, above all, with regard to the mobilization of resources.18 Nationalism, radicalized by the war and the defeat after 1918, united with antiliberal convictions and a strong emotional rejection of the Weimar democracy, which increasingly mixed in anti-Semitic prejudice. The basic conviction held by scholars, borne by patriotism and an emphasis on a powerful state, motivated them to offer to the Nazi regime their problem-solving expertise, frequently “out of political conviction,” occasionally also merely “for career reasons or out of dedication to science” – but in most cases willingly. In this way they also made it possible for the regime to wage a criminal war.19 The founding in 1920 of the NG – as a self-governed organization of precisely this nationalistically conservative scholarship – forms a part of the prehistory of this development. It was a direct response to the crisis in the German system of science caused by the inflationary period. Alongside the already established academies, the KWG, and universities, the NG evolved in the shortest time into a firm component of organized German science and into a supporting pillar of research sponsorship. Various reasons were decisive for this. The NG’s development paralleled the shift of publicly funded research from the individual Länder to the central Reich government. By the end of the 1920s, the NG had already taken on de facto the duties of an imperial science authority and thereby grown into an indispensible element in the argumentation and practice of advocates of an “active Reichskulturpolitik.” The moment in time was also crucial, as well as the motive behind its founding. The extremely dire conditions of the postwar years offered a chance to generate an all-encompassing self-administered body for science.20 Of equal importance was the constellation of persons reaching back into the Kaiserreich. The NG was based on networks formed prior to 1914 around the NG’s initiators: Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, Fritz Haber, and Adolf von Harnack. The NG was accordingly a late product of the imperial “Althoff era,” not just in the habitus of the actors but also in their strivings to develop a “scientific landscape capable of innovation.”21 The NG proved to be a cautious and gentle innovation at that, because it incorporated itself seamlessly into the existing scientific system as a new body for the promotion of research; it was an extension without dislodging other institutions. This became clear in 1925, for instance, when the nationalistic Cooperative Projects program (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten) was introduced. It had been created in 18

Cf. Ash, Wissenschaft, pp. 32 ff. Heim, Kalorien, p. 249; on the “self-mobilization” of science during World War II, cf. Ludwig, Technik, pp. 241–245; Mehrtens, Kollaborationsverhältnisse, pp. 27 f. 20 Cf. Flachowsky/Nötzoldt, Notgemeinschaft, p. 157. 21 Vom Brocke, Althoff, pp. 195–214. 19

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close consultation with the KWG to insure that it not impinge on the Society’s task profile. In implementing this plan, the NG’s president, Schmidt-Ott, drew from his experiences organizing science during World War I. He not only availed himself of the expert board system that the KWKW had tailored to cooperation between institutes at different universities. In emulation of that Foundation, he also made “patriotic projects of the technical science kind” a central part of the research sponsorship. That was why the NG’s Cooperative Projects also concentrated on directly practice-oriented and applied problems as well as on research for autarky. Its Cooperative Projects not only defined programmatic focuses within research but served equally as a forum of knowledge transfer throughout the Reich.22 The heads responsible for setting the Cooperative Projects’ goals mostly originated from the network that had secured the mobilization of science through the KWKW during World War I.23 This perspective on the Cooperative Projects corresponded to the thinking by the Armed Forces on defense efficacy. Since the mid-1920s it had been working resolutely toward resuming more intense relations with scientific institutions.24 In 1927 the Reich Ministry of Defense, already cooperating with the KWG, declared that it supported comprehensive state subsidies for the NG and was evidently trying at the same time to dispatch Army experts into its boards in order to gain direct influence on the NG’s research agenda.25 The utilitarian approach of the Cooperative Projects catered to the interests of the Ministry of Defense in any case and offered it virtually ideal points of departure for negotiations: such as, research on economizing gunnery steel, on ballistic problems, or sound ranging of military relevance.26 The German Navy also tested “new echo ranging from navigation technology for submarines” during a regular series of conventional depth measurements within the context of the NG’s spectacular “Meteor expedition.”27 The development of a stratospheric airplane that the NG conducted since 1926 in collabora22

Schmidt-Ott’s progress report Zur Lage der Notgemeinschaft, August 1932, BAB, R2/12021. For more on the Cooperative Projects, cf. Kirchhoff, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 156–307, 329–358; Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 75–92; Flachowsky/Nötzoldt, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 157–177. 23 Cf. Maier, Stiefkind, p. 104. 24 Cf. Hansen, Reichswehr; Budrass, Flugzeugindustrie. 25 Letter by the Reichswehrministerium (HWA, Prüfwesen) to Wa[ffen] Stab, 23 Aug. 1927, BA-Militärarchiv Freiburg (BA-MA), RH 8-I/919; see also the letter by the Reich Minister of Defense to the Reich Minister of the Interior, 21 Oct. 1927, BAB, R 1501/126761, fols. 165–166. 26 Cf., e. g., Maier, Forschung, pp. 243–255; Flachowsky/Nötzoldt, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 157–177; Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 87–92. 27 Kirchhoff, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 144 f. See furthermore Friedrich Schmidt-Ott’s note to Staatsekretär Heinrich Schulz (Reich Ministry of the Interior, RMI), 26 Jan. 1925, BAB, R 1501/116322, fol. 86; telegram by Alfred Merz on board the surveying vessel V.-S. Meteor (Buenos Aires), 27 May 1925, ibid., fols. 197–200; Report about the meeting of the Preparatory Commission for the German Atlantic Expedition on the surveying and research ship Meteor […] on the premises of the Notgemeinschaft (Bericht über die Sitzung der Kommission für die Vorbereitung der Deutschen Atlantischen Expedition auf dem Vermessungs- und Forschungsschiff Meteor […] in den Räumen der Notgemeinschaft), 7 Oct. 1925, ibid., fols. 288–300.

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tion with the Junkers firm was equally important. Junkers wanted to introduce it into the Armed Forces as a high-altitude bomber.28 Hence, even before 1933, the NG was involved in secret research for the Reichswehr, which regarded the NG’s grants as welcome support for their covert rearmament activities. The NG’s leadership was willing to cooperate with such activities. In this regard, too, it stood for the nationalistic, conservative, and vengeful mainstream of the cultivated elite during the Weimar Republic. This mainstream made the NG (in 1929 renamed German Research Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) receptive to the goals of the so-called national revolution of 1933. NATIONAL SOCIALISM, THE MILITARY STATE, AND A NEW ORDER FOR SCIENCE The National Socialists’ rise to power consequently did not represent any prodound hiatus. The Cooperative Projects could be connected without any problem with the plans postulated by the Nazi government to establish an autarkic military state – a Wehrstaat. Schmidt-Ott’s attempts in 1933–34 to orient the DFG toward problems more relevant for armament and autarky signaled not just ideological conformance to the regime but also that science and its bearers were either already mobilizing themselves for the Nazi state early on, or were ready to do so. Furthermore, the DFG contributed substantially to the discrimination against and rejection of Jewish scientists. Making reference to the policy pursued by the Nazi government of forced dismissals of politically or “racially” undesirable scientists, the DFG’s top leadership were anxious to go beyond the call of duty to declare in June 1933 that no more grants would be given to “non-Aryan” scientists.29 Despite all these efforts, Schmidt-Ott’s tactics did not work. The network of contacts he and the DFG’s influential staff had been building came apart at the beginning of the 1930s. That was because its leading protagonists had either been neutralized by the National Socialists or had died. Not just Schmidt-Ott, but the Joint and Executive Committees of the DFG were forced to resign. The succeeding presidency by the Party-activist Johannes Stark (1934–1936) proved to be a mere interregnum, however, wholly governed by the power struggle between Stark and the Reich Ministry of Education (Reichserziehungsministerium, REM). Newly established on 1 May 1934, it had been additionally granted authority over all scientific issues. At the same time, the conduct of this strong-willed DFG president also repeatedly gave cause for resentment within the scientific community.30 The true hiatus only came with the appointment of the influential Nazi 28

Cf. Kirchhoff, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 266–279; Flachowsky, Geheimnis. Cf. Mertens, Anmerkungen, p. 232; Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 111 f. 30 For instance, the head of the German Mineralogical Society, Friedrich Drescher-Kaden, who had close connections in the REM, complained about the DFG in November 1935 because a member of the society, Friedrich Hegemann, had been “arrested by the Secret State Police and held in solitary confinement for three weeks,” supposedly “at the behest of the Notgemeinschaft.” Letter by Friedrich Drescher-Kaden to Friedrich August Fischer (DFG), 25 Sep. 1936, BAK, R 73/13173. 29

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science manager Rudolf Mentzel to the presidency (in the fall of 1936) and with the alteration of the DFG’s statutes, which was completed at the same time. The new statutes of 1938 marked the end of the National Socialist “seizure of power” (Machtergreifung) within the DFG. It not only imposed the leadership principle (Führerprinzip) but also eliminated the existing instruments of participative decision-making – the Executive and Joint Committees, as well as the expert review boards. Thus the original vintage DFG disappeared. This last aspect points directly to the science policy followed by the REM, particularly by the group in Mentzel’s periphery, and to the related development of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR). The widely held view that the REM’s science policy was inefficient, largely ineffective and, above all, headless, needs to be corrected.31 Directly after the change in government on 30 January 1933, attempts were already being made by different complexes of interests to subdue federalism in the research landscape, to centralize the system of organized science, and to turn the direction of experimental research increasingly to problems of national defense and autarky. The DFG repeatedly played a central part in modeling the new order, especially in conceptions being drawn up at the REM, which was working toward complete control and supervision of the entire field of science. The idea of a “Reich Academy of Research,” developed by the REM functionaries headed by Erich Schumann and Rudolf Mentzel, was an expression of these efforts. It was essentially the basic program for how the entire landscape of German science was supposed to take shape. It aimed at imperializing the administration of universities as well as lifting the particularisms of the separate Länder in cultural policy. The self-administration claims by scientific establishments, such as the KWG or the DFG, were also supposed to go, in order for a state-controlled Reichsforschung to be installed on a centralized plane. Supported by ideas about economic autarky and defense, the ministry pursued, in cooperation with the Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt, HWA), the goal of steering and controlling the staffing and apparative resources along with the substantive direction of the research itself. The congruency existing between the interests of the REM and the HWA on this question ultimately formed the basis for the erection of the RFR in March 1937. The head of the HWA, General Karl Becker, was appointed its president. The changes made in the defense economy in 1936 formed the backdrop to the establishment of the RFR.32 Explorative discussions by the REM with representatives of High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW), with the Luftwaffe, and the organizational core of the Four-Year Plan – the Office for German Raw and Manufacturing Materials – prevented conflicting competencies from arising and made it possible for the DFG to be bound within the utilitarian rationale of an autarkic economy and the Four-Year Plan. The RFR hence emanated from this constellation. It was the outcome of agreements and a division of duties among the most important complexes of arms-related research. 31 32

Cf., e. g., Grüttner, Wissenschaftspolitik, pp. 559, 584. Cf. Tooze, Ökonomie, pp. 243–288.

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This not only speaks for a functioning pragmatic system of scientific research but also indicates that, despite various competing power struggles within the Nazi system of science, coordination of research did occur and agreements could be reached between the separate institutes. At the same time, the founding of the RFR signified – if only partially – the successful materialization of the REM’s political vision for a “Reich Academy of Research.” The German Research Foundation was closely tied to the Reich Research Council through its staff as well as through its institutional makeup. Nevertheless, it was pushed backstage as an actor in science polity when its activities were reduced to the functions of an administrative and treasurer’s department for the RFR. The RFR’s expert department heads (Fachspartenleiter) took over the responsibilities formerly performed by the DFG’s expert boards. Their authority extended far beyond the mere consulting functions of those earlier boards, however, because their expert opinions acquired new, decisive importance. It was incumbent on the expert department heads to survey the distribution of research work in the areas of the natural and technical sciences. Thus, they controlled the topical direction of these fields of research. Divergent from the DFG’s customary system of academic self-administration, the expert department heads were no longer elected by the scientific community; they were appointed by the Reich minister of education. De facto, this had no lasting impact on the review process. Nothing substantially changed under the expert department heads of the RFR in the internal decision-making about the merit of a given project grant proposal, because in most cases they were themselves certified scientists. Their appointments merely reduced the existing review process to a single person, hence accelerating it. However, the goals of research were clearly adjusted to the requirements of rearmament and the Four-Year Plan. Undoubtedly, the elimination of the DFG’s expert boards and their reduction to solitary expert department heads making decisions was a break with the scientific tradition of the past and meant an end to the pluralism anchored primarily in the expert boards. The selection of expert department heads was no longer determined by vote in the scientific community but by bearers of political and military authority. Practically, however, nothing changed in the review process itself because the pluralistic evaluation procedure in accordance with the DFG’s statutes had hitherto mostly only existed on paper anyway. Up to the founding of the RFR, it had also been normal practice in the German Research Foundation that only one expert evaluated a particular research application, which as a rule the chairman of the responsible expert board had then accepted without comment. It is hard to reconstruct the precise reasons behind the appointments of the individual expert department heads. It does appear, though, that political aspects were taken into account in their selection besides their primary professional qualifications. Most of the expert department heads were members of the Nazi party or one of its organizations. A worldview close to National Socialism was attached to privileged connections with the leadership level of the REM or the HWA. But above all these Fachspartenleiter availed themselves of resources in the form of close cooperative relationships with institutions of the regime, the

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Wehrmacht, and industry. They also wielded their own “dynastic power” within the research landscape, be it in the form of institutes under their direction, or in the form of research alliances under their control. The REM and the HWA followed a recognizable strategy in their choices of expert department heads, drawing such resources into the service of the RFR and placing them at the center of the scientific-militaristic-industrial complex. Lastly, a special criterion also made the expert department heads stand out: They were remarkably young.33 Most of them came from the “young front-line generation” (jungen Frontgeneration), that is, the group born between 1890 and 1900 who had lived through World War I as soldiers and were held to be “the true bearers of the so very much discussed front-line experience.” The second, younger group were recruited out of the “wartime youth generation” (Kriegsjugendgeneration), that is, the generation born between 1900 and 1910.34 As in other social areas as well, political and generational motives were attached to appointments to the influential positions as expert department head of the RFR. It was no longer the elder scholars, still habitually attached to the spirit of the Kaiserreich, who determined the scene, but the thirty- and forty-year-olds, who had been molded by the war and postwar period. Among them, the number of unquestioning supporters of the Nazi regime was much higher than among older researchers, who often repudiated the plebeian style of the Nazi movement. It would be wrong, however, to assume that this rejuvenation and politicization produced a decline in professionality overall. Professional excellence and Nazi radicalism did not necessarily preclude each other, as experience was to show. Because the RFR’s influence was limited to the competencies of the REM, it remained reliant on the success of expert department heads in binding it effectively within science policy at the Reich level and bracing it by means of other institutions and agencies. It mainly came down to developing cooperative relationships and creating sound personal contacts between research localities and those interested in the results of the research. On the basis of their multifunctional ties in the Nazi system of sciences, most of the expert department heads succeeded in directing the work supported by the RFR toward the goals of the Four-Year Plan. As mediators between RFR-sponsored research and the other research complexes, they were able to set up a number of cooperative relationships with the Wehrmacht, industry, and the Office for German Raw and Manufacturing Materials (from 1939 renamed the Reich Office for Economic Development, Reichsamt für Wirtschaftsaufbau, RWA). This not only guaranteed the transfer of knowledge and problems awaiting solution between the different agencies but also a mutually agreed task distribution and money flow. Above all, using the RFR’s means of funding or, respectively, by the mediation and initiative of its expert department heads, war or arms-related projects were taken on. With the suicide of the RFR’s president General Becker in April 1940, the Reich Research Council lost its “strong man” who had been providing the Army’s 33 34

Maier, Forschung, pp. 439 f. Herbert, Best, p. 43; idem, Generationen, pp. 97–102.

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cover for the board. Becker’s death triggered new attempts to restructure the existing organization of research, turning the RFR temporarily into a volleyball between diverging interest groups. The head of the RWA, Carl Krauch, put himself forward in this match. He wanted to construct a center for state and industrial research under his control. With Göring’s backing, Krauch tried to expand the influence of the RWA he was directing beyond chemical and process engineering in commercial research to envelope the KWG and the RFR. Accordingly, in contrast to what has previously been assumed, the RFR’s resulting reorganization cannot be attributed to its supposed “failure” and the war’s unfavorable military course for Germany. It was rather primarily caused by the diverging views on science policy of the various interest groups wanting to occupy the power vacuum formed by Becker’s death. The RWA advocated the most far-reaching goals. Krauch’s ambitions for comprehensive centralization had to face opposition, however, above all by Albert Vögler, chairman of the supervisory board of the United Steel Works (Vereinigte Stahlwerke) and president of the KWG. Together with the minister of munitions, Albert Speer, he had already drafted his own plans for a reordering in March 1942. Accordingly, arms-related research was supposed to be organized by the Armaments Ministry. Because Göring was occupying himself with similar questions in the process of reorganizing aviation research, Speer and the Reichsmarschall decided in May 1942 to subordinate the RFR under Göring for “concentrated promotion of research.” Once again, the RFR was not expanded into an all-encompassing central authority of research. Because none of the agencies participating in the reorganization negotiations were willing to subordinate themselves to such a central authority, the RFR ultimately was “just” assigned the responsibility of coordinator and administrator of research policy. Its primary duty was to further research with funding, apparatus, and staff. In addition, it was charged with the task of optimizing the exchange of experimental information and communications between researchers and offices interested in the results of their research, obtaining an overview of research, and pointing it toward the important demands of the war. Thus, a centralizing tendency lay at the basis of the RFR, as before in 1937. It was not its mission, however, to unite the “multiplex system” of Nazi research sponsorship.35 THE REORGANIZATION OF THE REICH RESEARCH COUNCIL IN 1942 With Hitler’s decree in June 1942 to reorganize the RFR, trenchant changes took place in its orientation, its duties, and its scope. Study Teams oriented toward specific problems within the departments (Fachsparten) and specialized plenipotentiaries and overseers similar to the ones existing in Göring’s aviation research since 1933, and within Krauch’s, Todt’s, and his successor Speer’s spheres of influence, 35

Maier, Stiefkind, p. 104.

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which up until that point had only been partly realized, were now formed in the RFR. Structural reform took place above all in the departments because most of the expert department heads evidently attempted to strengthen the coordination of their fields beyond their existing responsibility to advance research. They created numerous Study Groups also devoted to problems relevant to a war and defense economy. These Study Groups, involving scientists as well as sometimes also representatives of the state, industry, and the military, assured the exchange of experience and problems between interested agencies and reduced frictional losses caused by duplication of labor and secrecy restrictions. Some expert department heads even managed to cluster together in their Study Groups fundamental research, rooted in the RFR as well as in the Wehrmacht, and in that way establish a “very tight connection” between “all developmental and research sites of the Wehrmacht and the Reich Research Council.”36 The interinstitutional cooperative relations adopted from the “first” Reich Research Council and intensified in the “second” consequently led to cross-links with military and state agencies that in some cases also extended into industry. The RFR gained increasing importance in this regard precisely because many of its members were connected to various mid-level management boards, in some cases even in a leadership role. This principle was characteristic of the Nazi system of science. For example, the expert department head for iron and steel, Friedrich Körber, simultaneously held the following board positions and offices: director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf; head of the Experimental Teams for Powder Metallurgy and Gasket Problems of the Armaments Ministry; member of the Special Sintered Iron Pool of the Armaments Ministry; head of the Study Groups Crankshaft Steels and Heat Resistant Materials (Valve Materials) of the Committee on Materials Issues of the Association for Aviation Research, respectively the Lilienthal Company for Aviation Research of the Reich Ministry of Aviation (Reichsluftfahrtministerium, RLM); member of the German Academy for Aviation Research of the RLM; member of the Staff on Metal planned for cooperation between the RWA, the RFR, and the iron cartel Reichsvereinigung Eisen; member of the permanent board of the German Bunsen Society; and member of the executive board of the Association for German Ironworkers in the National Socialist League of German Technical Engineering.37 Through its expert department heads and overseers, the RFR accordingly maintained ties between the experimental teams, panels, and commissions of the Armaments Ministry, the research and development departments of the three branches of the Wehrmacht, and the RWA. It thus proved to be an important component of the web of interinstitutional alliances for the optimization of re36 According to Walther Gerlach (Fachspartenleiter for physics in the RFR) during a meeting of the “infrared” (Ultrarot) working committee at the Reich Ministry for Armament and War Production, 21 Aug. 1944, BAB, R 26 III/92, fols. 2–5, 2. 37 Körber was a member of the KWKW’s expert board on metal extraction and metalworking (Fachausschuss VI) already in World War I; cf. Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft (appendix); idem, Arbeit. A similar example for the head of the RFR’s Fachsparte for nonferrous metals, Werner Köster, is given in Maier, Stiefkind, p. 111.

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search for warfare and armament. This contrasts sharply with the dominant interpretation presented in the historical research that the RFR succeeded neither in breaking through the egoisms of social ranking, nor in arranging collaborations and exchanges of experimental information or organizing the transfer of knowledge between the individual research complexes.38 Changes also occurred for most of the RFR’s plenipotentiaries. They had been appointed in quick succession during the reorganization at the end of 1942. The underlying idea for these appointments had been to form concentrations and focuses within research. At the same time, the attempt was made to create structures for projects important for the war. The RFR’s plenipotentiaries were responsible for the promotion and coordination of special war and arms-related areas. They differed from the expert department heads in that they concentrated on narrowly confined fields of research, for example, research on high frequencies, lubricants, cancer, fibers, remote-control technology, and jet propulsion. These appointments substantially broadened the RFR’s scope. The reason for this was that the plenipotentiaries were flexibly deployed in reaction to the course of the war to solve immediate problems by means of a short-term extensive mobilization of resources and funds. Their range of work extended beyond industrial research into fields of special interest to the individual branches of the Wehrmacht. The consequence of the resulting close ties between the Wehrmacht and the RFR was that the projects supported by the latter were highly relevant to the war and armament. As part of the campaign for autarky pursued by the “Nazi defense economy” (NS-Wehrwirtschaft), the RFR sponsored whatever was directly beneficial to the regime’s war effort. This spectrum ranged from the cultivation of strains of cereals resistant to winter weather and droughts, to colonial research and tropical medicine, the extraction of new kinds of raw materials, the development of radar equipment, torpedo warheads, poison gas and biological weapons, as well as alloys for gunbarrel rings and aircraft engines. With such a sponsorship profile involving virtually all fields of research, the RFR became a central financing agency for precisely those research programs important for the expansionist goals of the Nazi regime. However, the RFR played an important role not just in arms research. It was also active in other fields directly connected with the National Socialist policy of conquest. One part of the supported research served the future shaping of a Germanized, National Socialist Europe and so it was, in the end, “war research” or research in the service of expansionism, Volkstum, and racism. This also applies to the research associated with the Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost), supported by the RFR and the DFG, which “projected the ethnic homogenization of broad swathes of Eastern Europe by the relocation of local populations and the resettlement of Germans.”39 Few areas of scientific research are so tangibly and directly linked with the racist and expansionary policy of National Socialism as the Mas38 Cf., e. g., Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 268–272; Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 351, 442, 544; Ludwig, Technik, pp. 210, 222, 231. 39 Heinemann, Wissenschaft, p. 45.

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ter Plan East. But the same also applies to projects that primarily explored such ostensibly apolitical goals (as repeatedly alleged by the participant scientists after the war) as “nutritional freedom” or agricultural restructuring of the occupied eastern territories. The extent to which dietetics and territorial order was directly connected with the expulsion, suppression, or in the case of Jews, the killing of the people living in Eastern Europe, the research projects funded by the RFR and DFG were directly connected with the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination.40 This also applies expressis verbis to the researches sponsored by the DFG or, respectively, the RFR in the area of Nazi policy on eugenics. These include the examinations of “antisocial elements” and “gypsies” conducted in cooperation with the Reich Office of Health and the Reich Department of Criminal Investigation as well as the criminal experiments on humans performed in German concentration camps.41 In its efforts to overcome the existing turf battles between individual agencies and to optimize exchanges about experimental results, the RFR pushed quite effectively for a loosening of secrecy regulations. It institutionalized on this basis an exchange of information with the three branches of the Wehrmacht about their current arms research projects. In addition, Rudolf Mentzel, as the managing director of the RFR, established a central system for collecting and distributing information by means of various information pools. Its purpose was to inform interested agencies about research developments in the “enemy states” as well as about German secret or unpublished research findings. It essentially covered five areas: first, establishing a central card catalog on research; second, systematically screening foreign journals for research developments in the “enemy states”; third, distributing in a controlled manner information about as yet unpublished, if not indeed secret research results by German scientists; fourth, locating foreign scientific literature accessible within Germany; fifth, publishing reports about research sponsored by the RFR itself. By the end of 1944, Mentzel created semifunctional structures in all these areas that were able to guarantee the flow of information within scientific research. The collection and distribution of information for the coordination of research programs was not the sole purpose of the RFR as an institution, however. At least in the view of the scientists, its more important function was to place at their disposal the resources they needed for their research. In this connection, it should be noted that the RFR largely assured the financial, staffing, and material needs of exploratory science. From 1943 it had, compared to its predecessor, generous funds available for the promotion of research. The apparatus and material resources required by research projects were provided by the War Economy Office (Kriegswirtschaftsstelle). Toward this end it worked closely with the responsible economic authorities and the Armaments Ministry. In cooperation with Speer’s ministry, the occupation authorities, and the SS, it also participated in the confiscation of equipment and apparatus in the occupied territories. The importance 40 41

Cf. Heim, Kalorien, pp. 16 f.; Heinemann, Wissenschaft, pp. 61–72; Oberkrome, Ordnung. Cf. Cottebrunne, Mensch; Zimmermann (ed.), Erziehung; Eckart (ed.), Man.

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of the War Economy Office is particularly evident from the fact that from 1943 Armaments Minister Speer granted it the power to assign the required priority rankings for research proposals. Contrary to what has hitherto been assumed in the literature, the RFR had not been authorized to do so until 1943. This approval to assign priority levels on its own upgraded the RFR. Furthermore, it signified a step by research in the direction of self-determination. Pursuant to the principle Speer was following within the arms economy, it was allowed to reach decisions, largely independently, on how the research should proceed. One precondition for this interaction between the state and science to work well was, of course, a willingness on the part of scientists to subordinate themselves to the regime’s war goals. One important agent responsible for the theft of equipment, apparatus, and books in Eastern Europe besides the War Economy Office was the plenipotentiary of the RFR for the chemistry sector in the occupied eastern territories: Erich Pietsch. In his efforts to mobilize and exploit staffing, institutional, and research capacities of the occupied eastern territories, he additionally organized systematic forced labor at concentration camps in cooperation with the SS and the OKW’s research department. Qualified camp prisoners were used to perform war-related research for the Nazi regime. This was supported by large sums from the RFR. Until the RFR was reorganized in 1942–43, no central authority existed in Germany to protect scientific staff members from being drafted in the military or to have them released from combat duty in the Wehrmacht. Consequently, only individual irreplaceably skilled scientists were released from direct military service, mostly for the sake of special interests in elements of the Wehrmacht or in state authorities. Many scientific institutes had been designated as “1st order requisitions” or “war economy operations” even before or immediately after the outbreak of war. Their staffs involved in research essential to the war effort, were thereby classified as indispensable. As a rule, however, university institutes were exempted. Moreover, during the early period of the war many institutes did not take any steps to secure their personnel because “a brief period of war” was taken for granted.42 After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Wehrmacht’s staffing situation intensified visibly as the numbers of casualties mounted. Various boards, plenipotentiaries, and staffs launched one new campaign after another to mobilize new recruits.43 Göring, as president of the RFR, and Speer’s Munitions Ministry recognized the danger this posed to arms research at the beginning of 1943 and instructed the RFR to draw up lists of scientists and technologists who in the interest of important war-related research should be prevented from being called up into military service.44 As a result of these developments an agency was finally formed that successfully worked toward removing scientific personnel 42 Quoting the RFR’s expert department head for electrical engineering, Erwin Marx, in a letter to Werner Osenberg, 24 Dec. 1943, BAB, R 26 III/49, fols. 175. 43 Cf. Kroener, Menschenbewirtschaftung, pp. 847 ff.; Janssen, Ministerium, pp. 119 ff. 44 Cf. Mentzel’s letter to the RFR’s expert department heads and plenipotentiaries, 18 Feb. 1943, BAB, R 26 III/123.

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from combat duty: the RFR’s Planning Office, directed by Werner Osenberg. Because of his untiring efforts to mobilize all research for the war, the interpretation often found in the literature – that the aim of Osenberg’s efforts to secure staff members had been to save as many scientists and their assistants as possible “from extermination”45 – appears questionable. His efforts were rather intended to tap the scientific competency of the “secured” professional staff for solving problems of relevance to the war, in order to be able to apply new developments in weapons technology to change the course of the war. It was not least because of this that Osenberg’s measures helped to prolong even more the already lost war. CONCLUSION The prevailing view in historiography of a basically ineffective science policy under National Socialism and a chaotic organization of research during the war has to be modified for some fields in the natural and engineering sciences. This applies just as much to the formerly definitive point of view that the polycratic structures of power of the Nazi political system had mainly prevented a mobilization of science.46 In fact, it appears “that the effectiveness of the Nazi organization of research should be given far higher marks than the predominant reading has hitherto allowed one to suspect.”47 The Nazi regime initially profited from arms-related organizational structures that the Reichswehr had already created in the 1920s and which made possible a smooth and forced rearming of the Wehrmacht after 1933. The conventional view that research did not begin to be mobilized in Germany until around 1941–42 appears doubtful. This mobilization may not have happened at the same time as the Nazis’ Machtergreifung but quite certainly soon afterwards. This is evidenced by the developments in aviation research as well as by the way in which the Four-Year Plan was organized. Research experienced renewed mobilization impulses during the “hot phase of the plenipotentiary wing” around 1940, when the Munitions Ministry under Fritz Todt and the Reich Office for Economic Development under Carl Krauch strove to draw scientists into Study Teams oriented specifically on particular problems.48 The RFR was directly implicated in this development by its different expert department heads. The question arising from this about the efficiency of the organizational structures established by the RFR in research policy as well as about the concrete successes of projects it funded cannot be answered conclusively. On the basis of the above-sketched developments, however, it can be stated that the RFR managed to exhaust the scientific problem-solving potential in various fields for the Nazi regime’s armament efforts. That is why the verdict that the RFR’s “achieve-

45 46 47 48

Müser, Institut, p. 68. Cf., e. g., Maier, Forschung; Hachtmann, Wissenschaftsmanagement. Maier, Einleitung, p. 31, cf. Hachtmann, Forschen, pp. 208–224. Maier, Einleitung, pp. 28 f.; cf. idem, Forschung.

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ments” for the war machinery of the Nazi state could “only come out negative”49 is more than questionable. It should be emphasized that the primary concern here was on the formation of structures of research policy pushed through by the RFR, and less on the resulting scientific output. A glance at a few of the RFR’s departments and Study Teams shows, however, that direct results were also obtained in various fields. Take, for example, the area of radar research. It significantly shortened the lead the Allies had in the area of centimeter wavelength technology by the end of the war. Likewise, in the area of steel and iron research a “substitute material” was developed that could be applied equally well in engine and apparatus construction, as well as in the mass production of artillery ammunition; or be it in the area of metals research, coordinated by the Expert Department for Nonferrous Metals, which played an important role in what the Allies described as the German “metal miracle.”50 Some of the solutions that originally arose out of arms-related issues found diverse applications after 1945 as well. These range from injection molding techniques for mass production to fluxgate magnetometers (known in German after their inventor as Förster-Sonden) used in the U. S. spaceflight program “Mariner II.”51 A similar flexibility can also be found in the area of settlement and territorial planning, or agricultural and socioagrarian conceptions, which envisioned large-scale expulsions and resettlements and reckoned with the deaths of millions of people. Purged of their racist components and repopulation policies, they were implemented in the Federal Republic of Germany from the late 1950s on and partly even bore fruit in the European Economic Community.52 When one therefore speaks of “successful” research policy by the RFR within this setting, it becomes obvious that success in research policy as well as in research itself cannot be separated from their respective political and social contexts.

49 Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 268 f.; on the “mismanagement” in the Nazi organization of science and on the purported failure of the Reich Research Council, cf. most recently Schumacher, Forschung, pp. 285–299, 355–396. 50 Müller, Speer, p. 421. 51 Cf. Maier, Forschung, pp. 696–717, 1121 (note 10). On successful exchanges in the area of metal research, esp. in the area of copper and aluminium alloys, cf. ibid., pp. 785–807; about radar research, cf. Flachowsky, Hochfrequenzforschung, pp. 212 ff., about steel research, cf. idem, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 255 f. 52 Cf. Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte (vol. IV), pp. 744 ff.; Oberkrome, Ordnung.

POISED BETWEEN SCIENCE ORGANIZATIONS – THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION, THE KAISER WILHELM SOCIETY, AND THE ACADEMIES OF SCIENCE 1920–1972 Peter Nötzoldt How did the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), originally founded in 1920 as the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG), become a sturdy pillar in the German research landscape, and what were the reasons? How did it manage to establish itself, particularly against the competing influential Academies of Science1 and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG)? In the following, the collaboration, coexistence, and confrontation between these scientific organizations during the Weimar Republic as well as during the Third Reich is reconstructed. Their extremely complex and variable relationships with politics will also be illuminated. The developments in the period after 1945 will be followed in that part of Germany in which the science organization of the Weimar period could not be resumed, and the centralized German Academy of Sciences (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, DAW) consequently took on the responsibilities of both the DFG and the KWG. ALTHOFF’S SYSTEM IN WEIMAR Four main reasons can be given for why the Notgemeinschaft became a solid component of the German system of sciences relatively quickly during the Weimar Republic, alongside the academies, the KWG, and universities. First, the genesis of the Emergency Association and the decisive breakthrough displacing public funding of research from the separate states to the Reich happened complementarily. By making resources available to research and fostering foreign cultural relations, the NG ultimately accepted the de facto duties of an empire-wide science agency. It became an indispensable component in the argumentation and practice of advocates of an active Reichskulturpolitik.2 In particular, 1 The Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (founded 1700); Gesellschaft (from 1941 Akademie) der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (1751); Sächsische Gesellschaft (from 1919 Akademie) der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (1846); Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München (1759); Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Heidelberg (1909). 2 Cf., for example, Reich Interior Minister Carl Severing’s statement at a meeting of the parliamentary budget committee at the Reichstag on 14 May 1929, reprinted in full in Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 121 f.; cf. Severing and the so-called “faction of professors” (Fraktion

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the NG’s headquarters were, from the beginning, the germ of a future Imperial Ministry of Culture, and its president was an illicit imperial minister of culture.3 Even the way it processed grant proposals was rather like a science administration according to the tried and true Prussian model. On such a basis it could develop broad sponsoring activities and after just a few years was able to become an apparently “indispensable factor of life in German science.”4 Second, the point in time and the occasion of its founding were also especially important. The obvious state of emergency perceptible to all after the war offered a unique chance to create a comprehensive self-administrative body for science. Even before the war, the relationship between science and the state was deemed “relatively unproblematic.”5 Self-governance per se was not new. The novelty lay in succeeding to neutralize the egoism, reservations, and possessiveness of the established scientific institutions and science-fostering agencies and drawing together the different interests. The real “marvel,” according to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, was that nearly all the institutions and hence all fields could be taken on board.6 It was also, in the end, one of the preconditions for the NG’s later being described as a “higher type of academy” (Georg Schreiber), a “major academy” or Großakademie (Ernst Heymann, Schmidt-Ott) or indeed a “central organ of German science” (Schmidt-Ott).7 Not the fact that self-administration was really being practiced was decisive but that it could be used as an argument to stave off state ambitions. Third, the NG proved to be a “gentle innovation” (schonende Innovation).8 It fused into the already existing ensemble of institutional types and expanded it without displacing others. This principle stands out in the extensiveness of the fields within its purview. The nationalistic Priority Programs within the framework of interinstitutional, utilitarian cooperative research – “patriotic projects

der Professoren) in parliament – Georg Schreiber (ecclesiastical history in Münster), Willy Hellbach (social and national psychology in Heidelberg), Friedrich Dessauer (biophysics in Frankfurt am Main), Martin Spahn (history in Cologne), Hermann Strathmann (theology in Erlangen), Wilhelm Kahl (law in Berlin), and Johann Victor Brendt (law in Marburg), as well as Julius Moses in the minutes of the 80th to 84th sessions of parliament, 8 to 12 Jun. 1929. See also Szöllösi-Janze, Umgestaltung, pp. 60 ff. 3 Cf. Becker, Probleme, pp. 435 ff. 4 Resolution, p. 42. 5 Nipperdey/Schmugge, Forschungsförderung, p. 10. 6 Schmidt-Ott, Erlebtes, p. 179; cf. similar expressions from 1920, Secret Prussian State Archive (Geheimes Preußisches Staatsarchiv, GPStA), rep. 76 Vc, sect. 1, tit. XI, part I/67, vol. I, fol. 22. 7 Cf. Georg Schreiber, minutes of the members’ meeting on 12 Mar. 1926 in Munich, Historical Archive of the Max Planck Society (AMPG), 1st dep., rep. 1A/920, fol. 141. Ernst Heymann, in: Comment by the Prussian minister of culture (Dr. Leist) about the minister’s meeting with representatives of the NG on the occasion of their general assembly in Dresden on 1 Dec. 1928, GPStA Berlin, rep. 76 Vc, sec. 1, tit. VI/6, vol. 1. Schmidt-Ott, Zusammenfassung, p. 3; idem, article about the NG and Mexico for the Mexico-Magazin, submitted to the Foreign Office on 29 Jul. 1930, Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (AAA) Berlin, R 65818, F 7921. 8 Cf. Laitko, Berlin-Brandenburg, pp. 17 ff.

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of a technical, scientific kind”9 – first appeared on the NG’s agenda10 after the academies had declared, in no uncertain terms, that under no condition were they willing to accept responsibility for those areas11 and after a modus vivendi had been found as regards how the duties were to be divvied up with the KWG.12 Schmidt-Ott, on the other hand, rejected any official involvement by the NG in resuming ties with international scientific organizations after the academies insisted that was their responsibility. This happened despite offers extended from abroad and contrary to the Foreign Office’s expressed desire, and even though Schmidt-Ott did not approve of the rigorous obstructionist policy by the academies and the Union of German Universities (Hochschulverband).13 Fourth, the particularly favorable constellation of persons involved was greatly important. Existing networks and crosswise personal alliances as well as their solicitous and purposeful strengthening were the basis of the NG’s growth and flourishing. The very dense web of relationships between scientists, officials, and politicians lay in the very capable hands of the former Prussian minister of culture, Schmidt-Ott. He also applied it as an effective means to exert power and constantly adapted it to the given circumstances. Historians often entirely legitimately emphasize Fritz Haber’s prominent role in designing the NG and his attempt to push through the principle of self-governance. Nevertheless, it was primarily Schmidt-Ott’s reputation and talent in negotiating that ultimately secured the continuance of the NG. It remained largely a theoretical model of a self-administrated body during the virtually autocratic era of its founding president. Yet its structures and basic design had already been shaped well enough that much could be adopted in the Federal Republic after 1945. For these reasons the NG certainly can be considered as a late product of “Althoff ’s system,” the most important goal of which was to construct a “scientific landscape capable of innovation.”14 This net of Friedrich Althoff ’s effectiveness – referred to in the history of science as the System Althoff – was most densely stretched over Prussia, but it also reached far beyond its borders. Its aim was not reclusive concentration but a balanced and competitive web, both territorially as well as institutionally, although it did make Berlin its center of scientific excellence. But there was no static agenda; opportunities that arose were used to mobilize the required forces. Often, only partial solutions could be realized – since 9

Szöllösi-Janze, Haber, p. 424. Szöllosi-Janze, Haber, p. 424. 11 Cf., Nötzoldt, Strategien, part II on the academies and the applied sciences, pp. 249– 251; idem, Technikwissenschaften, pp. 5–9. 12 Cf. Nötzoldt, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 288–294. Emphasis added. 13 For a thorough discussion, see Schroeder-Gudehus, Wissenschaft, p. 868; MacLeod, Internationalismus, pp. 317 ff. Friedrich Schmidt-Ott’s attitude is particularly explicit in his confidential correspondence with the vice-president of the Emergency Association for Hungarian Universities, Emil von Grósz on 24 Jul. 1924, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/239 as well as with the vice-president of the Viennese academy, Richard von Wettstein on 7 Dec. 1926 (transcription), AAA Berlin, R 65494 and on 5 Apr. 1927, Archive of the University of Vienna, Wettstein papers, 248/14a. 14 Cf. vom Brocke, System Althoff, pp. 195 ff.; Laitko, Zentrum, p. 30. 10

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the turn of the century, many other conceptions similar to the NG either did not get implemented or, if so, only partially. After Althoff ’s death, his pupil and coworker Schmidt-Ott was able to continue to use this system. He cultivated the style of discreet confidentiality and extended its reach further. In the case of the NG, his most important partners initially were Haber, Adolf von Harnack, and the secretaries of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, PAW) Max Planck and Hermann Diels. As differences of opinion began to arise more frequently between them, Georg Schreiber, Walther von Dyck, Friedrich von Müller, Heinrich Konen, and the official advisor for university affairs in Baden, Viktor Schwoerer, gained greater influence. All of them were virtuosos at mastering the exploitation of institutional arrangements and political trends and all were well connected amongst themselves and with other decisionmakers by means of multifarious systems of communication. Hence – just like the previous successful basic institutional innovation of the twentieth century, the KWG – the NG owed its existence and strengthening very substantially to the system for nurturing science created by Althoff and developed further by his successors. The Emergency Association began – somewhat differently from the KWG – as an unproblematic addition to the existing structures. When it tried to strengthen its innovative potential (Priority Programs) and triggered the “conservative basal reaction” to reject novelties (or, if such could not be avoided then to defuse their innovative substance as best as possible), the net found ways to overcome the barriers. That is how the Notgemeinschaft evolved step by step into the DFG during the Weimar period. The most important step along the way was establishing prioritized research by means of Cooperative Projects. Their formation drew upon experiences that the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for War Technology had gathered in mobilizing science during World War I. The developments in international science organizations also had been closely observed for example in the National Research Council in the United States as well as the domestic networks of science. The PAW’s decision not to continue the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation and to refuse to take responsibility for any utilitarian research whatsoever was especially significant. The introduction of Cooperative Projects and the implementation of practically oriented Priority Programs helped the NG shape an independent profile. Pointedly bunching together strands of research allowed it to step out of the long shadow cast by the academies and the KWG and to establish itself in this way as an independent actor in science policy.15 One clear division in competencies had already been negotiated in advance between the NG and the KWG. For von Harnack, the KWG had absolute priority. He did not want any competition, under any condition – certainly not one posed by a parallel enterprise with a “southern German, that means to say, a Bavarian focus” that could open up the prospect of the NG developing in a region still largely unoccupied by the KWG’s institutes. To exclude any “collision hazards” with the NG, he insisted on the unequivocable statement that 15

Cf. Flachowsky/Nötzoldt, Notgemeinschaft; Kirchhoff, Schwerpunktlegungen.

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only the KWG would be allowed to found research institutes and the NG must limit itself to forming commissions.16 After the agreement was reached in 1924 about how the competencies were to be divided between them, the NG and the KWG continued to develop without conflict. Five years later, the president of the KWG explicitly stressed that relations “were excellent and in no field did any overlap in their mutual interests occur.” Heinrich Konen also “stated the same” with respect to university institutes.17 When, two years after von Harnack’s death in 1932, tensions threatened to develop again because Schmidt-Ott wanted to expand the NG’s sponsorship to research in industry, the first vice-president of the KWG, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, pointed out in no uncertain terms that industry had created the KWG as its partner.18 Put point-blank: “Our friend Schmidt-Ott must radically reduce his sweeping plans.”19 Relations with the Academies of Science were more problematic. Within just one decade the Notgemeinschaft had in fact become a major academy of sorts alongside the KWG and the German regional academies. It was able to perform virtually all the regular functions of the elder academies equally well and to do so for a much broader spectrum of fields – that is, defining and controling scientific standards, evaluating scientific findings, publishing and disseminating knowledge, offering scientific expertise, partly also representing science at home and abroad. Its introduction of Cooperative Projects even made it able to get scientific enterprises started and to direct them according to the classic model of academy commissions. The group of scientists appointed on the NG’s boards also exhibited obvious parallels to the classical scholarly societies of the academies. In structure, it remained extremely stable. It expanded less by democratic election as laid down in its statutes than, in most cases, by internal board decisions. The commissions for Cooperative Projects were anyway not expected to use the electoral process. They saw themselves as an elitist group and had better access to resources. Reference was even made to “regular members” (ordentliche Mitglieder) in the manner normal to academies, so as to be able to distinguish between active members and the very few actors leaving a board after an election. Although the NG actually never departed from the path of a gentle innovation and had only penetrated into fields of activity not claimed by the academies, this development worried the academies considerably. Particularly after SchmidtOtt emphasized at the beginning of 1929 that it was the NG’s goal to be “compared with a major academy,” 20 and Schreiber expressly described the academies 16

Adolf von Harnack to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott on 11 Sep. 1924, AMPG, 1st dep. rep. 1A/919. 17 Cf. the report (by Freytag) to the minister dated 20 Apr. 1929, AAA Berlin, R 65817/ no. 7917. 18 Cf. Friedrich Schmidt-Ott’s proposal to the Reich minister of finance, Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, on 17 Dec. 1932 as well as Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach’s opinion of it to Schmidt-Ott on 24 Feb. 1933, BAK, R 73/201, fols. 183–185 and no. 199, fols. 21 f. 19 Carl Duisberg to Friedrich von Müller, 25 Dec. 1932, Duisberg papers, company archive of Bayer AG Leverkusen, manuscripts collection, Friedrich von Müller. 20 Schmidt-Ott, Zusammenfassung, p. 3.

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in the Joint Committee as “opponents” (Kontrahenten) of the NG,21 the alarm bells began to ring, at least at the PAW. It responded practically by developing a plan to reform the NG. One of its provisions was to take over the “indispensable functions” that the Emergency Association – still described as a “temporary agency” – was performing. For example, in order to be able to continue the activities of the expert boards, scholars from the entire German-speaking region should henceforth be appointable to “work together actively” with the PAW.22 And, when not long afterwards the NG was supposed to be turned into a permanent establishment – a “kind of major academy” under the name Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the PAW tried with all its might to block it. In the NG, Haber cautioned against an escalation. The “fine title ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’ [was] in the eyes of the academies an academy program. […] The so-called major responsibilities [großen Aufgaben] have naturally always appeared to them to be academy responsibilities, and in essence they are. This accent is magnified by ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’.”23 Von Harnack’s threatened “withdrawal from the Notgemeinschaft” if this name, “German Research Foundation,” were retained shows how dramatic the situation was perceived. Whether he meant the withdrawal of the KWG or the PAW from the NG remained unspecified, however.24 It was ultimately moot for the NG, because “that step would undoubtedly have spelt its end.”25 The PAW gave in at last for two reasons. For one, only half of the three-fold increase in the research and grant budget promised by the Prussian government would actually materialize and as a consequence it could not realize its expansion plans anyway.26 For another, Schmidt-Ott promised the four secretaries of the PAW that all demands made by the academy would continue to be fulfilled without additional scrutiny.27 In this way way he obstructed a protest campaign that all the academies had been planning. With the PAW now falling out of line, the protest ran aground.28 Seeing themselves caught in an “unfortunate opposition” to the NG, the academies had to be satisfied that Schmidt-Ott 21

Cf. Georg Schreiber, minutes of the meeting of the NG’s Hauptausschuss, 16 Feb. 1929, pp. 8–18, BAB, R 1501/126771, fols. 217–220. 22 Memorandum by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1st draft, 14 May 1929, Archive of the Academy of Sciences (AAW) Berlin, II–I, vol. 10, fol. 85. 23 Fritz Haber to Viktor Schwoerer, 11 Sep. 1929, Generallandesarchiv (GLA) Karlsruhe, Schwoerer papers, no. 39. 24 This is reported in Fritz Haber’s letter to Adolf von Harnack from 7 Oct. 1929. It has already been historiographically cited by Margit Szöllösi-Janze (Haber, pp. 632 f.). The controversial issue, however, is only revealed here in the context treated above. The letter is located in the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Harnack papers, Haber correspondence, fols. 20 f. (also BAK, R 73/74). Emphasis added. 25 Szöllösi-Janze, Haber, p. 633. 26 Cf. the outline for the meeting of the heads of the Prussian Ministry of Culture on 11 Oct. 1929 and that ministry’s letter to the presiding Prussian cabinet ministers and all ministers of state, 16 Oct. 1929, GPStA, rep. 76 IIa, sec. 53/48, vol. V, fols. 36 and 46. 27 Cf. the minutes of the PAW’s plenary meeting on 12 Dec. 1929, AAW Berlin, PAW holdings, II–V, 101 fols. 210–212. 28 Cf. the letter by the secretary of the Heidelberg academy, Hans von Schubert, to the five academies of the German Empire dated 26 Nov. 1929, AAW Göttingen, Etat 50, 1, fol. 25. Von

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extended the promise he had made to the PAW to apply to all academies.29 They were unable to carry through their demand that another representative of the academies (Karl Brandi) be elected as von Harnack’s successor as chairman of the Joint Committee.30 SUBORDINATED AGENCY AND INNOVATION MODEL UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM During the Nazi period the “steering and conflict-equalizing systems, carefully weighed by social and scientific policy, were dislodged or instrumentalized in the interest of the Nazi system.”31 Althoff ’s system of institutional diversity and openness along with extensive self-government collided fundamentally with Nazi interests. Moreover, its most important protagonists departed: Harnack died in 1930; Haber was forced to retire in 1933 and died in 1934. Planck, who had already reached the age of 75 in 1933, sought viable courses for the KWG and the PAW and resigned his offices in 1936 and 1938, respectively. Likewise in the eighth decade of his life, Schmidt-Ott had to cede his presidential seat in the DFG to Johannes Stark in 1934. Changes in political systems and generations were hence superimposed upon each other. The four reasons presented for the NG’s success during the Weimar period no longer counted or existed, as the following comparison shows. Why the henceforth renamed DFG lost its independent position during the Nazi period more rapidly and much more intensely than the KWG and the academies also emerges from it. First, the DFG was no longer needed as a bastion of the Reich’s policy on culture. In May 1934, a Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and Culture (Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Volksbildung, REM) was established to parallel the Prussian Ministry of Culture, indeed, sharing much of its staff; and it immediately attempted to subsume the DFG.32 The “self-governance label” did not work anymore against the covetousness of the science administration. If the DFG had truly been an autonomously managed organ, it could scarcely have fit into the REM’s scheme. However, Schmidt-Ott’s style of self-governance, with the focus set on efficient management of research promotion – indeed “a lesson on the quiet takeover of power by an authoritarian leadership and its bureaucracy”33 – was predestined to be a part of the new REM’s canon of compeSchubert described the situation fully to the secretary of the Göttingen academy, Hans Stille, in response to his query, 29 Dec. 1929, AAW Heidelberg, 671/1. 29 Minutes of the annual convention of the Kartell of German scientific academies on 25 Apr. 1930 in Munich, pp. 14–15, AAW Berlin, PAW holdings, II–XII, 8, fol. 104. 30 Walther von Dyck informed the secretary of the Göttingen academy, Hermann Thiersch, about his rejected petition on 31 Dec. 1929. AAW Göttingen, Etat 50, 3, fol. 21. 31 Vom Bruch, Institutionen, p. 9. 32 Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 88 ff., as well as Fischer/Nötzoldt/Hohlfeld, Akademie, pp. 545 ff. 33 Szöllösi-Janze, Haber, p. 542.

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tencies. As the new minister, Bernhard Rust, later expressly assured Schmidt-Ott, he would rather draw the DFG into a relationship with his ministry than have to wrest it away in a lengthy struggle from his fellow party-member Stark.34 Second, where obviously dire circumstances at its foundation had moved the Emergency Association to coalesce into a completely self-governed body, after the change of political systems in 1933, apparent opportunities and different fears among its members moved the DFG in the direction of self-imposed dissolution. As in the cases of the academies and the KWG, the DFG also switched practically immediately to voluntary conformity. Schmidt-Ott dealt according to the method: “Persons can be changed, and the external shape can be changed. But the core of the institution should be preserved.”35 The DFG initiated the dissolution of its boards of its own accord early in the summer of 1933 and at that time already proposed that it be converted into a research council after the Italian model, headed by the Nazi party member and new official chief of science at the REM, Theodor Vahlen.36 At first, this impeded Stark, who wanted to turn the DFG into his private domain as the “Führer of researchers.”37 When this new DFG president got increasingly embroiled in conflicts with the REM – and the KWG and the academies also had to fear interference by the ministry – these two establishments sent clear signals that a research council could also adopt the DFG’s functions.38 When this actually took place two years later and under Rudolf Mentzel’s baton the REM practically swallowed up the DFG whole, Planck even emphatically asserted that the institution could “not have been placed in better hands.”39 Third, in the Nazi system gentle changes were not deemed modern anymore, as a matter of principle. Some sort of major academy merely to supplement the regional academies and the KWG contradicted the new notions of a centralistic science policy. Stark had already suggested to Hitler a radical restructuring of the German system of the sciences topped by a Reich Academy of Sciences (Reichsakademie der Forschung) and a Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR). The REM also strove to build a new, clearly structured system for science that, although only partly realized, was never lost sight of. The German organization of research, which had been maturing for over a hundred years, had to be turned 34 Friedrich Schmidt-Ott informed Viktor Schwoerer on 28 Aug. 1937 about a conversation with Bernhard Rust on the subject on the occasion of the inauguration of the RFR in 1937, GLA Karlsruhe, Schwoerer/48. 35 Twelfth report of the NG authored by Friedrich Schmidt-Ott: Berichte, 1933, pp. 5–15, esp. p. 12. 36 Cf. these hitherto unknown plans in GLA Karlsruhe, Schwoerer papers/2. 37 Armin Hermann, Führer der Forscher, Berliner Zeitung, 21 Jun. 2007. Emphasis added. Cf. Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 173 ff., and Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 110 ff. 38 Cf. the statements about founding a Reich Academy of Research at the beginning of 1934: esp. Robert Fellinger’s report to Carl Duisberg, 12 Feb. 1935, Duisberg papers, company archive of Bayer AG Leverkusen, holdings 46, 11.2.1, as well as Max Planck to Bernhard Rust, 23 Feb. 1935, AMPG, I/Ia/202, fol. 34. 39 Max Planck to Rudolf Mentzel, 4 Dec. 1936, BAK, R 73/14168.

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upside down and put on a fast track, ignoring any successes it had reaped along the way. By establishing a Reich Academy of Research, the REM wanted to put all mainly publicly funded research facilities in Germany under its control. This meant that the DFG would be “utterly absorbed by the Reich Academy.”40 Fourth, the network that had carried the NG during the Weimar period completely fell apart between 1930 and 1934. Not only were the already mentioned men at the top missing but the second rank was also absent: von Dyck died 1934, Schwoerer had to leave the NG soon after Schmidt-Ott, and Konen, von Müller, and Schreiber lost their former influence. The new network was woven by men of the generation after the next, which tolerated a few “old men” like Planck, Stark, and Vahlen during a transition period or in positions on the sidelines, such as Schmidt-Ott in the Donors’ Union (Stifterverband). With Mentzel’s presidency from 1936 on, the DFG became a “subordinate agency” to the REM,41 the administrative apparatus of the new-fangled RFR, and bursar’s office for research grants in the humanities. Its form of registered association was retained along with its official name in order to suggest a certain autonomy of the institution and its versed and indispensable staff of personnel, and in order to keep the established allocation in the Reich Minister of Finance’s budget. The REM itself could only make available 185,000 reichsmarks “for the advancement of scientific aims” whereas since 1933 the DFG still had at its disposal an annual budget fed by the Reich government of around four million reichsmarks.42 Only with the DFG’s funds could the REM form a counterweight at all to the research support by the regional Länder and exercise it under the chronically tight financial conditions of the culture agencies, as has meanwhile been thoroughly demonstrated by the example of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.43 The DFG survived only as a formal shell of itself. Its arbitrary new statutes and the way its affiliate the RFR operated made that very clear. Whereas the KWG’s and the academies’ decision-making boards remained largely intact when they realigned themselves politically, the DFG’s fundamental principle of being a central and completely self-administrative organization of German science was completely eliminated. All of its existing decision-making boards – the Executive Committee, Joint Committee, and expert review boards – were abolished. Only 40 Cf. Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 163 ff.; Fischer/Hohlfeld/Nötzoldt, Akademie, pp. 547 ff., and Flachowsky, Reichsforschungsrat, pp. 201 ff. 41 Mentzel, quoted in Zierold, Forschungsförderung, p. 225. 42 These figures are taken from research conducted by the Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung in Berlin between May and July 1936: Sächsisches Landeshauptarchiv Dresden; Sächsische Gesandtschaft für Preußen beim Deutschen Reich, 3518, fols. 81–87; as well as Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 228 f. 43 If the REM was the sole sponsor of a project, it made generous use of the DFG’s funds and completely ceased to tap its own funds – such as, for the Grimm dictionary. If a number of Länder were involved – such as, for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae – the DFG’s share was cut and, using a procedure similar to the REM’s, the Länder were asked to make available more money from their own sources. Cf. on approvals of support for the Grimm dictionary: AAW II–VIII, vols. 32, 33; and for the Thesaurus: AAW Berlin, II–VIII, vols. 235, 236; as well as the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, MK 71126.

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the entirely powerless General Assembly was retained (although it never reconvened) because a registered association without a membership was unthinkable. Even though reputable scientists mostly “self-governed” research sponsorship as heads of their respective departments within the RFR, the Nazi Führerprinzip was “soundly implemented” under its auspices as well.44 The expert department heads were no longer elected by the professional community but appointed by the REM. From then on, thirteen expert department heads decided on what formerly 159 elected members on the NG’s boards had deliberated on. Hence, self-governance grounded in an electorate was not the only abandoned principle. The, at least nominally, upheld principle of pluralistic opinion-making in evaluations of grant applications was also lost. All these measures changed the DFG so fundamentally that it stopped existing as a self-governing organ of science. Thus, it is unreasonable to assert any continuity with the present DFG. Nevertheless, the Nazi period cannot and must not be excluded from the DFG’s cultivated memory, not least because its high level of compatibility with Nazi policies had preemptory and internal causes. There was, in addition, much overlapping in staffing between the Weimar and Nazi periods. Schmidt-Ott, for instance, was already practising a style that was thoroughly comparable to the Nazi Führerprinzip; under his authoritarian presidency the function of the self-administrating boards was quite limited. Frequent criticism of his leadership style and the passiveness of the boards prove this as much as the fact that extremely few indications of pluralistic reviewing can be found in the files. The boards were excluded more than ever during Stark’s presidency. The Joint Committee no longer had any role to play and the expert boards were marginalized. Its research sponsorship had already been oriented toward nationalistic goals during the Weimar Republic and even more so after Hitler’s takeover in 1933, mainly addressing autarky, armament, folklore, race, and health. Consequently, it was “Nazi-compatible” in many areas. This, in turn, not only made new careers but also allowed some continuity among its personnel. The medical doctor Ferdinand Sauerbruch, for example, an important comrade-in-arms of the president during the Weimar era, was placed on Stark’s list of candidates for a new Joint Committee in the summer of 1933, then again at the end of 1934, before he finally became one of the expert department heads of the new RFR in 1937. The primary beneficiary of the new situation and of the RFR’s large financial resources was the KWG, as Rüdiger Hachtmann and other researchers of the Presidential Committee on the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism have demonstrated: “The regime was aware of the fact that modern wars could only be waged with modern science in the background and that it would be difficult to find a replacement for the KWG.” The new men in government were reminded of this repeatedly along the KWG’s densely woven, robust, and continually renovated networks – which, contrary to the DFG’s, never tore apart. It was primarily for this reason that, at the latest with the preparations for 44

Original: “rein durchgeführt”: Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 228 f.

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war announced by the Four-Year Plan, the KWG was ultimately gingerly handled by all parties like “a raw egg.”45 All earlier plans to incorporate it within the REM were dropped; and when the RFR was being founded, it was stressed that the preservation of the KWG had been “deemed necessary by the authorities,” because of “its reputation abroad” and “for the sake of the link between research and industry.”46 Furthermore, by positioning its members in key RFR posts and at the same time allowing the most important decision-makers of this board into the KWG’s own decision panels, the society succeeded in returning to its proven and entirely effective privilege of mainly negotiating with itself. From the Nazi “takeover of power” up to the outbreak of war, the material resources made available to the KWG nearly doubled overall.47 The academies, led by the PAW, also tried to profit from the de facto disappearance of the DFG from the German research landscape. At the beginning of the 1940s they decided to unite all the German academies (including the Viennese and Prague ones) as a Reichsakademie der Wissenschaften. In this the academies were pursuing two aims. For one, they wanted to cement their claim as representatives of German science on the international stage, which in view of the actual plans for a “region-wide European science” was particularly important. For another, they spied a chance to make use of those elements of the “major academy DFG” from the late Schmidt-Ott era that had basically determined the NG’s success during the Weimar Republic. According to the article specifying its purpose, the Reich Academy was supposed to represent German science at home as well as abroad. It first had “to support excellent individual achievements,” second, to organize and foster cooperative projects in fields of particular importance in the National Socialist state,” and thirdly, to “encourage contacts between science and the people as well as promote the people’s understanding of accomplishments in science.” Committees were supposed to structure the route this work was to take.48 The idea of adopting the DFG’s innovative elements was not new to the academies, of course. The PAW, aware that its own scientific influence was increasingly slipping away, had drawn up plans as early as the beginning of 1929 to relieve the NG of its most important functions and was seeking to extend its own scope considerably.49 The serving vice-president of the PAW, who was at the same time the main instigator of this plan, Ernst Heymann, had formerly been the academy’s secretary; as the chairman of the NG’s publisher’s board he had been thoroughly informed about the NG’s options. Now Heymann and the PAW’s new president Vahlen tried to use the REM’s centralizing ambitions to implement these earlier plans. Besides the old academies – as a privileged “base for the Reich Academy” – new self-governed associations that the REM wanted to establish at all university locations were also to gain membership. This idea 45 46 47 48 49

Hachtmann, Erfolgsgeschichte, p. 21. Becker, in: Ehrentag, pp. 17 ff. Hachtmann, Erfolgsgeschichte, pp. 46, 48. Cf. Nötzoldt, Akademien, pp. 97–104. Cf. Nötzoldt, Strategien, I, on the academies and the NG, pp. 238–248.

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was particularly attractive because it opened up the possibility for the REM not only to control the academies more tightly but also to push forward, “through the back door,” the hitherto not yet really established sovereignty of the Reich over universities. On the other hand, since the academies had pursued a blockade policy for many years, they seemed less suited than the newly founded RFR to be responsible for fostering scientific relations abroad. Initially intensely pursued until 1942, this plan was eventually postponed until after the war. THE MAJOR ACADEMY IN THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC Two defining conditions primarily determined the new beginning after 1945. First, during the years of occupation the primary decision-making powers lay with the Allies. Second, profound territorial shifts within the German scientific landscape had already occurred even before the war had ended.50 This had farreaching consequences particularly for the Berlin academy. Aside from the necessity to assume responsibility during the postwar chaos, the opportunity suddenly arose to revise disliked – mostly self-imposed – developments of the past few decades within Germany’s system of the sciences. The academy’s standing could perhaps be improved; in particular, it could collect competencies for itself that had formerly been dealt elsewhere.51 These included, above all, the competencies claimed by the former KWG and the NG/DFG or, respectively, shared between them. Both of these institutions were practically nonexistent in the Berlin – and East German – scientific landscape.52 From Göttingen, the KWG fought for its survival and attempted to resurrect itself exclusively in the Western zones. The DFG and the RFR were totally discredited by their institutional and personal proximity to the Nazi state. Now that the academies’ cartel was completely incapacitated, for the time being the usual stridnet opposition to any special role for the Berliners need not be feared. Under this constellation the academy signaled to the Allies in charge in 1945, first, that it was prepared to assume and continue to execute the responsibilities of the former NG. Second, it would adopt orphaned institutes and found new ones. Third, it was willing to bear national responsibility for the promotion of science. As for the DFG, the academy had resolved beforehand “to get fiduciarily involved.” A commission headed by Hans Stille, whose familiarity with the DFG dated back to the mid-1920s and who had already been trying to increase the influence of the Göttingen academy at that time, was supposed to do what was necessary together with two former coworkers of Schmidt-Ott and in consultation with the latter.53 The Berlin academy no longer consider itself a mere local institution. In December 1945 it crossed “Prussian” out of its name and during its official reinauguration in July 1946 assumed the name German Academy of Sciences in 50 51 52 53

Vom Bruch, Traditionsbezug, pp. 3 ff. See the overview Kocka/Nötzoldt/Walther, Resümee. Osietzki, Wissenschaftsorganisation, p. 188. Nötzoldt, Wissenschaft, p. 31.

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Berlin (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, DAW). It was supposed to become Germany’s influential center for science. In other words, it was supposed to be restyled as a national, umbrella academy. During the inaugural ceremony, the academy explicitly pointed out that “the rich funding sources of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Emergency Association” had seeped away and would “not flow anymore in the foreseeable future.”54 It should be noted that this development was introduced by just a very small group of academy members. Almost two thirds of the PAW’s members, foremost scientists, had left Berlin. The academy’s plans corresponded well with the conceptions of the Soviet occupying power. It generally supported centralization and had reorganized its national academy in the 1920s, in close consultation with Schmidt-Ott, after the model of the KWG and the NG.55 The newly founded DAW now also immediately plied its honorary member Schmidt-Ott for his counsel. In October 1946, at the request of the academy’s leadership, the former president of the NG accepted a research assignment on the topic “Organizations for the promotion of science and research since the turn of the century.” This well-paid collaboration lasted until 1950, after which the academy applied to the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for an honorary pension for him. It cannot be said with certainty whether the former president of the NG really did help push through the “institutionally constituted new orientation” in the Eastern portion of Germany, but he certainly was present.56 The DAW was a research academy that controlled its own institutes since 1946. It was composed of what remained of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, former imperial and Prussian research facilities, and most of all of new foundings. These were scattered throughout the GDR. Their constant expansion turned the DAW into the most powerful pillar of research outside of universities within organized science in the East German part of the state. The academy thus rose from a “very small enterprise” of scientific production to a “major organization” of science. Just 87 scientists were conducting research at the academy in 1946, whereas in 1968 there were already 3,285 in over one hundred institutes with a total of 13,000 employees.57 For a few years the DAW became additionally the most important pillar of research sponsorship and steering – for the natural and engineering sciences until 1957, and for the humanities until 1964. From the point of view of the DFG’s then general secretary, Kurt Zierold, as well as of the western academies in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the DAW, as “the true research organization of the GDR,” certainly did fulfill duties comparable to the DFG.58 The DAW’s 54

Kienle, Festrede, p. 27. Schmidt-Ott, Erlebtes, p. 227, as well as around the same time, idem, in: Mitteilungen an das Auswärtige Amt on 18 Sep. 1925, there p. 2, AAA Berlin, R 64856, and Bericht über die 2. Reise im Frühherbst 1928, p. 11, GPStA, HA VI, Schmidt-Ott papers/43; see also Schicker, Akademie, p. 219. 56 See AAW Berlin, holdings on Akademieleitung, Personalia 426. 57 In the following, if not otherwise indicated, based on Nötzoldt, Akademie, pp. 39 ff. 58 Cf. Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 485–493; Brenner, Organisation, p. 21. 55

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classes performed these activities. They continued to grant subsidies to individual researchers, as the academies had before, and developed them further. They also determined research priorities inside and outside the academy. In order to be able to fulfill these duties, the DAW’s structure was initially expanded in 1949 from two to six classes and the permissible number of members was doubled. “Applied sciences,” such as engineering, medicine, agricultural science, and others that had previously been knocking at the doors of the German academies in vain, now gained admission. Since the 1950s the classes could additionally establish sections and even appoint researchers external to the DAW. This fine-structuring was intended to address a fundamental problem of the academies: their lack of flexibility. Now, at least in theory, new subjects could be rapidly integrated and temporary collaborators could be appointed in addition to the elected members of the academies. During the first few years of the DAW, decisions about granting subsidies for research projects took up a considerable portion of the classes’ work. Scientists from the whole of Germany could submit applications. The academicians reviewed them; the classes decided on them; the academy’s general assembly approved them, at least in the case of important problems. The procedure was, from a formal point of view, even somewhat more democratic than formerly in the NG, because a board had the final say, not the president. Individual subsidies very quickly became the exception, however, because the DAW was able to offer permanent positions in their numerous new institutes which regularly became vacant and available in considerable numbers on the job market, which was open until the Iron Curtain was drawn. Determining the focuses of research and finding the necessary funds increasingly became the core business of research promotion by the academy’s classes. Very quickly, however, the limits of this Großakademie model also became apparent in the DAW. Despite the expansion and the many auxiliary structures, a scholarly community limited to about one hundred members, elected for life, proved not to be appropriate for coordinating the nation’s scientific system. Setting aside political influences, the academy did not become a largely self-governed body and the conflicts in the rivalry over resources had even substantially grown within the DAW as well as outside of it. Important professional posts could not be filled with new staff because they were occupied by not very active academy members. Reshufflings proved scarcely doable because the established professional departments insisted on the status quo. Entire specialties gained no access because they happened not to have any lobby in the scholarly community. Corrections from outside were impossible because, different from the departments of the former NG, no elections could be held in the scientific community. This only intensified the tensions that already existed with the universities because of the better working conditions the academy’s institutes offered. In 1957 natural and technical scientists pleaded jointly with medical doctors for an end to the Großakademie experiment. They demanded that their research institutes be severed from the DAW’s classes and they also founded an association of institutes that was completely independent of the scholarly society, ex-

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plicitly modeled after the revived KWG, the renamed Max Planck Society. At the same time, a Research Council of the GDR (Forschungsrat der DDR) was set up for all problems regarding research funding in those fields. Under the leadership of Peter Adolf Thiessen, a former expert department head of the RFR, its members appealed to the East German government. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences, on the other hand, fought to keep their institutes in the DAW’s classes because there they could better mobilize relatively generous resources. And yet they had less political interference to fear because their proportional membership from West Germany was still relatively high. It was only in the mid-1960s that, against their wishes, an institutional association was created with an autonomous leadership that was supposed to work closely with the State Police. Thus, two decades after the DAW was founded, the projected centralized major academy had already failed. Returning to the old model of organizing research outside of universities seemed “logically right.” Nevertheless, it was no longer materializable “in order to protect the characteristic academy that evolved in the socialist countries.”59 Another reorganization involving drastic political interference gradually turned the DAW into a government academy of the second German state. It got the official stamp of approval as such in 1972 when it was renamed the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. CONCLUSION The Emergency Association for German Science (NG) certainly may be considered a late product of the Althoff system, whose main goal was building a “scientific landscape capable of innovation.” Just as earlier the other of the two successful institutional basic innovations of the twentieth century – the KWG – it owed its existence and strengthening very essentially to the system of science promotion created by Friedrich Althoff and developed further by the succeeding generation, with its densely woven network of personal contacts at its core. Unlike the KWG, the NG began as an unproblematic addition to existing structures. When it tried to strengthen its innovative potential (when with its Priority Programs it moved toward a policy of active support) and triggered the reactionary conservative response of reform rejection, the network found ways to overcome the barriers. Thus, in evolutionary steps throughout the Weimar period the NG became the DFG. The division of responsibilities with the KWG proceeded relatively unproblematically. The academies, on the contrary, soon saw themselves placed in “unfortunate opposition” to the NG. They had regarded the NG as merely a “temporary agency.” Because they were rather hostile toward innovations, and often particular interests encumbered cooperation between the five German academies, 59 BAB, SAPMO, ZPA, IV 2/9.04/372, fols. 414 f. Comments on the motion to determine the role, tasks, and further development of the DAW, discussed at the meeting of the Politbüro’s Central Committee of the SED on 10 July 1962, anonymous document in the files of the Central Committee’s Science Department dated summer 1962.

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however, they could not prevent the NG’s becoming a modern “major academy” (active throughout the German empire and open to all subjects). During the Nazi period the steering and conflict-avoidance systems, carefully counterbalanced by science and social policies, were uprooted or instrumentalized in the interest of the Nazi system. Althoff ’s system, with its institutional diversity and openness and extensive administrative autonomy, collided fundamentally with Nazi interests. To this was added the departure of its most important protagonists. Political and generational change overlapped. The net that had been carrying the NG tore away completely between 1930 and 1934. For these reasons the DFG lost its autonomy more rapidly and much more seriously than the KWG and the academies. It finally mutated into the REM’s research department and the RFR’s business office. The KWG profited enormously from the new situation and the RFR’s large financial means. But the academies also tried to take advantage of the moment in 1940–41 and regain lost territory. They wanted to join forces and become the Reich’s highest scientific authority and form the Großakademie that, in the eyes of many, the NG already had become in practice at the end of the 1920s before it expanded into the DFG. The only heavily disputed point was the Berlin academy’s leadership claim. The imperial authorities supported this plan only for a short time before delaying its implementation until the postwar period. The Großakademie plan could be tried out in practice after the German defeat under entirely different framing conditions. The deep territorial shifts in the German scientific landscape and the differing interests among the occupying forces offered it a basis. In the postwar chaos the Berlin academy was presented with the necessity to assume the responsibility again. At the same time, it was suddenly given the chance to revise unwanted, albeit mostly self-induced, developments in German organized science of the foregoing decades. The academy’s own standing could be embellished, particularly by drawing competencies hitherto managed elsewhere. The competencies formerly claimed or shared by the KWG and the DFG were foremost among these. Both institutions were practically nonexistent in the Berlin and East German scientific scene. The academy, which reopened in Berlin in the summer of 1946 as the DAW, expanded into a research academy with numerous institutes. It was explicitly supposed to assume the responsibilities of the earlier DFG regarding research funding and oversight. The limits of the Großakademie model very quickly became visible. Despite all the extensions and structural changes implemented, a scholarly community limited to about one hundred life-long members proved unsuitable for coordinating a national system of the sciences. Disregarding the political influences, the academy did not become an overarching self-governed body anchored within the scientific community comparable to the DFG. By 1957 the model of a centralized major academy was deemed a failure. The research institutes were severed from the scholarly society and grouped within separate institutional associations that were coordinated by a research council.

FROM EMERGENCY ASSOCIATION TO SERVICE ORGANIZATION – GUIDELINES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1949–1973 Karin Orth Contrary to a widely held perception, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) was not simply refounded after the war ended. Rather a new “Emergency Association” (Notgemeinschaft, NG) was founded in Bonn in 1949 that subsequently managed to prevail over numerous rival institutions: over the regional research councils that had formed in the immediate postwar period, the Notgemeinschaft in Berlin that still existed, and the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsrat, DFR) dominated by Werner Heisenberg. The NG in Bonn suffered such substantial losses in its duel with the DFR, however, that the DFG to emerge out of that conflict can be regarded as an entirely new founding. The old NG/DFG nevertheless played a prominent role in all the debates held since the war’s end on how best to resurrect research and its institutions. Scientists and policy makers resorted to a successful and already tested institution for the promotion of science that had a clear advantage over other designs yet to prove their merit. In addition, the supporters of the Bonn variety of the NG found influential allies in the culture ministers of the regional Länder. In view of the basic political constellation directly after the war, an orientation toward federalism initially seemed to be the only realistic option in any case. But this choice of allies proved to be a good one in the medium term as well. By 1949 at the latest, when it became possible to think and act supraregionally again and the era of regional research councils definitely belonged to the past, the ministries of culture already had such a great political advantage in the area of research through, for instance, the Königstein agreement on federal funding, that the meddling efforts by the federal government that was taking shape could no longer endanger their position. SPONSORSHIP OF THE “INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER PERSONA” DURING THE PERIOD OF RECONSTRUCTION The NG in Bonn existed from 11 January 1949 until 2 August 1951. A few individuals very significantly defined its evolution. Initially there was no policy making to speak of in the narrow sense, such as setting financial, institutional, or substantive priorities by the exertion of targeted influence on research sponsor-

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ship. All signs were rather pointed at founding and building up the institution, finding sources of money, and staving off claims by other institutions to power and therefore carrying forward its own position. The most difficult conflict the NG in Bonn had to withstand was against the DFR. The DFR had just as little democratic legitimacy as the NG in Berlin and represented the German scientific community just as well. However, it had a powerful ally in West Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The struggle over the central position in the arena of research promotion was lengthy and intense and not lacking in personal conflicts. Basically, however, those personal animosities were just a symptom of the fact that almost no one actually wanted the unification they verbally claimed. The NG in Bonn and the DFR were rather pitched in a battle for survival that set two institutions and two principles at loggerheads, for the NG and the DFR were based on entirely different conceptions, the elements of which are summarized below. The first revolved around the question of who should represent science and who should be its legitimate spokesperson. The NG in Bonn resembled an organization of the ranking West German professoriat. The members of the DFR, on the other hand, regarded themselves as representatives of German science by virtue of their Nobel prizes. They also differed on what the purpose of research actually should be. Two basic premises confronted each other: the “administrative evolutionary” approach of the NG in Bonn and the “political planning” principle of the DFR. Both institutions derived their convictions and argumentations from experiences gained during the Nazi period.1 Precisely because of this experience, the DFR concluded, scientific thinking must penetrate into politics. Science had the obligation, at very least the right, to take the initiative in public affairs. It was the DFR’s presumption that properly understood (natural) science was free of ideology and therefore was suitable as a basis for a rational, progressoriented policy and had to be put to use. This, likewise with reference to National Socialism, is precisely what the NG in Bonn rejected. It emphasized the principle of scientific autonomy. Freedom in science had to mean independence from politics. These different basic convictions expressed themselves in different political strategies. The DFR and the NG in Bonn sought and found different allies. While the NG proceeded federalistically and aligned itself closely with the ministries of culture, the DFR bet on state centralism. Its contacts were therefore initially the bizonal administration, later the parliamentary council, and finally the federal government. With such diverging background conceptions it is not surprising that it was so difficult for the NG in Bonn and the DFR to unite in the summer of 1951 as the German Research Foundation (DFG). What is rather surprising is that it succeeded at all. How, in the end, should the outcome be assessed? Did the two organizations merge together? Or – as Cathryn Carson and other historians judge2 – did the DFR not dissolve into the NG in Bonn? The truth probably lies somewhere in 1 2

Nipperdey/Schmugge, Jahre, p. 75. See, e. g., Carson/Gubser, Science; Stamm, Staat, p. 140.

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between. It is hardly possible to speak of a smooth transition to a new organization that adopted equal amounts from both its forerunner institutions. Yet by no means did all of the DFR’s constituent elements disappear. The DFR’s principle of centralized planning was preserved in and exercized by the newly created DFG Senate. Consequently – as a few of the participants also saw it – the Senate can be regarded as a continuation of the DFR within the DFG, especially if one considers that the members of the DFR subsequently included in the DFG’s Senate were not few in number. Furthermore, this chance in the summer of 1951 could be used to professionalize and politicize the NG in Bonn – and in this sense, to modernize it. In summary, it can be said that the DFG, arisen out of the conflict between the NG in Bonn and the DFR, should be viewed as a new founding, as a variant of the NG in Bonn adapted to the federalist-republican era of the early 1950s, modernized and enriched by the political core elements of the DFR. In the early 1950s the primary concern was stabilizing this newly created organization. Consolidation after the merger initially meant proceeding with the reconstruction in order to position the DFG as a leader within the scientific system of the Federal Republic of Germany. Just as before, now again it was a matter of strengthening the institution both internally and externally. The Executive Committee pursued a dual strategy abroad to achieve this. First (mostly successful) attempts were made to cooperate with established science organizations, such as the Conference of West German Rectors, the Max Planck Society, the Union of German Universities (Hochschulverband), and the Donor’s Association (Stifterverband). Second, the intention was to deflect claims advanced by newly formed institutions, such as, the Fraunhofer Society (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, FG), to having a say in the field of research funding. The attempt to incorporate the FG into the DFG failed, however. But, all in all the DFG was able to hold its own well. One reason was that no other federal opponent existed until the Federal Ministry for Atomic Issues was founded in the mid-1950s. The influence of selfadministrative organizations therefore continued to be strong. The organization also had to be consolidated internally. President Ludwig Raiser and Vice-President Walther Gerlach formed the decisive nucleus of the DFG’s first Executive Committee (Präsidium). The farther removed one was from that nucleus, the less possible it was to shape research policy. The same applied, to a diminishing degree, to the rest of the members of the Executive Committee, to the DFG’s managing boards, such as, in particular, the Senate, the Board of Trustees (Kuratorium), and the Joint Committee (Hauptausschuss), as well as the special commissions, the Senate committees, and expert boards. The DFG’s membership was the farthest removed, even though according to the Statutes it was supposed to determine the guidelines for the research. But de facto they met only once a year at the General Assembly to hear the president’s annual report, which emphasized the DFG’s overriding guidelines and underscored its accomplishments. As regards the research sponsored, during Germany’s postwar recovery the regular Individual Grants Program (Normalverfahren) predominated, along with

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support for “prominent independent researchers” (freie Forscherpersönlichkeiten). Until the early-to-mid-1950s the Individual Grants Program was the only procedure the DFG used to fund research projects because it was regarded as the sole guarantee to reaching the “true source of scientific and any other intellectual achievement, namely, the researcher’s free imagination and his drive for knowledge answerable only to his own conscience.”3 Research was supposed to be able to develop without guidance or planning. Thus, the Normalverfahren is the signature of the recovery period. Not all persons shared this position. Dissenting voices were audible, particularly in internal debates within the Executive Committee, even though it continued to publicly defend its general strategy. They did not perceive the DFG as an ever neutral money-distribution machine. They did not want to let research be governed purely by the free play of forces. They were convinced that for scientific progress to flourish regulatory intervention was necessary. “The point is,” Raiser argued as one exponent of this view, “to get away from merely handling proposals and put some thought into where funds ought to be applied in order to be able to steer research with a gentle touch.”4 The early discussions about how to design funding priorities can be interpreted as an outcome of this policy advocating a course of “restrained planning.”5 They were accompanied by assurances that there was no danger because it was a fundamentally different sort of science policy from the one followed by the National Socialists, for instance. It was clearly distinguishable from planning methods arising out of the ideological political rationale of a totalitarian state of rightist or leftist stamp, not least because it lay in the hands of the researchers themselves. The reason why this minority position of “restrained planning” was able to prevail, and as a consequence the first Priority Programs were established, was because, when the federal government, at long last, approved the special allocation for research, it attached concrete conditions to its release in the autumn of 1952. The government funds were supposed to be applied to devising a plan aimed at meeting the needs of many disciplines along the way to catching up and picking up the lead from research abroad in addition to supporting particularly important research projects. An accompanying rhetoric was needed, however, to justify establishing the Priority Program within the DFG. The Executive Committee emphasized the following points: The essential precondition for the Priority Program was that sufficient funds be available for the regular Individual Grants Program; in addition, it would have to be applied “cautiously” and “elastically,” and the researchers’ freedom to choose their project within the priority area should be retained. Creating priorities could then have an “invigorating” and “encouraging” effect, especially in “neglected” and underdeveloped subjects.6

3

DFG report for 1951/52: Berichte, p. 10. Record of the Senate’s 2nd session on 15 Dec. 1951 in Mannheim, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), B 227/162890, p. 16. 5 DFG report for 1952/53: Berichte, p. 12. 6 DFG report for 1954/55: Berichte, p. 17. 4

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The first Priority Program revealed, however, that the funding policy of the DFG’s managing boards deemed only certain scientific fields as worthy of urgent support, namely research in the pure and applied natural sciences. They justified not taking the humanities into consideration with the argument that their needs were different. Moreover, those literary arts requiring “cautious and patient solicitude over the long term” were being supported by publication grants and stipends as well as by the funding of various “major historical philological enterprises (documentary editions, dictionaries, etc.).”7 The public also perceived this prioritization: In the early 1950s the DFG was known as an institution for research on fundamental science. That basically agreed with the implicit understanding of the members of the inner circle. Accordingly, scientists defined themselves by their occupation with “pure,” basic research, preferably in the natural sciences, their professional position as a tenured professor at a university, and their assumption of responsible official functions, particularly in science policy. All the same, these men did not deny the value of the humanities. Indeed, they regarded the humanities as part of their own cultural identity. Primarily products from the educated strata of society, the Bildungsbürgertum, they all had bourgeois backgrounds. The comprehensive education they had been raised in incorporated a high affinity for the fine arts, literature, and philosophy, as well as history. A particular life style was an inherent part of the habitus of a bürgerlicher scholar, the pinnacle of which was the obligatory official villa residence and chauffeured car for the DFG president. Against this regular cultural background, the DFG’s General Assembly was not just for discussing current topics. It was a major social event in which not only the elite of the officiating university participated but also the honoraries of the host city, representatives of the respective Land, and the federal government. The termination of Ludwig Raiser’s presidency in 1955 coincided with the end of the postwar reconstruction period. Control in the area of research by the occupying powers was rescinded, the Federal Ministry for Atomic Issues (Bundesministerium für Atomfragen, BMA) was established, and the material conditions for scientific research improved. Furthermore, the DFG’s Executive Committee noticed a growing interest in scientific and research issues by the state and the public at large. This “considerable turn” might not be localizable “in the range of physical fact” but certainly “in the atmospherics, in mood and inclination.”8 Raiser drew the following conclusions at the last general assembly he presided over: Today, after the first ten years of rebuilding have elapsed, during which we had to find and secure the path out of the devastations of catastrophe to productive work and a complete return to the standard of research in the outside world, we are standing at the beginning of a new epoch. It poses research challenges that are no longer appropriately solvable by the

7 8

DFG report for 1953/54: Berichte, p. 15. DFG report for 1955/56: Berichte, p. 9.

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The first decisive measure was establishing the Priority Program, which ended the phase of unplanned research sponsorship. RESEARCH FUNDING BY PRIORITIZATION IN THE “IMITATION AND CATCH-UP PHASE” Two tightly intertwined factors particularly characterized the “imitation and catchup phase” from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s in the Federal Republic: first, the debate over the backwardness of German research, along with attempts to recoup these real or imagined losses; and second, institutional changes in science, which should be interpreted as a reflex precisely to this backwardness debate. The DFG, henceforth under Gerhard Hess’s presidency, was compelled to react to both of these factors. From the outset, the DFG’s relations with the BMA, with its technological and scientific ambitions, were contentious and quite the opposite of the cooperative relations it enjoyed with the Council of Sciences and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat). The DFG reacted defensively against the unaccustomed claims by the BMA to autonomy and power. The purpose of this defense was to preserve its assets in an attempt to protect its own turf. The negotiations between the BMA and the DFG in 1956 and 1957 show that it was not the DFG’s independence that was at stake but its claim to represent or sponsor science as a whole. In 1957 the DFG lost the authority to promote research in the fields of atomic physics, atomic chemistry, and atomic engineering to the Federal Ministry for Atomic Issues and was only allowed to support certain areas of application in atomic science. This was the first serious defeat that the DFG had to endure at the hands of the BMA. At the end of the 1950s the DFG also lost its former dominant influence on international atomic policy and research, in addition to its Senate Commission on Atomic Physics, its Priority Resource for Atomic Research, its Atomic Physics Priority Program, as well as its influence on fundamental research in nuclear physics. Finally, the DFG was thus deprived of the potential to exert defining influence on “one of the most striking phenomena of German postwar history in the area of science and research,”10 namely the establishment of big-science facilities, which were founded in connection with atomic policy and decisively shaped the research landscape of the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1960s. These facilities belonged within the authoritative sphere of the federal government, respectively the BMA. The DFG itself drew from all this the correct conclusion and resigned itself to the fact that the founding of the BMA had “retired” it from promoting the “central scientific fields connected with nuclear energy.”11 Consequently, rela9 Manuscript of Raiser’s speech delivered before the DFG’s General Assembly on 29 Sep. 1955 in Stuttgart, BAK, N 1287/38. 10 Szöllosi-Janze/Trischler, Einleitung, p. 9. 11 Mitteilungen der DFG, no. 3, 1964, p. 11.

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tions between the BMA and the DFG remained conflict-ridden and tense. Even relations with the Federal Ministry of Defense, from which the DFG as a rule held its distance, were regarded as more harmonious throughout those years. The loss of influence in atomic research played an important role insofar as this was not just any research branch. From the political perspective it was a highly significant one. In the middle of the 1950s atomic research was a central leading science, at least in terms of public awareness, international prestige, and funding. In the DFG’s unfavorable negotiations with the BMA, a principle appeared for the first time that would reassert itself repeatedly in subsequent years: The federal government drew in all the new disciplines regarded as leading sciences, thereby depriving the DFG of them. In the mid-1950s this happened with atomic research, at the end of that decade with water management, and at the beginning of the 1960s with space research. Atomic and space research, both of which became the responsibility of the new Federal Ministry of Scientific Research (Bundesministerium für wissenschaftliche Forschung, BMwF) at the expense of the DFG, were linked because they involved fundamental scientific research with considerable potential for technical applications. They both also filled a key role in the global competition for power and prestige. By combining these two fields within a single ministry, the federal government was able to demonstrate its determination to compete in the international contest over emblematic technologies. The DFG was also not able to make its mark on the big-science facilities being built in the mid-1950s in the midst of the “atomic euphoria” that substantially altered the research landscape in the Federal Republic, because they too were within the Federal Ministry’s purview. As regards research support, the DFG assumed the policy of “restrained planning” from the mid-1950s onward. It established and regularized the Priority Program as the second of its central grant instruments next to the Normalverfahren. The memoranda and so-called gray plans (Graue Pläne) were genuine instruments with which the decision-making protagonists attempted to support their verdicts. During that period it was the Executive Committee members and the senators, who became increasingly reliant on the Head Office to complete the preliminary work. How did the top policy-making grant boards deal with the DFG’s problem child, applied research, during the imitation and catch-up phase? The Placement Office for Contract Research (Vermittlungsstelle für Vertragsforschung, VV) can be interpreted as the DFG leadership’s attempt to tighten its links with applied research in order to be able to react appropriately to trends in research within the Federal Republic and in the international arena. The Placement Office was founded as a nonprofit association at the initiative of the Federal Union of German Industry (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, BDI) and the Donor’s Association (Stifterverband) on 21 September 1954. Its purpose was to promote contractual research in Germany, specifically by relaying research issues from commercial companies to individual scientists or research stations.12 Hence the Office was supposed to initiate contacts between scientists and industry and 12

Statutes of the Vermittlungsstelle für Vertragsforschung, undated, BAK, B 227/463.

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offer advice with contracts. The DFG joined it at the beginning of 1955.13 However, the Office struggled to survive and, from the beginning of the 1960s to 1967, it only existed on paper. The failure of the Placement Office for Contract Research, thus the attempt to bind applied research to the DFG, was probably also due to the fact that it basically remained alien to the influential actors on the DFG’s top boards, if not the institution as a whole. In other respects the DFG was more successful. A retrospective view reveals that the members of the Executive Committee and the Senate found their own ways to contribute toward removing the perceived or actual backwardness of German research. These ways better suited the DFG’s self-image as an organization. This is most clearly demonstrated by how the Priority Program was designed. The funding profile in the Priority Program can be seen as the DFG’s response to the backwardness debate. The engineering sciences certainly did not profit very much from Priority Program funding. That would also not have agreed with the DFG’s self-image or with its competencies. In almost half of the grants issued, these priority funds centered on the natural sciences. The DFG believed it could thus contribute its part toward catching up with the state of the art in two ways. For one, through massive support it seemed possible to ameliorate, if not eliminate, the existing need to catch up in the natural sciences – that is, the need as documented in the DFG’s memorandum from 1964 on the status and backwardness of research in Germany in science and engineering (Stand und Rückstand der Forschung in Deutschland in den Naturwissenschaften und den Ingenieurwissenschaften). For another, there was the conviction that, by promoting science, applied research would be strengthened at the same time. This would enable the Germans to draw abreast of research and technology in the USA and the Soviet Union over the long term. The notion of a linear model for innovation lay behind this strategy: the assumption that a straight path led from state-financed basic research to applied research and, over the bridge of contractual research, to the transfer of the results gained into the economic process. This would lead to an improvement in West Germany’s position on the global market or in the creation of new jobs. In this sense the Priority Program, with its funding profile strongly concentrated on the natural sciences, was the DFG’s genuine contribution to an intended elimination of the backwardness in science and technology. At the same time, this finding offers an answer on a more general plane to the question of why there were so few Priority Programs in the humanities up until the early 1970s. Moreover, some Priority Programs were unmistakably application-oriented – indeed, 21 percent of the priority funding benefited engineering – or were directed toward areas at the center of the federal government’s science-policy activities. This applies most particularly to two of the three most successful Priority Programs – measured by the number of individual studies, their durations, and not least the grant amounts – namely, to the Priority Programs on Water Research and on Aviation/Flight Research. Both these programs as well as the Priority Pro13 Record of the DFG’s extraordinary general meeting on 2 Apr. 1955 in Frankfurt am Main, BAK, B 227/162679, pp. 13 f.

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gram on Nutrition Research were deemed by the DFG’s top boards as particularly worthy of support in every respect. If the BMA had not already drawn atomic physics within its authority in 1955, it also would certainly have become one of the best-supported programs within the DFG’s Priority Program. At least this can be surmised from the funding provided in the first few years of the Priority Program. Atomic physics alone received over eight million deutschmarks. All three scientific areas – atomic physics, water management, and aviation/flight research – were equally central in the DFG’s active promotional policy as they were in the federal government’s, or respectively, the BMA’s and its successors. The DFG’s ambition to concentrate priority funding in precisely these three areas can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to undermine the federal government’s authority over them. From the DFG’s perspective, the state actor in the form of the BMA or, respectively, the BMwF, was continually constricting the DFG’s freedom of movement. Hess feared at the end of his term in 1964 that the equilibrium in research funding would be lost if the BMwF’s funding of individual specialties was both one-sided and generous. The possibility was not to be excluded, Hess argued, that the state would inadvertently gradually tend toward a monopoly of sponsorship through its measures and accustomed practice in central fields of research – not just in the transition areas of development – and by an extensive interpretation of its responsibilities.14 THE PROMOTION OF RESEARCH THROUGH “PLANNING” IN THE LATE 1960s AND EARLY 1970s During the late 1960s into the early 1970s, the DFG, now under Julius Speer’s presidency, underwent a process of reduction, or rather concentration. This was despite its cooperation with the Federal Ministry of Education and Science (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft, BMBW) in pursuing its promotional policy and despite recovering research funding tasks. Because wide areas of applied research and big science found alternative sponsors in the Fraunhofer Society and the big-science facilities, the DFG lost considerable authority and influence in funding and science policy. These research areas were considered to have much growth potential; and their political and economic importance offered them proportionate protection. In 1969 the thirteen existing big-science facilities obtained 752.4 million deutschmarks and thus about 44 percent of the total allocations to state-funded research and development establishments external to universities.15 The DFG had no share in this. At the same time, however, a reduction and concentration down to its core competency occurred, namely, funding of research in fundamental science and the humanities at academic universities. 14 Hess’s address on 8 Aug. 1964 on the occasion of the DFG’s annual convention is reprinted in Hochschul-Dienst, vol. XVII, nos. 15–16. A copy is available in the University Archive at Konstanz, Gerhard Hess papers: DFG. 15 Kreibich, Wissenschaftsgesellschaft, p. 675.

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This finding agreed with the applicant profile: At the beginning of the 1970s, over 90 percent of the proposals were submitted by applicants from universities.16 This assertion is underpinned by another development that intensely occupied the top boards at the beginning of the 1970s and forced a decision on the types of organization eligible for membership when the integrated universities/technical colleges (Gesamthochschulen) and higher-level technical training colleges of various kinds (Fachhochschulen) first articulated their claim to membership in the DFG during that decade. In the spring of 1970 the Pädagogische Hochschule des Landes NordrheinWestfalen and the Federal Ministry of Health both applied for membership in the DFG.17 The senators used this opportunity to rethink their acceptance criteria. Membership was permitted to all universities represented in the Conference of West German Rectors. In the senators’ opinion this distinction was no longer sufficient because the institutions assembled there were not all the same kind of “sites of teaching and research.” The discussions triggered by this inquiry, which was kept moving by additional applications by a variety of (professional) colleges and other research institutions, lasted until the summer of 1971. The following guideline emerged from the Board of Directors, the Executive Committee, and the Senate: Because the DFG was not a “university association but a research association,” only universities that focused on research would be considered.18 These efforts by the DFG’s top boards to change the Statutes in this regard reveal the central importance they attached to this conviction. Resistance came from the applicant institutions; from the Rector’s Conference, which wanted to retain the original regulation; as well as from a few members of the DFG itself. All the same, the General Assembly resolved on 1 July 1971 by a vote of 42 out of 45 submitted ballots in favor of membership according to the managing boards’ new definition.19 From then on the DFG only accepted universities and nonuniversity organizations as new members that were regarded as “research establishments of general importance.”20 The concentration process that the DFG underwent corresponded to the expansionary ambitions of the BMBW. Having succeeded the Federal Ministry of Scientific Research (BMwF) in 1969, it was expanded into a double ministry at the end of 1972. The BMBW continued to develop its position in the field of research support, albeit largely along a corporatist route. Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg was particularly keen on politically binding large scientific organizations to his ministry. They reacted to this expansion by the federal government into the field of research policy, as it were, in self-defense, by consolidating and

16

DFG’s report: Berichte, 1973, p. 11. Record of the 65th session of the DFG Senate on 9 Apr. 1970 in Bad Godesberg, BAK, B 227/162897, p. 47. The following quote ibid.; original emphasis omitted. 18 Minutes of the meeting of the directors on 5 Apr. 1971, BAK, B 227/163101. 19 Record of the regular meeting of the DFG membership on 1 Jul. 1971 in Essen, BAK, B 196/7152, p. 32. 20 Section 3 of the Statutes, quoted from the DFG’s report: Berichte, 1971, p. 13. 17

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institutionalizing themselves in the form of what was referred to as the Holy Alliance (Heilige Allianz). From the late 1960s into the early 1970s, research and grant policies were conducted under the guiding notions of global steering and planning and executed under economizing pressures from which the DFG was not spared. The Collaborative Research Centers (CRC, Sonderforschungsbereiche), established at the initiative of the Council of Sciences and Humanities, can be seen as a reaction to this situation. At first financed by special funding, these centers were added, with some initial hesitation, as the third central grant procedure to the DFG’s array of research-policy instruments at the end of the 1960s. From the beginning of the 1970s, larger sums were allocated to these CRCs than to the Priority Programs, and in 1973 they even overtook the regular Individual Grants Program for the first time as well. CRCs hence occupied the largest single line item in the DFG’s total budget. Despite the meanwhile omnipresent economizing measures, the number of CRCs established within six years, from 1968 to 1973, increased six-fold and the expended grant sums over 43-fold to almost 200 million deutschmarks. The federal government, which made available two thirds of these monies, evidently regarded CRCs as the appropriate instrument in academic research to confront the “American challenge” in research at the university level. These centers formed a kind of big science on the university level and as such constituted the pendant to big-science facilities for the university sector. These large-scale research facilities can be interpreted as an expression of the federal government’s political will to become directly involved in the planning and structuring of the German scientific landscape and in the research itself.21 Besides this establishment of Collaborative Research Centers, the second characteristic of the late 1960s and early 1970s is the ways and means by which the DFG pursued its research policy. Henceforth research policy was supposed to be comprehensively and systematically planned. A closer look at the DFG’s concrete “planning efforts” reveals, however, that the constantly used term “planning” was basically employed as a code for a systematized and differentiated continuation of the research policy that the DFG’s top boards had been practising for years. However, one important difference to the foregoing phases was that larger groups of people participated in the decisions. The center of such planning activities was four newly created Plannungsgruppen, each headed by a vice-president. These were composed of competent senators and other experts not necessarily sitting on other DFG boards. These planning groups were additionally interlinked with the professional reviewers of the Head Office as well as with three panels newly erected there: a directorial board and a planning review board as well as division heads. The additional work generated by these planning activities and, above all, by the CRCs created a dynamic of professionalization and differentiation at the Head Office from the mid-1960s onward. This process ended in a fundamental reorganization in 1970. At the beginning of that decade the Head Office acquired the shape and form that prevailed until the end of the 21

Cf. also Fraunholz/Schramm, Hochschulen.

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twentieth century. The changed self-image of the Head Office was expressed, for instance, in the sentence that Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, Speer’s successor, chose for opening his first annual report: “The German Research Foundation is a service organization.”22 CONCLUSION The development of the DFG’s funding policy from the late 1940s into the early 1970s involved a process, a gradual displacement of the central funding-policy decisions from individuals to groups: from the president to the Senate to the vice-presidents, planning groups, and divisions of the Head Office. The decisionmaking corridors through which the Executive Committee and Senate had to pass, as the formal responsible boards, were constructed of different groups since the 1950s whose preliminary work ultimately reduced the abundant decisionmaking powers to a minimum. Furthermore, it is notable that the major changes in the DFG’s funding policy – such as prioritizing, or the establishment of CRCs – had not been initiated by the top decision-making boards but by outside impetus. During the period examined, the DFG proved to be less of a shaping organization and more of a reactive one. Nevertheless, it managed to incorporate novelty in a surprisingly short time. The DFG was thus, in this sense, extremely integrative and capable of change. The DFG’s top boards were confronted from the 1950s onward with the fact that science was becoming an increasingly complex and unsurveyable field. By the 1970s at the latest, no single person was able to gain an overview of the entire scope of science or even of a single discipline. The DFG responded with differentiation and diversification, professionalization, and a certain amount of pluralization of funding-policy steering boards. This did not proceed in tandem with democratization, in the sense of having representatives of the entire scientific community, legitimated by elections, participate in funding-policy decisions. A single pattern rather emerged within the period studied: The top grant-policymaking board – initially the Executive Committee, then the Senate, finally the vice-presidents, planning groups, and Head Office divisions – fortified unclear or controversial positions by directing questionnaires to members of expert boards and “other gentlemen.” Here the DFG’s principle of self-referral (extended by a certain subjective factor of arbitrariness) was again appaent: the principle of shutting the organization off from other extramural groups in the scientific field. Against this background, and seen from the outside, the DFG remained until the beginning of the 1970s a buffered barricade of wagons, a “last preserve of full professors.”23

22

DFG’s report: Berichte, 1973, p. 11. Original “letztes Reservat der Ordinarien”; quoted in a press statement by the Bundesassistentenkonferenz Reform statt Festakt on the DFG’s 50th anniversary, 26 Oct. 1970, BAK, B 227/544. 23

THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AS A TOPIC IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE – A COMMENTARY Mitchell G. Ash Now that this major sponsored project is close to completion, I may divulge my identity here as one of the members of the review board that oversaw everything, with benevolence yet not without critical scrutiny. One of the worries that occasionally preoccupied us reviewers was that the large number of projects addressing issues in the general history of science could push institutional history into the background. Such topics naturally have their rightful place within the framework of a research program on the history of the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). But the results presented here allow me to report with pleasure that our worry was unjustified. These papers summarize a series of excellent studies about the core issue of the research program: the history of the institutions themselves. In the following I would like to raise a few questions that seem to me suitable ways of linking these studies together and developing our thoughts about the significance of these findings. In brief, these questions are: The institution – what was it? And the history of the habitus and mentality of the actors, or: Who distributed funds according to which behavioral patterns? When did these distributional structures change? And what research precisely was supported in the course of time? THE INSTITUTION, OR: WHAT WAS THE DFG? Some time ago Mary Douglas published a thoughtful book with the provocative title, How Institutions Think.1 At that time Douglas led the turn to what is now called ethnomethodology in social studies of science. By formulating the title as she did, however, she was consciously flirting with a basic error of thought in sociology: the individualist fallacy. Do social forms, such as institutions, really “think”?, this title compels her readers to ask themselves. Is it not a matter of the thoughts and conduct of people inside institutions? Of course, Douglas and the many researchers who followed her were not looking for a direct answer to this question. Her title was rather a basic reference to the institutional setting of all human activity, including scientific research, particularly in modern and most recent times. The supposed opposition between persons as individuals and insti1

Douglas, Institutions.

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tutions is in any case fictional on this account – it’s institutions all the way down. Nevertheless, historians who concern themselves with institutional history tend to perpetuate this just-denied opposition quite nonchalantly – if not heedlessly. Thus, time and again, formulations appear that imply that researchers instrumentalize institutions for their own purposes, as if such establishments were not themselves composed of people in contact with the actors in question. So what kind of institution was the NG or, respectively, the DFG? More precisely put: How should the DFG be understood within the complex of past and present scientific institutions? Is it a distributor of financial and material resources, a legitimating authority of science toward the state, or indeed both at once? Formerly the DFG would have been described as one of the many networks of authority linking science and the state, or science, the economy, and the state. But the DFG never stood “above” science or “between” it and “the state” because scientists were a part of it and were directly and centrally involved in the decisions it took as members of its expert boards. Let me first point out the only apparently banal fact that an institution for the advancement or funding of research is necessarily different from an institution for the production of research. The distribution of means – in other words, the options for scientific activity – was and still is what it all comes down to. Formulated more precisely, establishments like this one set the facilitating conditions for scientific work in the twentieth century. Putting it this way is a far cry from merely speaking of marginal or framing conditions for research. No picture exists without a frame, not even when artists purposefully dispense with conventional picture frames, because perception reinstates them anyway! In the same way, an institution like the DFG cannot be considered any more “external” to science than laboratories, which have figured recently as centers of research practice. If we think of institutions for the funding of research – or more exactly, the decisions reached within such institutions – as conditions making research possible at all, then the history of institutions like the NG/DFG should be regarded as a central component of any history of science in the German state systems of the twentieth century, with the exception of the German Democratic Republic. This is the deeper meaning of the title of Mary Douglas’s book, for how this institution “thought” was how science as a whole in Germany thought.

ON THE HISTORY OF THE HABITUS AND MENTALITY OF THE ACTORS. OR: WHO THOUGHT AND DISTRIBUTED FUNDS ACCORDING TO WHICH BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS? Speaking about the facilitating conditions of scientific work also means speaking about chances to acquire scientific power. As attentive readers of Pierre Bourdieu have known for a long time, institutions themselves are power structures. Within them the production or reproduction of social relationships of power are realized/embodied. More precisely, they possess a structure of their own that is nevertheless socially contoured. It is only for this reason, or when seen from this

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perspective, that it is worthwhile asking who behaves how within them. By means of which structures, modes of working, and norms for action was the distribution of research options and power carried out in the NG/DFG? And what style of thought do such modes of working embody? It is no more conceivable to consider these institutions as establishments outside of the sciences than it is to consider them outside of politics. Nevertheless, both sorts of institutions – those promoting research and those producing research – could, in principle, be examined using the methods of ethnomethodology. The question of whether something like a DFG style of doing research, in Ludwig Fleck’s meaning, existed, is moot. The question of whether something like a DFG style of thinking existed is serious and significant. The contributions to the present volume reveal to us what kind of habitus this could involve. It is hardly coincidental that terms like “privy councillor,” “professorial,” and “lord of the manor” types (Geheimrat, Ordinarius, Gutsherrenart) occur in these texts. The institutional habitus suggested by such terms evidently had an effect in the DFG and acquired new scope to develop there, though it originated elsewhere. Tempting though it may be to let such formulations speak for themselves, it is necessary to qualify them. The scientific manager type, which now appears to dominate scientific life, did not originate in the twentieth century. If we call to mind such names as Frédéric Couvier, then we know that this type existed long before 1900 and was not peculiar to Germany. When Adolf von Harnack wrote about “big science” (Vom Großbetrieb der Wissenschaft) in 1905, he certainly did not mean only natural scientists, such as the chemist Emil Fischer, but also and especially humanists, such as Theodor Mommsen. Both had long combined dual roles, directing individual doctoral theses but also running large-scale projects, such as compilations of Greek and Roman inscriptions. The resulting tension between the self-image of a patriarchal lord of the manor, literally the “doctor father,” and the competent managing expert hence emerged long before the NG was founded. Did anything change as the twentieth century progressed? Within the DFG, the shift from patriarchy to management apparently began only when the Head Office (Geschäftsstelle) was established in the 1950s and 1960s. With that step, yet another type, that of office holder and administrator, was added to the mix. During the period discussed in these papers, the line between the bestowal of grants in a patriarchal manner and distribution according to ideological persuasion seems to have been blurred. The question arises: Are the beginnings of a objectified or at least bureaucratized procedure already ascertainable in the transition to the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR)? This hardly seems likely. A closer look at the way in which expert RFR department heads like Walther Gerlach worked shows that their actions were highly discretionary individual decisions taken in a “lord of the manor” style. The transition to a bureaucratic mode, with the president figuring as the top science manager and representative of the institution toward the outside world, occurred, if at all, only long after 1945. The use of centralized decision-making expert boards for each subject

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area constitutes a fundamental continuity since the beginning. Although they were composed in very different ways throughout the decades, their members seem to have perceived them as “lords of the manor” meetings well past 1970. Was the short era of President Johannes Stark during the early Nazi period really just an “interval,” or nothing more than a brief interruption to this continuity, as Sören Flachowsky thinks? I would just like to recall that Stark himself was propertied; “lord of the manor” airs were not foreign to him, indeed, they were very much a part of his identity. Could his at times quite high-handed approvals or denials of funding be interpreted as an – admittedly, politically molded – version of Schmidt-Ott’s already familiar “privy councillor” style? (Postscript: Flachowsky’s response during the discussion was that, as a rule, decisions were taken in the mode valid before 1933, even during Stark’s presidency, hence according to what the expert boards deemed to be objective criteria. What this may have meant in individual cases must be left to a more detailed reading of Flachowsky’s monograph on the history of the NG and the RFR.)

WHEN DID THESE DISTRIBUTIONAL STRUCTURES CHANGE? To answer this question, two aspects need to be taken into account: the relationship between individual projects and interdisciplinary Priority Programs within the DFG, on the one hand, and the power relations among science policy making institutions in Germany overall, on the other. The first issue seems to be more easily resolved. The tension within the NG/DFG – between support for individual projects, with decision making organized by disciplines or departments (Sparten), and interdisciplinary Priority Programs – existed throughout the period under study but took different forms over time. Thus, there was a stronger grouping together of grants and funding programs under National Socialism and after 1960, whereas in the immediate postwar period the pendulum swung back in the direction of individual grants for a while. One of the interesting findings of Rüdiger vom Bruch’s contribution concerns the second issue: the power relations among German science policy institutions. He identifies a centralizing trend during the Weimar Republic compared to the decentralized structures in university and science policy during the Kaiserreich. Another component of this trend worth mentioning, besides the assignment of the NG and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG) to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, are the state-funded Kaiser Wilhelm institutes founded during this period. One could add that this centralizing trend corresponded to the constitutional history of the Republic itself, with its many new Reich ministries. The centralization of research support and hence of science policy that vom Bruch rightly emphasizes continued, as we know, to be forcefully pursued under National Socialism. It was counteracted, however, by the multiple funding agencies of the Nazi party, the SS Ahnenerbe, the various military research departments, etc. During the early postwar period, the Federal Republic, at least, rowed back in the direction of decentralization. Thus, the DFG became the

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advocate of university research (that is to say, of the power of the Ordinarien) and therefore also of the Länder in the redistributed political weightings. Meanwhile, new actors emerged, particularly the Fraunhofer Society, and governmental research intensified again, above all after the founding of the Ministry for Atomic Issues. The advantage of the closer attention given to the substance of individual grants that the DFG gained by stepping backward to decentralization came at the price, however, of reduced influence for this policy actor on the margins of the system.

WHAT PRECISELY WAS SUPPORTED IN THE COURSE OF TIME? Another important finding of these contributions concerns the DFG’s role as an agent of one of the central developments in the recent history of science: the loss of status by the humanities, or more exactly, the reversal of their previously predominant position versus the natural and medical sciences. The results of the DFG’s funding profile after 1945 are now available, thanks to research by Karin Orth. The dominance of medicine, followed by the natural sciences, has thus become visible. The introduction of inter- or multidisciplinary Priority Programs strengthened this already existing tendency. Unfortunately, we still know too little about the relative distributions of grant monies among the disciplines or types of disciplines for the period prior to 1945. Nonetheless, two continuities have already emerged. First, it seems that, from the beginning to the end of the period covered here, extensions and elaborations of already established research topics were preferred over research on fundamentally new topics or approaches. That such a preference is well suited to the above-described Ordinarienhabitus scarcely warrants particular mention. In funding decisions, the researcher personality was certified, not the project, as vom Bruch has set forth in one of the examples he cites. Therefore, the real innovation was the use of funding decisions to certify the research and personnel choices of professors. Second, it appears that in this area, as in other areas of German life as well, foundings of new institutions seem to have been preferred over thorough reforms from within. This is a continuity in university and science policy in Germany since the Kaiserreich. In more recent times the strengthening of higher-level educational institutions in the applied sciences (Fachhochschulen) alongside universities is a telling example of this tactic. The intention here is not to pass judgment in principle on the quality of such policy choices; comparable developments have occurred in a number of other major scientific countries. This contradicts the self-image of science as the quest for new knowledge, but the inherently conservative character of German scientific institutions seems to be established – it is conservative in the sense of maintaining already existing structures and upholding pervasive and influential styles of thought and action. This also fits the already described habitus of the grant distributors, which in some respects also appears to have been international. Some decades ago Donald Fleming spoke

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of “influentials” when writing about the decision makers of science policy and research funding in the USA during the 1920s and 1930s. These were not German Ordinarien but members of expert boards of the Carnegie Foundation; the grant reviewers and division heads of the Rockefeller Foundation certainly also regarded themselves as a small, quite self-confident elite of gatekeepers. To be sure, normal science is not necessarily averse to innovation, but incremental innovation is generally valued over radical change.

III NATURAL AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES

THE SYNDROME OF FALLING BEHIND – RESOURCE CONSTELLATIONS AND EPISTEMIC ORIENTATIONS IN THE NATURAL AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES Helmuth Trischler After 1945 the natural and engineering sciences were the dominant feature in the funding profile of the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG) and later the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). Its Individual Grants and Priority Programs were able to extend this dominance further throughout the 1950s and 1960s.1 Since its founding and phase of establishment in the 1920s, its funding structure, its conception of science policy and how it and others perceived its position, role, and function in the German system of science and innovation, the orientation of its activities, and the intramural distribution of opportunities among the disciplines was strongly influenced by the natural sciences. That which is valid for the entire research project on the history of the DFG applies the more readily to the four studies in the research program devoted to the natural and engineering sciences: These studies can only cut paths through this immensly large and complex field. Moreover, since no study has been dedicated to physics as the leading science (Leitwissenschaft) within the period under examination, the four cases cannot claim to cover the whole field adequately. A conference held in the fall of 2005 on research in physics and its promotion in Germany from 1920 to 1970 in international comparison was, of course, only able to fill part of this yawning gap.2 The four case studies on chemistry, computer sciences, materials sciences, and mechanical engineering offer, however, a high degree of relevancy and representativeness both in terms of their quantitative importance within the national system of research and innovation and their qualitative importance for the epistemic culture of the scientific elites in Germany. Chemistry enjoyed the highest share of funding from the DFG, with the exception only of medicine. Above all, in its dual role since the late nineteenth century as science-based industry and industry-based science, chemistry was highly influential for the national patterns of research and innovation. Focusing on polymer chemistry gives us a handle on the complex conglomerate of chemical disciplines and allows us to cast a glance at the guiding orientation of the community of chemists, set in spatial reference to the USA. The discourse on Americanization, which has penetrated all areas 1 2

Orth, Förderprofil, pp. 261–283. Trischler/Walker (eds.), Physics.

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of German society throughout the twentieth century, was particularly intense in computer science. Informatics, the European version of computer science, and its basic hardware tool, the computer, were strategically used by the DFG after 1945 to overcome the perceived backwardness of science in the Federal Republic of Germany that had arisen before and after World War II. In this way the DFG was able to stabilize its position within the national system of research and innovation. The area of raw materials and material sciences permits us to test the thesis – controversial among historians of science for some years now – that the German system of innovation was oriented toward the goal of political and economic autarky over long stretches of the twentieth century. The interwar period and World War II are singled out in particular. A twofold question is of particular interest here: Can we speak of a path-dependency toward autarky dating back to World War I which deeply affected the epistemic cultures and innovative patterns of Germany, and in what way did this path toward autarcy persist beyond the political, economic, and social rupture of 1945? The study on mechanical engineering is even more explicitly devoted to the concept of path dependence. It focuses on the epistemic culture of a key economic sector, which can be taken as paradigmatic of engineering in Germany. The central findings of these individual studies will be presented in greater detail in the following essays. The point here is to trace the contours of these findings in the light of a few issues of general importance. These guiding issues both pay tribute to the research design of the overall program on the history of the DFG and emphasize the specific agendas of the natural and engineering sciences. Among such specifics are those “structural shifts” in the epistemic cultures of disciplines which, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has demonstrated for the case of molecular biology, set its own rhythm and dynamic of change.3 A handful of guiding questions proves to be of particular importance. First: How may the NG and the DFG be localized in the national system of research and innovation? How do their contours as institutional actors change when they are drawn into an international frame of reference? Second: In what way can the structural options and limits of DFG-funded research be determined? To what extent do they differ from other forms of publically or privately funded research? Third: If science is understood as a resource, then how were its relations with other systems of society that made resources available.4 How did the resource constellations of science change in relation to politics, the economy, the military, and the public as they breached the socio-political divides? Fourth: Where do we identify continuities and discontinuities, and furthermore what about caesuras in the epistemic culture of individual research fields? Fifth: Which discourses characterized the NG and the DFG between World War I and the early 1970s, and in what way did the noticeably dominant discourses about the state of emergency – being behind other countries, and catching up with them – mirror discussions in German society as a whole during the twentieth century? 3 4

Rheinberger, Wissenschaft, p. 190. See Ash, Wissenschaft und Politik, and Nikolow/Schirrmacher (eds.), Wissenschaft.

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These questions will be answered in two steps. In a first, longer step, the results of the four studies on chemistry, computer sciences, materials sciences, as well as on mechanical engineering will be introduced individually. In a second, shorter step, these results will be combined and a few broad perspectives will be formulated that only become clear when the first two projects on the natural sciences are juxtaposed with the latter ones on engineering sciences.

THE “FOUR-YEAR PLAN FOR CHEMISTRY” AND THE “POLYMER REVOLUTION” Chemical research has been a leading discipline and to this day the chemical industry continues to be a leading sector of the national system of innovation which coalesced around chemistry in the late nineteenth century. Paul Erker’s study focuses on the research field of macromolecular compounds, which emerged in the 1920s. He uses the field as an analytic probe into transformation processes in the field of chemical research in Germany from the 1920s to the 1960s in a transnational perspective. The Freiburg chemist Hermann Staudinger postulated the existence of materials composed of enormous molecules. His ideas were initially dismissed and opposed – as paradigm changes in science often are – by the DFG’s boards. His peers rejected his grant application for an ultracentrifuge in 1929. This decision sheds light on the DFG’s profile within the German system of research support. Its strengths, grounded in the institutional setting of self-administration, lay in the promotion of lines of research that were accepted by the scientific community as “normal science,” whereas fundamentally new theoretical approaches fell through the screen of reviewers. With regard to how this new research field prevailed and the subsequent “polymer revolution” of abundant innovative chemical processes and products that reached the market, one can say in general that, whereas bitter and certainly also politically-charged controversies were fought over the details in macromolecular chemistry into the 1940s, its breakthrough came in the second half of the 1930s. In Germany a wide research network in polymer chemistry not only linked together different directions in chemical research, but it also correlated research conducted at universities with industrial research and thereby integrated polymer research into the four-year plan of the chemical company I. G. Farben. German polymer research could be regarded as the international leader up to 1942, but during the second half of the war new scientific fields were developed in the USA in the areas of synthetic rubber, silicons, and fluoric compounds of high molecular weights. In Germany after 1945 both science and industry perceived these new fields as representing a grave drop in status. Thus, chemistry also developed a syndrom of being behind and needing to catch up, which was connected to the secular discourse on America during the twentieth century. Within the context of this dominant discourse, the DFG was assigned the task of eliminating “systematic errors” in the organization and institutionalization of chemical knowledge production.

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This empirical finding of the study on polymer chemistry leads to three other issues: What influence did the Nazi period have on the composition, dissolution, and reforming of scientific communities? How strong was the defining power of industry in determining and implementing the DFG’s research programs related to chemistry before and after 1945? To what extent can one speak not only of an America discourse, but also of an “Americanization” of chemical research in Germany after 1945, and what role did the DFG play in it? The answers to these questions can be divided into three points. The establishment of polymer and macromolecular chemistry first accelerated during the period of National Socialism. The funding practices of the DFG and the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) played an important role in it. Two central nodes can be seen in the network of research on macromolecular chemistry: Peter Adolf Thiessen and the laboratories of I. G. Farben. Staudinger’s macromolecular chemistry was supported and funded as well as competing lines of research. Thiessen himself, as a colloidal chemist oriented toward molecular theory, embodied a new, “modern” complementary scientific approach. The goal of these scientists was to generate new materials, specifically, along a course oriented toward fundamental science, such as molecular structure analysis, measurement and explanation of binding energies in high polymers or polymerization theories. Thiessen represented furthermore – as did Walther Gerlach5 – the rise of a new type of science manager. In his case, political attitude played a central role as a factor in mobilizing resources. The history of macromolecular theory is exemplary of the characteristic constellation of resources under National Socialism identified by historians of science and technology in the past decade: Anticipating findings of political, ideological, and military utility, the Nazi regime made available to scientists at university laboratories and particularly at nonuniversity sites far more funds and personnel than had been the case during the Weimar Republic, and scientists hurried to meet the regime’s expectations.6 Second, the scale of industrial research also determined the distribution of resources by the DFG and the RFR. Different cultures of industrial research led to different funding practices and vice versa. Academic macromolecular chemistry was established as the industrial sector turned its emphasis toward thermoplastic synthetics. The work employing Staudinger’s model of macromolecules within the chemical industry as a whole accelerated its success in science. Industry’s power to define research topics supported by the DFG was therefore certainly great – even after 1945. It rarely had to apply this position of power, however. In general, decisions reached on topics of research were based on the common interests of industrial and university scientists, which points once again to the historically closely intertwined ties between science and the economy in Germany that had already formed in the late nineteenth century. Third, the DFG played a pivotal role in the polymer research network in the Federal Republic of Germany. Within the context of a virulent syndrome of 5 6

Cf. for details the article by Bernd-A. Rusinek in this volume as well as Karlsch, Bombe. Most recently Maier, Forschung; idem (ed.), Gemeinschaftsforschung.

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having fallen behind in chemistry during the early Federal Republic, the DFG was expected to act influentially in building a new network. The DFG initiated a whole series of Priority Programs (Schwerpunktprogramme) in chemistry, also including macromolecular and polymer research. The USA was always the point of reference. The discourses of the 1950s still revolved around the topos of recouping the “lost years” from the war but primarily from the Allied occupation. In the 1960s strategic functions were increasingly assigned to the DFG’s programs. It was then a matter of correcting long-running developments specific to German chemistry since 1918, such as strengthening analytic and theoretical chemistry as opposed to synthetic chemistry, which had been dominant since World War I. This horizon defined the scientists’ epistemic concepts well into the 1960s and 1970s.7 Here also, an orientation on the USA was supposedly the reason for this reallocation of resources. In fact, we can conclude that the Priority Programs of the 1960s and the Collaborative Research Centers (Sonderforschungsbereiche) of the 1970s provided a considerable modernizing boost to chemical research in Germany. SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING, NUMERIC MATHEMATICS, AND COMPUTER SCIENCE The perspective on Americanization – more concretely put, the orientation of German research toward the American innovative system as a referential space – is also highly relevant in the field of applied mathematics and computer science. Studies in this field of research, dating way back to the late nineteenth century, owe their beginnings to the problem of transforming the epistemic culture of scientific computing within the German system of science. Meanwhile, scientific computing has even evolved into the third fundamental method of research in science and engineering alongside theory and experiment. Of primary interest here is not the disciplinary development of applied mathematics and later of computer science, but the use by individual scientific and technical research fields of these available resources and the resulting changes in the system of science and innovation. Attached to this is the question: What consequences did public funding of instrument-supported computing have on the DFG in the long run? The results of the study as regards this dual issue can be reduced to six points: First, the methodological ideal of “pure mathematics” dominated until World War I. This theory-orientated scientific understanding stabilized how the boundaries, laid down in the nineteenth century, defined potential areas of application in scientific computing. For this reason the attempt to anchor scientific computing as a general transdisciplinary science centered on the Astronomisches Recheninstitut, a computing institute in Berlin founded in 1870, stalled from the outset. After 1900, however, applied mathematics was successfully institutionalized on 7

Marschall, Schatten; idem, Biotechnologie.

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a small scale, and graphic, numeric, and instrumental methods of computation could be systematized within that framework. As in so many fields of science and science policy, World War I acted as the primary catalyst.8 It conveyed the stimuli from the late Kaiserreich to establish applied mathematics and brought on new initiatives immediately after the war’s end. Second, during the Weimar Republic, the bottom line for scientific computing was also rather modest, compared internationally. Max Born’s attempt to create a national computing institute for theoretical and technical physics also fell flat, precisely because of a lack of support by the Emergency Association (NG). This plan was torpedoed above all by Felix Klein, chair of the Expert Board, and Walther von Dyck, vice-president of the NG. This exposes a general weakness of the NG. Its science policy was shaped largely by a generation of elderly scholars. Epistemic dispositions deeply rooted in German scholarly traditions and the NG’s limited resources worked together, preventing innovations in scientific computing that were taking place at that time in Great Britain and the USA. Third, over the course of the 1930s the equipment gap between the German innovation system and the Anglo-american ones continued to grow wider. The Differential Analyzer, for instance, a large computing machine developed by Vannevar Bush in 1930 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was used in atomic physics and theoretical chemistry, and scientific computing was comprehensively modernized and institutionalized within astronomy through the use of punch-card machines both in Great Britain and the USA. The largest tidal computer worldwide, developed in the second half of the 1930s at the marine observatory Deutsche Seewarte, was one of the few exceptions in Germany, employing powerful computing machines to solve complex mathematical questions. Significantly, this was an installation funded by the military because of its practical value. Fourth, recent studies have emphasized the mobilizing and self-mobilizing process of applied mathematics during World War II.9 It should be pointed out here that the modernizing process started around 1940 in scientific computing. The development and coordination of research on calculating machines, intensely pursued in many subfields of military research, largely by-passed the DFG and the RFR. Research managers such as Gerlach and Thiessen recognized the importance of these new powerful computing systems in solving complex scientific problems and worked toward having such systems installed at their institutes. However, they failed because of the increasing scarcity of resources in the German war economy, which moreover differed from the British and American innovation systems by being insufficiently coordinated. Fifth, in the time of the early Federal Republic, the DFG grew into the role of the central actor in this field. Having learnt from the experiences of World War II, its Commission on Computing Systems (Kommission für Rechenanlagen), founded in 1952, was supposed to channel the supply of computers to the German academic system. The commission, however, never aimed at achieving democratic 8 9

Cf. Trischler, Räumlichkeit; idem, Sicherheitssystem. Cf. esp. Mehrtens, Mathematics; Epple/Remmert, Synthese; Epple, Rechnen.

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self-administration for the benefit of the scientific community as a whole. The members of the commission, who had known each other since the 1930s, rather agreed on an oligopoly of computer projects in Darmstadt, Göttingen, and Munich. Only gradually could this “closed shop” be opened to other locations. The commission and the Computing Systems Priority Program it steered helped to re-establish a key role for the DFG in the West German academic system. The DFG developed into the gatekeeper of a comprehensive, apparatus-supported modernization of science. By 1965 the DFG had procured computer systems costing 85 million DM. As the sole major customer the DFG became the economic backbone of the nascent German computer industry. Sixth, by the middle of the 1960s at the latest, however, it became apparent that the DFG could not keep pace with the developmental dynamics in the area of electronic computing. When in 1967 the federal government entered the scene with its data processing programs within the context of the debates over the “technological gap,” the DFG lost its monopoly in this field of research funding. The ensuing expansion of computer science at universities in the late 1960s proceeded without the DFG, which had to learn that politics and industry no longer regarded its structures of cooperative resource allocation as appropriate for the problems in apparatus-intensive fields of big science like nuclear research, aeronautics, and space research. The DFG thereby also failed to build up and mold the discipline of computer science. Significantly, the discipline did not develop into an application-guided computer science according to the American model; it rather purposefully turned away from the U. S. model and turned into a theoryoriented German version of computer science called Informatik. During the 1970s and 1980s German industry heftily criticized this development as a system error that needed to be corrected. Industry pushed to create application-oriented linkage fields such as business informatics and health informatics.

FUNDING OF METALS RESEARCH ON RAW MATERIALS AND OTHER MANUFACTURING MATERIALS What continuities and discontinuities existed in the funding policy of the NG and DFG in the area of metals research? What was the academic knowledge base of the raw material and substitute material sector, which was crucial to the overall process of industrial production and rationalization between 1920 and 1970? The question of the academic shift toward autarky is also decisive: To what extent can one speak of a specific German innovation culture that favored substitute materials? Were the scientific elites characteristically oriented toward a politically prescribed goal of national autarky? And what role did the DFG play? Four central findings are emphasized here: First, the point of departure was World War I. In Germany, it promoted defensive strategies of raw materials management more strongly than in the other belligerent states. These defensive strategies included economizing on resources, recycling materials, and lastly, substituting scarce and therefore expensive materi-

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als with less costly ones. The War Ministry’s department for raw materials commenced substitute materials research in Germany as one consequence of state management. Originating in industry, it received massive state support during the last two years of the war. Universities were also heavily involved in research on substitute materials. The analysis of these research activities suggests, however, that none of these institutions devoted itself exclusively to the subject. Other projects on weapons systems development or other long-term research having no connection to substitute materials were in progress at the same time. Before state agencies entered the academic scene, political and economic strategies such as quota fixing had already been tested. Second, disregarding the transitional stage from war to peacetime economy, a fundamental change took placed in the 1920s. Considerable governmental energy was put into globally reintegrating the German economy, academia, and politics during the Weimar Republic, and scientists and technicians largely oriented themselves toward this goal. In scope, duration, and number of publications, the program Cooperative Projects on Metals (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten Metall) that the NG established in 1925 was the largest of all of its research programs. The program and its particular projects enabled the DFG to strengthen its position in the national innovation system and to beat institutional competitors, such as the Helmholtz Society. An analysis of about one thousand separate projects revealed that these Cooperative Projects on Metals were primarily fundamental solid-state research. Practice-oriented exceptions included research on corrosion, catalysts, and some projects on materials and aircraft engines. Neither in the concrete setting of goals nor in the justificatory rhetoric did autarky play an important part during the Weimar years. Once again the syndrome of catching up dominated the discourse. The USA became the primary “benchmark” of the actors, with the Soviet Union in second place. Third, the option of research funding directed toward economic autarky played a role again during the global economic crisis. In 1934 this goal began to shift to the center of National Socialist armament policy when state management of raw materials was introduced, influenced by scientific and economic rationalization. With Johannes Stark as its new president, the DFG positioned itself as the scientific center of state management of raw materials, which it shared with the Reich Office for Ground Analysis (Reichsamt für Bodenforschung). This orientation toward applications, and during World War II even toward product development, gained increasing importance. The Reich Research Council (RFR) can even be characterized as the placement agency of research contracts both for Army and industry. At first glance it looks as if the path of theory-oriented research chosen during the 1920s had dropped into the background. At second glance, however, numerous cases can be identified, where fundamentally oriented research was only renamed as applied research. Bearing the label “aluminum” or “zinc,” a given research project was henceforth stamped as a study on important substitute materials. Fourth, one of the DFG’s most important innovations after 1949–1951 was the Permanent Panel on Applied Research (PAR, Ständiger Ausschuss für Ange-

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wandte Forschung), founded in 1954. With the Senate and the Joint Committee (Hauptausschuss), it constituted the third permanent board of the DFG. This permanent panel was influential in positioning the DFG within the Federal Republic’s innovation system. After 1949 new institutions were founded – the Fraunhofer Society and the Association of Collaborative Industrial Research (Arbeitsgemeinschaft industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen) – that were able to compete with the DFG in the field of applied research.10 The PAR’s main task was to assess individual fields of applied research and to compare them internationally in order to initiate new targeted Priority Programs as well as to act as a mediator between academic science and research conducted off campus and in industry. Raw materials and materials research were central fields of action and discourse in the PAR from the outset. However, debates over substitute or exchangeable materials did not take place. Autarkic endeavors, as the panel explicitly declared, had become senseless. These DFG scientists deemed the basic knowledge about raw materials and other fabrication materials gathered under National Socialism to be of little relevance and not of international interest, not even the exploitation of mineral reserves that were scarce or difficult to extract. In short, the DFG essentially returned to the path taken during the Weimar Republic of conducting metals research as fundamental science, even in research fields as closely affiliated with industry as aeronautics. At the same time, aeronautical research is a telling example of the way that the DFG helped to create and re-create scientific networks. Aeronautical research, at the intersection between science and engineering, demonstrates that the networks formed around scientists involved in the DFG’s boards and connected research were deliberately demarcated from other scientific networks in their academic orientation and cognitive alignment. When the Reich Minister of Transport Theodor von Guérard founded the German Aeronautical Research Council (Deutscher Forschungsrat für Luftfahrt) in 1928 as a coordinating organ of research facilities financed by his ministry, he was invading the NG’s terrain. The NG was already occupying this field with its Cooperative Research Projects on aerodynamics. The NG’s commission on aeronautics perceived the founding of Guérard’s research council as an attempt by the state to undermine the autonomy of science and to encourage the incursion of nonuniversity research into academic science. When at the beginning of the 1950s the Allied ban on research was lifted, the question arose as to how best to rebuild the institutional framework of the Federal Republic’s aeronautical research. The same constellation reformed that had existed at the end of the 1920s. During the stand-off between academic research funded by the DFG and nonuniversity (big) science supported by the federal and state governments, the same arguments were re-employed that had been exchanged at the end of the 1920s. The scientists reassembled in the DFG’s resurrected commission on aviation initially repulsed efforts to rebuild nonuniversity research facilities, wanting instead to strengthen university institutes. They balked at any attempts at political coordination of research – not to 10

Cf. Schulze, Stifterverband; Trischler/vom Bruch, Forschung; Böttger, Forschung.

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mention any horror-ridden concept of regulation. Science should rather enjoy full autonomy and self administration.11 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING BETWEEN PATH DEPENDENCE AND PATH DIVERGENCE Mechanical engineering, too, can be located between continuity and discontinuity, between path dependence and path divergence. Throughout the entire period under examination, research in mechanical engineering was regarded as a core discipline of the engineering sciences because it referred to machine building as the main industrial pillar of German economy. The machine building industry has owed its leading role on the world market since the late nineteenth century to a finely meshed network mainly of small and medium-sized companies. These enterprises cooperate by means of a division of labor and avail themselves of a common knowledge base supplemented by university institutes, nonuniversity science, and industrial research. The American historian of economics, Gary Herrigel, sees in this historically grown network between industry and science a defining factor in explaining Germany’s long-term economic success.12 The history of machine building in Saxony is especially noteworthy. Saxony was able to sustain its global leadership not only through the political caesuras of 1918, 1933, and 1945, but also through the changes in political systems in 1949 and 1990. Research on engineering science in Germany – in stark contrast to the USA – was consistently oriented toward design theory and consequently was comparatively uninfluenced by the polar opposite field of practical fabrication. What importance can be attached to the DFG in the emergence and stabilization of this research trajectory, spanning the political and social breaks of the twentieth century? It played as good as no role at all during the 1920s. The institutional locus of research on mechanical engineering was remarkably indefinite in the years following World War I. For a long time the prevalent notion in the NG’s boards was that industry should provide the principal support for research in mechanical engineering. It was only toward the end of the 1920s that mechanical engineers at universities gradually managed to integrate their field into the NG’s internal discourses and activities. The research path oriented toward theoretical machine design was thereby expanded. Conspicuously, during the phase of National Socialism no department dedicated to mechanical engineering existed within the DFG or, respectively, the RFR until the end of 1944. This marginalization of engineering research by state promotional policy contrasts with its downright dramatic rise in importance in an economy fully directed at armament and war. The mass production of weaponry triggered a boost in demand in the entire mechanical engineering sector. It is therefore no wonder that the Armaments Ministry under Albert Speer claimed 11 12

See Trischler, Luft- und Raumfahrtforschung, pp. 142–156, 345–355. Herrigel, Constructions; cf. generally Trischler, Made in Germany.

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to have exclusive access to the scientific resources of engineering research. Mechanical engineering institutes at universities often grew into mid-sized research centers with their staffs fulfilling orders by the Wehrmacht (armed forces) and Army Ordnance relayed to them by Speer’s ministry. Despite much rhetoric promising to improve the production line, the epistemic culture of the discipline remained remarkably persistent. Research in mechanical engineering hardly experienced a shift in focus from design to production. Mechanical engineers rather argued that bulk series and mass production should be initiated at the design level – and so also their scientific methods and theories. In the Federal Republic, the DFG strived to shape research in mechanical engineering early on. As in the field of materials science, the DFG tried to gain control over public research funding. Upon closer consideration, however, the DFG played hardly any leading part in this field. It contributed to funding and organizing respective research programs but refrained from defining strategic aims. The Priority Programs for mechanical engineering in the 1950s and 1960s were based on the actor networks that had already developed during the 1930s at the latest and stabilized during the Speer era. The support programs that these networks negotiated once again followed the “classical” path of design orientation. They thus stabilized the methodological ideal of a calculating experimental science, which generally shaped the epistemic culture of engineering research in Germany.

OVERLAPPING FINDINGS A synopsis of these four studies on the natural sciences, on one hand, and on the engineering sciences, on the other, casts a number of results in particularly sharp relief against the questions posed at the start of this chapter. First, an enduring theoretical orientation is confirmed both for the natural sciences and for the engineering sciences. The ideal of mathematically founded theories shaped the epistemic culture in German academia across all political and social breaks. Of significance here is that this orientation was at least as deeply anchored within the engineering sciences as within the natural sciences. In the long run politics and industry alike observed it not as a weakness to be eliminated but as a strength to be encouraged. Second, the institutional locus where this orientation was negotiated and stabilized by means of grant programs was the NG and the DFG. The networks and boards of the DFG provided room for discussions on the path taken in pursuit of this scientific ideal. The DFG was, at the same time, the locus where scientists were able to acquire symbolic capital and to invest it within the academic, economic, and public space to further their careers. Third, the DFG’s importance in constantly forging and remolding disciplinary structures can hardly be overstated. Both in the natural and engineering sciences disciplinary and transdisciplinary networks were formed within the DFG’s discursive space.

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Fourth, in recent years economic historians and historians of technology alike have identified the profile of how Germany’s system of innovation has performed. Since the late nineteenth century, it has produced a constant stream of incremental innovations feeding economic growth. Germany’s leading position on the world market rests more on the long-term strategy of constantly improving existing technologies and less, however, on the ability to produce basic innovations.13 Public research support through the DFG has also been one of the driving factors that allowed for a dynamic innovation culture. It has favored what the scientific community accepted as “normal science” in both the natural and engineering sciences, whereas when it came to the distribution of resources, it was difficult to take radically innovative research concepts into account. Fifth, with reference to the question of the DFG’s importance in influencing the discourse, it is most notable that not only the humanities and social sciences, but also the natural and engineering sciences used the rhetoric of emergency, backwardness, and the need to catch up. The reference space of this discourse was usually the research and innovation system of the United States of America. This applies to the first half of the twentieth century and even more so to the second. The natural and engineering sciences participated significantly in the secular discourse on the USA, which was of eminent importance to twentiethcentury Germany. In this discourse the natural and engineering scientists within the DFG referred not only to scientific arguments, but also to societal, primarily economic justifications. To support research was to further Germany’s ability to compete economically. This discourse was addressed to political and economic audiences, rarely to the general public. If a close link between science and the public counts as a characteristic of modern knowledge-based societies,14 then the DFG was, properly speaking, not a modernizing agent in this field but a leading representative of a premodern, authoritative understanding of science that was particularly firmly anchored in the natural and engineering sciences. Sixth, the last question to be posed concerns the character of the DFG as an actor within the German scientific and innovative system. If one disregards the field of metals research, it is clear that the DFG was a comparatively weak agent. For the natural and engineering sciences it played an important role as a locus of disciplinary communication and network formation but hardly by its own concrete promotional activities. During the Third Reich the DFG even disintegrated as an institutional actor. Instead what strikes the eye is the enormous scope of action of individuals. As both a gifted scientist and a multifunctionary research manager, Peter Adolf Thiessen could claim, not without justification, that he acted as the sole influential authority for the RFR in the field of chemical research. Only after 1945 did the DFG acquire clear contours as an actor in the sphere of the natural and engineering sciences. Its Permanent Panel on Applied Research or Commission for Computing Systems for example sent out strong signals in shaping disciplines and fields of research. The Priority Programs of 13 See above all Abelshauser, Umbruch; Wengenroth, Innovationssystem; and idem, Innovationspolitik. 14 Cf. Weingart, Wissenschaft.

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the 1950s and 1960s then promulgated the DFG itself in areas closely linked to industry, such as chemistry and mechanical engineering. Only now, did the DFG develop into a major actor within the German academic and innovation system.

ON THE PATH TO TECHNICAL DESIGN – DFG-FUNDED RESEARCH IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING 1920–1970 Mirko Buschmann/Thomas Hänseroth This project studies the continuities and breaks in the German Research Foundation’s (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) support of research in mechanical engineering. In the process it asked about path dependencies and attempted path changes.1 It discusses the standing of the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG) and the DFG; and using this example probes the possibilities and limits of state science policy. The influence of different political systems on science and their specific treatments of it are assessed as well as the effects of technical and industrial changes on the epistemic culture in mechanical engineering and on the innovation culture in Germany. On the one hand, constellations of the historical actors and their networks are examined as well as, on the other hand, normative structures and the cultural “impregnation” of innovative systems as structural conditions, using the theoretical model of an innovation culture. Thus, conceptual points of departure for this study are approaches from cultural history and “the new institutional economics.” For the past two decades, innovation research – analyzing the efficiency of national economic, scientific, and technical systems as well as their specifics – has fruitfully drawn on the theoretical model of a national innovation system. This approach mainly examines three fields: the state/politics, industry, and universities along with their structures, interactions, and functional overlaps. More recent research has found that the conditions for successful innovative processes can be adequately measured only if the relevant cultural “impregnations” of these fields are taken into account. This takes research down the path from a national innovation system to a national innovation culture and conceives the history of innovation as cultural and social history.2 Mechanical engineering was drawn pars pro toto into the focus of this study on DFG-funded research in the area of the engineering sciences. As a classical group of disciplines within engineering sciences, it was very important throughout the entire period under examination, especially in Germany.3 It was ranked highly in nearly all of Germany’s polytechnics (Technische Hochschulen). Its most impor1 On the concept of path dependencies, cf. Cantwell/Vertova, Technological Diversification; David, Path Dependence; North, Economic Change; Vertova, Stability; Wengenroth/ Wieland, Pfadabhängigkeiten. 2 For a summary, see Wengenroth, Innovationssystem; idem, Innovationskultur. 3 Cf. Buchheim/Sonnemann (eds.), Technikwissenschaften, pp. 351 ff., 420 ff.

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tant actors could always build on high symbolic capital within the community of engineers. The field of practice – machine building – in turn, was, since the beginnings of the industrialization process, a veritable strategic center of technical and industrial development and a load-bearing pillar of the German national economy. Although its decline has been foretold more or less regularly since the late nineteenth century,4 since the 1990s at the latest, it has been considered the success model for an export sector of the economy that has been flourishing for decades.5 All the same, irrespective of this project’s representational claims, the specifics of this scientific field must first be taken into account. On the one hand, its history reaches far back into the nineteenth century and is therefore strongly marked by tradition. On the other hand, during the twentieth century it experienced strong specialization through a number of developmental boosts and molded itself into a discipline that is exceedingly complex in structure. An analysis conducted by commission from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1966 on the problems small and mid-sized mechanical engineering companies encountered determined that machine design is based on at least 35 professional specialties.6 Moreover, for various reasons scientific areas belonging to mechanical engineering became institutionalized within other disciplinary groups. For example, precision mechanics or control techniques are classed within electrical engineering/electronics. This considerable complexity, with its fuzzy boundaries with other groups within the engineering sciences, is why machine design and manufacture, the two cornerstones of mechanical engineering, have defined this project’s modeling and circumscribing of the field of analysis. The guiding issue is how do we explain the almost one-hundred-year – hence veritably secular – prioritization within the German mechanical sciences of research on engineering design, while well into the 1970s manufacturing processes were comparatively neglected?7 As a matter of fact, the mechanical sciences in Germany focused very strongly on machine building. This indicates a developed culture of design engineering which is normally contrasted against the typical manufacturing culture of the USA.8 4

Most recently Laske, Musterbranche. Cf. Hänseroth, Einführung; Kalkowski/Mickler/Manse, Technologiestandort; Manske, Stärken. 6 Meeting between professional representatives of the Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau and the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, 27 Jul. 1967, Hauptstaatsarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 501/733. 7 Manufacture is part of the production process and in machine building comprises, as a rule, the modification and fashioning of machined parts through a variety of manufacturing procedures. This is done using tools and machining appliances, with machine tools assigned central importance. The modification and control of the physical properties of forms and materials are the distinctive characteristics of manufacturing processes. The main groups of manufacturing processes are original molding, reshaping, fusing, separating, and altering the properties of materials and coatings. 8 Kalkowski, Innovationsstrategien; Knie, Konservative; König, Künstler, idem et al., Entwicklung; Manske, Stärken, pp. 103 ff.; Buschmann/Hänseroth, Pfade. 5

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Second, the specifics of industrial branches must be taken into account. Characteristic of the German machine-building industry, as opposed to the U. S. and later also Japan, is its predominant structure of mid-to-small-sized commercial enterprises throughout the entire period of analysis.9 This strongly limits the potential of industrial research and thereby also cooperations between state and industrial research. Precisely this small-scale elementary structure assigns a central place to research at universities and nonuniversity facilities. As late as the mid-1960s, only a few larger enterprises established substantial industrial research capacity, starting out from testing facilities, particularly in the area of machinetool design. These enterprises themselves followed a strategy de longue durée that only in exceptional cases envisioned mass markets promising cost-cutting economies of scale from serial and mass production of comparatively simple machines. They usually looked for competitive advantages outside of volume markets in segments seeking quality and excellent design of a limited number of all-round machines and installations, either custom-made or offered only in small series.10 The commercial ambition to be a leader in specialized markets worldwide or to at least be economically profitable paid off in the German machine-building industry over long stretches of the twentieth century. The orientation toward strongly diversified lucrative adaptable machines and a rather specialized product portfolio correlate naturally with the trade’s characteristic structure. The mid-sized branch structure otherwise also implies a problem of sources for examining cooperative relationships between science, the state, and industry. It generally became apparent that a constant rise in broadly informal contacts between universities and enterprises in machine building came with a proportionate drop in the degree of written evidence. From the perspective of institutional theory this implies trust in innovation cultures – for historians, who are dependent on analysis of textual sources, obviously hardly a welcome finding.11 Furthermore, as regards the specifics mentioned above, the structure of this branch dictates that only a thorough analysis of the numerous cooperative relationships between mechanical engineering companies and universities will yield solid empirical findings about the influence of industry on the research to be fixed in focus, on the one hand, and the transfer of knowledge from university to enterprise, on the other. Such findings could not be obtained within the temporal limitations of the present project. The progress made by historians regarding technical design must be characterized as extremely incomplete for the period under study. The same applies to the scientific basics in the form of a narrower history of mechanical engineering as a discipline and how it relates to general trends in the history of science of the twentieth century. Although the period in which the culture of technical design and manufacture formed and stabilized in the final third of the nineteenth cen9

König, Technikkulturen, p. 41; Buschmann/Hänseroth, Pfade, pp. 139 ff. Ibid. 11 Cf. most recently Schramm, Wirtschaft. 10

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tury into the early twentieth century is thoroughly researched,12 the history of science and technology has failed to consider adequately the further path of the design-oriented German mechanical sciences. Neither has it compared designoriented research against the manufacturing orientation, whether within the national or international contexts. Studies are currently available only on a few specialized technical developmental lines or subdisciplines in the engineering sciences. The latter are mostly authored by actors of the relevant subdisciplines in specific memorable cultural settings with particular historical intentions.13 Surveying accounts satisfying the requirements of the history of science with information about the basic technical and scientific developments in mechanical engineering are completely lacking. Consequently, the aim of this project has been to cast a bridge, for historians of science and members of the discipline alike, over this broad area in the history of mechanical engineering of the twentieth century, to help contribute toward closing this gap in the history of science and technology. One essential finding of this project was a remarkable continuity in substance and personnel across the breaks in the political system. Government funding was aimed throughout at questions oriented toward fundamental research with a prioritization on the area of technical design. Yet science-supported solutions to sets of problems more closely related to industry, which depended on the rather short-term priorities set for research funding and were also at least broached in science policy discussions, were rarely the subject of research sponsorship by the DFG. Instead, the focus was on research concerning – to mention a few examples – engines and machines, gear pieces, driving components, transmissions, as well as thermodynamics, dynamics, and materials strength theory. Thus, over the course of the entire period examined, these became traditional research topics that also guaranteed success for German mechanical engineering. A relatively constant circle of main actors – notwithstanding the political breaks – followed the strategy of continuously building upon the traditional design-oriented strengths of the mechanical sciences. That was how, at the same time, German machine building was intended to be supported in its effort to secure its place on the world market: through constant incremental innovative steps in the area of technical design. The success of German machine building was essentially based on precisely this excellence in design across a remarkably broad spectrum of products in conjunction with a quality guarantee. Thus, a close relationship was established between trust in the symbolic capital of the 12 Barth, Maschinenbauindustrie; Braun, Maschinenbau; Benad-Wagenhoff, Maschinenbau; Buchheim/Sonnemann (eds.), Technikwissenschaften, pp. 265 ff.; König, Künstler; Ruby, Drehautomaten. 13 Reference is made i. a. to Bähr, Industrie; Benad-Wagenhoff/Paulinyi/Ruby, Fertigungstechnik; Buchheim/Sonnemann (eds.), Technikwissenschaften, pp. 351 ff., 420 ff.; Haak, Entwicklung; Haas, Metallverarbeitung; Hänseroth/Krautz, Werkzeugmaschinenbau; Hirsch-Kreinsen, NC-Entwicklung; Mommertz, Bohren; Niemetz/Paulsen, Konstruktionspraxis; Specht/ Haak, Fertigungsautomatisierung; idem, Werkzeugmaschinenbau; Spur, Wandel; Spur/Federspiel (eds.), Produktionstechnische Forschung; Spur, Berliner Produktionswissenschaft.

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German machine-building industry and reliance on the epistemic strengths of the scientific discipline. THE FOUNDING PHASE UP TO 1933 The founding phase of the Emergency Association was pervaded by the programmatic ambition to support all branches of research represented at universities and institutions of higher education in order to provide them with an initial stable material basis for research and teaching. The Prussian Academy of Sciences instigated the founding of the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG). It submitted a petition on the subject to the Weimar National Assembly at the beginning of 1920.14 The ambition to support all academic research in Germany equally was a goal encompassing all the disciplines as a matter of principle.15 The NG’s statutes even opened with the assertion that it had emerged out of all areas of science, hence also comprising the natural and engineering sciences.16 It was a matter of strengthening universities and colleges as sites of state-funded knowledge production. At the same time, the aim was to create the preconditions for guiding state policy on science. The NG’s intentions hence underscored as its guiding purpose not only the maintenance and support of research in all disciplines at German institutions of higher education but also their future needs and, initially, the creation of a firm starting position for the preservation and expansion of an efficient university landscape. This conception of the sense of state promotion of research was accordingly all-encompassing. All disciplines were supposed to be included and therefore could ply for support on an equal basis. During the 1920s this claim was not applied even approximately to the mechanical sciences to the degree that the importance of this discipline and its applications would lead one to expect. An analysis of internal debates and public statements by the NG as well as its sponsoring actions reveals that the mechanical sciences possessed only marginal importance within the NG’s promotional policy. They also assumed minor ranking in the negotiations of its Joint Committee (Hauptausschuss) and were rather regarded as foreign.17 Renowned mechanical engineers on this board, such as Adolph Nägel and Conrad Matschoß, were largely fighting a losing battle when they tried to attract attention to their profession’s specific interests.18 14

Zierold, Forschungsförderung, p. 8. “The Emergency Association intends to use the funds flowing into it from public and private quarters in the way most beneficial to German research interests overall…” Statutes of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, 30 Oct. 1920, article 1; quoted in Zierold, Forschungsförderung, p. 542. 16 Cf. ibid. 17 See, for example, Fritz Haber’s letter to the NG’s Executive Committee (Präsidium), 25 Nov. 1920, BAK, R 73/4, fol. 84. 18 Adoph Nägel’s letter to Schmidt-Ott, 27 May 1929, BAK, R 73/195, fol. 107. 15

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The marginal position held by the mechanical sciences in the NG collided headlong with the public perception of how machine building ranked in the national economy. Ideas about economic policy, aimed at consolidating the German economy and anticipating it as an existential challenge, always assigned a high place to mechanical engineering during the 1920s. This science also found a prominent place in the broadly publicized debates about rationalization in this context.19 Why did this not rub off adequately on the NG’s promotional activities? We consider three overlapping motivations to be plausible explanatory options. First, the traditional German scientific system helped the scientific academies and disciplines in the humanities and natural sciences acquire a strong position within the NG. This immediately led to a focus on subjects in the humanities and leading disciplines in the natural sciences. Among the latter, subfields of physics and chemistry were deemed especially worthy of support. Second, the dominent view in the NG’s boards was that sciences oriented toward technical and industrial practice, such as the mechanical sciences, should be supported primarily by industry or institutions with close commercial associations. The likewise newly founded Helmholtz Society (Helmholtz-Gesellschaft), mainly supported and influenced by industry, was seen as a particularly appropriate alternative grant institution.20 In the beginning a dispute flared up between the society and the NG about where the mechanical sciences belonged, with the consequence that the latter were generally deprived of support.21 Besides the Helmholtz Society, the German Union of Associations in the Engineering Sciences (Deutscher Verband Technisch-Wissenschaftlicher Vereine) also tried to influence the composition of the NG’s expert boards on technical subjects and hence have a say in its support.22 The NG opposed this together with the Union of German Universities (Hochschulverband). The mechanical sciences were the only discipline to get caught between competing interest groups in such a way. Third, an imperial-versus-regional conflict over science policy must be pointed out.23 The regional Länder (states) regarded the founding of the NG as a challenge to their sovereignty in shaping science and university policy. By 1920 at the latest it became clear that the decision on how research support was institutionalized at the imperial level had important bearings on future competencies in science policy. This was the reason why the regional states initially received the NG’s foundation with some skepticism, something which has heretofore hardly been appreciated in the historical literature. In June 1920 the Reichsminister of the interior saw the necessity to assure the state representatives intervening in this 19

Freyberg, Rationalisierung. Minutes of the meeting of the administrative board of the NG’s Donor Association: Stifterverband der Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft, 23 Feb. 1921, BAK, R 73/189, pp. 223 f. 21 Cf. Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 29 f. In its founding appeal, the Helmholtz Society specifically set as its goal the support of “physical and technical institutes […] at all German universities, polytechnics, and mining academies”; cf. Anon., Helmholtz-Gesellschaft, p. 6. 22 Letter by Conrad Matschoß to Schmidt-Ott, 8 Nov. 1920, BAK, R 73/1, fols. 36a–38a. 23 Marsch, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 108 ff. 20

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matter that the planned NG would make available additional imperial monies for research without intending to interfere in the scientific organization of the individual states.24 Notwithstanding a few divergent views on the details, the Länder were generally unanimous that this Emergency Association should not become a permanent institution. It should only provide aid for the interim, that is, grant temporary assistance. Regarded from a longer-term perspective, instead of establishing a central organization situated at the level of the Reich, imperial funds for the promotion of research were rather supposed to flow into the state coffers. The Dresden Polytechnic, for instance, demanded together with the Ministry of Culture of Saxony that research monies donated by industry within their state should be made exclusively available to local institutions of higher education.25 In short, the initial insecurity about the promotional institutions responsible for technical subjects explains the conspicuous hesitation with which the mechanical sciences submitted proposals to the NG. Basically, two contrary standpoints can be identified in the continuing debates over sponsorship of the mechanical sciences during the NG’s founding stage. At the same time, they bring up basic issues with regard to the scientific locus, the epistemic culture, and the financing of the discipline in question – a technocratic position, which obviously could not be asserted and which regarded future research in engineering fields as closely tied to its immediate practical utility and therefore to application criteria. Industry was supposed to be heavily involved in setting the research priorities and also be obligated to finance it. The standpoint that did hold its own also conceived the mechanical sciences as a discipline tightly linked with the practical fields in technical industry. However, it did question that it should remain under the roof of a state-funded structure of higher education with the conventional epistemic systems of rules governing university science. Consequently, this worked in the direction of primarily guiding support toward topics of a fundamental character and oriented toward application. Thus, disciplinary trends in the mechanical sciences and the epistemic self-image of their actors were intensified at the same time. The term basic research (Grundlagenforschung), with its connotations for science policy, experienced a boom in the mechanical sciences for many years to come. However, it is entirely unsuitable for analyzing the epistemic developments. In the closing years of the 1920s, an increased integration of research in the mechanical sciences can finally be observed in the NG’s internal discourses and promotional activities. The unquestionable importance of machine building for the national economy prompted calls that state research be more intensely promoted. Furthermore, by that time the personal networks of engineers connected with the boards of the NG, the Helmholtz Society, and the Association of German Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, VDI) had grown in influence. These 24

Ibid., pp. 109 f. Letter by Arthur Salomonsohn to Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft about a debate during the founding meeting of the Society for Promoters and Friends of the Dresden Polytechnic (Gesellschaft von Förderern und Freunden der Technischen Hochschule Dresden), 14 Apr. 1921, BAK, R 73/189, p. 215. 25

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networks secured increasing support for the discipline.26 This indicates a heightened intertwining of interests among the institutions mentioned. Indeed, a bilateral cooperation between the NG and universities was not sufficient for effective funding practices in engineering subjects. They also had to be situated within the triple helix: state–universities–industry.27 Nevertheless, no thematically distinct support for mechanical engineering emerged by the end of the Weimar Republic. That is why no impulses emanated from the NG during this period to leave the strategic path oriented toward science-based technical design. THE NAZI PERIOD A glance at the further developments during the Third Reich reveals the conspicuous lack of a department dedicated to mechanical engineering within the funding organization until the end of 1944. It would be inappropriate, however, to conclude from this that the DFG or, respectively, the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) had pushed the mechanical sciences to the margins again. The field in question was covered, above all, within the departments of physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering, and the scale of support it received was comparatively greater than during the Weimar Republic. The lack of an Expert Department (Fachsparte) of its own and the assignment of the mechanical sciences to other disciplinary groups appears, on the one hand, to be a consequence of the already mentioned general orientational problems experienced by the mechanical sciences and the promotional institutions. On the other hand, inappropriate assignments make clear that the status of an applied science had been attached to the discipline. Obviously, there was still a major lack of insight into the specifics of the mechanical sciences as a technical discipline of science. The DFG’s role changed in 1937 when the RFR was founded. The Research Council assumed the reviewing and decision-making competencies for the natural and technical sciences and thereby for the foundation’s research of relevance to the Four-Year Plan.28 Thus, the DFG lost its status as an institutional actor as far as the mechanical sciences were concerned. Armaments research was henceforth favored, particularly studies on motor vehicles, engines, and machine tools. These experienced a boost in demand throughout the entire field of machine building from the forced mass production of military products beginning in 1935.29 The Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt) as well as the machine-tool industry placed a stronger emphasis on using research results from mechanical 26

Illustrations of the development of such actor networks are provided by the mechanical engineer from Dresden, Adolf Nägel, and the mechanician and historian of technology from Berlin, Conrad Matschoß. They were active members on expert boards for mechanical engineering not only on a decision-making panel of the NG but also on numberous other ones, such as for the VDI and other institutions supported by industry. 27 Letter by the Stifterverband to the Notgemeinschaft, 1 Feb. 1929, BAK, R 73/190, p. 48. 28 Flachowsky, Reichsforschungsrat. 29 Tooze, Modernisierung.

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engineering. This led at the end of the 1930s to new priorities in the advancement of research, which remained effective until the end of the war. Especially during the final war years, they were regularly specified within the authority of Speer’s ministry.30 The greatest importance was attached to technical design in the area of aviation research and, as before, on general research into new transmission and engine designs.31 In the area of manufacturing, special priority was given to processing precision and mass production rates and to stable manufacturing cycles. The growing shortage of specialists, in turn, placed topics on the agenda that simplified the operation of machines as it related to the highest possible degree of automation and flexibility.32 During the second half of the 1930s, as the DFG was losing significance, networks formed among reputable mechanical engineers. For example, the Industrial Engineering University Group (Hochschulgruppe Betriebswissenschaft) was founded in 1937 and continued to exist after the war. These networks certainly did not exclusively push for arms-related development; the continuation of conventional research topics in mechanical engineering was encouraged just as much. Those topics had to be kept alive at universities for educational purposes in any case. In 1943 the RFR showed signs of wanting to establish a separate department for research in mechanical engineering in the interest of efficiently combining research capacities. These efforts failed, however. Instead Speer’s ministry subsumed all machine production as well as substantial research resources in the mechanical sciences. The conviction was that mechanical engineering’s paramount importance to armaments production justified the Armaments Ministry’s authority. Machine-tool design moved to the center of the National Socialist armaments programs.33 A thorough rationalization of the manufacturing processes, as well as fine-tuned steering of production and a reduction in the number of product types were guiding models for a targeted increase in efficiency.34 The implementation of this program signified deep interference in the production culture of German mechanical engineering. As a consequence, virtually all reputable mechanical engineers accepted research and development projects from Army Ordnance or directly from offices of the Wehrmacht, which usually had been relayed by Speer’s ministry.35 Research exploring solutions to problems in mass production and development supporting incremental innovations dominated the funded projects. On the whole, both the basic approaches to research in mechanical engineering and the commercial strategies to raise production output reveal the persistence of traditional paths. At 30

Gehrig, Rüstungspolitik, p. 49, n. 12. Monthly report by the Special Committee on Machine Tools (Sonderausschuss Werkzeugmaschinen) in May 1944, 9 Jun. 1944, BAB, R 3/491. 32 Monthy report by the Special Committee on Machine Tools for July–October 1944, BAB, R 3/491, fol. 3. 33 Tooze, Modernisierung. 34 Haak, Entwicklung, pp. 27 ff.; Siegel/Freyberg, Rationalisierung, pp. 77 ff. 35 Letter from the Reich Office for Economic Development (RWA) to the RFR’s planning office, 20 Oct. 1944, BAB, R 26 III/43. 31

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the end of the 1930s, manufacturing terminology began to creep into the rhetoric of scientists, companies, and state actors in organized research and promotion. But there were no significant concomitant shifts of priority in the research practice. A changeover to a more consistent research orientation toward manufacturing did not happen, certain discussions notwithstanding. On the contrary, within the context of research practice it was argued that greater attention to the demands of large-scale and mass fabrication within mechanical engineering research would likewise have to be initiated primarily within the area of technical design. Only there could a promising adaptation to the changed needs of production take place.36 The DFG and the RFR were unable to exert any notable influence on events in research in the mechanical sciences, even during the later phase of the war. The Expert Department for Mechanical Engineering that was finally established in the RFR in December 1944 was politically symbolic and was a perfect illustration of its impotence compared to the Armaments Ministry. The DFG’s exclusion during the second half of the 1930s from the promotion of the engineering disciplines was ultimately a consequence of the state directly taking over the mechanical sciences. It was considered imperative, against the backdrop first of a rearming economy, and later a war economy. This new conception of research policy was initially supposed to be implemented by the RFR. But after it evidently was proceeding too slowly, the Armaments Ministry took over during the Speer era. Consequently, a systematic state policy on research in the disciplinary group of technical sciences was started in Germany for the first time – obviously without the involvement of the DFG. THE POSTWAR PERIOD UP TO 1970 The scene changed in the decades after World War II. The DFG gradually grew into its role as the central state actor in the engineering disciplines. The mechanical sciences’ unrestricted worthiness of support was unquestioned. Controversies and discussions within the sphere of professional funding concerned content and programs. The DFG’s competency, however, was unshakably firmly established. After a relatively quiet phase, which can also be seen in other disciplines, the funding of research in mechanical engineering by the DFG started again at the beginning of the 1950s.37 From the outset the altered support strategy compared to the period prior to 1945 is characteristic: The DFG aggressively attempted to shape the mechanical sciences. It sought substantial cooperation not only with universities but now also with the VDI and industry. In addition, it tried to integrate research promoted by industry and the state, albeit with only modest success. This shows that from this point onward, the DFG was on the way to 36 Monthly report of the Special Committee on Machine Tools in May 1944, 9 Jun. 1944, BAB, R 3/491. 37 For an overview, cf. Orth, Förderprofil; for details cf. the DFG’s annual reports 1949– 1952: Berichte.

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finding its role as a central state funding institution in the system of organized innovation. Thus, it had a considerable share in the development of structures though which the understanding of science at the technocratic cutting edge could be implemented.38 Resolute readjustment efforts did not occur without causing some friction, however. For example, the old quarrels about the relationship between basic and applied research revitalized. Nevertheless, the DFG was able relatively rapidly to develop an appreciation of the value of applied research in modern industrial societies. It founded the Committee on Applied Research in 1954 and called to life, together with the Donors Union of German Industry (Stifterverband der Deutschen Industrie), a Placement Office for Contract Research and an Association of Collaborative Industrial Research. During the “fallen behind debates” of the 1960s in the Federal Republic, the DPG contributed a memorandum39 in 1964 that broached the issue of research in science and engineering in Germany generally having fallen behind and called for increased funding of research in these groups of disciplines.40 The starting position for that was not unfavorable. The demands of the postwar reconstruction phase initially set essential premises for the mechanical sciences. It should be pointed out, however, that the reconstruction was mainly mastered with technology already developed before the war.41 Furthermore, the economic boom in western Europe secured traditional export markets for West German machine building. Despite having politically discredited itself, the country’s consumers continued to trust products “made in Germany.” The research topics negotiated between the DFG and mechanical engineers at universities in the postwar period took these conditions into account. The relevant actors at universities tried, at the same time, to maintain staffing and scientific continuity. With reference to progress im mechanical engineering in the USA, they insisted, on the one hand, on the necessity for promotional initiatives in order to overcome the German “lag” (Rückstand). On the other hand, they obstinately pushed for a continuance of research approaches of their own that they had been pursuing prior to the war. Both strands of arguments intertwined into a unique rhetorical construction combining scientific excellence with its indispensability to the national economy. In this self-image there was no place for reminders of professional self-mobilization during the period of National Socialism. The actors claimed to have merely been neutral administrators of research free from ethics.42 This permitted the declaration that technology and science had been subjected to “alien,” “demonic” ends, without questioning whether the actors bore any responsibility. At the same time, a technocratic 38 The period between the 1880s and the 1970s has been increasingly regarded as a unit, as an era of “high modernity”; cf. Herbert, High Modernity; Doering-Manteuffel, Strukturmerkmale; idem, Boom. 39 Cf. Bähr, Herausforderung; Szöllösi-Janze, Wissensgesellschaft, pp. 285 ff. 40 Cf. Clausen, Stand. 41 Radkau, Wirtschaftswunder. 42 Mehrtens, Missbrauch; Hänseroth, Fachleute.

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claim to power was able to prevail. This meant that demands of independence or superior ranking for technology against other areas of life or social subsystems, including the economy and politics, were successful. In accordance with the historical and political trends of the day,43 the decision-making strategy of the DFG’s boards did not encounter any noteworthy resistance. Thus, it supported the remarkably assertive demands by engineers for equal autonomy and continuity for their research under the DFG’s umbrella. The characteristic image of the autonomous Ordinarius can also be seen among academic engineers, despite their many industrial contacts in the decades before and after World War II.44 Their cooperation with profit-seeking enterprises did not stop these professors from declaring that their true domain was absolutely “disinterested” fundamental research. All in all, the project justifications of the postwar period followed argumentational patterns that stressed the continuity of research topics across political divides. They were, of course, stripped of their political contexts. Indeed, when references to researches from the 1930s and early 1940s were called for, they applauded the high level and relevance of apolitical research conducted during the Nazi period.45 The actors had good reason, in fact, to choose this strategy. The resurrection of German machine building in the 1950s, with its impressively profitable exports, also came from much university research on mechanical engineering from the Third Reich. Thus, preserving continuity among the persons and topics involved in research in the mechanical sciences also promised to stabilize this upswing. Networks and institutional arrangements within the professional community that had formed in the 1930s at the latest reorganized in the 1950s entirely along these lines. They served as mediators in the dialog between universities and the DFG. As only one example, the Fabrication Technology University Group exerted considerable influence on the pertinent funding policy and instructively testified to the obstinacy of research cultures in the technical sciences across political divides.46 The DFG financed and oversaw advanced research projects but did not exert any influence on the strategic research aims. The latter was not at all typical of their grant policy, for at least in its Priority Programs, the DFG tended to try to specifically motivate and frame the substance.47 Its Senate likewise decided entirely autonomously on the approvals of Priority Programs. This approach nevertheless cannot be applied to the mechanical sciences in such a stringent form. 43

Cf., Herbert, Geschichtspolitik; Hammerstein, Geschichtsbilder; Lübbe, Parteigenossen. Hänseroth, Fachleute. 45 Cf., e. g., the letter to the DFG by the certified engineer and director of the state Institution of Materials Testing (Materialprüfungsanstalt) in Stuttgart, Prof. E. Siebel, 8 Feb. 1956, BAK, B 227/FC 7567N, p. 2; see also Schallbroch, Forschung, p. 25. 46 The Hochschulgruppe Fertigungstechnik formed out of the Industrial Engineering University Group (Betriebswissenschaften) founded in 1937 (renamed Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Produktionstechnik since 1987); cf. Schallbroch, Forschung, p. 25. 47 Orth, Förderprofil; idem, Forschungspolitik; cf. the DFG’s annual reports, Berichte. 44

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Clear deviations from the rule come to light regarding the settlement of central grant programs in this discipline. Since the 1950s Priority Programs in the mechanical sciences were instead launched internally, conceived as joint ventures (Gemeinschaftsunternehmen) between the DFG, universities, and industry. Verbal arrangements and the positive vote of leading mechanical engineers prepared the ground for numerous approved programs. The initiative and positive ratings for Priority Programs originated nearly exclusively from universities. That was where their topics were drawn up and the legitimizing political arguments for their economic validity were put forward. Hence, even before these Priority Programs were discussed in the DFG’s boards and the outcome published, the future project heads had already reached agreement amongst themselves and chosen suitable topics. The occasional objection raised by the DFG’s vice-president, Walther Gerlach, to the Priority Programs initiated by the mechanical sciences was overcome in individual cases with the support of the West German Federal Ministry of Economics.48 Since the 1950s research at universities tapped other funding sources besides the federal government: regional state budgets. This turns our attention to the multi-source funding of research in the technical sciences typical of the postwar decades. Two Länder, Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia, offered promotional programs through their regional ministeries of commerce, to which university institutes could submit proposals.49 Industry also was increasingly tapped as another source of funding. Flourishing cooperations between university institutes and companies had established themselves since the early 1950s. Some of their prehistories can be traced back to the 1920s but the sources only allow more stringent documentation since the beginning of the 1950s.50 These relations evidently fully satisfied the interests of both parties and caused a boost in contractual research, although the term “research” ought to be questioned here. In many cases what was rather involved was developmental work or tasks that would be more precisely described as “information and documentation.” Evidently, many companies still had problems adjusting themselves to the USA’s lead and depended for quite some time on the advice offered by universities about orientating themselves within the international research landscape.51 An analysis of the multi-source funding shows that, first, the leading professional protagonists as recipients of DFG grants were largely identical with those 48 G. Gambke’s letter to Ministerialdirigent W. Hinsch at the Bundeswirtschaftsministerium, 25 Jan. 1956, BAK, B 229/FC 7568N. Gambke was a DFG manager who coordinated applications on mechanical engineering. 49 Correspondence between the Chair and Institute for Machine Tools and the Ministry of Commerce for Baden-Württemberg between 1967 and 1969. University Archive (Universitätsarchiv, UA), Stuttgart, 27/192. 50 Carl Martin Dolezalek’s long-term cooperation with the firm Dr. Carl Hahn AG is one example. See the company’s contracts: Aufträge der Firma Dr. Carl Hahn AG 1960–1965, UA Stuttgart, 27/110; 1963–1967, UA Stuttgart, 27/107; and 1965–1970, UA Stuttgart, 27/93. 51 On the “waves of Americanization” in the economy generally, see Schröter, Americanization.

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who were successful at the other mentioned alternative subsidy levels. Second, the application process for DFG grants was the most time-consuming and tedious. Third, financing from the federal states and from companies far surpassed that of the DFG. Many professors of the mechanical sciences were virtuosos at playing on this keyboard of funding options and building up large teams of coworkers. An inquiry into the promotional structure of supported topics leads to the result that the DFG continued to support “classically” oriented research projects in technical design. By contrast, the more abundant means of the federal states and of companies privileged numerous smaller projects with topics of far more relevance to applications. In interpreting this obvious divergence in the funded subject matter (yet to be treated in the pertinent historical literature) among the three mentioned institutional actors, three mutually effective motives are identifiable: First, the epistemic culture specific to the engineering sciences – compared internationally – established itself, with its self-image purporting fundamental research without practical purpose. This ideal was much more easily applied to the area of technical design than to the scientific analysis of manufacturing processes. However, the clearly intensifying efforts to analyze scientific phenomena at a more fundamental level in manufacturing processes quite obviously did not include any pressing production problems in industrial practice that would have pushed a transferral of the developed scientific solutions into practice. Second, the operators of DFG-funded projects particularly invested in qualifying aspiring scientists. Conversely, most financing secured by the states and industry secured already available positions or expanded them. Projects supported by the DFG, therefore, primarily helped to qualify doctoral students, whereas those borne by industrial or state means, as a rule, provided temporary positions for already graduated staff. Third and finally, topics oriented toward technical design and basic research, which were also funded by the DFG, evidently allowed a far greater accumulation of symbolic capital within academia than topics oriented more closely toward application or industry. This symbolic capital was helpful, in turn, in soliciting research funding from the federal states and from industry. The postwar years were characterized, among other things, by the DFG’s intense efforts to draw the mechanical sciences more definitely into focus. To this end it sought closer cooperation with the VDI as well as with commercial businesses, and in doing so, regularly accepted the recurrent rhetoric about the demands of the market and alleged technological backwardness. From the quantitative point of view, unquestionably this worked. Yet it did not translate qualitatively into any targeted steering of research. Although a growth in the number of supported projects in the area of production can be seen during the postwar decades, on the whole, the DFG continued to stabilize the path previously followed by the mechanical sciences and machine building toward technical design.52 Technical design itself was henceforth given a central place in research. 52 Cf., for example, Prof. Dolezalek’s letter to the president of the DFG, 11 Jun. 1963, UA Stuttgart, 27/167a. Dolezalek pointed out the necessity of basic research and technical design also in production engineering and called for their being more strongly institutionalized.

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This meant turning away from the notion that design was an “art.”53 New kinds of research on technical design were thus supposed to contribute toward rationalizing and systematizing technical design. Reduced to a few basic principles, it was additionally supposed to meet commercial requirements, rationalize production, and yield flexible problem-solving strategies. That was why establishing a Priority Program for technical design was considered.54 The DFG’s annual report for 1969, outlining a projected emphasis on developmental research in mechanical engineering, pointed out the high place technical design nonetheless continued to hold.55 The conventional orientation toward technical design in Germany was still going strong at the end of the period examined. From the point of view of the agents, these commitments did not constitute a grave problem. They banked on the tried-and-true cooperation between engineers and professionals in companies. These mutual exchanges promised, and in most cases were able to deliver, an efficient and workable problem-solving potential for manufacturing issues.56 This plan, in turn, demarcated a conventional arrangement within German mechanical engineering. CONCLUSION Throughout the observed period, the dominant research topics in the mechanical sciences supported by the DFG can be assigned to application-oriented basic research with a tendency toward elaboration of theoretical interpretative patterns. Thus, the DFG revealed its subservience to German classical guiding notions of the mechanical sciences. It stabilized connected paths in the culture of technical design. At the same time, it supported a commercial strategy in mechanical engineering defended by actors situated at universities. It fought for positions on the global market with technology-intensive, highly complex, excellently designed products. This, in turn, correlated with the mid-sized business structure, which set narrow limits on genuine industrial research as well as on the integrated state-supported research pursued by the DFG in tandem with industrial research. This was why companies were not willing to participate financially in its Priority Programs. The dominant orientation toward technical design of state-supported research is undoubtedly also attributable to the epistemic culture of the engineering sciences in Germany. Against the backdrop of the guiding scientistic images of the engineering sciences formed in the last third of the nineteenth century, the penetration of science in technology had specific traits in Germany, compared internationally.57 The engineering sciences measured themselves against 53 On the “scientistic” concept (Verwissenschaftlichung) in design practice, cf. Heymann/Wengenroth, Tacit Knowledge; Heymann, “Kunst” und Konstruktion. 54 DFG annual report for 1969: Berichte, pp. 63 f. 55 Ibid. 56 Manske, Stärken; Kalkowski et al., Technologiestandort, p. 87. 57 Cf. Hänseroth, Konstruktion.

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the methodological ideal of the calculational and experimental natural sciences and cultivated the superiority of fundamental research over decidedly applied orientations. Even the engineering sciences, the “sciences of doing” situated at the intersection between knowledge production and knowledge application, pursued a basic-research-oriented scientistic strategy and developed a clear tendency to close themselves off from short-term external stimuli. Such guiding models were much more easily implemented in technical design than in manufacturing processes, however. The latter evaded stringent model-building and mathematical theory for a quite a while. Thus they absolutely did not fit the ideal of epistemic safeguards within the classical engineering sciences. During the period examined the manufacturing processes used in practical machine building could still be mastered through systematized and descriptive approaches very close to practice and were adaptable, where needed, to new requirements. Research based on the fundamentals with a tendency toward theory formation scarcely appeared necessary within this field for a long time. When the first theoretically ambitious scientific solutions to production processes were at last discovered, the relevant practical problems were still lacking. In contrast, scientific support in the area of technical design proved useful for mechanical engineering from the very start.

COMPUTERS FOR SCIENCE – SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE IN THE GERMAN SCIENTIFIC SYSTEM 1870–1970 Ulf Hashagen It is a commonplace to say that in Germany scientific computing (Wissenschaftliches Rechnen) and computer science (Informatik) developed between 1870 and 1970 within a national system of organized science and innovation.1 More specifically, the first – unsuccessful – attempt to establish scientific computing as a “crossdiscipline” within the German scientific system was made at the beginning of this period, and the “fundamental discipline” of Informatik was institutionalized as the West German form of computer science at the end of it. It is doubtful whether the historigraphy usually applied to the history of mathematics and informatics treating this development as part of the history of a specialty and hence as early history of computer science is an appropriate historiographical method.2 Therefore, this essay will view the computer, as well as the numerical and graphic methods, the mathematical tables, and mathematical instruments and mathematical machines as a partly interrelated array of tools used as a specific kind of research technology3 in the natural and engineering sciences.4 In addition, the users of these mathematical methods, instruments, and machines are considered as the decisive actors.5 The question also arises as to how particular cultures of scientific computing formed in different disciplines is furthermore examined and how they either remained constant or changed under immanent or external influences. I would maintain that the historical process can then only be comprehended through an analysis of the various “specialty histories” interconnected by such institutions as universities, governmental ministries, professional scientific associations, and funding organizations, as well as by processes of negotiation in the scientific system as a whole. Therefore, the importance of national or disciplinary scientific ideologies and institutional structures of the knowledge system will be investigated as to how they affected the application and development of 1

Initial analyses exist using various historiographic approaches. See the studies by Petzold, Maschinen; Mehrtens, Mathematics; Hellige, Geschichten. 2 On the problematic influence of specialists on the historical narration of their fields, cf. on computing Mahoney, History. 3 The term research technology must be defined and interpreted differently here from how it is done in Joerges/Shinn (eds.), Research-Technology, however, because scientific computing, based on the computer and the numerical methods, does not fit into the “taxonomy” developed there. 4 On the history of scientific computing, cf. the bibliography: Yost, Guide; and Agar, Difference. 5 On the role of technical users, see Oudshoorn, Users.

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methods and instruments of scientific computing and as to how they affected the emergence and institutionalization of the new discipline of informatics. BASIC CONSTELLATIONS IN THE GERMAN SCIENTIFIC SYSTEM 1870–1918 In the 1870s the first attempt was made to institutionalize scientific computing within the German scientific system. Wilhelm Foerster (1832–1921), the highly influential director of the Berlin observatory, established an Astronomical Computing Institute (Astronomisches Recheninstitut) in Berlin along with an affiliated Seminar for Scientific Computing (Seminar für wissenschaftliches Rechnen). The founding of this seminar at the University of Berlin was aimed at introducing students of mathematics and the exact sciences to the theory and practice of scientific computation.6 Foerster’s initiative was, among other things, a reaction to a basic constellation in the German scientific system that had formed in the nineteenth century and continued to be effective far into the second half of the twentieth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific computing was a characteristic and recognized activity of a scientist or mathematician. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, it was deemed an inferior scientific occupation.7 A second related problem was that during the nineteenth century the mathematicians at German universities focused their attention more and more on theoretical research problems without any connection to physical or astronomical objects. Instead, mathematical theories had been developing toward symbolic reference systems of significance only to itself.8 The overall picture shows that applied mathematics had lost considerable ground to the dominant methodological ideal of pure mathematics. It is clear that numerical methods that before 1850 had attracted the attention of many mathematicians were no longer regarded as interesting topics for research. At long last Foerster’s attempt at changing this general development failed because the disciplinary influence of his Seminar for Scientific Computing remained limited to astronomy. It proved impossible to institutionalize scientific computing as a new scientific “cross-discipline” and to compete successfully against the methodological ideal of pure mathematics within the German university system and surmount the disciplinary boundaries set up in the nineteenth century between mathematics, physics, astronomy, and geodesy. It was only at the turn of the century that new interest in numerical computation arose in the German scientific system within the different fields of science and engineering. Fundamental papers as well as a series of influential textbooks 6 Reglement für das Seminar zur Ausbildung von Studierenden im Wissenschaftlichen Rechnen an der Königlichen Universität zu Berlin, 4 Jan. 1879, Berlin 1879. 7 On the developments in the English and French knowledge systems, see Daston, Calculations. 8 Mehrtens, Moderne.

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appeared about the fields of numerical analysis and scientific computing.9 In addition, the doyen of German mathematics, Felix Klein (1849–1925) managed by virtue of his good connections within the Prussian System Althoff to establish a newly defined subdiscipline: applied mathematics (Angewandte Mathematik), which combined descriptive geometry, geodesy, and engineering mechanics. During the next two decades Kleins’s iniative gained in importance in the further development of numerical, graphic, and instrumental computation methods and their status in the German scientific system.10 As these institutionalizing efforts were in progress, the mathematician Carl Runge (1856–1927) was appointed to the newly created chair for applied mathematics at the University of Göttingen in 1904. Under his direction Göttingen developed into the leading center for applied mathematics. Runge created a disciplinary agenda for applied mathematics centered on numerical, graphic, and instrumental methods, assembling it into a research and educational program under the label “practical mathematics” (Praktische Mathematik).11 An important aspect of these developments were the systematic analyses that Runge conducted on mathematical instruments and calculating machines and their uses in mathematics and science, reflecting the leading position of the German instrumentmaking industry of that region.12 Even so, the disciplinary effect of practical mathematics on the German scientific system remained relatively limited because most scientists had a low opinion it and its staffing base remained narrow. By the end of the Kaiserreich applied mathematics did not manage to increase its number of professorships at German universities. Nevertheless, it has to be pointed out that, compared to Britain, France, and the United States, the institutional innovations in the area of applied and practical mathematics under Klein’s and Runge’s leadership in Germany made some considerable headway during the Wilhelmine Empire. Whereas such innovations were almost entirely lacking in the American system, French mathematicians and engineers laid strong emphasis on graphic methods, and British scientists evidently concentrated on the further development of mathematical tables. INNOVATION – FALLEN BEHIND – FINANCIAL CRISIS 1918–1933 These developments set in motion during the Kaiserreich were continued during the Weimar Republic within the framework of one of the largest innovative achievements of the German scientific system – the close linkage of engineering science with methods used in mathematics and experimental science. It is quite certain that World War I had acted as a catalyst, because it had boosted 9 These developments fit well into a picture outlining a high developmental dynamic for the turn of the century. Cf. Szöllösi-Janze, Science. 10 Schubring, Mathematics. 11 Cf., e. g., Richenhagen, Runge. 12 Fischer, Instrumente; on the research-technology matrix in the German Kaiserreich, cf. Shinn, Matrix.

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decisively certain developments that led to new initiatives and constellations directly after the end of the war.13 New kinds of problems were thrown open in many areas of the engineering sciences that could not be solved using the existing arsenal of methods. The Association of German Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, VDI) consequently founded the journal Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (ZAMM) in 1921, and the founding of the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik, GAMM) followed one year later as a “German association for scientific engineers.” So it would appear that a new “linking discipline” was established between engineering and mathematics. Its research agenda was set by the theoretical, experimental, and mathematical problems cropping up in the engineering sciences. There is a fundamental difference between Klein’s and Runge’s activities to establish applied mathematics during the Kaiserreich and these developments, which did not have the goal of introducing a new mathematical subdiscipline. I venture to suggest that neither did clear boundaries exist between the fields nor was any distinct research agenda defined. This time, boundary work was being conducted, and successfully so.14 In comparison with the highly innovative creations ZAMM and GAMM, the institutionalization of applied mathematics remained rather ambivalent during the Weimar Republic. The Göttingen institute experienced a decline under the poor financial conditions of the postwar period and as Runge’s research agenda became paralyzed. The leadership role in applied mathematics passed over to the Institute for Applied Mathematics founded by Richard von Mises (1883–1953) at the University of Berlin in 1919, where a comprehensive teaching program was being offered that also included numerical, graphic, and apparative methods. The few professors of applied mathematics at the other universities, however, made virtually no impact on the advances in scientific computing and practical mathematics. It is worth mentioning here that the situation for applied mathematics was better at polytechnics (Technische Hochschulen). During the 1920s a few younger applied mathematicians were appointed to professorships at polytechnics and some institutes for applied or practical mathematics were even created there. However, because of the strong orientation toward teaching by mathematicians at polytechnics their effect on the advances in practical mathematics remained limited.15 On the question of whether there was scientific progress in numerical, graphic, and instrumental methods in Weimar Germany, my answer is deliberately diffident so far. Practical mathematics was built up by Runge and his pupils in the 1920s as a closed system. The textbooks published largely gave the field definitive form, yet they also reflected the stagnation beginning in Runge’s endeavors during the 1920s. New impulses for research on numerical and graphic methods as well as for the invention of new mathematical instruments came 13

Cf. on the role of World War I in the scientific development, Szöllösi-Janze, Science. For the theoretical context, cf. Gieryn, Boundaries. 15 An example here is the development of the TH in Darmstadt, which is partly portrayed in de Beauclair, Walther. 14

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primarily from von Mises’s activities in Berlin and from the scientific community of applied mathematicians and theoretically orientated engineers around the ZAMM and the GAMM. Whereas articles on numerical and graphic methods were regularly published in the ZAMM, these fields played only a subordinate role in the research agenda of the newly defined “boundary discipline” of “applied mathematics and mechanics.” A second, related problem was that, although Weimar Germany remained the global leader in the manufacture of superior mathematical instruments and mechanical calculating machines, it could not keep pace with certain developments in the American scientific system. Whereas the electrical engineer Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a large analog computer (the Differential Analyzer) for solving differential equations in the late 1920s and made it into the basis of his department’s research program,16 commensurate developments at the Munich Polytechnic ran aground at the start. The limited state financing of science in Weimar Germany as well as a lack of acceptance of practical mathematics in the German scientific system did not permit any larger-scale innovations in the area of mathematical instrumentation. Just consider, by way of illustration, the funding policy of the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) supporting virtually no projects on applied and practical mathematics during the Weimar Republic. More specifically, the Notgemeinschaft acted extremely hesitantly when it came to equipping institutes with mathematical instruments and computing machines, and only offered entirely insufficient grants for the design of new mathematical machines. In comparison with the institutional developments in scientific computing in France, Great Britain, and the USA the stagnation and lack of innovative energy in the German scientific system is perfectly obvious. Take the case of electrical modeling technologies of analog computing being employed within the aerodynamic research complex of Britain and France from the 1920s onwards. Whereas this led to the founding of the Laboratoire d’Analogies Électriques in 1932 at the Sorbonne in Paris, there was no equivalent to this laboratory in Germany.17 To take another example: a pendant was likewise missing at German universities to the service centers for mathematical problem solving in the sciences (“mathematical laboratories”) founded at some British universities in the 1920s. A similar out-of-date image for applications of machines in scientific computing emerges from a comparison between the Nautical Almanac Office in England and the German Astronomical Computing Institute. At the Nautical Almanac Office, Deputy Superintendent Lesley J. Comrie (1893–1950) extensively introduced (German) mechanical computing machines, later also Hollerith machines, and developed new methods adapted to machine use for calculations of ephemeris data.18 While the German economy experienced a wave of mechanization and rationalization that also frequently led to a fundamental reorganization of office 16 17 18

Owens, Bush. Care, Chronology. Croarken, Computing.

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work and heavy usage of calculating and Hollerith machines,19 the Astronomical Computing Institute in Berlin continued to settle for gradual change. These observations could be taken to mean that the last flowering of the German scientific system during the Weimar Republic can simultaneously be interpreted as failure due to the economic crisis. The financial limitations impeded innovations in German scientific institutions as it drove researchers to reach for new heights in theoretical achievement not as heavily dependent on resources.20 FROM IDEOLOGIZATION AND DECLINE TO WAR AND MOBILIZATION 1933–1945 It is a well known fact that National Socialist science policy had demonstrably strong repercussions on the development of mathematics in Germany. In addition to the exodus of almost one third of the professors and lecturers of mathematics and the loss of its leading position in the world, the quarrels about “Aryan mathematics” (Deutsche Mathematik) led to a crippling of the entire system of mathematics in the 1930s.21 Applied mathematics, too, was decisively weakened. It lost its leading figures to emigration, including such mathematicians as Richard von Mises; and the politically motivated appointments of second-ranking Nazi mathematicians caused his institute to experience a decline. Despite these great emigration losses, a limited amount of research on numerical, graphic, and instrumental methods continued to be conducted after 1933. In numerical analysis, however, only a few younger mathematicians, such as Mises’s pupil Lothar Collatz (1910–1990), produced more important work. In instrumental mathematics, Alwin Walther (1898–1967) was of primary importance. In the mid-1930s he founded an Institut für Praktische Mathematik (IPM) at the Darmstadt Polytechnic – harking back to the Göttingen tradition of practical mathematics. Walther cooperated closely with the Bavarian instrument maker Ott in making the design and application of mathematical instruments into a specialty of the IPM. Moreover, his institute developed into probably the bestequipped university institute with mathematical instruments in Germany in the 1930s. Yet his small staff and heavy teaching emphasis only allowed him relatively narrow influential scope.22 Altogether, the development of mathematical instruments and mechanical computing machines remained a strength of the German innovation system in the 1930s, but “large” mathematical machines were not built. Whereas the American Differential Analyzer, which had pushed the limits of classical mathematical instruments, was introduced in the “mathematical laboratories” of some British universities,23 the initiatives by Walther and other German scientists fell through 19 20 21 22 23

Nolan, Visions; Petzold, Rechnende Maschinen. On the innovation capacity of the German scientific system, cf. also Harwood, Styles. Schappacher, Fachverband; Remmert, Mathematiker-Vereinigung. De Beauclair, Walther. Croarken, Computing.

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for lack of funding and inadequate insight into the state-administered organs of science, which banked on the conventional top achievements of pure mathematics in Germany. The low opinion of scientific computing in Germany furthermore prevented the establishment of new institutions as were being founded in other countries. In the late 1930s there existed in France at the Institut Poincaré elaborate plans for a centralized computation laboratory, at some universities in Great Britain extensions or new foundings of mathematical laboratories, and in the USA the founding of an Astronomical Hollerith-Computing Bureau at Columbia University, where punch machines were employed on a large scale for astronomical computations.24 Typically enough, the militarily financed establishments in Germany, defined by that subsystem’s practical rationale, certainly were capable of designing very large computing devices in the 1930s. For instance, the world’s largest mechanical tide calculator was developed at the German Marine Observatory (Deutsche Seewarte) between 1935 and 1939. The outbreak of war then produced a fundamental break for research in applied mathematics as well as for the position of mathematics in the German innovation system. The controversies over “Aryan mathematics” soon proved completely pointless, and a stage of de-ideologization, mobilization, and “selfmobilization” (Herbert Mehrtens) of mathematics ensued for the furtherance of war research. Mathematical procedures were increasingly applied in areas of importance to the war effort – such as aerodynamics and ballistic missiles – leading to a “finalization” of mathematical research in Germany.25 This mobilization of mathematics for war research led to an enormous intensification of research on numerical and graphic methods and their applications. In addition, isolated cases did exist in which computing devices and Hollerith machines were employed on a large scale, and the building of large mathematical machines (integrator systems, program-driven computers) began. As in the USA and in Great Britain, the war gave a great modernizing boost to applied mathematics, especially in numerical and instrumental mathematics.26 Three examples will demonstrate the specific forms of this modernizing boost to the German innovation system. First, technical problems in war research led to important results in new areas of numerical mathematics and its practical applications. Take the case of the path-breaking analyses carried out by Helmut Wielandt (1910–2001) at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Fluid Dynamics Research (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Strömungsforschung) in Göttingen on complex eigenvalue tasks that had been inspired by flutter problems in airplane-wing design.27 Second, numerical procedures were used in war research to attain new dimensions in the scope of solvable problems, sometimes with extensive machine use – take the case of the solution of systems of linear equations. For applications in war research the time needed to perform given procedures using differ24

Baron, Computer Science; Croarken, Computing; Grier, Computers. For an analysis reference is made to papers by H. Mehrtens, M. Epple, V. Remmert, and R. Siegmund-Schultze; cf. Mehrtens, Mathematics; Remmert, Mathematicians; Epple, Synthese. 26 Cf., e. g., Siegmund-Schultze, Work; Goldstine, Computer. 27 Mehrtens, Mathematics. 25

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ent computing and Hollerith machines was studied. Also, the German Marine Observatory used its Hollerith machines extensively, punching 20 million cards to numerically solve the systems of linear equations for calculating the tides. Third, there were areas in which an intensive “finalization” of research activity manifested itself at very different stages. This was the case, for instance, in the solution of ordinary differential equations. For technical tasks numerical computations were performed on a large scale, numerous papers were published about special types of differential equations as well as about numerical and graphic methods to solve differential equations. Moreover, countless reports were issued on specially adapted procedures for ballistics and other problems encountered at the Aviation Research Institutes and at the Army Ordnance Office (Herreswaffenamt). However, the most striking change brought on by the war came shortly after its outbreak: the building of German differential analyzers. Two differerent types of differential analyzers were built by Alwin Walther and by the mathematician Robert Sauer (1898–1970) from the Aachen Polytechnic independently from each other for the Army Testing Station at Peenemünde and for Army Ordnance, respectively. Furthermore, for the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR), the differential analyzer came to symbolize the country’s backwardness compared to the American innovation system. As a result, from 1943 on the RFR placed considerable sums at Sauer’s and Walther’s disposal to build Differential Analyzers at their university institutes as well. These machines were supposed to be used by scientists at their universities and polytechnics. However, at long last no differential analyzer could be completed owing to the constantly worsening shortage of industrial engineers in precision mechanics up to the war’s end.28 Beyond this thematic reorientation in research, an inquiry into institutional changes at research institutes and universities in this area generated by the war29 yields a very similar picture in the cases of Sauer and Walther. Walther’s IPM and the Institute for Practical Mathematics founded by Sauer at the Aachen Polytechnic followed a similar developmental course during the war years and converted in a short time from “educational institutes” at polytechnics to “service and research institutes” for the military/industry complex of the Third Reich. The educational ties of both mathematicians’ institutes to higher education fell increasingly into the background as the war dragged on. The work at both institutes was heavily application-oriented, and the research reports they issued for their military contractors indicated through their style, brevity, and poignancy that, despite a larger physical distance from their commissioners, they were working very closely on concrete problems their engineers were grappling with, and the reports offered direct assistance in how to deal with them technically. Both scientists tried to use the wartime to further the institutionalization of the field of practical mathematics at their polytechnics and to improve their budgetary, 28

Petzold, Maschinen. Here, we are only exploring one specific form of war research in numerical and instrumental mathematics, namely, that conducted at institutions of higher education; cf. also Epple, Synthese. 29

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staffing, and institutional resources permanently for the benefit of their research. These two institutes differed relatively clearly on only one point: Whereas Sauer’s institute did not experience any particularly large growth in personnel, Walther used the situation to expand the IPM on a large scale, and the number of his coworkers grew tenfold. A look at the form that scientific steering took in applied mathematics during the war reveals that until 1942–43 there was no coordination. Rather the “clients” of war research alone determined which fields and questions were addressed. This situation began to change in 1943 when the president of the German Mathematical Society (Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung), Wilhelm Süss (1895–1958), was appointed head of the RFR mathematics Study Group and subsequently, using diplomatically clever power politics, attempted to direct all research in pure and applied mathematics – including the building of mathematical machines. Although Süss was promoted in 1944 to head an independent department (Fachsparte Mathematik) in the RFR, he was far from totally in control of applied mathematics. He neither exerted influence on the mathematical research conducted by the Luftwaffe and Army Ordnance, nor did he – as a second class pure mathematician – have the expertise necessary to coordinate research in applied mathematics. Süss’s primary goal to strengthen pure mathematics within the German scientific system instead caused the coordination of research in applied mathematics to fail. Furthermore, the Reichsinstitut für Mathematik – founded by the RFR in 1944, headed by Süss, and originally planned as a national institute for computing – remained practically irrelevant in war research. During the planning stage, Süss had transformed that imperial institute into a research center for pure mathematics that also worked on problems in applied mathematics.30 Sauer and Walther were among the leading scientists to be involved in the design of mathematical machines. At the end of 1943 they each obtained separate commissions by the leading researchers at the Luftwaffe and Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production to act as central advisors on developing mathematical devices. By the end of the war Sauer and Walther were intensively engaged in advisory activities – and they successfully backed the construction of a program-controlled relay computer offered by the private company owned by Konrad Zuse (1910–1995) for aviation research.31 Yet the innovations in computing instruments, supported by the military-scientific complex with comparable funding and the construction of large mathematical machines started too late to have a major effect on the innovations of the war economy. Although modernization and mechanization was clearly on the rise in computation in science and technology during the war years, the “standard model” of the German innovation system remained the computing institute. Its staff mostly consisted of a team of human computers within a larger institute of mathematics, astronomy, or aerodynamics, who performed extensive numerical computations by means of mechanical calculating machines and other computing aids. 30 Cf. on this with some diverging interpretations, Remmert, Mathematicians; Epple, Aerodynamics; Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft. 31 On Zuse cf. Petzold, Maschinen, where the roles of Sauer and Walther are unmentioned.

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They range from a few scientists and students carrying out computation tasks in an university institute to the Darmstadt IPM with its almost a hundred female computers as part of its work force. The full range extends further to the forced computing labor of scholars at the Institute for German Eastern Labor (Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit) and prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.32 A comparison with the British and American systems reveals similarities but also definite differences in the way that science was steered in instrumental and numerical mathematics. It also shows how much the National Socialist scientific system failed, particularly the RFR’s steering of this field – despite some major academic achievements by individual excellent scholars. In Great Britain, at first similar to in Germany, individual research and computing facilities were set up to perform numerical and instrumental computations. However, their further development led to the successful founding of a central computing institution that performed research directed by the Admiralty. Finally, shortly before the war ended, a national computing facility for the British National Physical Laboratory was also founded.33 This comparison with Great Britain and the USA points out, in addition, what disadvantages an authoritarian-structured steerage of science can have when an incompetent person is at the helm, steering it according to the wrong premises. Scientific direction in applied mathematics worked very much better in Great Britain and the USA – with its Applied Mathematics Panel founded in 1942 – than in Germany.34 OBSERVATION AND REPLICATION 1945–1959 The end of the war had an entirely different repercussion for applied mathematicians in Germany than on their fellow professionals in England and the United States. Whereas applied mathematics – above all, numerical analysis – in the USA underwent an immense dynamic development in the postwar years and became an influential figure in the American innovation system,35 these areas of research in Germany lost their institutional and financial base in war research. Added to that, a “self-demobilization” occurred, with most mathematicians choosing to return to the scientific ideal of “pure” mathematical research. Sauer, Walther, and Collatz were among a small group of professors who remained applied mathematicians even after war’s end. They constituted themselves anew within the framework of the refounded GAMM and returned to the niches and structures of the prewar period. This successful refounding had to face the problem that the institutionalization of applied mathematics (and particularly numerical and instrumental mathematics) at German universities remained an exceptional phenomenon during the 1950s. Nevertheless, despite this return 32

Mehrtens, Mathematics; Segal, Mathematicians; Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft. Croarken, Computing 34 On the coordination of research in applied mathematics in the USA, cf. Owens, Mathematicians. 35 Cf., e. g., Lax, Flowering. 33

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to the research ideal of pure mathematics with its powerful institutional repercussions, there were a few institutional innovations within German universities that took up the developments in numerical and instrumental mathematics from the war years as well as the international scientific developments in the USA and England. Besides a few chairs at polytechnics orienting their research toward numerical and instrumental mathematics, in 1953 the University of Hamburg founded an Institute for Applied Mathematics specialized in numerical methods, and in 1954 the University of Bonn founded its Rheinisch-Westfälische Institut für Instrumentelle Mathematik. One basic problem proved to be that – different from in the USA, England, and Switzerland – German scholars had no access to program-controlled digital computers until the middle of the 1950s. Therefore, it was not always so easy for them to execute the recent numerical analysis, which had been transformed by digital computer science.36 A related specific to the German scientific system was that both institutes in Bonn and Hamburg as well as the IPM “model institute” in Darmstadt long “coveted” a mechanical Differential Analyzer for their research – in direct continuation of the wartime developments inside Germany. As a consequence the German innovation system finally did adapt their usage of large analog computers – but over twenty years after the first developments in the USA. With this technology, unsurmountable obstacles no longer stood in the way of solving difficult differential equations in engineering. As in the British and American systems of science, the new connection between numerical computing methods and electronic computer technology did not immediately decommission all preexisting mathematical instruments, mathematical tables, and analog computers. Rather there was partly parallel usage of analog and hybrid computers far into the 1970s. It offered great advantages for many engineering problems and represented another kind of culture of mathematical knowledge.37 This concentration on analog computing machines was also a reflection of the scientific development of the early postwar years. The German developments of program-controlled computers ended with the collapse of the Third Reich or was interrupted for a long period of time. Their development in the USA and Great Britain continued full steam ahead and two British universities managed to build the first electronic von Neumann computers in the world in 1949.38 A few German scientists realized in the late 1940s that this computer technology was incomparably faster and at the same time universal. The fame that Sauer and Walther had earned during the war as singular experts in instrumental mathematics also bore its weight in the scientific system in the Federal Republic and both scientists played a leading role in the development of electronic computer systems. This development was started separately at three institutions in 1949–50: at the Munich Polytechnic under the direction of the electrical engineer Hans Piloty (1894–1969) and the mathematician Robert Sauer, in the IPM at Darmstadt 36 On the transformation by computers of numerical analysis, see Goldstine, Computer; Aspray, Transformation. 37 Small, Alternative. 38 Cf., e. g., Goldstine, Computer.

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Polytechnic under Alwin Walther’s leadership, and at the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Göttingen by the physicist Heinz Billing (*1914).39 These three groups came together in 1952 in a Commission on Computing Systems (CCS, Kommission für Rechenanlagen) founded upon Piloty’s initiative at the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). This commission became an influential force in the development and application of computers in the West German innovation system up to the end of the 1960s. The CCS proclaimed that the design of automatic electronic digital calculators would become the exclusive business of the academic institutes in Darmstadt, Göttingen, and Munich. Through Piloty’s influence at the DFG it was possible to channel the financial support in the DFG’s Computing Systems Priority Program (Schwerpunktverfahren Rechenanlagen) in such a way that scientists outside of this group had hardly any chance to obtain funding. By this “monopoly policy” it was hoped that the Anglo-American advantage could be redressed and the German scientific system could be provided with the necessary electronic computing machines. Generous funds supported digital computer projects and the “mathematical-logical preparation of computer programs” by Sauer as well as analog computer designs. The CCS arranged for communications between the three computing projects and from 1953 on organized colloquiums for the members of the participating projects. The information was exchanged internally within the commission and excluded other German scientists from sharing the latest knowledge about electronic digital computers.40 The DFG could be pleased about its computing policy, because by 1955–56 it had three digital computers to show for it: the G1 and G2 in Göttingen, and the PERM at Munich Polytechnic.41 Albeit this success was somewhat questionable because the period of DFG-supported monopolization and custom designing at universities was rapidly coming to an end. In 1955 a commercial vacuum-tube computer, the IBM 650, arrived on the market that soon became widely available and was used at many universities mainly in the USA. The DFG also came under increasing pressure about the CCS’s monopolizing policy on computing technology because a few influential aerodynamicists and applied mathematicians were demanding access to the new electronic digital computers. The true, unintentional success of the DFG’s policy was that, through the construction of computer centers, a larger group of competent experts was formed that subsequently supervised the equipping of German universities with computers as well as assured that German science caught up with the rapidly evolving computer science in the USA, England, and Switzerland. Despite their great advantage in computer design, universities in England and to a certain extent also in America were not quite as far ahead of German universities as one would expect, as far as their computer equipment was concerned in the mid-1950s. By 1955 only three universities in Great Britain were 39

Petzold, Maschinen. For the CCS’s point of view on its Computing Systems Priority Program, see Wolman, Rechenanlagen. 41 DFG report: Berichte, 1956, pp. 26 f. 40

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equipped with an electronic digital computer and British research funding organizations were only just beginning to address the issue of whether universities generally ought to be furnished with computers.42 In the USA, the first von Neumann computers were installed at a university in 1952 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) established a committee to address the question of equipping universities with computers as late as 1955.43 The situation looked considerably worse in France. An attempt to build an electronic computer at the Institut Blaise Pascal, founded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in 1946, fell through because the research project exceeded the limited abilities of the institute director in charge.44 The relatively late entry by German scientists into the field of electronic digital computing did not have a negative impact on active collaboration in computer science as it was evolving in the 1950s. In general, early entry into this new research field on electronic digital computers did not necessarily work advantageously toward its furtherance.45 Important scientific papers on programming problems did appear in the USA and Great Britain,46 but a few young mathematicians from the Munich and Darmstadt Study Group caught up with international developments through their own research on computer design and from working together with Swiss fellow professionals in the mid-1950s.47 A larger gap can be ascertained in the usage of computers by scientists and engineers: The few computers in Great Britain and the USA were put to intensive use in cristallography, meteorology, and numerical analysis and thereby introduced new conceptual and methodological changes in entire areas of research.48 “COMPUTING REVOLUTION” VERSUS DISCIPLINE BUILDING 1959–1970 Despite the general developments of the mid-1950s, it was only in 1959–60 that German universities started to be equipped with electronic computer systems on a large scale. Until the second half of the 1960s the DFG was the decisive actor in this field. Although the federal government provided large sums to the DFG to procure electronic computing installations as early as 1956, the latter decided against purchasing expensive foreign computers in favor of pushing through the founding of a German computer industry. The medium or smaller-sized computers that the DFG ordered from German companies did not yet exist and some of them could only be delivered in 1959–60. The DFG did not consider the negative effects of this purchasing policy very important. Yet in some areas of sci42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Agar, Provision. Aspray, Scientists. Mounier-Kuhn, Institut. Aspray, Entry. Campbell-Kelly, Development. Bauer, ALGOL-Verschwörung. Aspray, Transformation; Agar, Difference.

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ence and engineering the new electronic digital computers were urgently needed in order not to fall too far behind international developments. For the next few years as well, not computer users but electronic computers were at the focus of the DFG’s science policy, and the DFG initially even purposefully restricted the use of computer systems in science and engineering by setting bureaucratic and financial obstacles.49 It very quickly became apparent that the demand by West German scientists for computing could not be satisfied by the “large-apparatus campaign” initiated in 1956 and by a dozen computer installations. The computer systems installed at a few universities in 1958–59 had already reached full capacity by 1960. Despite these problems the DFG succeeded in coordinating the equipping of universities and research institutions with computers and covering the annually rising demand for computers within the existing feasibility limits. The CCS served as a central advisor to universities about their needs. It systematically observed the computer market and drew up plans for further equipping institutions of higher education. The size of the grants already indicates the magnitude of this task. By 1965 they were substantially more than for all other large scientific instruments.50 Nevertheless, the DFG, in its attempt to shape the transformation of the scientific system necessitated by the racing technological developments, very soon hit its limits. Since 1957 the DFG had been doggedly pursuing the goal of founding a national center for cutting-edge computing to supplement the local university computing centers. It took until 1962 to sort out the welter of competencies between the DFG, the regional states, and the federal government before the Deutsches Rechenzentrum could be inaugurated in Darmstadt. In the interim the concept of a national center had become questionable because the DFG had meanwhile been compelled to set up three regional computing centers equipped with particularly powerful computer installations. Additionally, quarrels arose about the direction the national center was supposed to take, and the incompetence of the ministries and scientists involved led within a few years to the demise of that large-scale project.51 The demand for a state-of-the-art German computing center with particularly powerful computing installations at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s came primarily from researchers on crystalline structure, meteorology, atomic and nuclear physics, aviation, and oceanography. Compared from an international perspective, German scientists in many disciplines clearly reacted hesitantly at first to the new technology of electronic computers and clung to more conventional research approaches. From 1960 on there was a sudden turn in the general mood, but sweeping modernization of the German system of the sciences began only in the middle to the end of the 1960s. German scientists and technologists remained well behind their Anglo-American fellow professionals in the use of 49 DFG report: Berichte, 1957, pp. 34–35. Elektronisches Rechnen in der Forschung, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, vol. 3, 1958, pp. 1–10. 50 Elektronische Rechenanlagen und andere Großgeräte, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1965, issue no. 1, pp. 23–26. 51 This is partly documented in Wiegand, Informatik.

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electronic computer systems as a result. This was also connected with the fact that certain subdisciplines in the German scientific system were underrepresented owing to their historical development. This applied, for instance, to theoretical chemistry and quantum chemistry as well as to crystalline structure analysis. At the same time, the DFG started Priority Programs in these fields and thus contributed substantially toward the modernization of the German research landscape. However, in numerical mathematics there was a fundamentally different situation at the end of the 1950s. Sauer and his pupil Friedrich L. Bauer (*1924) as well as Collatz had long since caught up with international developments in this field and were collaborating closely with leading numerical analysts in the USA, England, and Switzerland. In the 1960s the number of professorships in applied and numerical mathematics was on the increase, partly at the instigation of the German Council of Sciences (Wissenschaftsrat). Thus, by the beginning of the 1970s a relatively broad basis had been created for research and teaching in numerical analysis. But this is only part of the picture. By the mid-1960s the situation looked much more problematic for research in the field of computer science. Bauer and Klaus Samelson (1918–1980) made notable contributions from the mid-1950s on, for example, exerting decisive influence on the development of programming languages in the international arena (the stack concept, ALGOL).52 However, the personnel basis for the further development of emergent informatics remained too narrow at that time.53 With its Computing Systems Priority Program, set up in 1957, the DFG contributed only in a very limited way toward promoting research in the newly forming field of computer science because most of the grant money was spent on training the staff at the computing centers and only a very small group of persons received additional support for research projects. Whereas during the 1960s the DFG acted competently and successfully in furnishing institutions of higher education with computing centers and supporting scientific computing, up until the mid-1960s the German scientific system lacked state actors capable of pushing through disciplinary innovations in a concerted effort with science and industry. The regional ministries of culture proved to be too inflexible and financially weak, the majority of them also incompetent and caught up in Länder egoisms. By virtue of its mentality as a cooperative selfadministered organization, the DFG was unsuited for conceiving fundamental structural changes in science and carrying out the founding of a new discipline, computer science, in the German scientific system. The new field of Informatik was established and institutionalized only in 1967–68, when the setting in Germany for research policy had changed very much and when the Federal Ministry of Education and Science stepped forward as a new actor in response to the “technological gap” compared to the USA. The Ministry of Education began to provide massive support for this field of research and technology by means of a number of “data-processing programs” (DV-Programme) and from 1968 on spe52 53

Bauer, ALGOL-Verschwörung. DFG report for 1959/60: Berichte, pp. 35–36.

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cial grants were issued to create new professorships in informatics as well as for extensions and new buildings for existing institutes. The founding of the society Gesellschaft für Informatik in 1969 then demarcated the final constitution of the new discipline within the German scientific system.54 If one compares the German development of scientific computing and informatics in the 1950s and 1960s with the American, British, and French developments, one has to conclude that the German scientific system’s rise to this challenge was quite successful and by the end of the 1960s it was able to catch up with the international developments in research – provided one does not skew the comparison by using as the yardstick the much larger American scientific system, which acted under entirely different preconditions. Whereas the British development shows that a greater starting advantage does not necessarily lead in the long run to a leading position in the rapidly changing field,55 the French development demonstrates how much centralized steering of science, together with an ideology that raised the extreme form of Bourbakism to an ideal for pure mathematics, could impede informatics.56 In the comparison with the American development, the large differences in research support catch the eye. Besides the lack of military support in Germany, it is immediately noticeable that, until the mid-1960s, the DFG was the sole actor in this field. This is where the basic weaknesses of the German scientific system lay compared to the USA. The many different civilian and military funding organizations can be regarded as a decisive advantage in the American system’s greater capacity for innovation.57 The specific American scientific landscape had the additional great advantage that the computer industry mainly assumed the task of equipping universities. Furthermore, the much larger scale of funding in the USA does not permit any real comparison with West German research support. In the Federal Republic of Germany the federal government disbursed from 1952 to 1966 a total of 180 million deutschmarks to fund data processing; the majority of it was financed through the DFG. In the USA just the annual state expenditure on computing rose from 700 million dollars in 1958 to 7 billion in 1964. In 1958 alone the American government invested more than ten times as much in computers than the Federal Republic of Germany did in fifteen years.58

54

On the establishment of Informatik in Germany, comp., e. g., Coy, Informatik. On the furnishing of British universities with computers, see Agar, Provision. 56 Cf., e. g., Baron, Science. 57 Cf. on the promotion of research in information technology in the USA, e. g., National Research Council, Revolution. 58 Aspray, Scientists. 55

THRIFT MATERIALS, DOMESTIC MATERIALS, AND SUBSTITUTES – METALS RESEARCH IN GERMANY 1920–1970 Günther Luxbacher Historical accounts of German research on manufacturing materials have repeatedly assumed that it followed a special long-term path of its own: materials science was oriented toward the development of substitute materials. According to this argument, such research had already been conducted during the Weimar Republic. Germany had a “substitute economy”1 and “science-supported isolationism” with the goal of the “greatest possible autarky” as regards raw materials and had systematically and consistently adhered to a “substitute material culture” in a kind of mental “barricade of wagons” or in a “cage” throughout the different political epochs up to the Federal Republic of Germany.2 Were German scientists and engineers really primarily oriented toward such political and economic motives? Two facts support an affirmative response to this question. First, Germany’s raw material resources were and still are relatively scarce. Although it was a latecomer colonial power, at the same time Germany counted among the most highly industrialized states. These preconditions made it seem plausible that Germany took special care to develop state management of raw and manufacturing materials in order to minimize import costs for raw materials, on the one hand, and/or to maximize secure supplies in the case of crisis or war, on the other. Second, this ambitious mid-sized power expended much research effort within the context of the two World Wars with the purpose of covering the immense demand for industrial raw and manufacturing materials in a war economy (autarkic policy), circumventing the blockade policy of the Allies. During World War I, for instance, the founding of important scientific institutions was supposed to assist this. Researches on raw and manufacturing materials conducted at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Metals Research and the KWI for Iron Research,3 with the decided support of Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, were supposed to alleviate shortages in the supply of metals, among other things. A whole series of researchers had been trained to tackle these tasks. Many of these institutions were developed further in the Weimar state. Finally, less than fifteen years later this

1

Lesser, Resources, p. 36. Wengenroth, Flucht, pp. 52 f., 55, 57, 59; similar in approach, cf. also Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 217 ff.; Marsch, Industrieforschung, p. 426. 3 Flachowsky, KWI für Eisen. 2

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kind of research once again became part of the government’s agenda within the framework of the National Socialist autarky policy.4 According to the latest research, during the two periods of war and the National Socialist Four-Year Plans, state organizations took the initative in acquiring raw-materials5 and in research motivated by autarky.6 Since the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG)7 was a state scientific agency for the promotion of basic research, this chapter will investigate whether and how it supported these endeavors across the epochal divides in the period from 1920 to 1970. For practical reasons, this examination has concentrated on the most important industrial sector, that of metals. However, it addresses the whole processing chain from research on natural deposits to extending the useful life of materials. The view taken on the subject as a discipline has also been broad. It incorporates fields of practice in physical chemistry as well as in the engineering sciences and ranges from theoretical solid-state physics to simple mechanical materials testing. Did the state, in fact, primarily and continously finance scientific and technical research into problems pertaining to the national economy of materials or even to substitutes? What was going on in the heads of academic researchers? Did elements of a nationally conceived rationalization of materials, parsimony, recycling, substitution, and redevelopment survive there even without a war economy? And did these conceptions remain as a lasting motive, guiding real actions? SUBSTITUTE MATERIALS AND SUBSTITUTE-MATERIALS RESEARCH Substitute materials had their boom periods during the two shortage-ridden war economies. Because during the Weimar Republic the term “substitute material” (Ersatzstoff) implied wartime quality and therefore had a negative connotation, the National Socialists created the new term “exchange material” (Austauschstoff) to describe the same thing. Later, during the war, other terms were presented, such as “thrift material,” “domestic material” (Sparstoff, Heimstoff), etc.8 In principle, all materials were to be substituted for that either diminished foreign currency stock – devisenzehrend, as they put it – or were simply in short supply because of the blockade measures taken by the Allies. Metals and alloys could be substituted for others or even for different materials altogether whose use was considered more 4

Petzina, Autarkiepolitik; Maier, Forschung, vol. 1, pp. 152–178; Rauh, Schweizer Aluminium; on energy fuels, see Kockel, Ölpolitik. 5 See, e. g., Tooze, Ökonomie, mainly the chapter on the regime and business enterprise. 6 Luxbacher, Kohle, pp. 453–502. 7 Or the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG) and the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR), respectively. 8 An exchange material was understood to be a material exchanged for a less profitable one, according to national economic criteria (i. e., foreign currency exchanges). Thrift materials were materials causing savings according to these same criteria and/or were exchanged wherever possible for domestic materials. See Maier, Ideologie, pp. 357–388.

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beneficial to the war economy. Economic assessments based on the conventionally drawn balance of trade between the nation’s imports and exports had to be modified in favor of considerations based upon a defense economy. A series of new state institutions had to be established in order to implement and coordinate this new strategy, primarily with regard to industrial producers. The Raw Materials Department of the Ministry of War and the Metals Advisory and Distribution Office for Machine Builders will suffice here as examples. The latter was installed in the Reich Office of the Interior with the involvement of the Ministry of War as well as the Union of German Machine-Building Establishments (Verband Deutscher Maschinenbauanstalten).9 During the National Socialist Four-Year Plans and World War II, the Reich Office for Economic Development (Reichsamt für Wirtschaftsaufbau, RWA) and Speer’s ministry mainly pushed these exchange measures forward in cooperation with the Association of German Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, VDI). But they also encouraged the extraction of new mineral deposits. Thus, various institutions advised industry and research along the lines that the state intended. However, other methods were increasingly resorted to, such as confiscation and other coercive measures. The deputy head of the Metals Advisory and Distribution Office for Machine Building, Georg von Hanffstengel wrote in 1916, that the war, “with reference made to the use of metals in machine building, had swept aside many conventions.”10 Substitute-materials research in the area of metals related to very concrete materials, such as copper and tin. Any substitution measure always had to be preceded by a technical analysis of its performance spectrum and the specific demands made on a particular manufacturing material. One could not simply replace steel pieces for machine parts out of copper alloys, for example. That did not even work for mass-produced parts, such as machine bearings. Criteria like strength, flexibility, brittleness, conductivity, corrosiveness, weight, resistance to chemical substances, etc., had to be taken into account in each individual case. Only after such a preliminary investigation could the research work begin. In many cases the dimensions of a product had to be changed when there was a change in the choice of a manufacturing material. In other cases, exchanging the manufacturing material called for a given artifact to be partially – sometimes even completely – redesigned. Among other things, when a new material was employed, it required a different degree of accuracy to gauge dimensional stability or it necessitated a serious alteration in the production of a given machine part. Sometimes usage restrictions for the new artifacts or changes had to be tolerated.11 Substitute-materials research was applied research, and to a considerable degree, even, technical development and testing work.12 It was intimately

9 Georg von Hanffstengel, Über den Ersatz der Sparstoffe im Maschinenbau, attachment to the 483rd session of the VDI, Karlsruhe regional association, 5 Apr. 1916 (printed four-page ms.). 10 Ibid., p. 1. 11 Ibid. 12 See the numerous examples in Kessner, Ausnutzung. Similar to Hanffstengel, Arthur Kessner was heavily involved in the substitute-materials research of World War I.

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related to design issues.13 During World War II this went so far as to lead to a special publication on standards (conversion standards) or to an officially binding “Contract Procedure for Building Works.”14 In many cases the use of substitute materials was ruled out altogether because it was more efficient to leave out parts made of economizing materials in a completely new design.15 The essential site of substitute-material research was the laboratory of mechanical engineering and the workshop floor. Its methods were determined by technical practice.16 But there is more to this issue than research on substitute materials. Instead we are dealing with an entire set of measures. They also included, for instance, research on potential savings or on the tapping of new sources of raw materials. Special institutions were created in the field of raw and manufacturing materials to organize such research projects motivated by national economic policy. In the end, we should also investigate the larger political and economic context. As to the assumption that self-isolationism and the special path taken followed a continuous course in twentieth-century Germany, particular attention should be paid here to the economic policy of the Weimar Republic and the early Federal Republic of Germany. The interlocking aspects in the history of science and in institutional and economic history hence necessitate an expanded, deeper, and more intense contextualization within a closer examination of this topic. This contextualization is also necessary in order to be able to distinguish between substitute-materials research and other forms of change in manufacturing materials, for, when making all these assumptions, one should not forget that the employment of technically superior materials or materials that reduce the cost per unit constitute a central chapter in the history of human technology. Industrial manufacturers repeatedly improved, renovated, or replaced materials out of which their products were composed, be it for functional, aesthetic, or economic reasons. This phenomenon made its appearance in textbooks on political economics as a materials shift,17 or more generally, as a materials economy.18 The concept of “substitutematerial culture” hence falls short for the phenomenon at issue, which is why the more general term “materials economy” (Stoffökonomie) is preferable. We must in principle distinguish between offensive and defensive strategies in tackling the problem of resources. Purchases on foreign markets, the replacement of uncertain supply sources with others, the search for or exploitation of hitherto unknown or neglected deposits (for example in mining), as well as the military conquest and colonization of regions with abundant raw-material resources, count among the 13

On the close connection between materials research and design engineering, see Bürgel, Austauschwerkstoffe. This text was edited by Hanffstengel. 14 Verdingungsordnung für Bauleistungen: Weilbier, Austauschbestimmungen. 15 Cf., e. g., Wögerbauer, Werkstoffsparen. 16 See also the example of caoutchouc and rubber in Erker, Rolle, esp. pp. 421 f. 17 Materialverschiebung: Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, Beziehungen, pp. 199–205. Gottl- Ottlilienfeld defines Sparmaterial there on p. 199 as that material “whose inclusion instead of another helps better rationalize production.” 18 Stoffökonomie: Voigt, Ökonomik, p. 258. See the entire chapter on the economy of passive goods.

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offensive variants of resource management. All facets of economizing, including optimizing materials according to a product’s use value, recycling materials, and finally, substituting one material for another, count among defensive activities.19 Rationalizing materials and material cycles thus comprise a routine business in any industrial firm worldwide. Moreover, German industry in particular was always especially concerned about economizing and rationalizing production.20 Was this rationalization pursued to the point that, even between the wars, there were major research endeavors to replace imported materials with ones that could be produced domestically? Was industry perhaps supported in this by a powerconscious state? WEIMAR REPUBLIC – HIGHS IN SOLID-STATE PHYSICS INSTEAD OF “LOWS” IN METALLURGY Boycotted from 1914 to 1920/21, Germany invested – in international comparison – substantial scientific manpower in measures to economize materials.21 Such kinds of studies were not unfamiliar in other countries either. England, already a successful colonizer, had discussed related questions in the nineteenth century; the supply of raw materials in the case of war and potential “substitutes” were on the agenda again in 1903.22 Scientific and technical analyses on individual scarce materials were also conducted in the USA during World War I.23 Germany presented a comparatively restrained attitude about such precautionary supply issues.24 During the war, however, it surpassed the efforts of all the other countries. A fundamental change took place in Germany during the 1920s. The institutions of a war economy were dissolved and economic policy strove toward integration within the global market25 and exportation,26 even though the colonial powers emphatically intended to sustain self-sufficiency.27 The Great Manufacturing Materials Fair in Berlin in 1927 is evidence of how hard Germany was striving for peacetime quality and exports.28 Until about 1932 an autarkically 19 Günther Luxbacher, Konflikte und Lösungsstrategien bei der nationalen Versorgung mit industriellen Roh- und Werkstoffen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Talk delivered at the conference “Materia technologica”– Rohstoffe in historischer Perspektive, on 1–2 Apr. 2006 at the Deutsche Technikmuseum, Berlin. 20 Radkau, Technik, pp. 32, 112 f. 21 Knortz, Demobilmachung, esp. pp. 136, 140. 22 Report of the Royal Commission, vol. 2, pp. 142 ff., 348 ff. 23 See, e. g., Smith, Reserves, on the key role of manganese, for instance, pp. 15–17; on World War II, see Hurstfield, Control, pp. 61 f. 24 Cf. Burchardt, Friedenswirtschaft, pp. 58, 91 ff. 25 Cf. Schulz, Deutschland; more historically comprehensive in Pfetsch, Außenpolitik, p. 94. Accordingly, it may in fact have been reasonable for Germany to engage itself temporarily in some areas of substitute-materials research during the early Weimar Republic. 26 Ebi, Export, pp. 62 ff. 27 Comp., e. g., Smith, Theory, pp. 7 ff. 28 Die Große Berliner Werkstoffschau: Luxbacher, Wertarbeit, esp. pp. 9 f.

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motivated materials economy and the deployment of substitutes in Germany was not considered a presentable topic of discussion.29 Large segments of industry were happy to be able to make purchases on the world market again and to be rid of substitutes, which were mostly complicated to develop and process.30 Did the DFG, founded in 1920 as the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft, NG), devote itself to the national materials economy of metals? In any event, its first Priority Program within the context of many other future “cooperative projects in the area of the national economy, public health, and the common weal” did deal with metals research. In addition, as the Prussian minister of science during the war, DFG President Friedrich Schmidt-Ott had been crucially involved in the founding of the KWI for Metals and the KWI for Iron Research, which were oriented toward research on armaments and substitute materials. The case is similar for the professed radical right-wing chemist Rudolf Schenck,31 who headed the Gemeinschaftsarbeiten Metall. These Cooperative Projects on Metal, called to life in 1924, were dedicated in principle to basic research on solids, sampling metals, rocks, and earths. The research program was consequently, by structure and the methods it used, remote from any substitute materials. Its agenda also reveals little of the kind. Approximately 800 papers appeared within the framework of the Cooperative Projects on Metal, the majority of which are attributable to basic research in physical chemistry or enineering science.32 This corresponded to the German innovation system and scientific style of the state.33 This research program focused on theoretical analysis of the subject,34 an analysis of the research tools,35 the development of research technologies,36 the mathematization of methods and findings,37 which could be considered as preliminary research to the future study 29 It is notable that from the end of the 1920s self-sufficiency visions became fashionable in many industrial nations. They have recently been discussed under the key words economic nationalism and protectionism. See, e. g., the collection of essays Schultz/Kubu (eds.), History. 30 Luther, Wirtschaftsfragen, pp. 19 f. The electrical industry was pleased not to be using “savings materials” anymore from 1921 on. See e. g., Maximilian Frese: Die Geschichte der Spitzenverbände der electrotechnischen Industrie. Ms., archive of the Zentralverband Elektrotechnikund Elektronikindustrie, Berlin, vol. 1, p. 66. 31 Ludmann, Verband, pp. 58, 179, 191, 243. 32 Metallforschung, vol. 1, esp. pp. 5–30; Deutsche Forschung, issue no. 15: Metallforschung, 2nd communication, esp. pp. 7–32; Deutsche Forschung, issue no. 22: Metallforschung, 3rd communication. 33 See, generally, Weingart, Stunde, pp. 178 ff., 185 ff. 34 The first two departments of the NG’s Cooperative Projects on Metal were dedicated to research reports on the “essence of the metallic state” as well as on the “structure and physical and chemical properties of metals and alloys.” See Metallforschung, vol. 1, pp. 8, 11. 35 Here primarily on the utilizability of x-rays for x-ray spectral analysis and analyzing crystalline structure; see Macherauch/Neff, Entwicklung, pp. 345 ff. 36 Analogous to biochemistry, for instance: See Rheinberger, Experimentalsysteme, pp. 18– 34; similarly in fiber materials research during the interwar period, see Luxbacher, Roh- und Werkstoffe, esp. pp. 10 ff. 37 Particularly by means of diagrams, tables, formulas, geometric configurations, and laws in crystallographic research with x-rays; comp. Hümmer, Röntgenstrahlen, pp. 366–385.

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of solids,38 inquiries into the basic essence and structure of the metallic state (research on the constituents), and topics in chemical metallurgy (processing) and molding.39 In accordance with this profile, most prominent academic physical chemists, such as Gustav Tammann and Friedrich Körber, were members of the managerial board. The Cooperative Projects on Metals wanted primarily to use scientific apparatus to provide structural analysis to solids, crystals, and metal alloys and in doing so to come as close as possible to the level of atoms and electrons.40 Two such priorities were research at extremely low temperatures and, most of all, x-ray diffraction analysis. Three points appear to be noteworthy. First, researchers were intent on driving forward the more recent analytic methods of x-ray microscopy developed by Max von Laue, Hermann Mark, and Michael Polanyi and to spread them further by establishing professorial chairs in Germany. In fact, William Bragg and his son Lawrence were elaborating on these same methods in England almost exactly at the same time.41 Second, the NG managed to cut an important profile within the German system of innovation42 and score a few points against its rival, the Helmholtz Society (Helmholtz-Gesellschaft), by supporting this new method of analysis in the field of metals, as opposed to the areas of biochemistry and medicine.43 Third, consistent with this, findings were funded that could be gathered using these methods of investigation, such as analyzing properties and changes in properties of metals and their alloys from factors acting on them, such as temperature and pressure (the crystalline state, characteristics of crystal lattice, deformation textures, superconductivity, etc.). One conspicuous priority lay in the area of metallochemistry. In 1927–28 a comprehensive and basic program commenced on the study of processes in physical chemistry occurring in the blast furnace. A hastily established Subcommittee on Physicochemical Fundamentals of Steel Making had implemented this in fear of Germany falling behind a similar project by the Bureau of Mines in the USA.44 A small fraction of the projects within the Cooperative Projects on Metal were devoted to problems in applied research, for instance, analyzing what was 38 For example, much work on superconductivity was funded within the framework of the NG’s Cooperative Projects on Metal. On the general principle, see Hoddeson et al., Phaenomena, pp. 489–616; for the specifics, see Schenck, Bericht, pp. 8 ff.; cf. also Cahn, Materials Science, pp. 45 f., 57–71, 121 ff. 39 Marsch proposes the thesis that substitute-materials research stimulated increased research on chemical constituents in Germany: “German problems therefore had to incorporate research topics on chemical constitution if metals were to be substituted by others or made equivalent.” Marsch, Industrieforschung, pp. 426 f. 40 On the relative importance of basic research at universities to the industrial real world, see König, Industry, pp. 70–101. 41 Cahn, Materials Science, pp. 67 ff. 42 Lundvall (ed.), Systems, pp. 13 ff.; cf. also Johnson, Approach, pp. 28–44. 43 Eckert et al., Roots, pp. 68 f. 44 Schenck’s son wrote a report about this. Hermann Schenck: Bericht über die in America ausgeführten Arbeiten über die Physikalische Chemie der Stahlerzeugungsverfahren, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), papers 325/6, pp. 322 f.

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precisely happening to these differently composed metallic solids when exposed to temperature, chemicals, or mechanical deformation.45 One essential goal was to draw diagrams of binary and tertiary systems,46 today the basis of any textbook on metallography.47 Corrosion was another area of research,48 the perfecting of aircraft materials and engine components, as well as practical materials testing.49 Rudolf Schenck, the member responsible for manufacturing materials on the Commission on Aviation Research, was asked to write secret technical reviews on materials for the high-altitude airplane.50 Which research projects had the goal of improving the materials economy? The areas of chemical equilibriums, corrosion research, ore dressing, as well as Schenck’s specialty – anorganic catalysts – were noticeably heavily supported. We do not know how interesting Schenck’s researches in fact were for practitioners of the German chemical industry. In any event, they were related with FischerTropsch synthesis, developed in 1926.51 Because this process was suitable for the production of artificial lubricants and benzenes from hard coal, one could identify an indirect link here with research important for the raw-material economy. It should not be forgotten, however, that research on metallic catalysts is important in a whole range of chemical processes. A few projects concentrated on increasing the yield of dressing low-grade domestic ores, such as those found on Rammelsberg.52 These examinations were far from developing into a full-fledged program, however. Only two projects were concretely concerned with substituting costly import metals for reasons of diminishing foreign currency stock.53 In the first instance, the issue was whether one could reduce the lead content in engine bearings by using other materials, such as zinc, which was more available in Germany.54 In the second instance, the goal was to create a substitute material for monel metal,

45

See, e. g., Tammann/Neubert, Erholung, pp. 87 ff. See, e. g., Grube/Schönemann/Vaupel/Weber, Zustandsdiagramm, pp. 41–74. 47 See, e. g., Guertler, Einführung, pp. 186–241; Schatt (ed.), Einführung, pp. 136–163. 48 Thiel/Ernst, Korrosionserscheinungen, pp. 97 ff. The dissolving rate of a base metal in acid falls if a local element is formed out of it and a suitable foreign metal. 49 See Schenck’s summarizing remarks in Deutsche Forschung, issue no. 22, 3rd communication, p. 55. On the project’s requesting the DFG to keep industrial secrets, see Trischler, Luftund Raumfahrtforschung, pp. 155 f. 50 Hansen, Berlin-Lichterfelde, 22 Oct. 1930, Bericht über den Entwicklungsstand des Höhenforschungsflugzeuges Junk. J 49, written on 14 Oct. 1930, “confidential!,” papers 325/6, pp. 357–368; enclosure to Schmidt-Ott’s letter to Schenck, 23 Oct. 1930, p. 356. 51 Rasch, Geschichte, pp. 176 f. 52 Seidl to Schenck, 28 Oct. 1930, BAK, papers 325/6, p. 353; Schenck to Stuchtey, 17 Nov. 1930, BAK, papers 325/6, pp. 285 ff. 53 As opposed to technically motivated substitutions, such as substituting pistons out of gray cast iron with lighter materials; see Deutsche Forschung, issue no. 22, 3rd communication, p. 55. 54 On the project by Moritz von Schwarz on “self-refining aluminium-cast alloys with a high elasticity limit. Machine for testing bearing metals,” see Deutsche Forschung, issue no. 15, 2nd communication, p. 40; and Schwarz/Fleischmann, Lagermetall-Prüfmaschine, pp. 1098 ff. 46

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a costly import in the clutches of a cartel in the USA.55 The Cooperative Projects on Metal had already been concerned with this project,56 but notable results were only achieved through a collaboration between an industrial metallographer and the Junghans firm, which was interested in cheaper clock-spring steels. They were initially kept secret, however, in the company’s interest.57 It is not clear whether either project advanced beyond the prototype stage. In the case of the monel substitute material, one application of this material at Junghans predating the Four-Year Plans of the Nazi era seems not to have received priority treatment. The high developmental and testing costs were presumably too daunting. They were unavoidable in the search for a useful substitute material. Even if both these projects had in fact gone into production, one could still hardly speak of German research having been oriented toward substitute materials compared to the comprehensive activities during the war or set against the total volume of the Cooperative Projects on Metal. Of much greater importance in assessing the profile of the Cooperative Projects on Metal was that these application-oriented projects agreed less with the self-understanding of tenured professors of physical chemistry at German universities than with the field of practice at technical training colleges, and above all with applications of engineers in industry.58 But engineers were rarely supported by the elitist Cooperative Projects on Metal. Nevertheless university researchers held the view that they were contributing much importance toward creating new technologies. The topos of technology as an applied science was very widely held at that time.59 Thus, for example, they were able to derive the behavior of particular materials from observations they described. The implicit assumption by university researchers was that design engineers of a steel-skeleton-built home or fortified bulwark, of a ball bearing for a digger, a tank, or an aircraft could draw everything they needed from the results of their laboratory observations. Yet the practical application of manufacturing materials to specific designs required entirely different forms of knowledge and experience. The fact that design and operating engineers mostly saw no need for the fine details on materials presented in physics textbooks60 was at best regretted by full professors, but not seen as much of an obstacle to the development of new technologies. It was not least a con55 A rare uncorrosive nickel-copper alloy named after the president of the International Nickel Company, Ambrose Monel. 56 Deutsche Forschung, issue no. 22, 3rd communication, p. 55. 57 See the studies on “clock research” by Poellein at the KWI for Iron Research, Deutsche Forschung, issue no. 22, 3rd communication, p. 18. This project appears to be of interest for commerical reasons as well as for its military application (“automatically registering instruments,” ignitions). 58 This should not, of course, mean that Ordinarien refused to cooperate with industry on principle. It is only to say that, as a rule, this cooperation within academic research in physical chemistry was not crucial to their careers. 59 For a critique see, e. g., Banse/Grundwald/Ropohl (eds.), Erkennen, pp. 346 ff. 60 If indeed they had the necessary knowledge at all, which cannot usually be presumed. See, e. g., the practical manual on engine building and manufacturing materials by Thum, Werkstoffe, 2 vols.; comp. also König, Ziele, pp. 97 f.

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sequence of the energetic support by the DFG’s Cooperative Projects on Metal that within academic materials science the model of solid-state physics, oriented toward physical chemistry, remained dominant compared to a technologically oriented materials science.61 The global economic collapse that nurtured the international growth of economic nationalism also left traces in the DFG. Although some aspects remind one of the later projects conducted under the Four-Year Plans, the primary underlying concern was providing an occupation for aspiring academics.62 The DFG considered, for example, systematically supporting researchers who encouraged the reopening of work-intensive old mines, the processing of old slag dumps, or the dressing of low-grade German ores.63 NATIONAL SOCIALISM – AUTARKY AS A RESEARCH RESOURCE The National Socialists implemented their own work creation measures. In 1934 the Reich Ministry of Economics stipulated a conversion to the usage of domestic manufacturing materials “without regard for the potential economic effects, such as a more expensive finished product.”64 Flanking such measures were compulsory cartels,65 foreign exchange controls, and raw-materials management by means of installed monitoring offices,66 price and production manipulation,67 as well as a continually expanding contingency economy,68 which ended up in a proper planned economy with the Four-Year Plan Authority.69 These political measures had a bearing on the scientific and technological research of the DFG in 1934. The substitute-materials researchers of World War I reentered the scene. During the Weimar Republic they had not been supported at all by the DFG or only to a very low degree. One of them, the practice-oriented metallographer William Guertler, took over the Cooperative Projects on Metal, replacing Rudolf Schenck.70 61

Materials science for engineers was oriented considerably more toward materials testing than toward solid-state research. 62 Stuchtey to Dewitz, 17 Dec. 1932, p. 176, with Schmidt-Ott’s enclosed memorandum to Schwerin von Krosigk dated 17 Dec. 1932, pp. 177–184, BAK, R 73/201. 63 See, for instance, Deutsche Arbeit. 64 Transcription of Lüttke’s letter to Deutscher Normenausschuss, 7 Sep. 1934, attachment 1 to Garbotz to Reichswirtschaftsministerium, 16 Oct. 1934, BAK, R 73/168, pp. 13 f. 65 Barkai, Wirtschaftssystem, p. 128 f.; or else state agencies threatened as much, cf. Luxbacher, Kohle, pp. 473 ff. 66 Overbeck, Methoden, pp. 123 ff. 67 On the shoe and leather industry see Bräutigam, Unternehmer, pp. 82 ff., 87–101; on substitute materials, idem, pp. 91 ff. 68 See, e. g., Erker, Wettbewerb, pp. 401–423. 69 Petzina, Autarkiepolitik, esp. pp. 96–113. 70 William Guertler’s talk on building up German metals technology on German manufacturing materials, held on 12 Jun. 1933 at the external institute of Berlin Polytechnic. Ms., Prussian State Library, Berlin, pp. 9–16. One should also bear in mind that Guertler was a propagandist of the German, primarily Saxon, aluminium industry, who surely perceived the autarcic Nazi policy as a chance to improve his career and at the same time his business. Schenck’s invitation

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The Law on the Thorough Study of the Reich Territory for Exploitable Deposits71 initiated research in the same year under the designation “Geophysical Survey of the Reich” as part of a program of the Reich minister of economics to survey prospective domestic raw materials, ores among them. The DFG, or RFR,72 respectively, positioned itself together with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society73 and the Reich Office for Ground Analysis74 as the most important official channel for advice on science and technology and its implementation for Nazi agencies. Although basic research still dominated, the share of application-oriented project approvals grew. The replacement of a material regarded as problematic for the war economy with a “blockade-proof ” material or “domestic material” was but one of many measures. Before scientific and technical researches were initiated on substitute and exchangeable materials, comprehensive studies had always been introduced on solving the problem in other fields of knowledge, such as economics, the study of deposits and ore dressing, etc., and above all in rationalizing material usage in business. Substitute-materials research constituted the smaller percentage of the scientific project to turn Nazi Germany into an autarky; it was scientifically demanding, anything but popular in industry, and last in the chain of measures.75 Thus, research on substitute materials became the ultima ratio of the state management of raw and manufacturing materials, as it had before, during World War I. Although Guertler exerted massive influence in support of autarkic research measures, the newly appointed head of the KWI for Metals Research, Werner Köster, succeeded in rising to the position of expert department head (Fachspartenleiter) of the RFR during Rudolf Mentzel’s presidency in 1937. His political agility, his reputation among his academic colleagues, and his scientific scope exceeded Guertler’s abilities.76 Similar to his predecessor, but this time in decisive cooperation with the Four-Year Plan authorities, he produced a “list of problems” for autarkic research on metals to solve, which he then also implemented as department head.77 Compared to the period before 1934, a markedly higher number of approved proposals did in fact concentrate on economizing measures and the procurement of substitutes.78 At least resorting to it increased the probability of a list, 27 Aug. 1934, BAK, R 73/167, pp. 103 f. For a characterization of Guertler, see also Maier, Forschung, vol. 1, p. 167. 71 Gesetz zur Durchforschung des Reichsgebietes nach nutzbaren Lagerstätten; Wagenbreth, Geologie, p. 180. 72 Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 220 ff. 73 Hachtmann, Wissenschaftsmanagement, pp. 286 ff. 74 See Kockel, Ölpolitik. 75 Carl Friedrich von Siemens to Schmidt-Ott, 10 Apr. 1934, BAK, R 73, no. 193, pp. 60 f.; ms. by Stuchtey, untitled, BAK, R 73, no. 193, pp. 62 ff. 76 Maier, Dreistoffsysteme, pp. 178 ff. 77 Telschow to Schenck, 19 Mar. 1937 with enclosed “final list of problems,” ms. on “pressing problems in the area of iron and non-ferrous metals,” BAK, papers 325/26, Rudolf Schenck; cf. also Maier, Forschung, pp. 428 ff. 78 See, e. g., Rudolf Plank’s report on the “corrosion of metallic substitutes in refrigerators by refrigerants as well as analyses on new saline coolants for low temperatures of –50 degrees Celsius,

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project being accepted, which could be increased further if the department head attested to its importance for the state or even for the war.79 The development of the disciplines of pedology and mineral-deposit research was similar. The autarkic Nazi agenda gave these fields a chance to augment their importance and therefore extend their access to resources.80 German metals researchers and physical chemists subordinated themselves, some of them happily, others insightfully, to the wishes and whims of the expert department heads Köster, Fry, Körber, Paschke, Beyschlag, and Beurlen. Sometimes out of nationalistic or National Socialistic conviction, through their self-image as responsibile civil servants of the state, or because of the ambition of getting additional commissions or research resources, they resigned themselves to the fact that state funding was more available in the area of military and economic armament and was generally being meted out more frequently to application-oriented projects. At the same time, researches on substitutes or on economizing was not regarded by most tenured professors as an advantageous career profile within their guild. Practically useful examinations of subjects of technical functionality were not ranked as highly on the academic value scale as theoretical research. One could cut a good profile with precision analyses on solid-state and electron theory or on thermodynamics. This career strategy was valid at universities but also, to a lesser degree, at polytechnics. There seemed to be a mutual agreement on utility at play that served the purpose of permitting internationally acknowledged “normal science” to continue to be pursued.81 On the one hand, the full professors wanted to make their own contributions to the war effort, on the other hand, they wanted to further their own university careers. As both goals did not necessarily contradict each other, most scientists worked toward covering both as far as possible. From this attitude a strategy emerged of trying to make both goals agree as much as possible in substance, such as describing and analyzing chemical and thermodynamic processes but exemplifying them in domestic ores, for instance. That way (theoretically at least) fundamentally new findings could be made about certain reactions while pointing out ways to optimize extraction from these mostly low-grade ores to maximize the yield. Geologists, physicists, survey on scientific researches supported by the Reich Research Council during the first fiscal half-year 1937/38.” Printed ms., Gräfenhainichen 1938, p. 27. 79 Opitz to Köster, 12 Jan. 1939, and Opitz to Köster and enclosed questionnaire of 6 Mar. 1940, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB), R 26 III/30, pp. 133 ff.; Piwowarsky to DFG, transcription for Köster, 21 Aug. 1939, BAB, R 26 III/30, pp. 146 f. 80 Schneiderhöhn, Forschungsprogramm für das nächste Geschäftsjahr und die dazu benötigten laufenden Mittel, 20 Mar. 1934, BAK, R 73/14443, film exp. 1425. According to Hans Schneiderhöhn: “I had worked out a plan a longer time ago to register German metal deposits and iron deposits,” that is, or at least so he alleges in 1934 “above all in view of goals of defense policy”; cf. Schneiderhöhn, Bericht über die im Berichtsjahr 1933/34 ausgeführten Forschungsarbeiten, 16 Mar. 1934, BAK, R 73/14443, film exp. 1420–1424; Schneiderhöhn to Stark, 22 Feb. 1935, BAK, R 73/14443, film exp. 1385. 81 See the contribution by Bernd-A. Rusinek; cf. also Ash, Wissenschaft; Ash, Wissenschaftswandlungen, esp. pp. 34 f.

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chemists, and technologists ultimately did not have to decide whether this route made any real economic sense. It sufficed for them that it appeared economically plausible. The alternative was justifying the work on military grounds. It could suffice to conduct a project in the area of corrosion research – a classical topic of metals research on cartridge cases – not on just any arbitrarily chosen object of investigation in order to drastically raise the chances of approval by the RFR, for research proposals certified by the expert department heads Köster and Körber as important for the war economy usually obtained the funding needed. Köster was even asked by an applicant to come up with something appropriate in his expert opinion, which he did without any objection.82 From 1943 onward acute shortages in raw and manufacturing materials became more and more frequent. Accordingly, commissions became more and more urgent and oriented toward applications. The RFR increasingly took on the character of a research and coordinating agency for various offices of the Wehrmacht and industry. Basic research receded into the background. For many scientists supported by the RFR, such research became routine: analyses of titanium as a substitute for nickel and molybdenum in armour plates and grenades,83 the feasibility of iron cartridge cases in view of the copper shortage,84 the use of Bessemer steel instead of cast iron for tank track links,85 and studies on reducing phosphoric manganese ores86 or on chloridizing roasting with domestic pyrites because sulphuric acid was among the economized substances.87 Examples of projects on substitute materials for which the RFR independently took the initiative as organizational agent included the search for oscillator crystals and mica substitutes by the High-Pressure Study Team (Arge Hochdruck) and the Mineral Synthesis Study Team (Arge Mineralsynthese).88 The RFR also granted large-scale support for research on strategically cheaper substitutes for metallic bearings. Friction and lubrication as well as corrosion research, a recurrent classical topic of materials research, were ranked high among research fields of importance to the war effort. 82 Letter to Köster, 13 Oct. 1944, BAB, R 26 III/519, p. 433; Köster’s reply, 28 Oct. 1944, BAB, R 26 III/519, p. 432. 83 Fry: Bericht über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Forschungsaufgabe: Titan im Stahl, BAB, 26 III/109, pp. 61–68. 84 Studies by Masing in the ms. In den Arbeitsgruppen der Fachsparte Eisen und Stahl laufende Forschungsarbeiten, 15 Apr. 1944, BAB, $ 26 III/109, pp. 37–41; Pomp’s “secret!” researches on Kupferersatz durch Eisen in Bericht der Fachsparte Eisen und Stahl über den Fortschritt der vom Reichsforschungsrat geförderten Arbeiten im zweiten Halbjahr 1944, BAB, R 26 III/109, pp. 61–68. 85 Piwowarsky’s research plan to the RFR’s War Economy Office (Kriegswirtschaftsstelle), “secret,” BAB, R 26 III/261, pp. 46 f. 86 Researches by Willi Oelsen in the report by the Fachsparte Eisen und Stahl: Fortschritt der vom Reichsforschungsrat geförderten Arbeiten im zweiten Halbjahr 1943 – “secret!”, BAB, R 26 III/109, pp. 69 f. 87 See, e. g., Kangro, Untersuchungen zur chlorierenden Gewinnung von Metallen aus armen Erzen, BAK, R 73/12026 (according to the DFG database); comp. Stratmann, Industrie, pp. 100 ff. 88 Semiannual report by the Fachsparte Bodenforschung, 1 Jan. 1944, BAB, R 26 III/164, p. 3.

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WESTERN-ORIENTED SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT OF APPLIED RESEARCH Research bans imposed by the Allies influenced the early Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) but extensive integration into the world economy soon followed. The last strictures from the Americans and the forced administration of industrial imports and exports could be removed in the course of the 1950s.89 Afterwards the Federal Republic satisfied its demand for raw materials completely on the world market,90 entirely opposite to East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, GDR), where technical projects on material rationalization, such as research on substitutes, were still being funded by the state well into the 1970s.91 West German managers in industry generally reopened contacts with the U. S. that had existed before the period of National Socialism. This was the case, not just in the area of raw materials and production, but also in the area of staff leadership.92 Similarly, the DFG did not return to the RFR’s program and form of organization, rather reaching back to the Notgemeinschaft of the 1920s as a funding organization for basic research at universities, which is one sign of an institutional discontinuity. Applied research, or even development and testing, were not part of its core competencies. The Panel on Applied Research (PAR, Ausschuss für Angewandte Forschung) that was eventually founded within the DFG in 1954, was born not so much out of expansionary desires but rather was the consequence of the lack of success by the Fraunhofer Society (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) and the Association of Collaborative Industrial Research (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen) in establishing a research institution of that sort and because the field seemed to be at risk of being forgotten by the nation’s innovation system.93 With this panel the DFG managed to continue to develop the prominent features in the research landscape over the long term “through planning and steering” (DFG President Ludwig Reiser) as an advisory organ of politics and as a middleman within academia.94 None of the former expert department heads reappeared in this top panel, but a number of scientists who had received RFR support certainly were involved. They included Willy Oelsen from the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Herwart Opitz from the machine tools department of the Aachen Polytechnic, the Hannoverian engineers Otto Kienzle and Egon Martyrer, the two aviation specialists Hermann Blenk and Günther Bock, the geologist from Munich, Albert Maucher. For their part, they solicited reports and advice from many of their colleagues who had formerly been supported by the RFR. However, the DFG 89

Kock, Trade Policy, pp. 141 ff. Buchheim, Wiedereingliederung, pp. 119 f. 91 See, e. g., Werkstoffeinsparung. 92 Kleinschmidt, Blick, pp. 95 f. 93 Trischler/vom Bruch, Forschung, pp. 46–59; Böttger, Forschung, pp. 49 f., 61–71; Zierold, Forschungförderung, pp. 516 ff. 94 Minutes of the 1st meeting of the Ausschuss für Angewandte Forschung, 20 May, 1954, pp. 1 ff., DFG archive, Bonn (with the author’s thanks to Mr. Pietrusziak at the DFG in Bonn). 90

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was hardly interested in promoting state management of raw and manufacturing materials. Neither a commission, an official publication, nor any of its Priority Programs were dedicated to it, even though when the PAR first took up its activities, it integrated in its memoranda the topics of raw and manufacturing materials, in particular metals, research on natural deposits, minerals and earths, and sheet-metal working.95 Discussions about substitute materials or even just considerations about a national economy of materials were not on the agenda at the PAR’s meetings. Neither did the panel members sent from the government ministries show any interest in them; nor did other institutions exist that could have advocated the issue. Such considerations played, if at all, a marginal role even in the very rare relevant research projects. Aspects of economizing materials were only incorporated where earlier experience with rationalizing industrial efficiency were called for under conditions of a competitive internationally integrated economy. The PAR discussed, for example, questions of quality assurance, research on use value, and rationalization of materials, such as in dressing low-grade ores, refining materials, corrosion, and durability. Marketing and international competition as well as industrial management considerations always outweighed economizing policies. The president of the Union of German Ironworkers (Verein Deutscher Eisenhüttenleute) and PAR member, Hermann Schenck, suggested a number of topics. These included analyses on the reduction of labor and costs in firms, such as in the consumption of coke fuel,96 but also research on chemical equilibriums and slag with an eye to salvaging the companion elements. However, the discussions about slag research and dressing low-grade ores held in the young FRG should be assessed within its international setting. Interest in this topic was rising generally in view of the secular process of dropping metal content in ores worldwide. The Committee on Applied Research for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) worked on it under British chairmanship97 and scientists in the USA also did so independently.98 The knowledge acquired by German experts within autarkic contexts would naturally have had to be of interest in these examinations. However, it seems that the international transferability of these German observations remained within modest limits. The PAR members regretted during the 1950s that the research under the autarkic policy of the National Socialists on low-grade ores had been conducted too unsystematically and cursorily.99 An advance was attempted in a single case to motivate the PAR “not only to preserve the [national] ore base but, if possible, also to enlarge it.” It came from 95

See, for instance, Anon., Angewandte Forschung, pt. 1. Hermann Schenck: Probleme der Eisenforschung, talk presented to the PAR, 7 Oct. 1954, pp. 1 ff., BAK, B 227 MF 7486-023, unpaginated. 97 Discussion on researching natural deposits: agenda item Lagerstättenforschung, minutes of the 8th meeting of the PAR, 10 Jun. 1955, pt. 1, p. 11, BAK, B 227/7487, unpaginated. 98 OEEC (ed.), Zinc, p. 7, 91–93. 99 Discussion on researching natural deposits: agenda item Lagerstättenforschung, minutes of the 8th meeting of the PAR, 10 Jun. 1955, pt. 1, p. 12, BAK, B 227/7487, unpaginated. 96

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the politically implicated Friedrich Buschendorf, who had worked along the lines of the Nazi autarkic policy and on the RFR commission that had studied French resources of lead, zinc, and antimony.100 His argument was based on competitiveness – namely, that the geology and study of mineral deposits conducted at the University of Freiberg appeared exemplary by comparison. His cautionary call received little attention because the trend toward internationalization and connections with the West drowned it out. The demand abroad for research results by German pedologists, geologists, and natural-deposit researchers had already grown steadily stronger by the early 1950s. It led, not only within the bounds of the PAR, to far-reaching internationally oriented suggestions to restructure the professional canon.101 Other subjects were in a similar situation. In 1955 a few chemists discussed within the PAR whether the DFG should contribute toward building up an industry of large automatic analytic recording instruments in Germany after the model of the USA so that they should not be dependent on foreign apparatus.102 The physicist Heinrich Kaiser, founder of the research institute for spectrochemistry in Dortmund, expressed the opinion held by the majority with the words: “efforts to achieve autarky have become senseless.”103 The PAR concentrated on other topics: general assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of German research; the debate over its deficits, and even the suspicion of a “technological gap”; issues concerning aspiring professionals; strategies for internationalization and questions of research support within NATO; the stance to take on new (private) research institutions; and the constantly recurring question of how to raise the German export quota through directed promotion of research in the natural and engineering sciences. The Priority Programs co-initiated by the PAR were oriented toward international models or were set up from the start as international cooperative projects. The Solid-State Physics Priority Program, which started to be planned as early as 1952, hence before the PAR was established, in close consultation with the Union of German Physical Societies (Verband Deutscher Physikalischer Gesellschaften – later consolidated into the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft), oriented itself entirely toward semiconductor research underway in the USA.104 The Materials Testing Priority Program did not even concentrate on metals or some other group 100 For example, Buschendorf, Lagerstättenkundliche Untersuchungen an französischen Antimon-, Blei- und Zinkvorkommen, BAB, R 26 III/18, 281, according to the DFG database. 101 Discussion on researching natural deposits: agenda item Lagerstättenforschung, minutes of the 8th meeting of the PAR, 10 Jun. 1955, pt. 1, pp. 14–17, BAK, B 227/7487. 102 Richard Vieweg, Physikalische Groß-Messgeräte, talk at the 7th meeting of the PAR, 29 Apr. 1955; materials for the minutes of the 7th meeting of the PAR on 29 Apr. 1955, pt. 2, BAK, B 227/7487, unpaginated. Discussion of Vieweg’s talk, minutes of the 7th meeting of the PAR on 29 Apr. 1955, pt. 1, pp. 1–4, BAK, B 227/7487. 103 Kaiser to the DFG, 4 May 1955, materials for the minues of the 7th meeting of the PAR on 29 Apr. 1955, pt. 1, BAK, B 227/7487. 104 Minutes of the expert board meeting (Fachausschuss) on 27 Jul. 1953 on evaluating proposals in the area of solid-state physics received within the framework of Priority Program (Schwerpunktprogram) II, BAK, B 227/FC7565N/731, 12, H. 1.

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of materials, but only on how particular testing procedures could be standardized.105 The Physics of Metals Priority Program submitted to the DFG by the head of the research laboratory of the Krupp steelworks, Eduard Houdremont, and the MPG expended its efforts on fundamental construction issues and lattice structures, as had the Cooperative Projects on Metal in the 1920s, as well as on thermodynamic problems regarding metals.106 The “Tribology” Priority Program (friction and lubrication) did not waste a thought throughout its existence from 1960 to 1968 on potential replacement materials for bearing materials, even though bearing trials had been a central project for the development of substitutes during National Socialism.107 CONCLUSION The term substitute-materials research falls far too short in outlining a presupposed “special German path” taken in twentieth-century materials science. Researching substitute materials is only one of many routes – and not even the most important one – to attaining autonomy from foreign raw-material suppliers. Both wartime phases demonstrate that trade strategies and power politics, the strategy of gaining access to new deposits, raising efficiency levels, generally economizing on material use, and technical design measures were of much greater importance. Anticipatory research on substitutes constantly flanked these measures and was not an isolated phenomenon. The exploration of substitutes was not a uniquely German but international phenomenon, even though it acquired its sharpest contours in Germany in the two wars. During the interwar and postwar periods, that is to say, during phases in which Germany was tied internationally within the global economy, other fields of economic and scientific policy were of greater significance. Researchers and themes pleading for German self-sufficiency receded into the background also within the DFG. Expert opinions sometimes evaluated systematically conducted research on the microstructures of the metallic elements as important for the national economy. Nevertheless, these statements were not primarily aimed at the analysis of potential substitutes. They rather very generally pointed to the potentials inherent in developmental research on innovative fabrication materials. Even under Nazism, autarky-driven research had its difficulties. In order for it to be implemented, it was necessary for science to be steered by state institu105

Lists on Schwerpunkt Materialprüfung, note by Gambke, Mar. 1957, etc., BAK, B 227/ FC7568N/731, 48, H. 1. See also the ms. Werkstoffverhalten für Konstruktion und Formgebung, 5 Oct. 1961, note by Heitz, 5 Oct. 1961, BAK, B 227/FC7571N/731, 75, H. 2. 106 The official formulation found for it in the PAR was: “Fundamental research was subsidized as well (albeit intentionally metallurgical problems).” (“Dabei wurden grundlegende Arbeiten (jedoch bewusst metallurgische Probleme) bezuschusst.”) See Bericht über das Schwerpunktprogramm der DFG auf dem Gebiet der angewandten Forschung sowie verwandter Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften und Technik, p. 3, materials for the minutes of the 17th meeting of the PAR on 11 Dec. 1958, BAK, B 227/7488. 107 Tribologie, pp. 7–14.

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tions; and it required the involvement of researchers who, for reasons of career strategy or realistic policy, had formerly not been working on substitute materials. Shortages of materials during the war generated a rise in economically motivated research on raw materials and manufacturing supplies. And yet even then such research projects remained decidedly in the minority. Substitute materials research is not a matter of solid state research by physicochemical apparatus in a university laboratory, rather it is the object of the testing room of the industrial workshop and of analyzing practical use. Without fine-structure analytics reflecting back on applied research, development, and trials, and without interactions with design, production, and practical application, matter may well be investigable, but not materials – despite the efforts by some full professors of physics and chemistry to present other rhetorical figures in their funding proposals.

THE “FOUR-YEAR PLAN FOR CHEMISTRY” AND “POLYMER SCIENCE” – THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND CHEMICAL RESEARCH FROM THE 1920s INTO THE 1960s Paul Erker At the beginning of the 1920s Hermann Staudinger presented a radically new paradigm for research in chemistry: He postulated the existence of substances composed of giant molecules with molecular weights of 10,000 and more. (Polyethylene, for example, has molecular weight 100,000.) Polymer molecules could be linear, branched, or cross-linked, each of these qualities accordingly influencing the properties of the substances. The complexity, diversity, and dynamics of macromolecular structures corresponded to specific physical and chemical properties, hence they ultimately also led to an endless variety of product traits for new manufacturing materials. The vision was: making it possible to influence and steer this process by tinkering with the “architecture of macromolecules” and affecting the regularity of the chain structure or distribution of chain segments.1 This concept initially met with general and hefty opposition, including from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). It rejected Staudinger’s grant application for 20,000 reichsmarks in 1929 to purchase a Svedberg ultracentrifuge – thereby giving Staudinger occasion to formulate his (not uncontroversial) viscosity formula. Staudinger’s new theoretical approach was shocking to organic chemists and physical chemists alike. One German chemist said in retrospect that the way it was formulated felt just as if a zoologist had been told that an elephant 45 meters long and 9 meters high had been found somewhere in Africa. The ensuing controversy, bitterly fought on both sides, continued into the 1940s and was additionally politically charged during the period of National Socialism. Contrary to Staudinger’s assertions that the Nazi regime had obstructed and shunned macromolecular chemistry, the second half of the 1930s rather marked the breakthrough of the new view and scientific approach. The result of this polymer revolution was the appearance of new chemical processes and products. We still know little about the formation, implementation, and propagation of this scientific concept during the Nazi period and during the first two decades of the Federal Republic – particularly from the perspective of the individual actors (that is, scientists, companies, research institutions, and the political regime) and 1 The volume of essays edited by Staudinger’s wife offers the most complete overview of his research: Staudinger (ed.), Werk.

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particularly as regards the steering and promotional influence on the research.2 What influence did the Nazi period have on the composition, formation, dissolution, and restoration of these scientific communities? What specific paths, conceptual traditions, and scientific orientations of chemical research were reinforced, restricted, or blocked? And to what extent? What courses did they follow after 1945? How great was the defining power of companies in the formulation and implementation of chemistry-related DFG programs? Was there an “Americanization” of chemical research in Germany? And most importantly: What role did the DFG play with its funding policy before and after 1945?3 In examining these questions, two approaches are methodologically and conceptually interesting. First, the application of the boundary concept, i. e., examining the processes and problems involved in the shaping of a scientific profile and the drawing or erasure of borders between disciplines.4 Polymer science, as the science of macromolecules, developed into a new boundary discipline between physical and organic chemistry, between chemistry and physics. In other words, there was a rapid development with broad branching into all the other areas: into physical and physiological chemistry, into medicine, biology, and physics, into theoretical chemistry/quantum chemistry, and into mathematization and chemical technology. This “new idea” – or better put, this advance – into an entirely new world of molecules had some ambivalent features, as all branches of science do. Of course, the new macromolecular chemistry could also be applied according to the prescriptions of a “Four-Year Plan for Chemistry.” Hence, it included research on substitute materials, artificial synthesis of raw materials such as natural rubber, fuels, fibers. In other words, through polymerization one could transform the cheapest possible substances of lower molecular weights into valuable high molecular compounds. But in the end, all this extended very much further, to the invention and artificial synthesis of completely new materials as well as to completely new knowledge about chemical processes and substances. The boundary concept additionally turns our attention to the role of father figures in molding the identity of this new discipline. In this case, the rivalry between the two “main father figures” Hermann Staudinger and Hermann F. Mark lasted from the dispute about macromolecular models in the 1920s to the terminological dispute in the 1960s.5 This approach also touches on the manner and scale of boundary blurring in chemical research. It possesses, in addition, high-potential links with industrial history. Alfred D. Chandler’s “defining and redefining of strategic 2 Fundamental sources continue to be Furukawa, Polymer Science; Morawetz, Polymers; and Deichman, Flüchten, on chemistry during the Nazi period. 3 The most important primary sources besides the various individual funding files of the DFG or the RFR in the Federal Archives in Koblenz and Berlin are the central collections on Otto Bayer (Bayer archive, Leverkusen), Hermann Staudinger (archive of the Deutsches Museum (DM), in Munich), and Peter A. Thiessen (archive of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG) in Berlin). 4 Cf. Gieryn, Boundaries; Morris, Fields; Furukawa, Science; also Nye, Chemical Philosophy; idem, Science. Furthermore, the findings of the Sixth International Conference on the History of Chemistry, Neighbours and Territories. The Evolving Identity of Chemistry in Aug.– Sep. 2007 in Louvain, Belgium. 5 Cf. the two autobiographies: Staudinger, Arbeitserinnerungen, and Mark, Molecules.

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boundaries” is followed to explore the transgression of old boundaries by companies and their research and development (R&D) into new fields of business.6 The second approach centers on the resource constellations of science, the economy, the general public, and politics. It changes the point of view but at the same time relates closely to the first approach in that it examines the mutual delimitations, references, and border transgressions along the lines of relational history.7 The focus here is on the processes of negotiation in reorganizing and redesigning resource ensembles. That is, research is understood as complex processes of negotiation between the Nazi regime, or the various institutions steering research, and chemists in the rapidly changing environment of the 1930s, with its altered relations and utility expectations. This negotiation process, conceived as the careful weighing of corporative autonomy/self-guidance against state guidance/instrumentalization, proceeded both institutionally and organizationally as well as scientifically and practically. The question arising out of this is: How were resources mobilized on the part of science as well as the Nazi regime? The outcome of frequently conflicting acts of negotiation was a network-like cooperation between interest groups in scientific and technical chemistry and National Socialist bureaucracies or wielders of power. Precarious yet efficient arrangements with ranking policy-makers from the profession certified the mutual balance of interests between chemists, an armament economy, and Nazi representatives.8 To this extent, it is a question of scrutinizing more closely the individual actors in this relational web and network – that is, Staudinger and others from university science; industrial research and industrial researchers, represented by Walter Reppe, Georg Kränzlein, and Otto Bayer; research establishments outside of universities, namely the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI); and finally, state institutions, such as the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) and the DFG, represented by Peter A. Thiessen. NETWORK OF MACROMOLECULAR CHEMISTRY RESEARCH DURING THE NAZI PERIOD It is worth taking another closer look at the struggle and controversy surrounding Staudinger’s notions and his concept of macromolecules. This debate was heavily influenced by distorted conceptions which still persist, of traditional, and therefore outmoded research approaches versus modern or forward looking ones. Mark’s “American” approach, polymer science, originating from physical chemistry, is still considered more modern compared to Staudinger’s macromolecular chemistry, which came from classical organic chemistry.9 Staudinger’s approach, in turn, was considered far more modern than the conceptions of colloid chemistry,

6 7 8 9

Chandler, Shaping. Cf. Ash, Wissenschaft; Nikolow/Schirrmacher, Verhältnis. Lemuth/Stutz, Patriotic Scientists, p. 598. Cf. Furukawa, Inventing; Morawetz, Polymers; also Feichtinger, Wiener Schule.

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which was competing with it in many respects.10 On the one hand, the clearly sinking reputation of colloid chemistry had to do with its objects of analysis. It came to be known as “grease chemistry” (Schmierenchemie) from its analysis of greases and oils. On the other hand, colloid chemistry was also cast in a bad light because some of its most important representatives in Germany, including Wolfgang Ostwald and Peter A. Thiessen, were particularly closely connected to the Nazi regime. Thiessen headed the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry from 1936 onwards and, as the DFG/RFR expert department head for chemistry, was a man of great influence in the distribution of resources in chemical research during the Nazi period.11 The guidance function and “steering efficiency” of the RFR itself should not, in fact, be overrated because the expert department heads had attained a high degree of autonomy – Thiessen in particular. Having managed to mobilize substantial sums for chemical research, Thiessen determined their distribution – the lion’s share went to his own KWI. He arranged contacts as needed between the Reich Office for Economic Development (Reichsamt für Wirtschaftsaufbau, RWA) and the military, and also maintained contacts with industry (the chemical company Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie – I. G. Farben). They were useful to him in coordinating and adjusting the research projects. Lastly, he assigned research work and funding right up to the final months of the war. Science managers, such as Thiessen or Walther Gerlach, acted largely according to their own sense of duty to science. In Thiessen’s case that meant promotion of widely scattered, heterogeneous research strongly oriented toward basic research. It was his conviction that this was precisely what was needed for optimal procurement of resources for the Nazi regime in abidance by a “Four-Year Plan for Chemistry” and “defense chemistry” (Wehrchemie). Thiessen’s importance corresponds to the rise of new types of resource managers in science, for whom political attitude became a central factor of resource mobilization. The history of macromolecular chemistry during the Nazi period seems to be a classical example of this resource constellation, in which the Nazi regime or the state and academic and extramural research tossed balls, that is to say, personnel and funding as well as armament and war-related results and findings, back and forth to each other. However – calling to mind the quarrels between Staudinger and Ostwald – it also demonstrates that this did not always work over the long term. As concerns the research approach and scientific understanding, it is apparent that Thiessen, in particular, advocated a new colloid chemistry that integrated Staudinger’s conception and opened up numerous avenues to modern research founded in physical chemistry and its quantitative, mathematical, and theoryoriented way of addressing problems. Thiessen applied this approach to his own research or, respectively, to the research projects of his KWI’s interdisciplinary staff, which included pupils of Staudinger, such as Kurt H. Meyer and Mark.12 10 For instance, Deichmann, Flüchten, pp. 380 ff.; cf. conversely Somsen, Modern; cf. also Pritykin, Role; Bernal, Greasy Chemistry. 11 Cf. the first personal sketch of Thiessen: Eibl, Thiessen. 12 For the KWI’s research projects, see Abhandlungen aus dem Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie in Berlin-Dahlem, vols. 23–28 (1935/36–1941). Thies-

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He also applied it to his highly autonomous funding policy as expert department head at the RFR. The strong connection between experiment and theoretical interpretation permeated Thiessen’s style of science as well as his vehement pursuit of the latest analytic methods, of roentgenography and electron microscopy, along with mathematical procedures.13 Apart from Thiessen, this modern mix between physicochemical colloid chemistry and organochemical macromolecular chemistry was only practised by I. G. Farben in its numerous research laboratories, including in particular the interdisciplinary Polymer Basic Research Unit established under Meyer’s direction in Ludwigshafen at the beginning of the 1920s. This lab employed many of his pupils, Mark among them, who represented this physical colloid chemical approach. In Ludwigshafen this team of about forty researchers included Hans Fikentscher, Walter Reppe, who since 1938 headed the main scientific laboratory, and Heinrich Hopff, who was responsible for directing the Laboratory for Intermediary Products and Synthetics. At the same time, armies of Staudinger pupils were entering I. G. Farben’s laboratories, particularly in Hoechst and in Leverkusen, who had been trained in the methods and way of thinking of macromolecular chemistry. During the regular meetings of the Synthetics Commission (Kunststoff-Kommission, KuKo), established at the beginning of the 1930s, pertinent research results were exchanged and discussed without any drawn-out debates arising about terminological principles. At that time, such an “interdisciplinary” approach in chemical research was being practised in the USA only by DuPont. Noteworthy research facilities conducting macromolecular chemistry inside or outside of universities, on the contrary, did not exist yet. Germany consequently had a research network of macromolecular chemistry that created an advantage over USA until 1942.14 Two other actors in this network apart from Thiessen will be briefly illuminated: Hermann Staudinger and the group of industrial researchers. Much still remains unclear with regard to Staudinger’s role during the Nazi period. Staudinger’s application for party membership had initially been rejected and he had fallen into political disfavor for a few years. He reappeared on the scene fully rehabilitated by 1939/40 at the latest and was able to celebrate his breakthrough in science policy earlier, in 1936. By 1932, he had already assembled his most important articles in a textbook on high molecular-weight organic compounds (Hochmolekulare Organische Verbindungen). This book was the macromolecular chemist’s Bible for a long time afterwards. Disregarding the protracted dispute with Meyer and Mark since 1929, with hefty polemics still ongoing, the great sen’s 20–30 coworkers included colloid chemists as well as classical organic chemists, physical chemists as well as mathematicians. On Thiessen’s conception of research, cf. Thiessen, Chemie; idem, Von Ergebnissen; idem, Wissenschaft; idem, Wissenschaft und Praxis; idem, Vom Wesen. 13 For example, Thiessen traveled in spring 1938 to the USA for many months and visited V. Bush at MIT to view his new “computing machine.” Cf. Thiessen’s autobiography, pp. 284 f.; archive of the Max Planck Institute, ZA 52. 14 Wallace Carothers himself recognized this; cf. Meyer, Forschung, and BASF company archive UA/W 1.

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Network of Macromolecular Research in the Nazi Period Army Ordnance (HWA)

Reich Research Council/DFG

Research Agency of the Air Force

Reich Office for Economic Development (RWA)

Chemistry Staff/Chemistry Block (P.A. Thiessen; Karl Krauch; Walter Schieber, head of Reich Chemistry Section in the NSBDT)

Peter Adolf Thiessen (Expert department head for chemistry and KWI president) Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry (P.A. Thiessen) 11 Four-Year Plan institutes in the area of physical chemistry/ polymer chemistry

Plenipotentiary for synthetics research: Prof. Richard Vieweg (TH Darmstadt) Plenipotentiary for fiber research: Eugen-Richard Dörr (Phrix Corp.) University research (H. Staudinger et al., Freiburg K. Ziegler, Halle; G.V. Schulz, Rostock; F.H. Müller, Dresden)

3 Four-Year Plan institutes for synthetics research in: Berlin (Prof. Röhrs) Frankfurt (Prof. Müller) Darmstadt (Prof. Vieweg)

Joint Committee on the Chemistry of Synthetics at the VDC/VDI in the NSBDT

Research Laboratories of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG Synthetic Rubber Laboratory and Central Laboratory in Leverkusen (Otto Bayer), Synthetics Commission, Polymer Research Group at the Main Laboratory in Ludwigshafen (Reppe), Synthetics Research Laboratory in Hoechst (Kränzlein)

breakthrough of his conception of macromolecules occurred shortly afterwards. The first occasion was the famous convention of the Faraday Society from 26 to 28 September 1935 in London under its guiding theme “On Phenomena of Polymerization and Polycondensation,” with all the internationally leading polymer scientists in attendance. Staudinger’s legendary encounter with Carothers also took place during this convention.15 A short while later the “nationalistic” breakthrough occurred at the First Imperial Meeting of German Chemists from 8 to 10 July 1936 in Munich. On the same occasion the Division (Fachgruppe) for Chemistry and Synthetic Materials of the Association of German Chemists (Verein deutscher

15

Cf. Transactions of the Faraday Society 32 (1936).

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Chemiker, VDC) was also founded.16 In 1937 Staudinger was able to establish his own Research Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Freiburg with substantial support by I. G. Farben.17 At the beginning of 1939 Staudinger commenced his great opus reporting on advances in macromolecular chemistry, as it were, on state commission. It appeared in two volumes – Wilhelm Röhrs and Richard Vieweg served as coeditors with Staudinger – in 1939 and 1942 under the title Fortschritte der Chemie, Physik und Technik der makromolekularen Stoffe.18 Research on macromolecular chemistry had clearly not been impeded during the Nazi period. With the founding, in the middle of the war, of the Journal für Makromolekulare Chemie as a central forum for polymer science in Germany, Staudinger took another successful step toward establishing his approach. The essential initiative for this came from none other than Thiessen, who also wrote the programmatic preface to the first issue in 1943. The short two-page introduction is noteworthy to the extent that it completely avoided the use of any Nazi phraseology. It also vehemently appealed for and propagated a “reconciliation” between macromolecular chemistry and colloid chemistry. In accordance with Thiessen’s self-understanding, the close ties between science and technology was stressed as a specific attribute of macromolecular chemistry: “independent scientific research serves not only the exploration of Nature but also furthers technical design.” Hence, much can be gathered from this episode on the development of professional journals of chemistry about the posturings of the scientific discipline and its formation. At the same time, Staudinger’s researches were rapidly bound up with the “Four-Year Plan for Chemistry” in a mixture of self-mobilization and targeted resource allocations by the Nazi regime in the form of funding through the RFR and the RWA. At first, from 1935 to 1937, Staudinger made rather modest gains. He did, however, succeed in having a number of his pupils and coworkers obtain DFG/RFR grants. They included Werner Kern and Günther Viktor Schulz with their analyses on the reaction kinetics of emulsion polymerization of unsaturated compounds – one of the big topics in polymer chemistry during the second half of the 1930s.19 When the war started, Staudinger still had problems as far as 16 The most important talks at that convention appeared very soon afterward in a volume “on the development of the chemistry of high polymers” (Zur Entwicklung der Chemie der Hochpolymeren). In addition to Staudinger’s programmatic essay On Macromolecular Chemistry, it contained an equally fundamental article by Georg Kränzlein on the Development, Scope, Importance, and Chemistry of Synthetic Materials that signified, if you will, a clear and official proclamation by the community of I. G. Farben researchers in favor of Staudinger’s approach. Cf. for details the extensive exchange of letters between Kränzlein and Staudinger, Hoechst company archive, Kränzlein holdings C 1/2c. 17 Negotiations with Carl Bosch as KWI president 1938–39 about establishing a KWI for macromolecular chemistry ran aground, however. 18 At the same time, a special issue of the Journal für praktische Chemie appeared in 1941 in his honor on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. 19 Cf. Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/14897 on the incorporation of Staudinger’s researches into the Four-Year Plan research. In total, Schulz received 32,000 reichsmarks in RFR support between 1938 and 1945.

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obtaining funding from the RFR was concerned. He responded by emphasizing in detail the relevance of his researches on fibers, natural rubber, and synthetics to the war and rearmament. In December 1939 Thiessen finally intervened on Staudinger’s behalf and recognized his work in the field of high molecular substances as important to the war effort. In the end, Staudinger received substantial sums from the RFR or, respectively, from Thiessen, totaling approximately 150,000 reichsmarks. In 1941, for example, the grant was for an electron ultramicroscope. At the same time, Staudinger proved to be an extremely successful procurer of resources in other areas as well. He tapped gushing sources of money elsewhere: 150,000 reichsmarks from I. G. Farben; another 160,000 reichsmarks from other industrial sponsors, such as the Union (Wirtschaftsgruppe) of the Textile Industry; 60,000 reichsmarks from the RWA; and 150,000 reichsmarks from the Reich Ministry of Aviation. All in all – and these estimates are rather too low – it came to about 700,000 reichsmarks. Only Thiessen outbidded this gigantic amount for the time for his own KWI.20 “Thereby it was possible,” Staudinger noted at war’s end, “until the destruction of the institute by an air attack at the end of November 1944, to continue the research on macromolecular chemistry undisturbed under favorable working conditions.”21 The Aviation Ministry’s involvement through its Reich Office for Research Guidance indicates the growing competition posed by Göring’s agency. It had begun to set up its own endowed chairs and research institutes on a considerable scale, the large Synthetic Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main among them. No doubt, this competition, also between the RWA and the Reich Chemistry Section of the National Socialist League of German Technicians (Nationalsozialistischer Bund Deutscher Technik, NSBDT) under Walter Schieber’s leadership, provided more maneuvering room for university chemists and power to assert their authority in the conflicts over resources.22 In the end, Staudinger’s later self-heroization and self-stylization as a victim of the “damage done to macromolecular chemistry on the part of National Socialism” has little to do with the reality of the time.23 With these industrial researchers, another cohort of actors comes into view who not only acted in the company-owned laboratories but who also occupied central management positions at the intersection between university, extramural, and industrial research. The central node in this network was the Division for Chemistry and Synthetic Materials of the VDC and the Committee on Synthetics that was founded at the same time by the Association of German Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, VDI) in the NSBDT. With its numerous Study Groups (Arbeitsgruppen), it was headed by Georg Kränzlein from 1943. Thiessen also played 20

Cf. Staudinger’s notes dated 19 May 1950, DM archive, papers 88, D II 17.166; as well as on Thiessen, who was able to record research funding of about 780,000 reichsmarks, Deichmann, p. 232; cf. the individual research proposals, BAK, resp., the Berlin branch. 21 Staudinger, Bericht über die Arbeiten des Instituts in den Jahren 1939 bis 1945, dated May 1945, DM archive, papers 88, B II/68, p. 5. 22 Cf. Lemuth/Stutz, “Patriotic Scientists,” pp. 643 f. 23 Staudinger’s note dated May 1945 on the “influence of National Socialism on the development of macromolecular chemistry,” DM archive, papers 88, B II/68, p. 5.

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a pivotal role here in his capacity as head of the important Physical and Chemical Evaluation of Synthetics Study Group. This Study Group was, so to speak, the spearhead of basic research in polymer science. That was where the most important researchers from industry and academia met for regular conferences.24 Polymer research in I. G. Farben itself was fully tuned to the race against DuPont/Carothers with their polyamide research and was overshadowed by the synthetic-rubber contest as a strategic raw material.25 Even though the Americans kept ahead in both, Gottfried Plump’s assessment that the polymer research conducted at I. G. Farben was supposedly weak is not correct.26 Industry took up Staudinger’s idea very quickly and early on. It realized that his application allowed regular production of synthetic materials.27 Contacts and regular exchanges existed between Staudinger and I. G. Farben since 1926/27 and specific focuses developed at the individual locations in Ludwigshafen, Leverkusen, and Frankfurt/Hoechst.28 The Baden Aniline and Soda Factory (Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik, BASF) in Ludwigshafen was the center of synthetics research. Much basic research was conducted there on emulsion polymerization, on polymerization catalysts, as well as on cross-linked copolymers. There was complementarity, so to speak, between modern polymer chemistry and the – frequently anticipatory – “Four-Year Plan for Chemistry” and the “autarky oriented” R&D. It could lead just as well to new materials of strategic importance as to lucrative mass-produced consumer goods. Reppe’s development of high polymer organic chemistry in the former BASF laboratories laid the foundations for the entire technology of synthetic and buna rubber. Alwin Mittasch, who also came from high-pressure and hydrogenation chemistry, had built up considerable basic know-how in the area of catalysts and catalytic processes. Otto Bayer, on the other hand, inaugurated completely new developments in the area of synthetics in the former main Bayer laboratory in Leverkusen with his polyaddition procedure and built the foundations of polyurethane chemistry. The direct motivation behind these researches by Bayer were to circumvent the patent held by Carothers or, respectively, DuPont on nylon. The aim was to find a new synthetic fiber or a new polymer material. But recognition of its many possible applications was slow in coming (only after 1945) and, after surmounting other obstacles, also in being put to industrial use.29 Finally, Paul Schlack developed polyamide 6 at the same time, a synthetic fiber equivalent to DuPont’s nylon. In 1939 Otto Bayer added polyacrylnitrile 24

Guests from the plastics industry were invited to attend meetings by this Arbeitsgruppe “Physikalische und chemische Bewertung von Kunststoffen”; cf. excerpt from the agenda of the meeting in fall 1942. It is astonishing that all these talks were not in the least secret. They were published shortly afterward in the journal Kunststoffe, some including the discussions. 25 Morris, Buna. 26 Plumpe, I. G. Farben, pp. 471–477. 27 Zur Strukturaufklärung der Makromoleküle. Ein Briefwechsel zwischen Prof. Staudinger und Dr. Kränzlein (Dokumente aus Hoechster Archiven, vol. 15), Frankfurt am Main 1966. 28 Cf. Becker, Know-how; Schuller, Polymerforschung; Steinberger, Acetylen-Chemie; Achilladelis, History. 29 A history of the development of polyurethane still remains to be written. Cf. Bayer, Diisocyanat-Polyadditionsverfahren, based on a talk held in June 1943 at the RWA in Berlin as

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fiber. Lastly, in the former Hoechst laboratories basic research on synthetic chemistry was likewise performed under Kränzlein’s direction, such as on the kinetics of polymerization. The initial rapid accumulation of polymer know-how was clearly market-driven. The polymer research at I. G. Farben was certainly not primarily aimed at the arms market and weapons technology. Rather, numerous new mass markets in the area of consumer and industrial goods opened up for polystyrene, polyamide, and vinyl PVC, which I. G. Farben served and occupied with its trademark plastics Oppanol, Luvikan, Perbunan, Igelit, Igamid, or Luvitherm. They specifically involved varnishes and adhesives, packaging foils, tubing and leather substitutes, rubber gaskets and seals, insulation for cabling and building materials, waterproof clothing, household products, and plastic housings.30 POLYMER SCIENCE MARKED BY THE BACKWARDNESS DEBATE AND CATCHING-UP SYNDROME UNTIL THE END OF THE 1960s Research on (polymer) chemistry after the end of the war was initially defined by major circulation and transfer processes. Access to German research also in the area of macromolecular chemistry gave a powerful push forward for research in the United States. Many research approaches and results from Germany in the 1930s returned after 1945 as “American” polymer research, along the detour of emigré scientists or publications by the British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (BIOS).31 An initial comparison reveals that in the short phase since 1942, when both countries lost sight of each other, so to speak, each specific variant of polymer research advanced further. In Germany the war prevented virtually all knowledge, in the main, about two fields of research (apart from the successful American research on synthetic rubber): Paul Flory’s theoretical research (1942) and the development of inorganic macromolecules. Two new groups of synthetics – silicons (essentially developed in the GE company laboratories) and high molecular fluorine compounds (teflon) – were produced and brought to technical maturity in the USA during the war. Paul Flory had joined DuPont as a young chemist in the 1930s but left the company in 1938 to pursue an academic career. In 1942 he developed a theory of chain growth that, simply expressed, could explain how long macromolecules grow during polymerization (the thermodynamics of high polymer solutions). In 1948 Flory presented these ideas in a textbook (Principles of Polymer Chemistry) that rang in a paradigm change and simultaneously replaced Staudinger’s publications as the new Bible of polymer science.32 well as the two reports by Otto Bayer at the TA meeting on 21 Sep. 1941 (Polyurethane) and 3 Nov. 1943 (Polyurethane II), Bayer archive 312–800-111/202. 30 Cf. also Mienes, Kunststoffe. 31 Cf. Ziegler (ed.), Chemie; Clusius (ed.), Chemie; Hückel (ed.), Chemie; Klemm (ed.), Chemie. See also Kline, Plastics (there also 1946 onward, the reprint of translated proceedings of the I. G. Farben’s KuKo) and DeBell/Goggin/Gloor, Plastics. 32 Cf. Somsen, Modern, p. 8; above all Chayut, Scientific Change.

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One fact that was overlooked and at that time often concealed by American scientists was that corresponding researches – supported by DFG/RFR funds – had long been in progress in Germany as well, foremost by Schulz, the “Paul Flory” of German polymer chemistry.33 Until the end of the war, this work as well as the research by Reppes and Otto Bayer were also practically unknown in the USA. Notwithstanding the polymer revolution taking place in industry and science, Staudinger had considerable problems to contend with after the war to position macromolecular chemistry within the field. Staudinger’s personal significance underwent a change. The center point for the disparate macromolecular chemists to fix their attention on was no longer his research but his international reputation as a politically uncompromised “elder statesman.” They quickly regrouped around him as a personal constant and his focal journal. The orientation Staudinger himself chose was toward industrial polymer science because, in contrast to the universities, industrial polymer research immediately got going again without interruption. In 1946/47 the exchange of ideas with researchers in the laboratories of the former I. G. Farben was intense. The first articles to appear in the first postwar volume of Staudinger’s Zeitschrift für Makromolekulare Chemie besides his own mainly came from I. G. researchers. Staudinger’s efforts to rebuild his institute in Freiburg as the center of academic macromolecular chemistry was beset with failure, however. Persisting skepticism within the community of chemists was evidently the cause. In 1952 Staudinger applied to the DFG for financial support for his journal but his proposal was rejected. One of the reviewers had complained that “molecular size did not grant the right to detach one section of organic chemistry.” Staudinger’s furious letter to the DFG about the opposition to macromolecular chemistry, “where this area today already possesses greater economic importance than the rest of organic chemistry put together,” did not achieve its purpose.34 Staudinger’s intense efforts to exert his influence on refilling vacating chairs with his own pupils was blessed with just as little good fortune. From among his 75 graduates, who had written their doctoral theses in macromolecular chemistry, only four occupied such chairs. Strictly speaking, if one omits Rudolf Signer, who went to Berne, Staudinger’s son, a biochemist, and Hans Batzer, who left to work for BASF, it was just one: Werner Kern (who had actually been chosen to head the Four-Year-Plan Institute for Synthetics Research during the Nazi period but had then gone away to I. G. Farben’s research laboratory in Hoechst from 1939 to 1945). Staudinger’s crestfallen statement in 1951 that “we still have much work ahead of us to bring to bear macromolecular chemistry in Germany,” was entirely understandable.35 33 Schulz, Kinetik; other related publications in Angewandte Chemie 50 (1937), pp. 767 ff. Comp. Kuhn, Gestalt; see also Guth/Mark, Statistik; cf. Schulz, Probleme; Bawn, Chemistry; Melville, Chemistry; Schildknecht, Vinyl; even Flory, Principles. 34 Cf. Staudinger’s correspondence with the DFG in March 1951, DM archive, papers 88, D III/54–57. 35 Cf. also Staudinger’s letter to Kern, 23 May 1952, DM archive, papers 88, D III/57; Staudinger’s note, March 1951, idem, D II, 17.175a/b.

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Staudinger’s reputation additionally played a central role in the rapid reintegration of German scientists into the international community, organized in the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Staudinger’s and Mark’s paths crossed again within this union, specifically relating to the debate about the international nomenclature. The IUPAC had formed a Commission on Macromolecular Chemistry in 1947 chaired by Mark. Since 1952 the Germans sent as their own national representatives Staudinger together with Schulz and, for Austria, Otto Kratky. The discussions about setting up a uniform terminology were lengthy and continued up to 1958/59. The bone of contention was the term “high polymer” (Mark) versus “macromolecular” (Staudinger) and the usage in print of the nomenclature Mark proposed in the Journal of Polymer Science that he had founded in the interim, which Staudinger perceived as a direct rival. However, Staudinger eventually had to drop his desperate efforts against American concepts and terms. The difficulties academic research on macromolecular chemistry encountered in reestablishing itself were diametrically opposed to experiences in industry. The research laboratories of I. G. Farben’s successor companies continued to generate findings and results in polymer chemistry. On 24 June 1946 Hans Fikentscher presented his latest research “On the kinetics of polymerization reactions” in the main laboratory I. G. Farben Ludwigshafen. In 1952 Fritz Stastny made a breakthrough with porous polystyrene (Styropor). Further advances in Reppe’s chemistry led to decisive improvements in the production of high-pressure polyethylene (Lupolen). A former pupil of Staudinger, Adolf Steinhofer, successor to Reppe as director of R&D at BASF, pushed polymer research in the subsequent period, and in 1961 Hermann Schnell managed to develop polycarbonate chemistry (Makrolon), another breakthrough. Whereas BASF/Ludwigshafen concentrated on polystyrene, the researchers in Hoechst enjoyed good success with polyethylene and polypropylene, and Bayer came forward with innovations in the area of polyurethane (Vulcollan or isocyanate plastics) and polyester research.36 Altogether, a clear reconstitution of the network of research henceforth officially designated as “polymer science” occurred. What was the DFG’s role? In the process of reinventing itself within the setting of an syndrome of having fallen behind and the theme of years lost, this research organization faced a series of major challenges in chemistry: first, renewed formation of the community of chemists; second, restitution or new formation of the polymer chemistry network and its international connections; third, rapid continuation of support for research in progress and its operators; fourth, new sponsorship of hitherto marginal fields of chemical research along the lines of rectifying the specifically German “special path” of chemical research since 1918, above all, theoretical chemistry and analytic chemistry.

36 Bayer, Neuere Chemie; cf. also the proceedings of the scientific conferences of the Lower Rhine 1936–1981, Bayer archive 048/004-007, as well as the publications from the Main Science Laboratory of the Bayer Dye Works in Leverkusen for 1945–1957 and 1966–1969: Veröffentlichungen, 1958 resp. 1970.

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Polymer Science Network after 1945 DFG (Individual Grants, Priority Programs, Collaborative Research Centers, etc., on the physics and chemistry of polymers)

Universities Polymer Chemistry Center in Mainz (Kern, Stuart, G. V. Schulz) and in Marburg (F. H. Müller), Aachen (Jenckel), Munich (Patat), and Freiburg (Staudinger/Husemann)

MPI for Physical Chemistry (Bonhoeffer) Fritz Haber Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Max Planck Society in Berlin/Dahlem (Laue/Brill) MPI for Coal Research in Mühlheim/Ruhr (Karl Ziegler) Deutsches Kunststoffinstitut in Darmstadt

Research exchanges/colloquia Division for Synthetics and Rubber of the Society of German Chemists Expanded colloquium on macromolecular chemistry (Freiburg) International conferences on polymer research IUPAC

Research laboratories of I.G. Farben’s successor companies: Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF corporations Main Science Laboratory, Bayer in Leverkusen (Otto Bayer) Polymer Research Group at the Main Laboratory in Ludwigshafen Synthetics Research Laboratory in Hoechst

No “master plan” existed for the future orientation and promotion of chemical research after the war came to an end. Chemistry was classified among the fields that had fallen behind in international comparison from the very beginning. Thus, its allocations in the DFG’s early considerations about future promotional activities were above average, when it started up funding activities again.37 In view of the broad researches conducted during the Nazi period, some explanation is called for, especially considering that chemistry was not subsumed under fields that the DFG regarded as having gained some advantage for German research 37

NG report for 1 Apr. 1950 to 31 Mar. 1951: Berichte, pp. 12 ff. and 45 f.

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needing to be maintained and exploited. It rather counted among those areas of research that had once given Germany the lead but had been more recently neglected and was in need of being revitalized. “Entire disciplines,” the annual report for 1950/51 reads, “threaten to become destitute in Germany, such as inorganic and analytic chemistry.”38 Chemistry figured centrally also in the considerations about the (re)establishment of Priority Programs and special committees for the DFG in 1952. However, the issue of promoting research on high polymers was controversial. “It should not be concealed,” the relevant report states, “that research on high polymers has largely become the affair of industry.”39 Industry was primarily present in the person of Otto Bayer, who headed the main laboratory in Leverkusen and was on the Bayer corporation’s board. As a founding member of the German Research Council (Deutscher Forschungsrat) and later also of the DFG’s Panel on Applied Research and Senate, his word weighed heavily in all these dealings from the beginning. In the spring of 1950 Bayer had mentioned and taken stock of the situation of chemistry in Germany at its universities in a series of speeches and essays.40 His argumentation can be summarized as three points. First of all, the great damage to university institutes had not only originated during the last few years but had its roots in the more distant past. Bayer perceived a cumulative effect, so to speak, from longer-term “structural deficits” (elsewhere he also refers to “systemic errors” by chemical research) and the subsequent “cut-backs” in research and development since 1944. “If you were to ask me to compare our university chemistry laboratories with the most modern ones abroad, I would have to reply in a drastic form: They relate to each other as the prewar institutes in the Balkans did to German research facilities.”41 Second, Bayer warned against an impending break with tradition that during the Nazi period had not yet occurred – that is to say, not even then. The great threats constituted lacking funds and above all, lacking personnel because the existing staffs were too old. Third, industry had to help and provide immediate financial assistance with sums worth millions. It is also significant that Bayer passed on to his coworkers in the Bayer laboratory the issue of establishing future Priority Programs with DFG funding or with the assistance of the European Recovery Program. He received the resolute and obvious answer from there in November 1950: “At the present time the area of polymerization is being worked on far too little at German universities compared to in America and England.” This accordingly did not apply so much to inquiries into the constituents of high polymers (Staudinger) as into the polymerization process. The syndrome of having fallen behind related less to the Nazi period than to a fear of falling behind during the postwar years. This was still the tenor in the Denkschrift Chemie, compiled by commission of the DFG in 1957, which was notably published as volume 1 of the memoranda series. In total, the DFG had given 38

Ibid., p. 46. Ibid. 40 Cf. Bayer, Die augenblickliche Situation der Chemie an Deutschen Hochschulen, speech on 24 Feb. 1950, and idem, Förderung; see also Bayer archive 312/1. 41 Ibid. 39

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out almost four million deutschmarks for chemical research as regular Individual Grants and another 2.3 million deutschmarks for Priority Programs. These grants were increased substantially in the period that followed.42 At the beginning of the 1950s the DFG initiated a whole series of Priority Programs in chemistry, such as on photochemistry, electrochemistry, chemical kinetics, the chemistry of complex compounds, and on natural and artificial high polymers – later redesignated the Priority Program on Macromolecular Substances. In the 1960s four more major Priority Programs followed that continued well into the 1970s: analytic chemistry, the chemistry and physics of boundary surfaces, theoretical chemistry, and the physics of polymers (1956–1978). Without going too much into the details, the four important points are: First, the early Priority Programs still appeared to lack any explicit underlying strategy to steer the research into a particular direction. The Priority Program on Macromolecular Substances, for example, whose steering committee naturally also included corporate representatives from Bayer and BASF, soon found itself criticized by industry as well as by the scientific community itself. Otto Bayer complained that there were far too many Priority Programs. Moreover, the project was far too broadly conceived and more oriented toward persons than toward topics. Karl Freudenberg did, in fact, dominate the program with his research on natural polymers, which thus made a clear thrust forward to biochemistry. Second, subsequent Priority Programs no longer had any catch-up functions. Instead they aimed at correcting the long-running special evolution of German chemistry since 1918 and before, particularly in analytic chemistry and theoretical chemistry. The Society of German Chemists (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker) had addressed a memorandum on the “dire situation of analytic chemistry in Germany” to the regional ministers of culture in July 1952. The chemical industry, foremost BASF, exhibited great interest in appropriate financial support from the start. In 1953/54 a related Priority Program was then also initiated but for lack of submissions soon fell dormant. In 1958 BASF pushed to revitalize it and get it off to a second start. At the end of 1959 a Denkschrift Analytische Chemie was compiled and the Priority Program started up in 1960 and ran until 1965. It was repeatedly emphasized throughout that the causes of the low point in the theory and research of analytic chemistry in the Federal Republic lay much further back in time than the National Socialist period and the war.43 The DFG’s Priority Program then finally helped analytic chemistry get due recognition in Germany and develop into an independent discipline. But during the closing colloquium in 1966, there was yet another argument about whether it really was the right path to follow, considering that even in the USA analytic chemistry did not explicitly constitute an autonomous discipline. In any event, its success in encouraging newcomers to the field was singled out besides one important “psychological effect” of the Priority Program: When the program 42

Cf. Clausen, Stand. Cf. record of the preliminary meeting on the Schwerpunktprogramm “Analytische Chemie” on 12 Feb. 1955, BAK, FC 7502 N; also Wurzschmitt, Bedeutung, pp. 177–179; Bayer archive, 312/002. 43

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started, analytic chemists were often perceived as second-class chemists; “today this attitude is surely overcome.”44 This was similarly valid with respect to theoretical chemistry. The origins of theoretical chemistry and quantum chemistry actually partly lay essentially in Germany of the 1920s. But its various advances were scarcely noticed or were even explicitly rejected at that time, owing to the dominance and ascendancy of organic chemistry. In 1960 considerations began about establishing a Priority Program to make an enduring correction to this long-time development. But this program only really get started in 1966 and ran just until 1969. The massive conventional reservations that theoretical chemistry had to contend with was probably also a cause. A comment in the debate about DFG sponsorship in 1960 was indicative: “Quantum chemistry is a pure desk science. Nothing would be missed by waiting out a few more years of undirected research.”45 All of a mere 250,000 deutschmarks per year were then initially earmarked for the Theoretical Chemistry Priority Program, explicitly excluding funding for apparatus. Latest by 1967 it became evident, though, that quantum chemistry had become “computer chemistry” and required appropriate hikes in funding. Third, the drafting of Priority Programs involved some hefty internal and interdisciplinary tussles and squabbles. One example is the program on the Chemistry and Physics of Boundary Surfaces. The first efforts and considerations about it were made in 1961. It initially involved classical issues of colloid chemistry. That was what the Priority Program was also supposed to be called, but then it was renamed. The program only got started in 1965 and it was actually supposed to begin like all the others, with an official memorandum, but in the end it never appeared, despite appropriate attempts and drafts since 1963. One chemist wrote the part on “the chemistry of boundary surfaces” and a physicist the other part. By 1969, that is, up to the very end of the program, they had still not managed to combine the two parts. The ways that physicists and chemists thought and spoke were still too different. Fourth, lastly, the promotion of research in chemistry by the regular Individual Grants program was also massive. Two “multiply successful applicants” of over one hundred submitted – and approved – projects stand out: the first is Hermann Hartmann, who had earned his postdoctoral Habilitation degree during the Nazi period and had since become the professorial chair holder for physical chemistry in Frankfurt am Main; the second is Georg-Maria Schwab, who was likewise teaching physical chemistry in Munich. He had written a textbook entitled Katalyse vom Standpunkt der chemischen Kinetik in 1931, had been dismissed in 1938/39 because of his Jewish father, and had emigrated to Greece, eventually returning in 1950 to accept an appointment to the University of Munich. Hence, there was some continuity in research sponsorship to carry forward and build up physical chemistry in Germany.

44 45

Ibid. On this cf. BAK, B 227/138727.

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FINDINGS First, the period of National Socialism and war became a decisive, catalytically accelerated phase in the process of setting up the discipline of polymer and macromolecular chemistry and establishing it. This applies to Germany and the USA alike. In Germany, however, this process had already started in the 1920s. In the United States, on the other hand, it began only later, during the second half of the 1930s or, respectively, in 1941/42. The funding practices of the DFG and the RFR – that is to say, Peter Adolf Thiessen’s – played an important role between research policy-making and path continuity. “Staudinger”-oriented research was supported and promoted as well as colloid-chemical investigations by chemists who explicitly opposed Staudinger’s theory. Thiessen himself, as a macromolecularly oriented colloid chemist, veritably embodied this new and modern complementary scientific approach. The premise of research into substitute materials played much less of a role than would have been expected. The search for new manufacturing materials dominated far more. Research mostly concerned topics of fundamental relevance, such as the analysis of molecular structure, measuring and explaining binding forces in high polymers, and theoretical interpretations of polymerization processes. That its applications – not least for armaments and the wartime economy – were quickly derivable, was clear throughout. Second, the German polymer chemistry was in the lead by 1942, or it was at least neck to neck with the United States. To speak of an “intellectual autarky” (Jeffrey Johnson) for German scientists thus does not appear to be justified. The true point when German polymer research fell behind was the period from 1944 to 1948/49. At the war’s end, it was American and British polymer chemists who were intensely studying German research, which had meanwhile been published in the Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT)/BIOS reports (in many cases it was already available in the form of articles in all the important American professional journals). On the German side, these summarizing reviews of German research had the side effect of presenting a first overview of these researches, which had been lost sight of since 1943/44. The “arenas” of polymer chemistry research in Germany altered markedly before 1945 versus afterwards, whereas the staffing composition and the actors within the community of polymer chemists hardly changed. Prior to 1945, they were I. G. Farben, the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, as well as Staudinger’s research department for macromolecular chemistry at the chemistry institute of the University of Freiburg, and the RFR/ DFG-funded Four-Year-Plan institutes, for instance, in Halle and Frankfurt. After 1945 the central players, aside from the three successor companies to the disintegrated I. G. Farben, were the new polymer-chemistry centers in Mainz, Darmstadt, and Munich, as well as the current Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Polymer Research. The MPI for Physical Chemistry (Bonhoeffer), respectively, the MPI’s Fritz Haber Institute, lost importance for a while until it was regained during the 1970s. Third, the scale of industrial research also determined the scope and manner of sponsorship by the DFG and RFR.46 Formulated otherwise, different cultures 46

Cf. Alher, I. G. Wissenschaft.

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of industrial research led to different DFG/RFR funding practices. The establishment of academic macromolecular chemistry occurred together with the turn toward thermoplastic synthetics. The work applying Staudinger’s model of macromolecules within big chemistry accelerated the strengthening of his position in science. Nevertheless, the defining power of the chemical industry as regards DFG-supported research topics was weak – as it also was after 1945. Consensus evidently reigned between industry, the DFG, and universities that the main issue was broadening and “underpinning” research on polymer chemistry with theoretical chemistry, analytic chemistry, and above all, improved instrumental equipment and mathematical methods. In chemistry also, as in many other areas of science and technology, a discursive catch-up and syndrome of having fallen behind developed after 1945, which had less foundation in actual fact than appears at first glance. This was just as true of academic polymer chemistry as for its industrial counterparts. All three successors of I. G. Farben built up dominant commercial positions in three or four central markets for polymer products: BASF with polystyrene, Bayer with polyurethane (and also with polycarbonates/Makrolon), and Hoechst with polyethylene, and all three together, through the Hüls Chemical Works, with synthetic rubber and PVC. Finally, Karl Ziegler discovered in 1953 highly effective catalysts for the polymerization of olefins, founded “Ziegler chemistry,” and helped organometallic chemistry into existence as an independent discipline, although it remained within the narrow context of polymer chemistry. Precisely this highly developed state of industrial and academic polymer chemistry prompted the DFG to concentrate on correcting the long-term “systemic errors.” The DFG’s sponsoring activities, in general, and its Priority Programs, in particular, corrected more long-running deficits in the organization and institutionalization of chemical research since the turn of the century than any deficits from the Nazi period. During the 1960s, however, a leveling process occurred in the scientific communities. Basically, as a result of the DFG’s activities, the organization of these disciplines in Germany lost its specific national character. From the point of view of research policy, the funding measures then flowed into the Priority Program on the Physics and Chemistry of Boundary Surfaces (1961 to 1972) or on the Physics of Polymers (1965 to 1976) as well as into the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) No. 41 on the Chemistry, Physics, and Biological Function of Macromolecules – the one with the longest duration in the DFG’s history. It operated from 1968/69 until 1988, thus twenty years. A substantial modernizing push can also be attributed to the later Priority Program. All this created the preconditions during the 1960s for the new form of disciplinary orientation of chemical research that constituted the basis of the modern polymer chemistry of the 1970s and 1980s. Dipping into a “box of catalyst building blocks” that had been developed in the interim, special polymers could henceforth be specifically and systematically produced.

CIVILIAN MILITARY RESEARCH AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF SCIENCE – A COMMENTARY Ulrich Wengenroth “Science has given modern warfare its catastrophic character.” With this assertion twenty-two scientists from the University of Cambridge, prominent Marxists such as Joseph Needham and John D. Bernal among them, addressed their colleagues in May 1936. In an open letter to Nature they explained: “War would be impossible if all scientific workers opposed it. Each individual scientific worker should first consider what ought to be done, and then use his influence to see that it be done.”1 The somewhat cryptic second sentence refers to a previous list of four different standpoints on militant activities that scientists could adopt. These ranged from the patriot ready to fight, to the purely defensive warrior, the categorical pacifist, to the Socialist, who considers war inevitable while capitalism still predominates. All four of these, the conviction goes, could agree on common action under certain conditions, which would be to refuse to conduct research for the military. This stance by the group from Cambridge was not isolated. The signers of the appeal explicitly referred to prior contributions to Nature directed along similar lines. The political activities of scientists since World War I initially basically concentrated on repairing ties, preserving and expanding international exchanges. Later, with the take-over of power by the National Socialists and the Abyssinian War by the Italian fascists, concern about peace grew. Mainly British and French scientists, preponderantly from the political left, strengthened their frequently joint endeavors since 1936/37 to expose the political and social dimensions of science.2 The analysis in this opening quote seems clear: Science let modern warfare become a catastrophe. Yet the responsibility of scientists is nevertheless unclear in the statement that immediately follows: “While scientific investigators cannot be held directly responsible, many of them are coming to feel that they cannot remain indifferent to the indirect effects of their work.” Even these politically very astute and critical scientists still clung to the quest for Truth enjoined by the Enlightenment as the certainly morally unassailable unique goal and distinction of scientific research. If science gave modern warfare its catastrophic character, then only indirectly so, as an unintended by-product. If, it goes on to say, “many” scientists develop the same feeling that these unintentional consequences should not be received with indifference, then what their proclamation is appealing for is 1 2

Scientific Workers and War, in: Nature 137, no. 3472, 16 May 1936, pp. 829–830. Petitjean, Joint Establishment; on the situation during the 1930s, esp. pp. 248–255.

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what in ethics would be called a supererogatory attitude – a nonrequisite sense of responsibility. The categorial distinction between knowledge-seeking science and application-oriented technology here becomes a moral buffer between the acquisition of knowledge and the utilization of knowledge. The authors do sense that this buffer is morally questionable; however, they cannot yet grasp it analytically and therefore cannot make it into a basis for binding rules of conduct. The appeal in Nature from 1936 shows how the dilemma between sciencebased military technology and the Enlightened scientific mission looked to ethically and politically particularly reflective scientists beyond the reach of dictatorial discipline. For them, scientific knowledge was blind to utility and neutral toward values. The moral problems only began with the technical application of this knowledge. A gray area formed, however, with the anticipated reprehensible utility of scientific knowledge. It ignited this sense of malaise. And this is where the intellectual lever was situated for the later revision of the Kulturkampf-image of true – and therefore also good – Science. This image had been formed in the tenacious struggle against the competing Truths offered by the revelatory religions in the nineteenth century. The scientists of the Nature appeal were still looking back at these struggles by modern science to orient itself. On the other hand, they were already looking ahead to the propensity for conflict that the remoteness of science from society posed, as the emerging sociology of science soon afterwards ascertained. They found their analytical certainty in the battles of the past; their moral malaise was already an expression of their sensibility to their present. Moral self-categorization in such situations of upheaval is left open. It can just as well follow the paradigm of scientific positivism and faith in progress as follow the developing new insights into the ambivalence of scientific truth. In 1936 these were primarily drawn from the experiences of gas warfare and the ongoing Abyssinian war. With its superior claim to truth and enlightenment, modern science had also inherited the problem of theodicy and had just begun to grapple with it internally. Here, entirely analogously, scientific truth as an objective representation of the physical world counted as intrinsically good; only mankind erred and sinned. This self-description had consequences for the determination of what military research was: It could basically only begin within the concrete context of military application. Everything that preceded it was “good” science. Although we may now see it differently, this changes nothing about the morally relevant selfperception by “scientific investigators” of the time, as it is presented by the consternated signers of the Nature appeal. Here the Thomas theorem from sociology applies: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”3 How this self-perception by the scientific investigators withstands an encounter with critical sociology of science today or in its early beginnings is less historically interesting than how it described the moral dilemmas of military research during the 1930s and what the basis of the then apparently so plausible distinction between good science and bad application was. 3

Originally formulated by Thomas/Thomas, Child, p. 572.

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The plausibility of this distinction in this context is particularly relevant for the functional demands of military research. If it is to be successful, military research has to be accurate; in the case of a crisis, to be very quick in mobilizing the available potential of industrial science; to produce decisive advantages in arms technology for the war; and above all, to keep the latter development as secret as possible. These four demands are not automatically compatible with each other and even pose quite substantial dilemmas for military research. Above all, points one (accurateness) and four (secrecy) are not amenable to modern science. It is a fundamental characteristic of modern science that optimal quality control be accomplished by publication and peer reviewing. Publication exposes new findings to as broad as possible criticism. Peer reviewing confronts them with the most competent of critics. Both together count as the most efficient instrument for rooting out misinterpretations and errors. The higher the degree of secrecy, the worse off is the quality control,4 which, in turn, raises the risk of failure for the military research involved. There is no shortage of failed secret military projects. In order to avoid the associated wastage of resources and possibly fatal loss of time, it makes sense for the military to keep the level of secrecy as low as possible. This is most effectively done by decontextualizing the military research and assigning it to ostensibly nonmilitary, or at least projects that are not secret. Generalizing a piece of artillery as a gas-powered machine, for instance, opens up a wide field of research that, despite its specific intentions, overwhelmingly consists of non-specific science, the results of which are nevertheless essential for military application. One spectacular example of successful decontextualization is the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs. For a while as many as 200,000 people were supposedly involved. Yet only the smallest minority among them knew what they were actually working on. Patriotic pride about having participated on a weapon crucial to the outcome of the war could only develop after the secret had been disclosed. The requirement to be able to mobilize the available technical and scientific potential in case of a crisis – including preparations for an offensive war – presumes that the scientific potential convertible to military purposes not only be observed for its utilizability within its civilian contexts, but also be fostered, promoted, and strengthened in quality. Scientific potential can thus grow within civilian contexts and pay off. Just as a large-scale automobile industry during peacetime creates the preconditions for large-scale production capacities for military vehicles in wartime, civilian research provides the scientific capacities for military research at war and in preparation for war. The search for advantages over a potential opponent in arms technology is similar. Some are certain to be found in the closest proximity to existing weaponry. However, fundamental and extremely surprising breakthroughs in weapons engineering are mostly due to the transfer of new discoveries and developments from other, often initially civilian areas of technology. Clockworks 4 On the institutionalization of “open science” and the “peer review” and the underlying rationale for this approach taken by funders of research, cf. David, Origins.

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become precision ignitions; television technology becomes a homing device; and a radiochemical experiment, an atom bomb. Successful management of technology and science by the military consists, to a large part, in constant screening of on-going developments for their military potential. This is faster, more comprehensive, and much cheaper than letting the military develop all these potentials on its own in research performed within a closed circle. “Weaponizing” is just the last step of a developmental process that first occurs in a civilian context and – what is particularly important – is also maintained there in an entirely legitimate manner. Military research lives to a large part from attaching its own purposes to the products of civilian research in all their possible permutations and combinations. This functional crossing in the more recent past has been well studied. David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg analyzed quantitatively the division of tasks between civilian and military research, taking the American system of innovation after World War II as their example. During the 1980s they found a largely functional differenciation between basic research at universities in the form of “open science,” on one hand, and research within the military/industrial complex, on the other. They noticed that the latter only invested very small amounts (that is, less than 5 percent) in basic research. Instead, it applied its means quite predominantly (more than 80 percent) to development.5 This does not mean that the military did not know what to do with the civilian-financed and freely published fundamental research. It just did not have to integrate it institutionally nor fund it, knowing all along that the quality control was being properly taken care of within the scientific system. It is useful to the military that science conducted at universities and other state-funded research establishments is deemed public property, thus legitimating its upkeep with tax revenues. It lies in the nature of public property that anyone interested in its results be able to help themselves to them. Publicly funded science is intellectual infrastructure for the common good, which is certainly also understood as a smoothly running domestic economy and efficient armed forces for a nation. Commercial enterprises also allow their researchers to publish and thereby contribute to the public good. For this, they gain reputation and external quality control in fields of which the managing heads themselves do not have a cognitive command. The fact that the greater part of the research required for military applications is unspecific permitted the American military, in the example quoted above, to put the greater part of its research monies into application-related development. This recently designated spin-in effect is ultimately the rationale behind industrialization from above during the nineteenth century. It is the realization that military power needs a highly efficient civilian industry as a permanent, rapidly mobilizable resource. As science began increasingly to permeate the twentieth century, this consideration applied equally to scientific investigators who, as they noted in their Nature appeal, consequently were coming to feel uneasy about it. 5

Mowery/Rosenberg, Innovation System, p. 43.

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It was not the aim of these brief considerations about the functional demands of research for the military to contest the existence of unconditional, targeted military research performed by scientists who are fully in agreement with the intentions of their own military authorities. Uncompromising, brutal military research without regard for morality has always existed – quite certainly in Nazi Germany. Yet one should also bear in mind that strategically planned military research in modern industrial societies needs a large range of civilian science with which it can enter into an exchange of knowledge and personnel, as concrete demands dictate, in order to be able to scoop up whatever suits its purposes out of a large pool of nonspecific research. In this exchange civilian science not only has the character of a scientific data bank and reserve army. It serves at the same time as quality control for the desired knowledge input and morally relieves the individual members of this scientific reserve army, up to the point of open application. Furthermore, it is helpful for the purposes of military research for intensive civilian research to exist that is clearly distinct from it. A complete militarization of research would soon make it sterile. Distinguishing between civilian and military research is, in any event, not suitable for an assessment of the scientification of warfare and weapons production. It still is difficult, and was so for many scientists in the 1930s, to estimate their own personal participation in and responsibility for military research. The very fundamental necessity and usefulness of institutionally civilian research for the military blurs the moral division between these two fields of work in science and opens up an apparent freedom for participants to choose how to classify themselves. It lets the exculpatory “just a scientist” postwar strategy seem promising in the first place. This ambivalence permitted scientific careers to move easily between civilian and military environments. With their research programs otherwise unchanged, and continuously upholding the rigorous scientific ethos later described by Robert Merton as ideally typical, such scientists could not perceive this state as altering their field of work and consequently their professional goals. It was frequently not even crucial to their research to know which concrete developmental aims they were ultimately working toward. Where it did become known and appeared morally questionable, it was a simple matter to shut one’s eyes to it, for one’s own peace of mind, and “to concentrate entirely on the science.” As long as the conviction was that science, especially civilian science, was good in principle and in the worst case was only abusable from the outside, they shielded themselves from (self-)remonstrance for being corrupt. This conviction was no less false around 1940 than it is today, but as the quoted stance taken by the extremely critical scientists from Cambridge shows, it was easier to believe. And herein lies an important historical difference. After the experiences of gas warfare, a second moral shock in the form of the atom bomb was still needed before the scientists’ self-image was able to see the “catastrophic character” of modern warfare as a “direct” consequence of science and no longer to consider the institutional separation between civilian and military research as a separation also in substance and, hence, also morally. This “coming to feel that they cannot remain indifferent to the indirect effects of their

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work” did not delude these signers of the Nature appeal, yet it shifted from the margin to the center of scientific responsibility only after World War II. Only then was it acknowledged that scientific ethos on its own is not suited to facing the moral problems of science. A new understanding of the social function of science and scientific ethos first had to develop out of this “coming to feel.” Otto Hahn was at the turning point on 6 August 1945 when, while still in internment, he learned of the dropping of the first atomic bomb: Hahn was completely shattered by the news and said that he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was originally his discovery which had made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realised the terrible potentialities of his discovery and felt that now these had been realised and he was to blame. With the help of considerable alcoholic stimulant he was calmed down and we went down to dinner where he announced the news to the assembled guests.6

Hahn’s tragedy lay in his acceptance of personal responsibility for his scientific discovery having made the most catastrophic weapon to date feasible. Four years later six American atomic scientists led by J. R. Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the atomic bomb project during World War II, closed their official evaluation on the possibility of developing a hydrogen bomb with the statement: “In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.”7 This already involved the institutional responsibility of science, which could not be grasped by an ethos devoted to the search for truth. Moreover, it was only with this new image of science that it became normal within science for scientists to no longer identify “truth” with “good” but rather to controversially debate how these two ideals relate to each other. The responsibility of science was no longer an individual problem, nor one internal to science, but a problem of society. The personal dilemmas of science during the 1930s became the political dilemmas of present-day science. Certainly a step forward.

6 7

Operation Epsilon, p. 70. Quoted in Cantelon/Hewlett/Williams, Atom, p. 122.

NATURAL AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES – A COMMENTARY Moritz Epple It is not easy to comment on the complex analyses from this section on the Natural and Engineering Sciences – especially since, as Helmuth Trischler modestly indicates, only “paths through this immense field” could be cut here, which is undoubtedly true. The following remarks should therefore be conceived merely as suggestions for further research, not as an attempt at a critical assessment of the total field of state-organized research sponsorship under discussion here. There is an immediately conspicuous parallel between these four studies, which – as far as I can see – is also confirmed by the research project for the history of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) in general. The transformation of the structures of research support from the Weimar period into the politically integrated promotion of research during the National Socialist period was remarkably frictionless. In many areas it was still rudimentary and tuned more to professorial authority than to disciplinary innovativeness. Whether in metals research or chemistry, in mechanical engineering, mathematics, or physics, the DFG’s structures, and later those of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR), fit easily into place in the research landscape molded by National Socialism. This was not least due to the fact that the careers of the leading personalities – namely, the expert department heads (Fachspartenleiter) – brought them close to the government. It was also due to the partly ideological, partly opportunistic orientations of most of the grant applicants. Of course, on the level of daily research practice, their freedom was mostly successfully defended against professionally incompetent, direct ideological or political interference. Many authors within the field of inquiry of this researcher group (Buschmann/Hänseroth, Luxbacher, Trischler) refer here – also from the overarching temporal perspective – to the concept of a “national innovation system.” Its “path dependencies” and specificity (“Does a special German path exist?”) are explored as much as its continuities beyond 1933 and 1945. The German research landscape’s transition under National Socialism must, however, be seen against the backdrop of large-scale emigration, particularly in the natural sciences and mathematics. These mark an extremely abrupt discontinuity. In view of recent studies1 it is out of the question, at least in certain areas of research in the natural and engineering sciences, that either the purge of 1 As representatives see: Deichmann, Biologen; idem, Flüchten; Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematiker. The List of Displaced German Scholars, London 1936, published by the Academic Assistance Council, has still not been fully evaluated for the scientific areas under discussion here.

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substantial segments of these scientific communities, or the research competency thereby lost, could have been overlooked. In mathematics, for instance, about one third of all tenured professors (Ordinarien) lost their positions in 1933.2 Research sponsorship was also involved in this upheaval at the level of potential applicants as well as in the decision made in 1933 before it was enforced by the state to no longer support “non-Aryan” applicants. In this connection it would be interesting to know the proportion of Jewish scientists who had been receiving grants from the Notgemeinschaft and the DFG prior to 1933, ordered by professional specialty. In view of the noted “leaden silence” by the DFG organs and the unsatisfactory state of the files, more research will evidently be needed for this. Considering this prehistory and obvious discontinuity with the beginning of National Socialism, investigating whether there was a continuity in research funding across the threshold of 1945 gains particular significance. Should we be looking specifically for another, essential discontinuity in organized research in the field of science and engineering after 1945? Should we expect one? Trischler’s findings do, in fact, point more toward continuities than discontinuities. They emphasize a special “theoretical orientation” by science and engineering in Germany that bridged the political hiatuses, an orientation characterizing both the German scientific landscape and the DFG’s promotional conduct. He indicates the DFG’s role in implementing disciplinary modifications over the entire period since 1920, and he still speaks of a “premodern, authoritative understanding of science” for the phase preceding the mid-1960s. One could add to this various sorts of staffing continuity, as demonstrated not least by Walther Gerlach’s case. This deserves a closer look, foremost at the “theoretical orientation.” The case studies do seem to show that a difference certainly existed between research sponsorship during the Nazi period and the early Federal Republic. In metals research, for instance, it is emphasized that under National Socialism arms-related research was always pursued alongside the elucidation of metallic structure, whereas after 1945 the thread of state-funded basic research was taken up again. At the same time, however, the relevant case study also underscores the importance of the DFG’s Permanent Panel on Applied Research during the 1950s and 1960s. Trischler points out that this theoretical orientation was identifiable “even in research fields as closely affiliated with industry as aviation.” These theses on metals research – and very similarly in the case of polymer chemistry at the transition from National Socialism to the Federal Republic – throw open three related questions. The first question is: As historians we must make sure that we be very careful with the labels “basic research” and “applied research”. During the last few years, many studies have shown the primarily rhetorical, situative role of this distinc2 The most accurate figures are available in the expanded English reedition of SiegmundSchultze, Mathematicians, pp. 13–29. On the significance of this break in the culture of mathematical research, cf. also Bergmann/Epple/Ungar (eds.), Transcending Tradition. In order to visualize the contemporary importance of such a figure, it is helpful to imagine the sudden loss of a corresponding fraction of scientists in one discipline today.

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tion. Scientists used it – and still do – differently in their various political settings without it agreeing with equally clear, objectivizable distinctions on the level of research practice. Moreover, the Priority Programs and Collaborative Research Centers of the DFG of the early Federal Republic in the field the mathematical sciences exhibit a clear proximity to potential or actual industrial “application.” Conversely, the practical research programs described as Zweckforschung in the idiom of the Nazi period likewise also always maintained a theoretical orientation. Secondly, and despite the above, the case studies of this section depict a clear priority mainly in favor of support for scientific and technological research close to application in the broadest sense. It is not quite clear whether this impression arises out of the way in which the analysis has been designed – i. e., the selection of the examined areas, for instance, scientific computing instead of the entire field of mathematics/informatics – or out of the subject itself. I do surmise the latter, however. In view of this, we should perhaps be speaking of the dominance of basic research close to application or, respectively, of theory-oriented applied research rather than of a theoretical orientation per se for the examined areas. This does indeed endure across the political breaks. For a clearer picture, it would, of course, be necessary to obtain detailed, quantative data on the grant amounts for the various subfields of the natural and engineering sciences. How much money flowed into polymer chemistry and how much into quantum chemistry during the 1950s and 1960s, for example? How much money flowed into the area of scientific computing? How much into “pure mathematics”? Or – to jump over the boundaries of a field, for once – into literary studies or the history of art? A third related question is whether international comparison is necessary for an appropriate evaluation of the DFG’s support of the sciences? Do the natural and engineering sciences in Germany before 1945 or afterwards manifest significant differences in research sponsorship compared to other states? This issue appears significant, if only in view of the repeatedly stressed discouses of “having fallen behind” and “Americanization.” A second general point will be outlined briefly. The analyses of this area has explored, among other things, the extent to which the DFG and its predecessor organizations assumed an influential role in “shaping the discourse.” They inquired into its character as an “actor.” As far as I can see, the answer offered by these case studies is just as ambivalent. The DFG took on major functions in initiating and consolidating new areas of research during the period examined – specifically using the instruments of Priority Programs and Collaborative Research Centers – and thereby supported disciplinary shifts. On the other hand, the individual studies show that it was also constantly reacting to the changing constellations of disciplinary authority, which were foremost embodied in the leading persons on the decision-making boards, as well as to political and economic interference. That is why it must remain open for now whether the DFG’s science policy as presented here should be interpreted as an expression of complex scientific discourses already in progress or whether they can be assessed as having concentrated or influenced these discourses. The critical issue here is whether the DFG represented a voice independent of other institutional actors

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in the scientific discourse of society, a voice that lends expression above all to the interests of research or researchers, respectively. In this connection a comment is also called for on the thesis briefly summarized in Trischler’s conclusions about the initially weak actor “DFG” and its dissolution “as an institutional collective actor” in the National Socialist state to the benefit of powerful individual actors, particularly the RFR’s expert department heads. It is indeed important to point out, as Trischler does, that other institutional actors dominated the field of science and technology under National Socialism, such as the Wehrmacht, foremost the Reich Ministry of Aviation. This was because of the support funds involved and because of the way political power was distributed. Nor can the intentional autocratic form of action according to the Führerprinzip by leading representatives of these institutions, including the DFG and the RFR, be ignored. Nevertheless, the role played by actor networks within these institutions – as well as within their predecessor and successor institutions – must also be carefully checked. As the studies on Walther Gerlach and Peter Adolf Thiessen show, such individual actors could only work successfully with the help of smoothly functioning networks of scientific relations. It is only on this level that the representational character of the DFG and its institutional activities across the breaks in 1933 and 1945 can be appropriately evaluated. Thus, it appears to me central to know to what extent – and when – the DFG’s reviewing authorities and decision-making structures became consistently pluralized beyond the personal networks of leading authorities. There are many indications that this happened very late. This leads me back to an aspect in the scientific case studies mentioned in the beginning, that is, the search for an essential structural discontinuity in the promotion and organization of research after 1945. All four examined areas bring to the fore what has already been demonstrated in most thorough studies of science and technology under National Socialism: After 1933 there was virtually no sign of, and quite certainly too little, resistance by scientists to the massive interference in research, even within their own disciplines, by a criminal state – moreover a state that was militarily, technically, even economically reliant on research, at least in the middle term. To an organization for the promotion of science recruited from the ranks of scientists, the question must be posed: Why was this resistance so evidently absent? The research supported by the DFG and the RFR was “happily” subjected to the new political, ideological, and military conditions, or at least “discerningly.” (However, I ask myself how one can speak of “discerningly” in this context without distorting its meaning.) This is demonstrated again by the role of the expert department heads in all the RFR’s areas. Has anything about this lack of resistance to the questionable political deployment of the scientists’ main organization for the promotion of research changed in the Federal Republic? Fortunately, this problem is at least in part counterfactual and might therefore be put aside as irrelevant. But perhaps it still deserves further consideration. As far as I can judge, no answer can be found in the present analyses. Nor do I find any convincing evidence there that, within the period under examination,

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normative structures of science organization were erected to protect research in science and technology from politically questionable instrumentalization in the future. It is conspicuous that – as far as can be gathered from the present investigations – the “leaden silence” about the purges in the years following 1933 apparently initially persisted even past 1945. A search for targeted sponsoring measures to enable expelled scientists to reengage scientific contacts or even to offer support for an eventual return has yielded no results. Has anything changed in this regard since the mid-1960s? Did generational change, the departure from the DFG’s boards and reviewing structures of the groups who had been socialized into the German scientific system before 1945 as well as their immediate pupils, make possible a new independence of the organization of scientific research, one which does not sacrifice rigorous research to the prevailing short-term interests of nonscientific – governmental or economic – actors and which defends the moral integrity of research policy? Let us – optimistically – suppose so.

IV HISTORY OF MEDICINE AND THE BIOSCIENCES

INSTRUMENTAL MODERNITY AND THE DICTATE OF POLITICS – SPONSORSHIP OF MEDICAL RESEARCH BY THE EMERGENCY ASSOCIATION/ GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1920–1970 Wolfgang U. Eckart Prior to the project on “The History of the German Research Foundation 1920– 1970,”1 the topic of medical research funding by the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) had not been systematically pursued.2 This is astonishing because of the excellent availability of sources and the exceptional opportunity to gain through such a inquiry insight into the research routine at universities and how it developed over the decades, something that otherwise could not be obtained from the published research results or the university archives, which are oriented toward the history of staffing and administrative issues. Thus, within the framework of the project as a whole, the history of medicine was granted far-reaching access to the research practice within the context of the various political and social determining factors. Several individual projects were supposed to reconstruct the history of the DFG’s promotion of medical research – medicine received the broadest share of grants altogether in the foundation’s history – at least in outline. The extraordinary extensiveness of the source material soon made it clear that this could only be done exemplarily. Thus, initially the basic problem involved subjecting individual aspects to closer analysis. But which ones should they be? In the first place, the overall direction of the project had to be taken into account. In studying this issue, a longer time period was necessary, covering the situation during the Weimar Republic, the subsequent period of bio-political dictatorship under National Socialism, and finally also the postwar period. Consequently, it could not be a matter of picking out particularly spectacular “cases” of criminal medical science during the Nazi period, of which there was no shortage within the DFG’s funding horizon. For systematic reasons it seemed advisable to look for those fields of support most especially suitable for analyzing the professional continuities and breaks over the entire period under examination, from 1920 to about 1 For preliminary results of the whole project, cf. Eckart (ed.), Man; Eckart/Neumann (eds.), Medizin; Eckart, NS-Diktatur. 2 See the brief but useful annotation in Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft. For general acknowledgment of DFG-supported medical research, cf. also Gradmann, Forschungsgemeinschaft; Roelcke, Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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1970. At the same time, these fields had to be of such representative importance within National Socialism as to afford answers to general questions about the conditions in society, power politics, and the history of medical research between 1933 and 1945. With these background considerations the following four thematic complexes were examined: First, human heredity within the context of the DFG (Anne Cottebrune);3 second, DFG funding of physiological research, taking into special account its transition from civilian to military research (Alexander Neumann);4 third, support by the DFG of research on colonial and tropical medicine before, during, and after the Nazi dictatorship (Marion A. Hulverscheidt);5 fourth, the DFG’s promotion of cancer research (Gabriele Moser).6 The Researcher Unit additionally arranged for an international conference on the history of state-supported experimentation on humans in the twentieth century. The results have meanwhile appeared under the title Man, Medicine, and the State. The exceedingly abundant source basis primarily comprised documents from R 73 – Individual Grant Proposals/DFG – in the Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz, the Individual Grants files 1948/49 ff. in the DFG’s archive in Bad Godesberg, and the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) in the Federal Archive in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Out of approximately 6,900 separate files in holding R 73, an estimated 1,500 to 1,800 are related to medical Individual Grants procedures between 1933 and 1945 and beyond. It became evident, first of all, that these files convey a vivid picture of the daily routine in medical research and medical science in Germany overall. Second, they provide signs of a strong tendency in certain areas of medical research to meet the state criteria or ideological prescriptions set by the ruling National Socialist movement – such as racist ideology, anthropological social science, and psychiatry. Third, they indicate reorientations to goals of military importance, cast in the light of Germany’s impending attack on Poland. Within certain areas of medical research, for example, they included aviation medicine, cardiovascular research, and psychopharmacological drugs or amphetamines.7 Fourth, they contain evidence that – gauged against the Reich Interior Ministry’s provisions of 28 February 19318 – the DFG also supported illegal and criminal research on humans in concentration camps and prisoner-of-war compounds, mental institutions, and nursing homes, as well as within the range of the “euthanasia” policy. Beyond that, an accurate analysis of these holdings held the prospect of significant revelations about a strong interinstitutional and interpersonal network 3 4 5

Cottebrune, Mensch. Cf. Neumann, Kontinuitäten; idem, Humanexperimente; idem, Nutritional Physiology. Cf. also Hulverscheidt, Menschen; idem, Neuorientierung; idem, Auseinandersetzun-

gen. 6 About this, cf. the papers by Steinwachs, Tumorforschungsprogramm; idem, Förderung. From among the present group of researchers, cf. Moser, Musterbeispiel; idem, Forschungen; idem, Deputy. 7 Cf. Steinkamp, Pervitin; Roth, Pervitin; Kästner, Missbrauch; Baader, Menschenversuche. 8 Cf. Eckart/Reuland, Principles; Eckart, Humanexperiment; Reuland, Humanexperimente.

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in some lines of war-related research, in particular bacteriology and parasitology, or cardiovascular physiology and the chemistry of blood gases within the framework of aerial weaponry, performed in Göttingen by Hermann Rein,9 in Münster by Erich Schütz and Karl Eduard Rothschuh,10 and in Bad Nauheim by Hans Schäfer.11 Even the more detailed studies on this thematic complex had not made use of the details contained in these DFG holdings to investigate these cases. The paths followed by research on aviation medicine as described by Karl Heinz Roth did not lead exclusively to Dachau, by any means.12 They also interlinked diverse physiological institutions and their researchers within a network of military structures. This is what the first case study argues. DFG RESEARCH BY HANS SCHÄFER IN BAD NAUHEIM In the years between 1940 and 1945, Hans Schäfer, after 1950 Heidelberg’s Ordinarius for physiology,13 was head of the Department for Experimental Pathology and Therapy at the Research Institute for Cardiology in Bad Nauheim. It was part of the William Kerckhoff Foundation, formed in 1929. For Schäfer, a young and ambitious private lecturer, this leadership position at the Kerckhoff Institute in Bad Nauheim was his first; it also coincided with the outbreak of World War II. Schäfer understood the signs of the times and purposefully banked on the “war importance” of his research in order to obtain funding from the DFG. On 24 November 1939 he wrote to the German Research Foundation: “On the 1st of January 1940, I shall assume the direction of the Department for Experimental Pathology and Therapy at the Kerckhoff Institute in Bad Nauheim as successor to Prof. Koch. I now request that the department be assigned tasks of importance to the war, to which it is excellently suited, as this department is equipped particularly abundantly with apparatus, making it surely one of Germany’s largest physiological institutes.”14 The areas of research that Schäfer suggested as topics of inquiry were causal therapy of tetanus, therapy of encephalitis, hyper- and hypoxaemia research of importance to high-altitude airmen and rescue teams using oxygen apparatus,15 ophthalmological diagnostic research for teams working with range finders, and, finally, also general research on the circulatory system. Schäfer had previously worked on fundamental research on many of these topics. In the months following the application, the institute was mainly engaged in “hyper- and hypoxaemia research,” Schäfer reiterating their “war importance” throughout, almost like a prayer wheel. Three aspects provided the basis for his reliance on this magic phrase: First of all, the primary concern was, of course, 9

Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/13879. BAK, R 73/14563, 14564. 11 BAK, R 73/14197. 12 Roth, Höhen; idem, Bodies. 13 Schäfer, 60 Jahre. 14 Schäfer to DFG, Bonn, 24 Nov. 1939, BAK, R 73/14197. 15 Schäfer to DFG, Nauheim, 5 Jan. 1940, ibid. 10

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getting approval for the funding of the project, but, second, it did indeed involve the supply of what were called “rationed materials” (bewirtschaftete Stoffe) – for example, anode batteries – and, thirdly, dispensation from active combat for himself and his male co-workers. Schäfer was successful. In March he received the petitioned grants and the important official stamp by the RFR certifying “war and state importance.” In the interim he had been called up by the Wehrmacht but stayed in Kassel and, evidently contrary to the intentions of the Kerckhoff Institute’s director, Prof. Eberhard Koch, pushed for the subordination of his own department and possibly also of the entire institute to a centralized authority. At the present time it is not clear whether anything actually came of these plans to detach the institute. But it is conspicuous that, from then on, Schäfer and his group put their entire energy into important war research. It is clear that Schäfer was granted a contract through the RFR to conduct military research under the code name “altitude fitness.”16 This and other contracted experiments, including the so-called Bezold effect from critical height sickness, were continued up to December 1944 in Bad Nauheim. Prior to the war, Schäfer had specialized in experimental electrophysiology. This scientific orientation opened up for him new research and funding opportunities on problems of military relevance. Kriegswichtigkeit was more than just a catch phrase for Schäfer to secure financing options. In addition to the research on hypoxaemia, Schäfer also started to conduct studies on fatal detonations using larger dogs, which also took place in his Bad Nauheim laboratories. They were conducted in close cooperation with the Pharmacological Institute in Innsbruck and the Physiological Institute at the Luftwaffe testing station in Rechlin. In these experiments the physiologist and later Catholic philosopher of social ethics placed anesthetized and unanesthetized dogs in the acoustical shadow of armored plating. They were then subjected to detonation pressures from undamped 30–100 kilogram TNT charges ignited at 2 to 5 meters distance from the steel plating. The animals that were still alive afterwards were put down with potassium cyanide.17 This example makes thoroughly evident how the issue of war importance turned into a decisive motor for the recipients of DFG-funding for materials, affecting the way they wrote their applications and progress reports. But it also shows the radical lengths to which research practice could go, in order to claim “war importance,” without even crossing the line to illegality or inhumanity. It also clearly shows how research, situated in civil life, was increasingly acquiring military connotations. Questions immediately also arise, of course, about whether civilian physiological networks were established in this special field of research as Karl-Heinz Roth reconstructed them for research in aviation medicine – albeit based on different sources. In order to grasp the continuities in professional thinking and research topics already existing prior to 1933, this study began not in 1933, but instead during 16

Höhenfestigkeit: Schäfer’s report to the DFG, Nauheim, 10 Mar. 1943, ibid. Schäfer’s part of the report to the DFG on the project labeled Detonationstod, Nauheim, 10 Mar. 1943, ibid. 17

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the Weimar Republic. Particularly given the background problem of analyzing continuity versus discontinuity in German scientific sponsorship before and after 1933/45, it is indispensable first to find out who had been supported by the NG during the Weimar Republic and in what form – material support, stipends, or publishing grants. The radical changes during the first years after the National Socialists’ takeover require special attention. The science policy declaration made by the NG in mid-May 1933 in Königsberg (Kaliningrad) already took into account the looming change in medical research themes in the direction of a stronger emphasis on promoting racial hygiene and biological heredity. It revealed, in addition, how rapidly Friedrich Schmidt-Ott was ingratiating himself politically with the new men in power. The speakers included Prof. Eugen Fischer from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, who proudly pointed out that he had been “the first to prove the inheritance of traits of the human race in South African bastards” (“bastards” from Rehoboth) and that his institute had been heavily involved in the sterilization law awaiting passage. In the three-page summary of his speech held in early summer 1933, Fischer alluded to necessary steps toward a “conscious population policy.” Not only sicknesses were “hereditary,” but also “racial characteristics.” In order to reach the eugenic population goal of a “conservation of good, healthy German families,” Fischer arrived at the conclusion that the “hereditarily sick and those not fitting racially into our nation must be culled out.” Meanwhile, National Socialism not only created the conditions for a clear shift in accent on “population policy” in medical research support, but it also permitted a radicalizing shift in the limits of what was legally permissible and socially desirable within the bounds of medical science. This is particularly obvious in the context of human experimentation before and after 1939. Its outcome remains depressing. The results spanned the whole spectrum of experimental research on human subjects, from the scientist conducting experiments on himself and the comparatively low-risk delousing trials executed on Russian prisoners of war with powders developed by the Soviets for delousing game (Veterinary College in Hannover),18 the extremely risky infection experiments with tropical malaria (Gerhard Rose, Pfaffenrode)19 and the expendible-twins research by Verschuer and Mengele in Auschwitz,20 to the brain research connected with the name Hallervorden performed at the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch on victims of Aktion T4, i. e., the program to kill off the incurably sick.21 The issue here is less the dramatic quality of such experiments documented by DFG applications and reports than the “normality” of human experimentation in the semantics of medical research under the Nazi dictatorship during times of peace as well as war.22 18

Tierärztliche Hochschule Hannover. BAK, R 73/316, vol. 4. BAK, R 73/14064. 20 BAK, R 73/15341–15342. 21 BAK, R 73/11449. 22 Cf. for the situation during the Weimar Republic: Reuland, Humanexperimente; on the Nazi period: Ebbinghaus/Dörner (eds.), Vernichten. 19

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THE MALARIA EXPERIMENTS BY CLAUS SCHILLING AND GERHARD ROSE In preparation for the war, German tropical medicine specialists and epidemiologists conducted elaborate tests on the home front, or preferably, on the supposedly ethically extraterritorial grounds of German concentration camps and prisoner-ofwar compounds. The experiments in tropical medicine that were carried out in mental institutions and nursing homes, in POW and concentration camps, placed special attention on trials of malaria preparations. These were needed in great quantities as the war expanded into the Balkans in the spring of 1941.23 But they were also of interest in view of revisionist colonizing plans. A concentration on the development and clinical trials of synthetic malaria therapeutics existed even before the onset of hostilities to gain independence from raw-material imports (quinine). Human trials with such preparations – Atebrin, Plasmochin, Sontochin – produced by the Bayer Works with the aim of creating a monopoly in this market sector, had already become tradition by 1933. German malarial research, ranked as important to the war since 1933 and correspondingly promoted, reached their gruesome high point in Claus Schilling’s experiments in the Dachau concentration camp.24 Between 1932 and 1944 Schilling found funding for his researches on malaria safety by the DFG.25 Numerous proposals on malarial research were submitted to the DFG within the period from 1933 to 1945. Generally, the source material is extraordinarily bountiful. It ranges from the old issue of employing malaria as a therapeutic – a “malaria remedy” so to speak – in the late stages of syphilis (progressive paralysis) in Wagner-Jauregg’s approach26 to general research on malarial therapy and prophylaxis, and experiments in voluntary and involuntary human trials conducted in concentration camps and nursing or health institutions for mental patients and prisoners of war, such as in Pfaffenrode in Thuringia. Exploiting the nimbus of the hero-doctor, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, head of the medical department at the RFR, called together students in his surgical auditorium on 3 February 1938 to volunteer for vaccinations with a malarial plasmodium.27 This was not in the least unusual for the time. “Voluntary” medical trials, such as the ones on ensigns with the methamphetamine Pervitin or Lost, were routine in the Berlin Academy for Medical Officers. But Sauerbruch also knew about other studies that had very evidently been conducted on nonconsenting persons, such as those locked up in the Dachau camp. This conclusion very probably also applies to Claus Schilling, who successfully approached the RFR with an application to fund a micromanipulator for “infection” experiments on peo23

Cf. Vogel, Probleme. See on this Vondra, Malariaexperimente. 25 BAK, R 73/14290. 26 Dr. Günther Kudicke (Prussian Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases, Tropical Medicine Department): Natürliche Infektion mit Mücken bei therapeutischer Malaria, 1937–39, BAK R 73/12467. 27 Sauerbruch, Bericht über Malariaforschung in Heilanstalten und mit Freiwilligen, Berlin, 20 Jun. 1938, BAK, R 73/14290. 24

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ple “with individual parasites of bird malaria.” Schilling lent particular weight to his proposal by noting that his experiments – of importance to the war – were taking place “at the order of the Reich Medical Führer in a malaria laboratory at the SS hospital” in Dachau.28 The tropical medicine specialist Gerhard Rose should also be mentioned in this connection.29 Surgeon General Rose served as consultant on public health and tropical medicine for Air Force Medical Inspection (Luftwaffensanitätsinspektion, Lln 14) between 1939 and 1945. He participated directly in DFG-funded malaria experiments on human subjects. Rose was condemned to life imprisonment in 1947 in Nuremberg for his typhus-vaccine trials in the Buchenwald and Natzweiler concentration camps but was soon released again in the 1950s and awarded the Paul Schürmann Medal by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wehrmedizin in 1977. His researches, performed in the Laboratory for Military Hygiene in Pfaffenrode and in the local sanatorium, were not deliberated on in Nuremberg. These studies on nonconsenting patients were primarily devoted to preventative research of war importance. But the search for malarial vaccines of relevance for colonizing probably played a role in the researcher’s expectations. Rose and Schilling regularly exchanged letters. Rose’s research may have been directly related to German preliminary considerations and researches on biological warfare. In the spring of 1943 the operations staff of the Wehrmacht and the general staff of the Luftwaffe were pushing for rapid preparations for offensive B and C warfare. In February 1943, the Study Team entrusted with this task received the code name “lightening rod.”30 The leadership of this study group included the cancer and plague researcher Kurt Blome from Posen (Poznanv), the epidemiologist Heinrich Kliewe from Giessen, and Surgeon General Walter Paul Schreiber, besides Rose as malaria specialist. Broad areas of his malarial research were supported by the DFG, totaling 13,600 reichsmarks overall. Patients included in it came not only from the Pfaffenrode sanatorium in Thuringia but also from the state-run health care institutions in Görden in the state of Brandenburg, in Arnsdorf, and Eberswalde.31 All these investigations were carried out in close cooperation with the chemical company I. G. Farben and primarily covered clinical trials of the synthetic antimalarial preparations Atebrine, Plasmochin, and Sontochin as well as the quinine derivative “quinine hydrochoride.” Most of these patients were artificially infected with Plasmodium vivax but also with a specially cultured “Pfaffenrode” tropica strain. The course of the fever was monitored by circadian two-hour rectal temperature readings. However, this section on the history of medicine of the research project on “The History of the DFG” should not focus on individual phenomena of ideol28

Schilling to RFR, Dachau, Malariastation, 12 Feb. 1944, BAK, R 73/14290. Emphasis added. On Rose, cf. Vondra, Malariaexperimente. 30 See the statement by Generalarzt Prof. Schreiber before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, in International Military Tribunal, vol. 21, pp. 605 ff. On the internal organization of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft “Blitzableiter” see German BW Organization, in: Military Intelligence Division, War Department, Washington. Biological Warfare, Activities and Capabilities of Foreign Nations, 30 Mar. 1946, National Archives Washington, record group no. 330. 31 BAK, R 73/14064. 29

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ogy dependent or criminal research proposals supported by the DFG – notwithstanding the certainly spectacular individual aspects of this criminal research. Such spectacular cases have been pointed out repeatedly in the past. Concentrating on the issue of perpetrator research under National Socialism was certainly politically and historically meaningful at a particular stage in the historical assessment of Nazi science. Yet beyond this narrowly defined area, it becomes relevant in the history of science only when the scientific necessities and ethical conditions of experimental research on human beings are placed within the context of the political and cultural conditions for science – its “style of thinking” (Denkstil) – and its intended goals. Hence, the issue here is the structural transformation of medical research, its spaces, its languages, themes, directed aims, and attitudes under the influence of an ideology that penetrated society and science alike, under the dictate of a segregating image of humankind and the dictate of war. But foremost is the issue of the medical “research routine” under special political conditions. The occupation with sponsorship of medical research by the DFG under Nazism is ultimately interesting primarily from the perspective of the sociology of science because the partially contradictory character of the Nazi government can be described particularly clearly by this example. On the one hand, the medical experiments conducted on prisoners of war, patients at health institutions, and internees in concentration camps, which frequently calculated the deaths of the experiments’ subjects, impressively verify the unprecedented inhumanity of Nazi rule and science. On the other hand, however, medical research and research support under National Socialism was marked by continuity in method and content reaching back to the Weimar years exercised by “apolitical” researcher personalities. The objects of examination partly matched the political zeitgeist on race and militarism and could very well move within the mainstream of international medical research. If these two aspects are regarded in isolation, the result can be either demonization or dilution of the Nazi regime but not sober analysis in a historical context. In my view, the issue of the ambivalence between modernization and modernity under National Socialism is also inherent in a sober analysis of the experimental research on human subjects in particular but also of medicine in general. This problem can certainly be posed for medicine without incurring the charge of intending to relativize medical crimes as long as the issue is detached from or avoids any superficial equivalence with modernity and its positively connotated ideas of progress. Riccardo Bavay pursued this question critically in his study published in 2003 on the Ambivalenz der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus. In his concluding remarks he summarized his findings as an image of modernity under National Socialism, not so much evolved out of advancement as drafted by contingency. Here contingency would generally mean a shaping of the given in view of potential otherness and would contain subjects or areas of issues “within the horizon of possible transformations.”32 As a totalitarian and, simultaneously, a modern racist state, the Third Reich was “at its core definitely forward-looking 32

Luhmann, Systeme, p. 152.

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and oriented toward the future.”33 Its goal had been to establish “a progressive, tightly organized, performance-oriented society selected according to racial biological criteria, secured by a modern, centralized, rationalized, and differentiated social and health system.”34 In this sense – with the above-described restrictions – from the point of view of our medical division of this project, one certainly could identify central aspects of medical research under Nazism. Hence, evolutionary theory, in particular, could be seen in view of a racially and hereditarily healthy state, and cancer research in view of the problem of a growing awareness of chronic illnesses, as well as physiology in view of the advancing problem of performance enhancement in civilian and particularly in military areas, or colonial or tropical medicine – and the study of infectious diseases generally – in view of a new colonial policy in the making, and each of these could be interpreted as specific contributions toward instrumental modernization. Here instrumental modernity or modernization makes allusion to the concept of instrumental rationality according to Horkheimer and Adorno,35 to be understood as purposefully rational, instrumental action under defined social and economic conditions. For the promotion of research on health and medicine under National Socialism, this means that under the worldview and politics conditioned by the Nazi dictatorship – just as in democratic states – the determination and utilization of efficient means-to-end relations was sought at the highest level of science and technology. Such “modernity” in research on cancer, tuberculosis, aviation physiology, and other fields sought to concentrate research and its means and to reconnect with international research and international comparability, difficult as it was to realize under war conditions. The risk that the political “engineers” of such a health and medical research policy “would ignore” the conventional and generally acknowledged “categories of civil association”36 and would limit themselves to constructing apparent modernity under conditions of racial elitism, which “permitted” the instrumentalization of the actions and corporality of the disparaged peoples, even eliminating their very physical existence, was willingly taken. All the subfields mentioned above are more or less united by the aspect of a common aim toward apparently concrete materializable utopias for a future healthy and productive totalitarian-constituted society. From this perspective, according to Michael von Prollius in his review of Bavay, only the establishment of a racist state appears revolutionary.37 This perspective points out the dangers and consequences, however, of modernity thus conceived despite or precisely because of the singularity of the Third Reich. Taking the example of the DFG’s medical research practice, the following hypothesis can be tested and verified against all the research aspects taken by the 33 34 35

Bavay, Ambivalenz, p. 201. Ibid., p. 202. Instrumentelle Moderne bzw. Modernisierung; instrumentelle Rationalität: Habermas, Theorie,

p. 489. 36 37

Habermas, Lehre, p. 50. Prollius, Review of Bavay.

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projects sketched in this article. Medical research under the Nazi regime was, first, closely connected both conceptually and methodologically to long-term, entirely international trends in science policy. Second, at the same time, however, it contained specific elements of a targeted medically instrumental modernity of the biopolitical Nazi dictatorship. Third, it generated a historically unprecedented destructive potential. THE DFG AND THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HEREDITY The breakthrough of the doctrine of human heredity in its Mendelian orientation was slow. It took over twenty years from the beginning of the twentieth century. The Emergency Association of German Science (NG) supported only a few research proposals during the 1920s aimed at directly applying Mendelian genetics (as conceived in the research by Eugen Fischer or Ernst Rodenwaldt) to human beings. The first investigations on the issue of heredity to arise within the context of medicine took a closer look at the role of inheritable factors from an entirely different perspective. In the early Weimar Republic, studies on heredity mainly emerged as a marginal field of modern bacteriology and nutritional physiology. The situation was different in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The founding of its Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in 1927 set alternative accents. The area of racial research is significant, however, in the context of sponsorship by the NG. During the Weimar Republic, manifold projects were supported under the still extremely flexible concept of “racial research” from the mid-1920s on. The category of race was applied as one of numerous other influential variables. It was not yet primarily a matter of relating race to pathogenetic aspects. On the contrary, it was not infrequently the case that the participating researchers were not supposed to verify a dependence between pathological processes on racial factors but rather to draw this into question. One instance is the funded research project in the area of “comparative national and racial pathology” – as it was essentially initiated by the Freiburg pathologist Ludwig Aschoff. Attention was directed instead to environmental or habitual influences on heredity, such as issues of nutrition. The transition to promoting paradigms of hereditary biology first occurred within the framework of so-called Cooperative Projects on Race Research (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten für Rassenforschung) supported by the NG from 1928 on. The shift in accentuation by the DFG to supporting research on hereditary pathology basically only started in 1930 and was essentially attached to the persona of the psychiatrist and heredity researcher Ernst Rüdin,38 who served alongside Fischer at the KWI for Human Heredity as mentor of the long-term project by the NG/ DFG introduced around that time. It is interesting that, when Rüdin became involved in these Cooperative Projects, studies on inherited pathological traits 38

Cf. Roelcke, Funding.

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took precedence over population analyses hitherto made along anthropological lines. This change in accent toward issues of racial hygiene and hereditary pathology, which had already clearly started in the final years of the Weimar Republic, were consistently continued after the National Socialists took over power. The reviewing and approval practices hardly changed, however, because Fischer and Rüdin, as the priviledged experts on heredity and race research, continued to exert a lasting influence on the promotion of research on genetics beyond the political break in 1933. In this connection the pressing question arises: Was this radical shift from racial anthropology to hereditary pathology a consequence of modernity? Instrumental modernity in this context means turning away from a doctrine on heredity mainly oriented toward racial anthropology, and a reductionist, habitual and infectious inherited pathology concentrated on germ toxins (alcohol, syphilis, tuberculosis), toward a more pathogenetically differentiated way of seeing things. The desired goal of recovered “health” for the individual and for the “body of the nation” (Volkskörper) thus shifted to the realm of reality, as a concretely attainable utopia. The DFG contributed substantially toward this after 1933. It exerted a high degree of influence in the area of heredity and race research and was definitively involved in the radicalization of the field and its biopolitical implementation in the context of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Sick Progeny of 14 July 1933. Anne Cottebrune demonstrates that active and willing participation in broadening the Nazi laws on heredity by the researchers of heredity supported by the DEG could proceed with, at times, entirely unforeseen research results. Their research did not always result in a directly politically implementable “yield for the Nazi policy on cultivating heredity and race.” The “research motivated by racial hygiene could ultimately also constitute basic research” and thus evade a “politically directly calculable relationship with the utility of the regime’s racist eugenic measures.” In the moral context, they remained at all times misanthropic. A deep caesura in support for heredity and race research followed the outbreak of the war in 1939. The consequences of this caesura on funding were even more striking than the radicalization and narrowing in favor of promoting research on racial hygiene and hereditary pathology in the year 1933. The establishment of the RFR, responsible for organizing research funding according to the goals of the Four-Year Plan, led to a redistribution of the research budget. The consequence was an increasingly obvious dismantling of research on heredity and race over the course of the war. This cut in research funding was not homogeneous, of course. Areas that were directly connected with the Nazi regime’s policy of selection and expulsion enjoyed noticeably greater subsidies. I mention here in particular the support given by the RFR for research on so-called “asocial elements,” including “research on gypsies.”39 After 1945 the starting position for support of the science of human heredity was very unfavorable. The discipline, renamed Humangenetik, hardly obtained 39

Cf. Cottebrune, Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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any financial support in the 1950s. Overall, this lack of funding for human genetics cannot be explained exclusively by the disrepute the field had fallen into. It is based on a more complex chain of events. Professional controversies caused plans to establish a separate DFG Anthropology Priority Program to fail in 1958. The dynamic evolution of “clinical genetics,” causing a reorientation of the field, had triggered a scientific controversy that mainly impeded the quest for adequate backing for Humangenetik. Its traditional link with anthropology posed an obstacle to constituting itself as an independent field of study in Germany. This situation accordingly led to the professional field receiving little funding and remaining behind internationally as a consequence. Furthermore, its special path had become obsolete and out of date because it had not found a way to link up with the new paradigms of genetics. Its belated orientation toward the paradigms of molecular biology can accordingly be attributed to structural factors as well as to a perseverant adherence to its “own” traditions determined by staffing continuities. Thus, it was only with much delay that the constitutive integration of different disciplines could occur toward the emergence of molecular biology at German universities. Disciplinary stagnation also prevented an earlier link between human genetics and cell research and ultimately determined the backwardness of German human genetics much more than the temporary isolation of the field after 1945. After a delay of nearly twenty years, the break was finally made with the continuities in content and method prior to 1945. This was determined by generational change and was under the influence of an increasingly internationalized research on human genetics. Here also the DFG played an important role by granting subsidies for the meanwhile up-to-date biochemical and cytogenetic methods of Humangenetik. It made available larger-scale allocations for Priority Programs as well as for travel stipends for the coming generation of younger researchers. The DFG Priority Program on the Biochemical Basis of Population Genetics, launched in 1968, was especially important.

RESEARCH ON PHYSIOLOGY AND TROPICAL MEDICINE The development of physiology and tropical medicine within the funding horizons of the Emergency Association (NG), respectively the DFG, can only be discussed cursorily in this survey. But here, too, the issue of the modernity of these specialties before, during, and after the Nazi dictatorship should be discussed. On the one hand, the prominance and promotion of nutrition physiology during the 1920s had its motivating impetus oriented backwards in time, namely, on concrete observations among civilians and the military during the catastrophic starvation of World War I. That was why it pursued research that had already begun during the World War. On the other hand, however, the state of the art lay in the mainstream of international research on nutrition physiology, as can be demonstrated by the example of vitamin research. The NG provided the impetus, which the circles of grant recipients could also see. The pharmacologist from Munich,

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Walther Straub noted in a speech in 1930 about the success of NG-supported vitamin research but also about its outstanding obligations: “We should just be aware that there is still very much work to be done and these researches cost a great deal of money. I acknowledge here thankfully that throughout the ten years of its existence the Emergency Association for German Science proved itself to be a most effective vitamin for our vitamin research; without it, our so meagerly allocated university laboratories would be rickety, scorbutic, and sterile.”40 This biologistic vitamin comparison speaks volumes but should not obscure the fact that the mentioned convalescence by vitamin research from vitamin deficiencies not only translates into a cure but also signifies a recuperation through improved equipment and therefore also through modernization. The shift of physiological research to the new paradigm of performance enhancement after 1933, which was also supported by the DFG, did not happen abruptly, but gradually. The expelling of Jewish scientists from physiology – painful though it was – did not cause a dramatic collapse in ongoing research projects. No more so did the acquisition of power by the National Socialists initially mark any clearly recognizable change in research topics in physiology. Research on nutrition continued to play a central role in the sponsorship of physiological research by the DFG, although in a new ideological dress, because special significance was attached to nutrition of the “sound Volkskörper” within the framework of autarky policy and Nazi ideology. After 1933, of course, a noticeable verbal radicalization and ideologization of an already existing development can be seen in grant applications. During the early years of the Nazi regime, there was no evidence of an orientation toward cardiovascular issues or metabolic physiology in the sense of a greater modern emphasis on habitual common diseases compared to infectious diseases. Even researchers with a particular say, such as Rein in Göttingen, found it hard to raise funds for this branch of research. Propagandistic improvement of the reputation of German physiology about the way it conducted research was deemed necessary, however, especially compared to England. A clear reorientation by DFG- and RFR-sponsored physiology can be seen only at the beginning of World War II. Research on nutrition physiology – again with retrospective reference to World War I – concentrated on how to avoid a threatening “protein and fat gap” or how to compensate for it, as well as on yeast research. But other militarily “necessary” researches appeared in the area of psychopharmacological performance enhancement with amphetamines, for example in connection with aviation. With regard to the modernization of physiological research, the military complex appeared to dictate the conditions of modernity, while physiology had the task of designing it bionically. On the one hand, the necessary formation of networks in flight physiology in the field of circulatory and respiratory research, which rapidly materialized when the “war importance” of such analyses was emphasized, was new. Also new, however, was the radicalness with which murderous human experiments – which can also be documented in this area – were carried out. The DFG and RFR also shared sponsorship of 40

Straub, Vitamine, p. 44. Alexander Neumann found this quote.

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such research, in Dachau, for instance, albeit camouflaged as allocations via the Committee on Scientific Instrumentation. Radicalness in this connection does not refer to the inclusion of illegitimate experiments on human subjects per se, which could be referred back to older lines of tradition, but rather to the implementation of reckless human experimentation, hence consciously causing or risking the death of the subject within the exceptional situation of the concentration camp. These researches – ignoring moral judgments – were innovative and the state of the art in scientific practice far beyond 1945. The continued career of the flight physiologist Hubertus Strughold in the USA through Operation Paperclip demonstrates this more than enough. German research on tropical medicine in the 1920s as a whole was fundamentally remolded by ideological notions of revisionist colonialism.41 The loss of the colonial territories, which was perceived as a deep injustice, did not lead to research support by the NG. Despite undeniable crucial successes in research on sleeping sickness during the final war years and early postwar period, there was a shortage of research topics and fields. Much more research was sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry than by the NG, however. This changed conspicuously after the National Socialists took over power in 1933. Research on malaria concentrating on African problems profited in particular. For many World War veterans, the fantastic plan for new German colonial possessions stretching from Cairo to the Cape certainly was on the political, and in particular the racial policy agenda right up to the first few years of the war. Ernst Rodenwaldt in Heidelberg, for instance, was indefatigable in his labors for the sake of the racial-biological future of the German colonial possessions still awaiting recovery. But it was his Hanseatic opponent Peter Mühlens, director of the Tropical Institute in Hamburg, who described in 1941 the new ideal type of colonial doctor and practitioner of tropical medicine. This colonial medical officer must, in “calm, virtually uninterrupted work day and night, [be busy] with the medical preparations for the retaking” of the German colonial areas:42 There must and can only be one type of doctor in our colonies; the German colonial doctor. And we must mold him now. It is crucial that he, first, be a good German National Socialist, down to his bones; second, must be a trained doctor in every respect, who is willing to assume any post and fill it fully; and third, that he fulfill all German colonial requirements, particularly those of uniform leadership in public health, with utter selflessness.43 Only a doctor with such qualities would in the end be in a position to address the “inseparable” problems of “European and native eugenics” as well as all its related “race, population, and sociopolitical questions.” Technical administrative problems, Mühlens was convinced, could safely “be entrusted to strong political and health leaders.”

Against this backdrop a scholarship program, the Kolonialstipendiatenprogramm, was set up in the DFG that was far removed from research but was decidedly

41 42 43

Cf. Eckart, Medizin. Mühlens, Aufgaben, p. 42. Ibid.

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ambitious about colonial policy. It offered financial support to doctors wanting to continue training in colonial or tropical medicine. The careers of such doctors were supposed to be regulated through planning by the Nazi Party’s office in charge of colonial policy, using a DFG scholarship as its vehicle. This was clearly an attempt by colonial revisionists in the Nazi Party to usurp the DFG’s organizational and financial means for their expansionary efforts and plans. The continuities in personnel of this program, in particular, is remarkable: Former recipients of colonial scholarships, the overwhelming majority of whom were members of the party or the SS and who had neither conducted any research nor were expected to do so, were given preferential treatment in subsequent applications all the way into the 1950s. Issues of modernity are hardly likely to have borne fruit in the DFG’s Colonial Scholarship Program, unless one wants to interpret the new racist biological program for Nazi neocolonialism in the sense of instrumental modernity by the National Socialist state in questions of colonial policy. Instead, clearly backwardlooking aspects of a politically ambitious colonial revisionism are in the forefront here. The comparatively heavily funded research program in the area of malariology was very different. In the 1930s, particularly after the takeover of power, this program was clearly striving for malaria-prophylactic and therapeutic goals. The first synthetic pharmaceuticals, that is, drugs not originating from quinine, were developed by the pharmaceutical industry. Trials were conducted with DFGfunded projects in concentration-camp research – for example, Schilling’s and Rose’s – or on members of the Wehrmacht. This shows the tightly interlocking collaboration between industry, the military, and state-funded research. In the 1930s malaria research was certainly part of a modern trend towards an international malariological scientific community oriented toward securing the health of the colonial possessions, but also toward creating concrete military options for combat in endemic malarial regions. The difference with respect to the international situation, which characterized the Germans through research efforts sponsored by the DFG, was the willingness, already repeatedly noted, to abandon ethical norms. German research let its trial patients die, or at least exposed them to serious risk without objections being raised.

CANCER RESEARCH WITHIN THE FUNDING HORIZON OF THE NG/DFG Cancer research figures importantly in a variety of aspects within the framework of research sponsorship by the DFG. Although its promotion was neglected during the 1920s and early 1930s, it advanced to the top position among the DFG projects in medicine during the National Socialist dictatorship. The repeatedly lamented fragmentation of German cancer research, a branch of medical research that was weakened like no other by the painful blood-letting that this field had to suffer from the dismissals and expulsions of Jewish cancer researchers, led to a

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unique centralization. The National Board for Cancer Treatment (Reichsausschuss für Krebsbekämpfung) boosted support for cancer research from 1936 until 1945. Thus cancer research became the lead science, as it were, of DFG-sponsored medical research. The National Board was doomed to failure by the course of the war and collapse of the Nazi dictatorship, but also because of the far too high expectations from state-centralized cancer research. During the postwar period German cancer research developed further along different paths. Whereas in the Soviet occupied zone preparations were already being made in 1947 for a centralization of cancer research in Berlin-Buch, inspired by the Soviet military administration, in the western zones similar plans moved forward sluggishly. In the early 1960s advice from the Hinterzartener Kreis initiated by the DFG finally set in motion efforts to found a national cancer center. The university-affiliated German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum) was inaugurated on 25 September 1972 not in the then capital city Bonn, but instead in Heidelberg, at the recommendation of the Council of Sciences and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat). The early history of the promotion of cancer research by the DFG and the RFR is notable in many respects. After the dissolution of the Deutsches Zentralkomittee für Krebsforschung (1911–1933), complaints about a fragmentation of German cancer research multiplied within the profession in the face of growing foreign “competition.” These were, of course, just one aspect of a fatal research desideratum. To it was added the circumstance that three of the four cancer research institutes (Berlin, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Hamburg) had “lost” their directors and department heads to emigration (Hans Sachs, Ferdinand Blumenthal, Ludwig Halberstaedter) or deportation (Wilhelm Caspari, Richard Werner, Ludwig Hirschfeld). This was, consequently, not just a matter of coordinating and reorganizing what seemed to be a fatally desintegrated research landscape but also a matter of compensating for self-imposed losses of personnel. For instance, one had to make do without the leading German serologist from Heidelberg, Hans Sachs (1877–1945) because, “according to information by the Ministry of Culture, [… he had] left.”44 When the DFG inquired about him in August 1936, Sachs had already emigrated, having been ousted from his posts. This was the background leading up to the Reich Study Team on Cancer Control (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Krebsbekämpfung), formed in a remarkable financial tour de force in 1936 as well as the Cancer Program of the DFG or RFR, respectively. The pathologist from Munich and chairman of the Reich Study Team on Cancer Control, Maximilian Borst (1869–1949), was appointed as coordinator of German cancer research. In the summer he started to develop an ambitious research program in close consultation with the DFG. Its aim was to initiate an undoubtedly unique project of centralistic steering and promotion of cancer research as a “multidisciplinary Cooperative Project.”45 This was an entirely new

44

Breuer to Borst, 4 Aug. 1936, BAK, R 73/12388. Cf. also Steinwachs, Tumorforschungsprogramm. His dissertation on the RFR, published in the same year (2000; submitted in 1991) only takes into account a selection of the Individual Grants files but provides important pointers for more detailed studies. 45

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form for the time within the international research landscape.46 It established supraregional scientific Study Groups (Arbeitskreise) and parallel Study Teams (Arbeitsgemeinschaften) with central topics of inquiry and differing budgets, depending on their importance. Automatic synergy effects were quite evidently anticipated. Study Group I on the specific problem “early serological diagnosis of tumors” was supposed to concentrate on the “diagnosis” of carcinomas. Study Group II was intended for work on cancer genesis; other Study Groups concentrated on therapeutic research and the influence of “constitution and predisposition” on carcinogenesis. The proposed topics within the framework of the Cancer Program, which were assigned to specifically qualified scientists, are the central point of the present research project. For the first time, it is now possible to differentiate between the research themes and accomplishments of the participating persons as well as the funding made available for it over the years. The main question is: Which parts of the ambitious plan developed by Borst – measured against the DFG’s substantial investment in this program (1936/37: 200,000 reichsmarks; 1937/38: 252,478 reichsmarks)47 – could be realized at all? Also: Which specific research priorities were formed? And what efforts were made to pick up the lead again internationally? Serum research, the old domain of cancerology, noticeably retreated into the background while new fields of research were added, such as on papillomavirus, which was being pursued particularly vigorously in the USA during the 1930s,48 or the influence on carcinogenesis of (sexual) hormones, or the “chemistry of growth substances” and carcinogenetic substances. The range of cancer research was itself ideologically charged. This is illustrated by the plan to implement special cancer “schooling” in leading doctors’ associations. Its advocates hoped that such a transmission belt would drive wide-ranging instruction among patients: “Although this is not a research task, it should be the responsibility of leading men in cancer research to push this schooling through in doctors’ associations. It should also be remembered to arrange for the National Socialist associations, such as the Women’s Organization [Frauenschaft], S. A., S. D., etc., to cooperate with this schooling of patients.”49 The Cancer Research Program was propagandistically flanked by dramatic articles in the Völkischer Beobachter. It used the occasion of a visit by Reichsminister Goebbels in the hospital in Berlin-Virchow on 24 November 1938 to point out the “release of a larger sum for research on cancer.” In the “battle against cancer,” Berlin should “become a center in this struggle.”50 In January 1939 the Völkischer Beobachter printed an extensive interview with Borst on “Cancer – World Enemy 46

Friedrich Kröning (Zoological Institute, Univ. of Göttingen) to Breuer, Göttingen, 22 Nov. 1937, BAK, R 73/12388. 47 Distribution plan for the fiscal year 1 Apr. 1936–30 Mar. 1937; approved applications from the Cancer Program 1937/38, BAK, R 73/12388. 48 Cf. Eckart, Tumorvirologie. 49 Krönig to Breuer, Göttingen, 22 Nov. 1937, BAK, R 73/12388. 50 Dr. Goebbels im Virchow-Krankenhaus. Berlin edition of Völkischer Beobachter, daily suppl., 24 Nov. 1938.

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No. 1.” In it, “Germany’s most important authority on the fight against cancer” outlined the health-policy goals of the Cancer Program started up in “close collaboration with the Reich Ministry of Propaganda (Dr. Thomalla, Ministerial Director Gutterer)” and the “Reich leadership of doctors”: “supporting research”; “keeping records on cancer patients”; “preventing the quackery trinitrotoluene”; “enlightening the lay”; training “the practising physician.”51 The readers of the Völkischer Beobachter learned nothing about the internal strain that the DFG’s and RFR’s ambitious Cancer Program had experienced since its founding. There was permanent friction and squabbling over competencies between Borst and Sauerbruch. As the expert department head of medicine, Sauerbruch did not feel obligated to respect the Cancer Program’s list of topics. He disapproved of the massive attempt to centralize research and continued to approve or reject applications on tumor research autonomously without consulting Borst, irrespective of whether or not they ought to belong within the Cancer Program. Sauerbruch clearly balked at the “totalizing” of cancer research efforts planned by the DFG in collaboration with Borst. In June 1937 he was willing, however, to approve at least one core area of “cancer research.”52 Nothing came of Borst’s threat in October 1937 to resign from the Cancer Research Program, however.53 Personal differences were not the only obstacle to the centralization of cancer research within the context of the DFG’s Cancer Program. There were also competing institutional competency claims. The Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and Cultural Affairs was still insisting in March 1937 “that the Reich Office of Health as well as the ‘Robert Koch’ Institute for Infectious Diseases and the other institutes or establishments subordinated under the Ministry’s Department of Public Health” must be “at liberty to work in this area as well, also scientifically where applicable, because these institutions cannot completely dispense with such activities if they are to fulfill their practical responsibilities in combating cancer properly.”54 Altogether it can be stated with certainty that cancer research under National Socialism experienced an enormous amount of support – for strategic reasons in science policy as well as for ideological ones directed toward the health of the Volkskörper. Nevertheless, the course that the war took and the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship, as well as far too highly pegged expectations for cancer research centralized by the state, caused the National Board for Cancer Treatment to fail. It met its formal end with the dissolution of the National Socialist state and was not resuscitated in postwar Germany.

51

Professor Borst-München über die Krebsbekämpfung in Deutschland. Völkischer Beobachter, 28 Jan. 1939. 52 Breuer to Borst, 1 Jun. 1937, BAK, R 73/12388. 53 Borst to Breuer, 22 Oct. 1937: “If Mr. Sauerbruch approves funds for cancer research as chairman of the Reich Research Council for Medicine without my knowledge of it, then the necessary consequence I see is that I resign from the program I have set up. Please clarify”; BAK, R 73/12388. 54 Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft to DFG, 13 Mar. 1937, BAK, R 73/12388.

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CONCLUSION – MEDICAL RESEARCH SUPPORT BY THE DFG AND MODERNITY Should German cancer research, which was massively supported by the DFG and the RFR, be regarded as a scientific version of instrumental modernity? Is it an attempt driven by necessity to concentrate research for the purpose of catching up with the state of the art in the international scientific community? Or is it indeed “merely” an attempt to compensate for the loss of professional competency caused by the expulsions and discrimination against Jewish champions of science? Certainly all three components are important, although to different degrees. The perception by German cancer research of its loss of competency after the dismissals of its important representatives is presumably more weighty ex post facto than during the dictatorship. The inquiry about Hans Sachs in 1936, whose absence at that point in time had still not really been noticed very much, seems revelatory here. The competition with foreign cancer research was surely more obviously motivating. It appears to me, however, that what is decisive for the issue of modernity is the clear accentuation of medical research on the cancer problem and a centralized Cooperative Project as the choice of instrument to counter the perceived “fragmentation” of such researches. The purposefully chosen intensification of research on chronic illnesses starkly contrasts with the hitherto still dominant infectiological paradigm. It took into account for the first time definitively new pathogenetic or pathophenomenalogical aspects of demographic change. To what extent German cancer research was merely following an international trend, hence was modern by tagging along, or was consciously innovative in a modern sense would have to be solved comparatively. Be this as it may, it was quite evidently a part of a Nazi utopia with ultimate liberation from chronic illness as the goal, which needed concentrated and centralized medical research. It would be a grave mistake to conceive of administered medicine, and the medical research toiling toward it, as a pure expression of charity more or less strongly anthropologically attached to the human being – as an expression of solicitude for the sickened subject. Medical practice and research can and may only be explained by their cultural, social, and political contexts, in which they are firmly embedded. This, at least, is what the analyses on DFG-funded university medicine have once again made unmistakably clear. This also means that medical progress or medical modernity do not necessarily allow themselves to be construed exclusively as evolutionary processes of advancing development. They can certainly also manifest themselves as contingent phenomena within a given specific cultural, social, or political situation. Furthermore, if the National Socialist state, grounded in a policy of extermination, and the will of its rulers are not supposed to be interpreted merely as instruments in the pursuit of a purpose-bound system of dominance opportunistically directed at defined private or group-specific goals, but rather as a means toward imposing higher-ranking social, political, or national utopias,55 then medical research also yields questions 55

Cf. Hermand, Traum.

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about the goal-oriented and thus modern intentionality of the actions they promoted within the context of such utopias. This can be most immediately established for the area of hereditary pathology and its exploitation for the social and political prospects of the Nazi regime, as regards its racial-anthropological and anti-Semitic aspects and hereditary pathogenetics. However, “exploitation” here cannot necessarily be equated with the reductionistic interpretation of “working towards the Führer” (dem Führer zuarbeiten). Leeway in research – albeit system-immanent research – certainly was perceived, if not fought for. As has been described, matters are more complicated for the examined fields of physiology and tropical medicine, at least as far as DFG and RFR-funded research are concerned. On the one hand, an ideologically remolded physiology pursued the performance-oriented prescribed goals of the system and pragmatically followed the technical innovations of the military complex. On the other hand, however, it was also trying to catch up with the international state of the art, such as in Britain. Hence, two aspects of modernity converged, a system-immanent one and system-encompassing one. Matters were similar for research on tropical medicine. On the one hand, it strove for a reshaping of the new colonial “commonwealth,” with colonial-revisionistic – hence political – motivations within the racist state paradigm of the system. On the other hand, however, seen in international comparison, it also strove for innovative and therefore, as we can also say ex post facto, entirely visionary goals for malariology which are valid to this day. Active vaccine immunization against malaria, as Schilling was endeavoring to achieve in Dachau, is a modern, but still unattained aim of malaria prevention. Cancer research, in view of its organizational framing conditions for science, certainly was modern. But its leading impetus points back to initiatives shortly after the turn of the century, even though its goals were ideologically easily integratable within the Nazi state. A centralization of cancer research, including its apparatus for mass registration, was taken up again in temporally shifted continuity during the epoch of the two German states. The establishment of cancer registries as an outcome of systematic “records” only occurred in the compulsory state system of the GDR. Was medicine in the Nazi state modern? The complexity of the medical field and the finicky definition of the term modernity make this question difficult to answer. If one is prepared to apply the term instrumental modernity to medical science, then – this much is clear – in view of its illegitimate method of human experimentation and the sought-after and frequently also willingly performed service to an inhumane, criminal system, one will unavoidably have to talk about the menacing essentials of this “modernity.”

FASTER, HIGHER, MIGHTIER – PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH SUPPORT BY THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1920–1970 Alexander Neumann This contribution analyzes the support for physiological research by the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) during the years from the beginnings of the Weimar Republic to the end of the 1960s. The aim throughout will be to establish how it relates to the general history of the field, because only thus can it be determined whether the DFG followed general trends within physiology, presented itself as a pioneer and sponsor of particular developments in specific areas, or rather lagged behind the trend and just supported what was long-familiar. Three subfields of physiology are taken as exemplarily: nutritional, occupational, and cardiovascular or aviation physiology. The choice of these three areas is not only dependent on a quite good availability of sources but also on their importance in physiology as a whole by virtue of their function in society and the state. An important role was attached to all three areas in solving prevailing social, political, and military problems: Nutritional issues gained national importance not least from the hunger crisis during World War I, when unrest broke out on the home front. In the eyes of politicians and most scientists, nutritional science was supposed to assure that, on the basis of latest scientific results, such a development would never be repeated. Nutrition already occupied an important place during the Weimar period. Its importance was jacked up even more against a background of rearmament and war plans by the Nazi regime.1 The same also applies to occupational physiology (Arbeitsphysiologie). Its rise began with the swiftly changing capitalism of the early twentieth century and was closely associated with the names of the American engineers Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor. It came into focus for the state and industry as an applied science because maintaining and augmenting work output was considered the basis of a strong state.2 The aim of occupational physiology was to adapt workers to their machine environments in businesses and factories, whereas aviation medicine sought to understand the processes affecting the human organism inside ever faster, ever 1 On nutritional physiology see, e. g., Kübler, Ernährungsphysiologie; foremost Tanner, Fabrikmahlzeit. 2 A number of publications exist on occupational physiology and fatigue research. Cf. Rabinbach, Ermüdung; Sarasin/Tanner, Gesellschaft; Vatin, Arbeit.

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higher-flying aircraft. It became apparent early on that the boundaries between civilian and military research were fluid, more so than between the other two subfields of physiology.3 These very brief, sketchy accounts intend to clarify that the relationship between science and the state or, respectively, the military played a central role in all three of these selected fields of physiology. By these examples it can be shown how these actors acted toward each other in different political systems and what the professional responses were to current research trends or to the political and military developments. The point is also to analyze who was the acting subject or driven object at what particular time in order then to determine to what extent science and scientists were influenced by their political and societal contexts. CONSTANCY, KULTURKAMPF, CLOSENESS TO PRACTICE – PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH SUPPORT 1920–1925 During the early stage of the Emergency Association (NG) between 1920 and 1925 an underlying structure among the supported medical projects, or any visible steering within physiological research is difficult to see. One does notice, however, that most funding went to acknowledged authorities in their specialties, for example, Emil Abderhalden in physiology.4 These men appeared on the support lists with high subsidies for materials; their applications were rarely declined. The reason was understandable: After the NG had established itself and researchers had recognized that it afforded a substantial opportunity to stock up their institutes’ weak budgets, they usually submitted a new proposal every year either for themselves or for one of their coworkers. Over time a certain constancy in research support developed as a result. Thus, by the mid-1920s almost all academic institutes of physiology appreciated the NG as a constant source of funding. Both parties, the NG as a self-governed organ of science and the scientists themselves, profited from it. Listing the names of scientific coryphaei in its interim report for 1926 served the NG primarily as a legitimation of their continued endeavors.5 In return, the NG’s allocations for the researchers mentioned created free scientific spaces that they also did not want to deny to themselves in the future, and considering the still unsatisfactory financial situations at universities and research establishments, they could not afford to dispense with these if the existing standard was to be upheld, or if, indeed, the intention was even just to repair the wartime neglect. The NG was an important element of research funding not just for the coryphaei. It also opened up chances for young scientists to advance their own research. Having once proven to be a careful worker and producer of new results, a scientist’s proposals usually passed through the Joint Committee without problems. This is illustrated by the example of the later No3 4 5

On aviation physiology see Cüppers, Entwicklung. Cf., e. g., the NG’s second and fourth reports: Berichte, 1923, p. 9, resp., 1925, p. 61. The NG’s fifth report: Berichte, 1926, pp. 129 ff.

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bel laureate Adolf Windaus, who received support early on for his anti-rickets research on vitamin D.6 The reasons for rejecting or declining proposals were mostly that the reviewers considered the costs exaggerated or that the research schedule inadequately delineated the course of the experiments. Another reason why the acquisition of an apparatus on loan would not receive approval was that the expert board or Joint Committee members thought equipment for university institutes were the business of the individual states.7 The NG’s statutes prohibited transactions that might lead to state control of a recipient institute. The NG wanted only to support concrete projects. That was why apparatus were entrusted to individual researchers only on loan. An adept institute could obtain its installations with state funding and finance a good part of the operating costs of the research itself with monies from the NG. Support for the rising generation benefited. It was considered a measure by which the international scientific potential and renown lost after World War I could be regained. Some statements by NG representatives revealed belligerent Kulturkampf features: On the basis of his foreign travels over many years, Privy Councillor Aschoff–Freiburg characterized our cultural foundation as our only remaining lever of might in the competition among nations, which, unlike civilization, cannot be bought. All areas of medicine in which we used to blaze trails now urgently need not only material supplies but also, above all, support for aspiring scientists. Once extinguished, blast furnaces of scientific research cannot be fanned alight again so easily.8

There were also political motivations, not just internal scientific reasons, for expanding science and the grant system. It was considered an important substitute for political power in the rivalry among nations. Additionally, contacts with research institutions abroad that had been interrupted by the war were revived through scholarships, which certainly was in the interest of the NG. Numerous renowned or subsequently very successful scientists were able to pursue their research outside the country with support from the Rockefeller Foundation or continue to work at an institute in their native country. An example is the ambitious physiologist Hermann Rein, who sojourned in Vienna from September to December 1925 at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology.9 In 1920 Friedrich von Müller presented the aim of nutrition research: “Laboratory research teaches us within which limits and with which foodstuffs the nutrition of a child, a hard laborer, or a sick person should be kept, which foods are indispensable, what damage is caused by wrong nutrition.”10 Some progress had been made in the research on vitamins, for example, to prevent rickets and other illnesses due to vitamin deficiencies. However, by the middle of the 1920s basic questions still 6

Hauptausschuss-Liste 12/26, Generallandesarchiv (GLA) Karlsruhe, 235/7340. Cf, e. g., the minutes of the Hauptausschuss meeting, 30 Jun. 1922, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/84. 8 Minutes, Bierabend, 20 Nov. 1926, BAK, R 73/15. 9 Rein’s curriculum vitae, University Archive, Freiburg, B 53/791. 10 Parlamentarischer Abend, 23 Nov. 1920, p. 38, BAK, R 73/8. 7

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remained open, not least the one regarding what the total number of vitamins was.11 It was not yet possible to isolate vitamins and produce them artificially. Altogether, nutrition physiology had hardly any influence on the nutritional situation of the first years following the end of the war, because foodstuff quantity occupied central interest in nutritional policy making, not their quality. There was a gradual professionalization and modernization of the nutritional sciences in Germany during those years, however, bolstered by a growing knowledge about the chemical nature of vitamins. New subdisciplines formed. Above all, biochemical research experienced an enormous upswing, which also can be credited to the NG.12 Special emphasis on NG-supported research’s closeness to practice catered especially to representatives of parliament and industry, with whom the founder and first president of the NG, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott maintained good contacts.13 In the rest of medicine, practicality was more obvious. The best example within this first period constituted the projects on occupational physiology. They adhered to the guiding image of rationalization and were supposed to raise industrial productivity by means of expanding assembly-line work.14 Projects on flight medicine do not appear on the support lists in the beginning stage during the Weimar Republic. This is not very surprising if one considers that military research was forbidden, according to the regulations of the Treaty of Versailles. Some first physiological studies on high altitudes took place in alpine research institutes, for example, in the Instituto Mosso near Monte Rosa, or at the Institute for Alpine Physiology and Tuberculosis Research in Davos.15 SPECIALIZATION, AMERICANIZATION, NORMALIZATION – PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH SUPPORT 1925–1933 Over the course of the second half of the 1920s, medical science became increasingly specialized and differentiated. For example, physiological chemistry was developing increasingly into a separate branch within physiology, which found institutional expression in the foundings of the first university Institutes for Physiological Chemistry.

11

Cf. Stepp, Ergebnisse. Spiekermann, Bruch; on the turning point in the nutritional sciences, also idem, Pfade, pp. 28 f. 13 In Schmidt-Ott’s words: “It is, of course, valuable to the Emergency Association if a word be uttered about the scientific endeavors supported by it ultimately also going to the benefit of practical life.” Cf. Schmidt-Ott to Walther, BAK, R 73/12. 14 See, e. g., the research by Edgar Atzler on the “rationalization of human labor” in the NG’s fifth report: Berichte, 1926, p. 85. On the rationalization discourse, cf., e. g., Burchardt, Fortschritt, p. 98; Freyberg, Rationalisierung, p. 312; Bublitz, Einbürgerung. 15 German scientists, such as Otto Kestner, Hermann Blaschko, or Ernst Wollheim, were working in Switzerland in the Institut für Hochgebirgsphysiologie und Tuberkuloseforschung. Loewy, Beiträge; cf. also Neumann, Luftfahrtmedizin. 12

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Enormous advances were made in nutrition physiology. Even though, with the exception of vitamin D, a clear picture of vitamins had not yet been drawn by the end of the 1920s, essential results on avitaminoses had been gathered, not only as regards scurvy, the sickness resulting from a vitamin C deficiency, but also as regards the importance of vitamin D in preventing rickets.16 Considering the vitamin research still awaiting completion, combined with the bad state of the economy at the end of the decade, the pharmacologist from Munich, Walther Straub, who managed the NG’s Roche Fund,17 pointed out the NG’s role in this field of research: We should just be aware that there is still very much work to be done and these researches cost very much money. I acknowledge here thankfully that throughout the ten years of its existence the Emergency Association for German Science itself proved to be a most effective vitamin for our vitamin research; without it, our so meagerly allocated university laboratories would be rickety, scorbutic, and sterile.18

As in the USA and other industrial nations, investigations of the industrial process continued to gain increasing importance. The NG likewise reacted to this development and in 1926 announced occupational physiology as one of its Priority Programs. The projects financed by it in this field had a direct impact on workflow. The cue word rationalization that came into downright inflationary usage in the public debates of the mid-1920s basically replaced the word Taylorism, which was disliked in Germany for various reasons. Rationalization referred to the strongest “Americanization” in the German working environment up to that time.19 This development or debate about these tendencies also had repercussions on the NG’s sponsorship of research, because it financed the first pertinent projects as early as 1926. The “response time” was thus astonishingly short. The NG picked up new research trends proposed to it by scientists and granted them broad-scale support. Although, compared to the support for research offered by other donors more closely linked to industry, it does appear rather modest.20 As in other areas, German research orientated itself toward the great model USA. After a brief boost, the rationalization movement in Germany experienced a serious crisis, mainly because of general economic developments. Rationalization

16

Cf. Barth, Physiologie. The Roche-Fonds, founded at the end of the 1920s and sponsored by the Swiss pharmaceutical company, financed pharmaceutical research in Germany until 1933 in the amount of 150,000 reichsmarks; Straumann/Wildmann, Chemieunternehmen, p. 245. 18 Straub, Vitamine, p. 44. 19 Freyberg, Rationalisierung, p. 355; Radkau, Technik, p. 270; Hughes, Erfindung, pp. 287 ff. The degree of influence that “American methods” in fact exerted is under debate today. It is rather assessed as low because according to a survey in the metal industry in 1931, 84 percent of plants performed no “assembly-line production” (Fließfertigung), and 95 percent no conveyerbelt (Bandarbeit) work at all; Lüdtke, “Ehre”, p. 370. On Amerikanisierung generally, cf. also Becker, Amerikanismus; idem, Amerikabild. 20 Three research departments of the Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit received one million reichsmarks just in the period from 1926 to 1930; Nolan, Visions, p. 135. 17

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primarily correlated with job losses and mass unemployment.21 As a result, much more than before, scientific management became the labor turf of the conservative right or even of right-wing extremist currents. These included the milieu of the German Institute for Technical Labor Training (Deutsches Institut für Technische Arbeitsschulung, DINTA), for instance, in which industrial science was mixed together with nationalistic ideas, as the slogan, presented in 1925 “One state, one Reich, one nation, one mind” impressively demonstrates.22 This development did not exist in comparable countries, such as France or Great Britain, which could explain the late development of German scientific management, which rather orientated itself toward the model of Italian fascism.23 Research conducted by DINTA or even by the Imperial Board on Economic Efficiency (Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit) were not funded by the NG but by industrialists, such as Albert Vögler, or directly by government authorities, such as the Reich Ministry of Economics.24 Some of the researchers working on scientific management supported by the NG, such as Ewald Sachsenberg or even Edgar Atzler, had close ties with DINTA or belonged to the “Society of Friends of DINTA,” founded in 1928.25 Modern sports physiology also only began to develop during the middle of the 1920s.26 The NG set a priority on this current field of science, just as it had in the case of occupational physiology. The two fields share much in common, with many overlaps in content. Both were consequently raised to the rank of a Cooperative Project. Even though, after a brief peak, projects on sports physiology actually funded began to fall in number in favor of other fields, the NG did support some important sports medicine experts. Wolfgang Kohlrausch and Oskar Bruns, whose researches contributed essentially to the professionalization of this young discipline, were among them.27 At the end of the 1920s the NG justifiably regarded its Cooperative Projects as successful. They had resulted in a certain amount of directed research sponsorship, yet only general scientific trends were strengthened; no new ones were initiated. The NG also could only support research if the scientists involved initiated it; it did not launch any research project of its own accord. The self-administrative model of German science, which agreed with the self-understanding of the participating scientists, had the additional effect of reflecting national trends in research in the NG’s promotional practice. These trends in physiology likewise

21

Büttner, Rationalisierung, p. 17; Hinrichs/Peter, Friede, pp. 66 ff. Ein Staat, ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Geist. Quoted in Hinrichs/Peter, Friede, p. 71. 23 Hinrichs/Kolboom, Rationalisierung, p. 385; Maier, Taylorismus, p. 205. 24 Nolan, Visions, pp. 134 f.; Kohl, Vögler, pp. 168 f. In 1930 the Imperial Board published a 1,200-page handbook as a report of its activities that lists all participating authorities and occupation areas: Reichskuratorium, Handbuch. On the history of DINTA, cf. Nolan, Visions, pp. 179 ff. 25 Gesellschaft der Freunde des DINTA. Bunk, Erziehung, pp. 214 f.; Hinrichs/Peter, Friede, p. 72. On DINTA see also Schottdorf, Arbeits- und Leistungsmedizin, p. 154. 26 Radkau, Technik, p. 274. 27 Cf. the NG’s fifth and eighth reports: Berichte, 1926, p. 87, and 1929, p. 80. 22

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largely corresponded to the developments in other industrial nations, with slight differences in weightings, for example, in rationalization. Thus, basically, with few exceptions, no “special German path” divergent from the ones followed by comparable states is distinguishable in physiology. One typical illustration that the NG was but one of a number of income sources for many scientists is provided by the example of Emil Abderhalden. He not only received allocations from the NG each year but also continuously received funding from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, industry, and private endowments.28 He knew how to present himself and his researches as important to science and the nation. He justified as altruistic his participation in research conducted by the Imperial Ministry of Nutrition and Agriculture. As an appointed member of its Imperial Committee on Nutrition in 1928/29, he had received 5,000 reichsmarks for this research: “I participated in these researches because I consider it my duty to place my special expertise in the area of nutrition in the service of the public.” Besides, it was a matter of catching up with other nations in the lead: “From what I know about the situations in Russia, America, and Canada, it is absolutely necessary that every conceivable effort be made to uphold the global status of German research and if possible to augment it further.”29 Abderhalden is probably unique as regards the funding received and duration of sponsorship, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Occupational Physiology, by virtue of its connection to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, cannot be taken as an example for all physiological institutes. Nevertheless, it does indicate the prevailing practice of obtaining financing for research from many places, if possible, in order not to become dependent on one income source. The international isolation of science after World War I, which was governed by the provisions of Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, might lead one to suppose that German research had followed a special path of its own. One could only speak of a walling-off of German physiologists up until the middle of the 1920s at the latest, however.30 The internationally renowned president of the German Physiological Society, Wilhelm Trendelenburg, was invited together with a German delegation to attend the international convention of physiologists in Edinburgh as early as 1923.31 Thus began the normalization of international scientific relations. The effort to reconnect with the international scientific community speaks against the hypothesis of a “self-insulation by German science” during the Weimar Republic, at least in the area of physiology. In addition, the NG’s relations with the Rockefeller Foundation document the first successful attempts to overcome the isolation. Young physiologists benefited from it most of 28 Cf. Abderhalden’s budget statements, Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (AMPG), 1st dep., rep. 1A, 1646 and 1647. 29 Abderhalden to Harnack, 11 Apr. 1930, AMPG, 1st dep., rep. 1A, 1648, pp. 22–23. 30 Schreiber, Auslandsbeziehungen, p. 20. 31 Oberregierungsrat Bauer (Württembergisches Ministerium des Kirchen- und Schulwesens) to Hochschulreferenten, 22 Dec. 1922, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, H II/W g 8, p. 1; cf. also Franklin, Story.

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all, because they were able to study abroad with the assistance of scholarships and acquaint themselves with the host scientific landscape. Foreign relations gradually normalized again, primarily with Switzerland, the Latin American states, Spain, and Russia.32 EXPULSION, RADICALIZATION, PREPARATIONS FOR WAR – PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH SUPPORT 1933–1939 With the assumption of power by the National Socialists in January 1933, the process of conforming or “self-realignment” (Selbstgleichschaltung) can also be seen within the DFG. Already by the end of April, just a few days after issuance of the Law against Overcrowding in German Schools and Colleges, the NG stopped approving grants to “Non-Aryans.”33 The primary profiteers of the subsequent dismissals and emigrations were their politically correct “colleagues,” because the dismissed professionals had to leave behind the apparatus that the DFG had made personally available to them. Some “Aryan” scientists – mostly from the same institutes or universities – immediately took steps to retain the apparatus for the institute and their own research as soon as they got word. The procedure used to carry this out was the same one applied when the possessor of a device died.34 Most of the dismissed physiologists chose English-speaking countries for their future working places, for example, Bruno Kisch, who initially accepted a guest professorship in Santander, Spain, in 1934. At the end of the 1930s, he emigrated to the USA, where he taught as a professor of philosophy, history, and biology at Yeshiva University in New York.35 But numerous other countries were able to profit from the knowledge of the German immigrants in building up or expanding their universities. In Turkey, for instance, Kemal Ataturk was able to modernize the nation’s universities with the assistance of such adopted scientists. Some physiologists were also among these immigrants: Hans Winterstein left Germany for Turkey in 1933, where he held the office of the director of the Institute for Physiology at the University of Istanbul until 1953.36 32

Schröder-Gudehus, Wissenschaft, p. 203. Gesetz gegen die Überfüllung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen. Mertens, Führerprinzip, p. 38. 34 Such was in actual fact the case only for Gustav Embden. The DFG loaned out his apparatus in January 1936 to his pupil Emil Lehnartz as well as to Albrecht Bethe from the Institute for Animal Physiology in Frankfurt: DFG to Bethe, 25 Jan. 1936, BAK, R 73/10280, as well as DFG to Lehnartz, 25 Jan. 1936, BAK, R 73/12643. In other cases also the instruments were left on location: A Sartorius balance from Hans Winterstein went in January 1934 to his colleague Schmitz from Breslau; and in Berlin a metabolic cage from Magnus Levy changed hands to Friedrich Holtz: DFG to Schmitz, 27 Jan. 1934, BAK, R 73/14416, as well as DFG to Holtz, 14 May 1936, BAK, R 73/11784. 35 Kisch finally returned to the FRG, where he died in Bad Nauheim in 1966. Engelhardt, Enzyklopädie, vol. 1, pp. 328 f. Between 1933 and 1942 about 6,000 medical doctors emigrated to the USA; cf. Pearle, Ärzteemigration, p. 113. 36 In 1956 Winterstein finally returned as emeritus to Munich, where he lived until his death in 1963; Widmann, Exil, pp. 80 f., Neumark, Zuflucht, pp. 106 f. 33

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All in all, it can be said that, next to pharmacology, physiology as a fundamental subject was particularly hard hit by the dismissals of Jewish and of politically mistrusted university faculty.37 In connection with these upheavals, a relevant question is whether research in Germany suffered a loss in quality, or, respectively, whether specific research strands in physiology were cut short by the forced emigrations and whether any ties to international developments were missed or given up.38 Finding an answer to this is not simple, because the “emigration losses” are hard to calculate and establish. Of course, any departure by a qualified scientist, such as the physiologists mentioned above, constitutes a loss, because the knowledge and experience he or she had gathered throughout years of research was purposefully given up for reasons not based on science. In most of these cases, however, qualified “Aryan” substitute scientists were ready and able to fill these openings.39 This also applied to such fundamental subjects as physiology or biochemistry. Many Jewish scientists had collaborated with their “Aryan” colleagues during the Weimar Republic so this research could also be continued without them. Notably, the work of many Jewish scientists was interdisciplinary, however, in an effort to surmount the limits of the established canon of fields.40 To that extent, they represented an important methodological approach that was an element of progress in medicine at the beginning of the 1930s. With their expulsions, this development at least suffered a setback. Altogether, one can certainly say for physiology as well that “there can be no question of an absolute ‘exodus of the mind’ or of modernity after 1933.”41 It remains open, however, to what extent the barring and expulsion of Jewish colleagues changed the climate at universities and had a direct influence on the direction research took: “through his contacts with colleagues” an émigré “influences not just them but indirectly also those who do not have a personal relationship with him” anymore.42 If one looks at the fates of the affected scientists in the countries that took them in, it must be concluded that the careers and life trajectories of many scientists and physicians were destroyed, interrupted, or delayed.43 Not all were able to reconnect with the academic world in their adopted countries. Prevented by the difficult economic and social conditions as a “refugee,” they had to look for other professions to

37

Kröner, Emigration, p. 23. Ash, Wissenschaftswandel, p. 8. 39 Different from other fields, in medicine no problem existed in finding young successors during the Nazi period; Grüttner, Wissenschaftspolitik, pp. 572 f. 40 Daub, Vertreibung, p. 53. 41 “… von einem ‘Auszug des Geistes’ bzw. der Moderne schlechthin”: Ash, Wissenschaftswandel, p. 8. 42 Fischer, Emigration, p. 547. 43 Within the USA, for example, most states had issued restrictions on by foreigners’ qualifications, which made pursuit of such a career much harder. It affected not only emigrated medical students but also certified doctors from Germany, because some jobs in a hospital required the completion of an entire course of study at an American university; Pearle, Ärzteemigration, p. 115. 38

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secure a livelihood in their new homeland. Most sources are silent about their destinies; their special history remains to be written. One main characteristic of physiology in the DFG that spans across the caesura of 1933 was – as generally among the elite of the Deutsche Reich – a continuity in individuals and substance.44 After the dismissals of their Jewish and politically unwelcome colleagues, most physiologists, as other scientists, quickly returned to the daily routine and normalcy. The majority among them was “realigned but not reeducated, loyal to the state but not convinced, professional but not politically engaged.”45 In order to continue to enjoy research funding by the DFG, they had to adjust themselves to the new system, rely on old contacts, and forge new alliances.46 Within the DFG’s sponsorship of physiological research, nutrition research played a central part, as it already had prior to 1933. Within the framework of a general policy of autarky and Nazi ideology, special importance was attributed to the nutrition of the “sound body of the nation” (gesunder Volkskörper).47 The new president of the DFG, Johannes Stark, did not just happen to push for precisely this thematic field. It was in a certain way merely a continuation of the tradition Schmidt-Ott had set. Thus, the development after 1933 should rather be regarded as a radicalization and ideologization of an already existing trend. A substantial break did not occur. Against the background emerging from the available sources, Stark’s purportedly so dominant position also has to be regarded with skepticism, at least in the area of physiology. At first the established system of reviewing, which was based on the verdicts of elected scientists, continued to apply to almost all the physiological projects under his presidency. Nazi-specific was the fact that scientists who identified closely with the Nazi ideology, such as Ragner Berg, were either granted funding for the first time or were especially generously supported, even though some of them were academic outsiders. Nevertheless, there was no automatic approval for proposals of the kind. These applicants also had to accept cuts to the requested grant sums. This depended on the DFG’s budget or the reviewing situation, because formal and scientific standards continued to be quite decisive in approvals.48 In some cases political pressure by Nazi and government institutions was visible. But there, too, the DFG did not always automatically give in. Each individual case had to be examined. Individual cases also determined to what degree the DFG was a willing tool of the Nazi regime or whether scientists also knew how to exploit specific developments to their benefit, such as the nutrition physiologists who recognized a favorable moment for obtaining more funding for their research. In contrast to comparable countries, such as the USA or Great Britain, social issues played no role in nutrition science in National Socialist Germany. Whereas in the western Länder many scientists recognized a direct connection between poverty and deficiency 44 45 46 47 48

Groehler, Personenaustausch, p. 167. Seier, Hochschullehrerschaft, p. 266. Ash, Changes, p. 338. Bäumer, NS-Biologie, pp. 181 ff.; Melzer, Vollwerternährung, pp. 206 f. Thus also Hammerstein, Wissenschaftssystem, p. 220.

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sicknesses,49 analogous conclusions could not be drawn publicly within the German Reich for ideological, propagandistic reasons. During the first years of the Nazi regime, there was no noteworthy rise in the number of aviation projects. Within cardiovascular physiology other topics also dominated, such as prevention of hypertension or the quest for substances affecting the circulatory system. Even proven aviation experts, such as Hermann Rein, had difficulty getting money for their research in this area. This had a lot to do with the DFG’s bad financial situation under Stark, who had to take ever deeper budgetary cuts over the course of his power struggle with the Reich Ministry of Education and the periphery of the “strong men” in science policy-making, Rudolf Mentzel and Erich Schumann. The latter headed the research department of Army High Command (OKH) and the science department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW). In the end, research funding in general paid the price.50 Cardiovascular physiology was particularly affected by this because, different from nutrition physiology, it did not have a special place in Nazi ideology and was not yet able to deliver any practical use for the military. In contrast, occupational physiology was given much more attention because the Nazi regime placed greater emphasis on a policy of performance enhancement than the former governments of the Weimar Republic, not least in order to compensate for the labor shortages exacerbated by the preparations for war. Within the field of occupational physiology it is noteworthy that, despite the general continuity that marked this sector as well, certain displacements nevertheless occurred that also affected the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Occupational Physiology. It became more difficult than before for it to procure DFG grants and it had to depend more and more on other financial sources.51 Sports physiology, which is closely related to occupational physiology, received comparatively little attention by the DFG, even though it was also reflected in the scientific debate. A major sporting event was due to take place in Germany: the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. However, other institutions, such as the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront) and the Reich Ministry of the Interior, assumed financial responsibility for this event, viewed by the regime as important. That obviated the need for the DFG to promote it.52

49

Smith, Construction; Kamminga, Axes, pp. 91 ff. Cf. Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 145 ff.; on Erich Schumann cf. also Luck, Schumann. 51 The probable reason was that during the Weimar Republic the institute concentrated too much on the rationalization campaign, which was despised in the Nazi era. It had gained a serious rival in the Deutsche Arbeitsfront with its better connections to top leaders within the Nazi system. Despite these problems the KWI for Occupational Physiology remained an important actor in this field of research. Close ties with the Reich Ministry of Employment, Army Ordnance, or, resp., the Armed Forces generally, as well as in the private economy allowed the institute to continue its work as usual. Höfler-Waag, Arbeits- und Leistungsmedizin, pp. 165 ff. Financial bottlenecks constantly reappeared, however, which could only be removed with the aid of the institute’s major sponsor, Albert Vögler; see Kohl, Präsidenten, p. 193. 52 Reeg, Bartels, pp. 100 ff. 50

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Finally, other subdisciplines of physiology were also promoted by the DFG in a quite prominent manner, for example, muscular physiology. It was a field in which German specialists occupied a top position for years within the international scientific community and had already been generously supported by the NG. Apart from some ideologically charged concepts already described, DFGsupported physiological research followed along its familiar course, with the development of the discipline as a whole, and differed only slightly from the developments in other comparable countries. Even researchers with close associations to Nazism, such as Ragnar Berg, had their own counterparts in other countries in which Berg’s preferred topics of inquiry – naturopathy, dietetics, and alternative medicine – were likewise experiencing an upswing.53 Fellow professionals from abroad continued to publish articles in medical journals. Contact with international research occurred at conventions and conferences, etc., to which German participants were repeatedly invited. Scientists such as Trendelenburg, Abderhalden, or Rein had a good reputation outside the country as well and contributed not insignificantly toward a positive image for Germany after 1933. The reasons were mostly patriotic, such as, the one Rein once indicated: “England presently counts as the leader in the area of physiology. However, all of English physiology goes wholly back to German schools. I consider it a nationalistic duty to show, especially in England, that, contrary to some assertions abroad, scientific research is being performed in present-day Germany.”54 A “clear step backwards in all fields” after the National Socialists entered government is out of the question.55 This assertion does not mean to legitimate the discriminatory and racist conduct of the Nazi regime at universities and research institutions, causing numerous scientists to lose their positions. But it does show that science and the Nazi regime certainly were compatible and even renowned researchers could integrate themselves well in the system and allow themselves to be integrated in it. Thus “normal” research – however defined – could also take place under the conditions of the Nazi dictatorship. With the promulgation of the Four-Year Plan in 1936/37 and the establishment of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) in 1937, scientific inquiry adjusted itself increasingly to the requirements of a country preparing for war.56 New importance was thereby attached to application-oriented research within science. The Nazi regime became more and more interested in exploiting the expertise of physiologists for its policy of autarky and armament, that is, for war preparations. A close cooperative relationship grew between politics, the 53

An overview of nutritional reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be found in Baumgartner, Ernährungsreform, pp. 89 ff. 54 Rein to Reichserziehungsministerium, 20 Mar. 1936, University Archive, Göttingen, Kur PA Rein. Hence Rein follows in Fritz Haber’s tradition; cf. Szöllösi-Janze, Wissenschaftler, pp. 62 f. 55 As was thought establishable in Mertens, Führerprinzip, p. 68. See on the contrary, e. g., Szöllösi-Janze, National Socialism, p. 15. 56 Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, pp. 232 ff.

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military, and science that intensified even more during the impending war.57 The results by dietitians, in particular, played an essential role in the preparations for war.58 Here again the oft-noted process of an advancing politicization of science and scientification of politics is manifest. As in other fields, too, the tasks and creative spaces of the “experts” expanded in the National Socialist system, especially compared to the Weimar Republic.59 Full ideological agreement on the part of scientists was not even necessary. It was more important that these researchers sent unmistakable signals to the influential institutions of the political regime that they were willing to cooperate professionally. In return, physiologists received relative autonomy and the funding and staffing they needed to continue working,60 even if the overall amounts lay considerably below the expectations and wishes of these university researchers. Contrary to a widespread thesis in the scientific literature, so-called Zweckforschung – practical or applied research – was not all that was supported in physiology but a large amount of fundamental research was as well. Therefore, in viewing the research conducted in medical physiology, it is out of the question that there was a general or basic neglect of this science and its representatives by the Nazi rulers. Nor was there even general “anti-science sentiment.”61 The regime rather helped itself to the results that solid and autonomous research produced and only prescribed its general direction and guidelines (expulsion of Jewish colleagues, introduction of the Führerprinzip, policies of autarky and rearmament). One of the men of influence, Erich Schumann, professed his adherence to traditional “free research” with the proviso that it should not be “unbridled” (zügellos) but obey the primacy of politics.62 Scientists suited the Nazi system best if they pursued their supposedly unpolitical fundamental research on a widely acknowledged plane, some of it on a very sophisticated level.63 In this way, even research in an area that had been neglected in Germany for a long time, such as aviation medicine, was able to catch up with the foreign competition and reconnect with the international state of research. By its constant support of a few researchers or their institutions in this area, the DFG played a minor but not insignificant role.64 Until the war began, some exchanges did occur with their professional colleagues from abroad at a number of international conferences before the war. For example, a German delegation participated in the nineth annual convention of 57

Cf. the concept of a triple helix, or, resp., a quadruple helix in Trischler, Wachstum. Cf. Volkmann, Landwirtschaft, p. 13. 59 Raphael, Ordnungsdenken, p. 36. 60 Raphael, Experten, p. 245; idem, Ordnungsdenken, p. 37. 61 This anti-science hypothesis (Wissenschaftsfeindlichkeit) under National Socialism already appears in Maier, Hochschulpolitik, p. 89; Ludwig, Technik, p. 210; cf. Fischer, Repression, pp. 173 ff. On the contrary, e. g., Szöllösi-Janze, National Socialism; Sieg, Strukturwandel. 62 Schumann, Wehrmacht, p. 118. 63 Ash, Bruchstellen, p. 221; cf. also the controversy over Adolf Butenandt in Schieder, Spitzenforschung. 64 Roth, Strukturen, p. 68; Neumann, Luftfahrtmedizin, pp. 140 ff. See also Broemser, Physiologie, which describes occupational physiology, nutrition theory, and aviation physiology as the three areas in which “definite progress was made” after 1933. 58

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the Aero Medical Association in New York in 1937, during the course of which Hubertus Strughold even received honorary membership in that association.65 The Sixteenth International Physiological Congress, which took place in Zurich in 1938, should also be pointed out in this context. Although the invasion of Austria by the Wehrmacht and the subsequent National Socialist takeover unexpectedly prevented some of its citizens from attending, this conference of over 1,200 participants still met. In the opinion of the chairman, W. R. Hess from Switzerland, political conflicts should stand back in discussions on science.66 One special point on the program for that congress was a visit to the high-altitude station on the Jungfraujoch, where a small symposium took place chaired by Alexander von Muralt on questions of acclimatizing and adapting to high altitudes. This is one more illustration of the international importance attached to highaltitude physiology.67 The scientific isolation after 1933 alleged in the historical literature, for which they had only “themselves to blame,” thus cannot be demonstrated among physiologists up the start of the war. SELF-MOBILIZATION, DISPLACEMENT, DELAY – PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH SUPPORT DURING THE WAR As the war continued on, the importance of the medical sciences continued to grow. Leaders of the Nazi regime and the military realized that progress could only be made by addressing urgent problems through high-quality research.68 These problems not only concerned the health hazards caused by the “protein and fat gap,”69 with major studies being conducted in the area of yeasts in an attempt to close it. They also concerned aspects of aviation. For instance, the ever faster aircraft technology being developed called for adapting humans to conditions at great heights and speeds.70 As experts on questions of social and health policy, physiologists enjoyed much maneuvering room and were rather active participants in, rather than tools of, the Nazi regime. They offered their expertise to the regime,71 even if the orientation on policies of autarky and armament in many cases set limits on science: “The self-mobilization of many German scientists secured professional maneuvering room at a price of growing conformity with the ideological framework.”72 Accordingly, substantial funds could flow via the RFR to the university institutes and nonuniversity research facilities, such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Their leading scientists could continue to work in their given fields of activity, some of them in fact directing their research projects 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Roth, Bodies, p. 109. Hess, Congress, p. 18. Ibid., p. 23. Mehrtens, Wissenschaftspolitik; Szöllösi-Janze, Neubestimmung, p. 304. Cf. Pelzer-Reith/Reith, Fett. Neumann, Luftfahrtmedizin, pp. 143 ff. Cf. on the fundamentals, Ash, Ressourcen. Raphael, Ordnungsdenken, p. 30.

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according to the demands of the war. In other instances, it was a mere relabeling of existing research projects.73 The majority of scientists knew how to avidly exploit the opportunities and free spaces arising out of the exceptional war situation and to push forward the process of professionalization and specialization in their fields of science.74 In the majority of cases, the research was not some sort of “pseudo-science” but research following the international rules of doing science.75 Thus, serious science was entirely compatible with the National Socialist system. This is not supposed to excuse scientists for participating in the aggressive war and policy of extermination. It just goes to show how excellently researchers could accommodate themselves to the conditions set by the Nazi system and that scientific progress is not tied to a democratic system. To this extent Mark Walker is confirmed: “It is precisely [the] apolitical nature of scientific research that allows good scientists to do good science, no matter who the employer or patron is or where this research may lead. Moreover, as far as science in the Third Reich was concerned, fellow travellers were often far more dangerous than either Hitler’s true believers or his bitter opponents.”76 As regards the research results of scientists supported by the RFR, novelty certainly is identifiable, be it their utilization of yeast in human nutrition, or the development of aviation medicine. Scientists also profited from cooperations existing between research institutions. These always worked when those involved were in agreement about a common goal. This is not to deny that jealous quarrels over competencies and the like constantly arose at the very highest echelons,77 which impeded scientific operations. However, even the paradigmatic case of Sigmund Rascher demonstrates that they much less concerned possible moral issues than scientific prestige. He conducted morbid experiments on humans in the Dachau concentration camp in the areas of high-altitude physiology and low temperatures that were supported by the RFR. Furthermore, the picture changes if one looks at it from the level of the scientists involved. As a rule they got on quite well with each other if certain limits were respected – such as, the discretionary power of the SS.78 Scientific exchanges continued to occur at conventions, conferences, and in Study Teams, where the competitive mentality was less pronounced and scientific ambition favored cooperation when confronted with urgent problems to solve. A lack of attention by the regime or perhaps the wrangling over competency based on polycratic structures evidently had less grievious consequences than exogenous factors outside of science. An example is the prevalent problem of raw materials management or the lack thereof. The fact that 73

According to Trischler, Luftfahrtforschung, p. 121 for aviation research. Ash refers to the mobilization of “conceptual and rhetorical resources to legitimate their own research,” Ash, Wissenschaftswandel, p. 9. 74 Seier, Universität, p. 148; Ash, Wissenschaftswandel, p. 9. 75 Lundgreen, Forschung, p. 122; Ash, Science, p. 458. 76 Walker, Science, p. 271. 77 Ludwig, Technik, p. 239, emphasizes this Kompetenzwirrwarr besetting research; more recently, Schieder, Spitzenforschung, p. 58. 78 See the already thoroughly covered “Rascher” case; also Roth, Höhen; Neumann, Luftfahrtmedizin, pp. 145 ff.

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Allied air raids destroyed many institutes strongly hampered scientific research, causing repeated setbacks, if not aborting it completely. In many cases the only solution was to relocate to areas where it was thought safe to continue working. But these removals also caused delays to research in progress, which moreover was being conducted under great time pressure. It should not be forgotten that the war lasted only six years, with the result that the period from the initiation of the basic research to its application was extremely short. Thus, it is not surprising that some results only began to be applied during the postwar period, whether in the context of Operation Paperclip or continuing research along a given line in peacetime.79 UPHOLDING, INTEGRATING, ADAPTING – SUPPORT FOR PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC After World War II ended, the existing scientific networks were of decisive importance in researchers’ efforts to assert themselves in science management despite having cooperated with the Nazi system. If the image of a “zero hour” after 1945 is inappropriate, then assuming a mere continuation from the past must also be corrected. This process is rather best circumscribed by the concept of construed continuity (Mitchel G. Ash). The historical actors used various strategies. On the one hand, scientists wrote exculpatory affidavits (Persilscheine) about each other, or could produce positive character references by persons previously persecuted by the Nazi regime.80 On the other hand, they were the ones deciding on professorship appointments and academic careers at universities. Most physiologists in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) managed to continue their careers by the beginning of the 1950s at the latest. A discursive strategy was added to this institutional strategy: Despite the Allies’ partial legal processing of the Nazi period in the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, Germans generally disapproved of looking back on their own history. Their own pasts and their own roles during the twelve years of National Socialist rule were either distorted or completely revised.81 Aviation physiologists, in particular, succeeded in reinterpreting or covering up their own active roles in the Nazi system of science by scapegoating a few culprits, such as Rascher. It was very convenient that the dead Rascher could not say anything about his own complicity in the official system of sciences under National Socialism.82 Once again, there was no abrupt change in staffing in the discipline. The Allies and democratic Germany needed academics to rebuild universities and push ahead in many fields of research. Their professionality and the expertise 79

Cf. Kurowski, Jagd; Hunt, Agenda; Ciesla, Project. Konstruierte Kontinuität: Ash, Bruchstellen, pp. 222 ff., Sachse, Persilscheinkultur. 81 Ash, Bruchstellen, p. 225. 82 Rascher had performed numerous fatal experiments on humans in the Dachau concentration camp. He was executed before the war had ended on charges of kidnapping children and favoritizing prisoners in Dachau. Cf. Benz, Rascher; Klee, Auschwitz, p. 216. 80

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they had reaped during the Nazi period was not the least of reasons behind this. Physiologists, in turn, managed to negotiate “new job opportunities and working conditions […] for themselves and in that way not only [to regard] themselves as resources of the relevant state but also [to treat] the relevant state as a resource for themselves.”83 Science organizers, such as Hermann Rein or Hans Schäfer, could use their earlier experiences with state promotion of science and revive old contacts.84 Schäfer had not only received financial support from the DFG as an individual scientist but had also worked for it as a reviewer and peer specialist for the Examiners Group on Cardiology. He possessed one of the highest research grant quotas among physiologists of the postwar period.85 He had an excellent sense for how to accommodate himself and his co-workers within the DFG’s various Priority Programs. Apart from these connections and contacts within the research landscape, he mainly owed this high rate of support to his scientific research. This often picked up on new trends in research and generated excellent results.86 In the 1950s the DFG initially granted Schäfer projects on the microphysiology of the heart. The reviewers referred repeatedly to his high scientific reputation.87 His scientific versatility – which also caused him to be accused of “flightiness” (Flatterhaftigkeit) – is underscored by the fact that he was supported not only in the Priority Program on Cardiology/Cardiovascular System but also in the ones on Kidney Research, the Nervous System, and on Molecular Biology.88 Hans Schäfer is a malleable illustration of the fact that it would be misplaced to draw conclusions about continuity in general content from continuity in personnel. A differentiated analysis needs to work out in which areas both lines meet, and where abrupt thematic breaks in fact occur. The transition from wartime research to peacetime science in the FRG seemed to succeed remarkably quickly. The Allied Occupation and material need significantly restricted any continuation of war research from the start. Some specialists in aviation medicine found scientific acknowledgment on the part of the United States, because many participating German scientists were integrated into the American Air and Space Flight Program within the framework of Opera83

Ash, Umbrüche, p. 923. On Schäfer cf. Oehler-Klein/Neumann, Militarisierung. 85 BAK, B 227/968 as well as the grant file Scha 2: Scha 2/1–Scha 2/60, DFG-Archiv (DFGA). 86 Schäfer was one of the leading electrophysiologists in Germany since the 1940s. He introduced cathode-ray oscillography and intensely studied the efficiency of the electrocardiogram. 87 Cf. the grant file Scha 2: Projekt Scha 2/3–Scha 2/9 and H. A. Liste 13/50 and H. A. Liste 35/56, DFGA. There was some criticism about the high level of assistance for materials, however. The critics argued that the DFG should not adopt the responsibility of the Baden Ministry of Culture by equipping Schäfer’s institute with apparatus and similar things, H. A. Liste 39/51, ibid. 88 Cf. the grant file Scha 2: Scha 2/19 and Scha 2/28–2/30, DFGA. Interestingly enough, Schäfer’s growing attention to social medicine finds very late expression in the DFG’s files: He headed the Kommission für medizinische Epidemiologie und Sozialmedizin, established in 1967; however, projects by Schäfer in this regard only date to the 1970s. Cf. Zierold, Forschungsförderung, p. 453. 84

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tion Paperclip, where their expertise was welcome as the Cold War era began.89 Some scientists stayed in the USA permanently, such as Hubertus Strughold, the founder of American space medicine. However, controversies erupted repeatedly over his past as director of the aviation research institute of the Reich Ministry of Aviation. As head of this institute, founded in 1935, Strughold was responsible for all research on aviation medicine and therefore also for Rascher’s concentration camp studies, which he at least knew about.90 Others returned to Germany in order to continue working on their specialties as eminent professors at eminent research institutions. These included Kurt Kramer, who worked for the U. S. Air Force in Europe up to the beginning of the 1960s. His supported DFG projects strongly differed in subject matter, however. They concentrated on kidney research and the development of an ion microscope.91 Pure aviation research was otherwise only supported by the DFG in the 1950s. Because Siegfried Ruff had been acquitted in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, he was able to keep his top position in the FRG as well. He headed the Institute for Flight Medicine of the German Experimental Station for Aviation (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt) now quartered in Bad Godesberg near Bonn. A highaltitude laboratory and a modern low-pressure chamber were already available in 1952 to continue analyses on aviation medicine.92 Based on his former research he was a specialist in this area, so the scope of his projects is not surprising. He let the DFG fund his “analyses on the influence of the effect of high altitude on the serum characteristics of blood, active fermentation, during an ascent, the influence of altitude on the immunobiological situation, defensive functions, the course of infectious diseases, and hormonal and fermentation metabolism at great heights.”93 Initially, Ruff still profited from the DFG’s Priority Program on Aviation Medicine. But aviation medicine was separated out of this program soon afterwards because it was just a marginal field. The reviewers also complained about missing results from these analyses. Finally, in 1958, Ruff ’s proposals as well as the ones submitted by Max Matthes from Freiburg, the second aviation physiologist the DFG was supporting, were deferred.94 One year later, it was decided that the existing Priority Program should henceforth only support projects belonging in aviation research in its narrower sense. All other projects were referred back to the regular Individual Grants Program. A decision on estab89 This group of persons, employed mainly at the School of Aviation Medicine in Randolph Field, Texas, included Kurt Kramer, Rudolf Thauer, Otto Gauer, Herbert Gerstner, Karl E. Schäfer, and Hubertus Strughold; cf. the files on individuals: the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of Research & Engineering, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JOIA), Foreign Scientist Case Files in the National Archives in Washington. 90 Klee, Auschwitz, p. 254. 91 Grant file Kr 45, DFGA. 92 Grant file Ru 27, DFGA; cf. also Cüppers, Entwicklung, p. 139. 93 In addition to the grant money from the DFG, Ruff also received five-digit sums in deutschmarks from the Federal Ministries of Economics and Transport as well as from the corresponding regional ministry in North Rhine-Westfalia. These amounts are likewise recorded in Ruff ’s DFG grant file. 94 Grant file Ru 27, DFGA.

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lishing new Priority Programs, such as one on aviation medicine, was promised for the following year.95 Such a program was never set up, however, officially “because an enterprise of this kind [would fail] for lack of institutes of applied physiology.”96 This was a clear sign that aviation medicine had little relevance in the Federal Republic of Germany. Cardiovascular physiologists in the FRG thus hardly considered aviation medicine important. They rather concentrated on applying their knowledge to clinical circulatory diagnostics. Otherwise, they moved into other areas, such as the study of environmental influences (e. g., noise) on humans. Such influences were recognized in modern industrial mass societies as new urgent problems and were also being supported by the DFG in a dedicated Priority Program.97 It is otherwise noteworthy that in the mid-1950s medical support by the DFG in the cardiovascular area increasingly centered on the (further) development of medical apparatus and the sums for purchasing urgently needed equipment rose accordingly steeply. Technological progress in medicine was rapidly accelerating. One interesting development in which the DFG played a role involved the heart pacemaker.98 The reviews in this connection frequently mentioned the necessity to reduce the technological advantage held by the USA. This was a justificatory topos that runs like a red thread through the German scientific landscape of the twentieth century.99 The United States remained the fixed point of reference for German physiologists even after 1945, just as since the end of World War I. On the whole, the year 1945 demarcates a discontinuity in the substance of physiological research. From the point of view of the political and social conditions, the continuity in personnel is not surprising. Scientists adapted themselves quite quickly to the new circumstances, because they had their expertise to offer as a resource to the occupying powers as well as to the FRG. The transition from wartime science to peacetime science succeeded just as quickly and smoothly as in many other areas of West German society, in which the academic Nazi elites often quickly found their places again. It was only toward the end of the 1960s, with the retirement of the involved scientists, that the main figures in the operation of science were exchanged. That is, once this boundary had been crossed, a development that had started thirty to forty years before came to a close.

95 Kommission Luftfahrtforschung, booklet no. 11: Hess Forscher, 2 Sep. 1959, DFGA no. 6016. 96 Excerpt from the minutes of the 33rd meeting of the DFG Senate on 19 Dec. 1959, ibid. 97 Cf., e. g., the research from the mid-1960s on by August Wilhelm von Eiff from the Medical University Clinic in Bonn as part of the Cooperative Project on the Influence of Air-Traffic Noise in the Priority Program on Noise Research, grant file Ei 20, DFGA. 98 For instance, by supporting the Göttingen physiologist Emil Bücherl, grant folder Bu 28, DFGA. 99 The reviews for approval of the proposals submitted by Bücherl also use this topos: Gutachten Wagner, 17 Oct. 1951, ibid. Cf. also Standke, Lücke; Majer, Lücke; on earlier epochs, e. g., Hachtmann, Begründer.

THE PLANNABLE HUMAN – THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HEREDITY 1920–1970 Anne Cottebrune Human heredity, eugenics, and racial research numbered among the National Socialists’ favored disciplines in science policy from 1933 onward. A look through the copious secondary literature on the biosciences during the Nazi period reveals that the prominent promotion of this scientific field is not just emphasized, it is also styled into a significant phenomenon of the Nazi regime. Bur more than anything, it is the specific interlocking of research on heredity and race with Nazi Rassenhygiene that has been thoroughly examined and documented. Examples from leading research facilities are mostly chosen to illustrate this. They have served as a preferred subject of investigation and are drawn into the focus of interest among scholars. The historical commission established by the president’s office of the Max Planck Society in the mid-1990s to study its forerunner institution, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), during the Third Reich, for example, devoted thorough attention in its publication on the science of human heredity to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI) “cultivating heredity and race” (Erb- und Rassenpflege) under National Socialism. Active participation by the associated scientists in the pertinent political measures became manifest. In his monograph on the history of the KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik), Hans-Walter Schmuhl showed in detail how, “in endeavoring to merge the biosciences with biopolitics,” its group of researchers not only willingly prepared the way for the National Socialist regime but was clearly successful in doing so.1 Regarded as elite research establishments, the KWIs certainly influenced the entire research landscape. Despite such close examinations of their scientific programs, it remains difficult to make a general statement about the extent to which the “official” premises of racial ideology spread within the community of researchers in the discipline. The KWI for Anthropology in Berlin and the often congenial Genealogical Demographic Research Department of the German Institution for Research on Psychiatry (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie, DFA) in Munich set professional guidelines for research on hereditary pathological effects. Yet their political proximity and dominant position within the academic landscape gave them exceptional status in both respects. Their example is indeed of very great significance for the history of the discipline. However, it also distracts atten1

Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen.

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tion from phenomena instructive in interpreting the maneuvering room available to researchers on heredity and race. By focusing on elite research establishments one inevitably loses sight of the range of options scientists made use of in their dealings with a new political system. For this reason this study on the promotion of the science of human heredity, conducted within the framework of the research project on the history of the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG)/German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), places special importance on the analysis of less important research institutions. Its aim is thus also to reach conclusions about the less spectacular facets of the field that have hitherto been less well researched. The grant files of the DFG proved to be extraordinarily valuable sources for this project. They yielded notable revelations about the cohesiveness or divergent attitudes of the community of researchers toward political presumptions, expectations, and also toward the political pressure that was often applied. The sources of the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG), founded in 1920, were also useful. It adopted the name German Association for the Preservation and Advancement of Research (Deutsche Gemeinschaft zur Erhaltung und Förderung der Forschung) in 1929 and in the postwar period was renamed the DFG (in a merger between the NG with the Deutsche Forschungsrat in 1951). Not only could insight be gained into the entire spectrum of research activities within the area of human heredity, but the richly varied standpoints of a “prominent” discipline, towards which a regime was principally favorably disposed, could also be retraced. For systematic reasons it was necessary to incorporate into this analysis the scientific ranking of research on human heredity and race, on the one hand, during the Weimar Republic and, on the other, in the period after 1945. This broadening of the period of investigation to half a century made it possible to determine more closely the special specifics of National Socialist policy on the promotion of hereditary and racial research. It was linked to multiple conditions from the 1920s that persisted in the form of staffing and research substance far into the Federal Republic. The NG/DFG offered privileged access to interpreting the political policy on science because, since its foundation, it has rightly been seen as the most important funding institution for German academia as a whole.

RESEARCH ON RACE IN WEIMAR Up to the end of the 1920s, the NG supported only a few research projects aimed at directly applying Mendelian genetics to humans. The first researches on the question of heredity that occurred in the context of medicine approached the role of inheritable factors from a perspective that was certainly not seeking to uncover Mendelian heredity models. In the early Weimar Republic studies on heredity were mainly located in marginal fields of modern bacteriology and nutrition physiology. These areas of research had gained importance from wartime experiences and for that reason formed a focus of the NG’s policy of support in

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the immediate aftermath of the war. The great speed with which new findings were being made in bacteriology and the progress made in overcoming nineteenth-century medicine, with its biased and monocausal fixation on processes of the organs, gave new impetus to research on bodily constitution and the role of disposition in infectious diseases. It did not remain one-sidedly concentrated on the role of hereditary factors. Scientists directed their attention just as much, if not even more intensely, on the effects of the environment. It turns out that the inheritance question in most research projects receiving support in the 1920s was embedded within the overall health situation of environmental and nutritional theory. From the mid-1920s on, a variety of projects were supported under the term Rassenforschung – an extremely flexible reference quantity that increasingly became a political factor at the end of the Weimar Republic – in which the race category was chosen as just one of numerous influential variables. In the funded research projects in the area of “comparative national and racial pathology” – a research orientation initiated by the pathologist Ludwig Aschoff (1866–1942) in Freiburg – the participating researchers were often expected to question the dependence of pathological processes on racial factors. Attention was directed all the more to environmental factors and the importance of nutrition. The transition by the NG to sponsoring paradigms of heredity was made in 1928 within the framework of the so-called Cooperative Projects on Race Research. The conception of Cooperative Projects (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten), which arose in 1924 with the return to a stable currency, was based on the ambition to give the NG a profile of its own through an offensive policy of research sponsorship. By this turn to creative promotion of research, the NG’s activities were supposed to be set more strongly toward executing tasks of “national importance.” The Cooperative Projects on Race Research were situated at the intersection between medicine and anthropology. They emerged as such not exclusively through the direct impetus of the NG. Scientists were intensely debating whether anthropological stock-taking of the German population was necessary. In the process, the bottlenecks in the conventional study of the races rapidly became visible. The intense efforts to objectivize the process of racial formation indicated the hopelessness of this approach to the scientists participating in the Cooperative Project. The majority of them had been trained in the tradition of physical anthropology. Interest consequently increasingly moved toward anthropogenetic problems. In their attempts to set physical anthropology upon a hereditary foundation, some of the scientists involved resorted to a concept of race that was rather oriented toward population genetics, which clashed with the notion of pure, prescribed racial types. It was visibly difficult for other researchers to consistently deny older axioms of race studies. The anthropologist from Kiel, Karl Saller (1902–1969) is one example. He was working on a survey of the inhabitants of the Baltic Sea island Fehmarn as part of these Cooperative Projects. His orientation toward a concept of race directed toward population genetics critically challenged the received compilations of racial types. Saller defined race as a complex of inheritable traits in a group of individuals by which they differ from other groups. However, he continued to use the racial categorization by Joseph Deniker (1852–1918),

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which was built upon established differences in geographic distribution, as a basis for his assignments. His theoretical considerations on the dynamic content of the concept of race proved not to be compelling as a result. This inconsistency demonstrates that, despite his inclination toward anthropogenetic paradigms, Saller’s practical work ultimately still remained strongly governed by his training in classical anthropology. Other representatives of this field also alternated, in different intensities, between these heuristic poles. The shift in accent by the funding institution, which by the end of the 1920s was increasingly being referred to as the DFG, toward promoting research on pathological heredity occurred around 1930 with the inclusion of the psychiatrist and heredity researcher Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952) in the Cooperative Projects on Race Research. Rüdin figured along with Eugen Fischer (1874–1967) as a mentor of this long-term NG project. He had been heading the Genealogical Demographic Research Department of the recently founded psychiatric research institution in Munich, named Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie, since 1917. With Rüdin’s involvement in these Cooperative Projects, analyses on inherited pathological traits gained precedence over anthropological population studies. Alongside this genealogical research conducted by Rüdin and his study group, the promotion of research on twins was also started. Its foundations had been laid in the mid-1920s in a collaboration with Baron Otmar von Verschuer (1896–1969) and the Dutch dermatologist Hermann Werner Siemens (1891–1969). Furthermore, studies on the inheritability of divergent social behavior, for which a discipline of its own – anthropological criminalogy (Kriminalbiologie) – had been established, was also supported. This line of research received special support as a Study Team from the NG beginning in 1929. The heavily funded “complete” (lückenlos) family and twin studies, aimed at an etiological delimiting of inheritable factors from environmental factors, attracted increasing attention because here scientific issues and political interests overlapped at an explosive point.

RACIAL HYGIENE UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM With the arrival in power of the National Socialists, the shift in accent already set in motion during the late Weimar Republic in the direction of racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene, also known as eugenics) and hereditary pathology continued. Reviewing and approval practices hardly changed. Eugen Fischer and Ernst Rüdin, who by the end of the Weimar Republic had advanced into the privileged position of experts on heredity and race research, continued to be consulted most frequently as reviewers of proposals in this field. Thus, they were able to exert lasting influence on the advancement of research on heredity. A third frequent reviewer of proposals in this professional line was the department head at the KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Baron Otmar von Verschuer, who was later appointed head of the newly founded Institute for Racial Hygiene and Hereditary Biology (Institut für Rassenhygiene und Erbbiologie) in Frankfurt am Main in 1935. Despite this visible continuity, the ways and means to promote

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research on “racial hygiene” during the Third Reich are in many respects characteristic of the DFG’s political realignment. A new actor appeared in the field of heredity and race research in 1933 with the Health Department of the Reich Ministry of the Interior under Arthur Gütt (1891–1949). The Health Department was responsible for the promotion of all research projects that held out the promise of legitimizing the Nazi legislation on genetics. Accordingly, it tried to gain influence on DFG support. Above all, it sought to coordinate research on heredity at the national level, in order to enlist it more efficiently in the service of Nazi racial hygiene. This was conducive to the disciplinary shift toward research on racial eugenics and hereditary pathology. On the one hand, the shift was encouraged by an established system of expert reviewers; on the other hand, it resulted from the intervention by the Interior Ministry’s Health Department in the review process. It soon became evident that most scientists who applied were largely prepared to place their investigations in the service of Nazi policy on heredity and race. Under National Socialism the DFG molded research policy in the field of genetic and racial research to a very substantial degree. Although it always considered itself a funding institution devoted to providing exceptional assistance to specific research projects for a limited period of time, it was crucially involved in the financing of newly founded research sites and university institutes in this area. During the Third Reich the DFG participated in financing the overwhelming majority of newly established institutes.2 In some important cases its grants made their founding and continuance possible, in the first place – as the following selection of examples shows. In Stuttgart and Hamburg the DFG bore the basic costs for the construction of clinical departments for twin studies and heredity research under the direction of Wilhelm Weitz (1881–1969), brother-in-law of Fritz Lenz (1887–1976) and mentor of Baron von Verschuer. Weitz had helped further developments in twin research and its methods with great dedication during the 1920s as head of the Medical Polyclinic in Tübingen. He became a pioneer of clinical research on heredity. Until 1933 Weitz lacked the material means to conduct any major research on heredity. He had headed the internal medicine department of the municipal hospital in the Cannstatt suburb of Stuttgart since April 1927.3 Organizing comprehensive series of twin studies initially exceeded his budget. After the Nazis had taken power, Weitz was able to expand his research in the area of hereditary internal diseases considerably, not least through DFG grants. Together with the City of Stuttgart, the DFG was the main financer of his genetic research. At the beginning of 1936 Weitz was appointed director of the Second Medical University Clinic in Hamburg. Just as he had done in Stuttgart, Weitz compiled 2 Among the 13 new university departments in this area, no less than ten received grants from the DFG: The two Institute für Rassenhygiene in Munich and Berlin, the Institut für menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik in Greifswald, the Institut für Erb- und Rassenpflege in Giessen, the two Rassenbiologische Institute in Königsberg and Tübingen, the Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene in Frankfurt am Main, the Institut für Rassenbiologie in Würzburg, the Erb- und Rassenbiologisches Institut in Innsbruck, and the Erb- und Rassenhygiene in Prague. 3 Cf. the Hamburg state archive: Staatsarchiv der Freien Hansestadt Hamburg, 361/6 IV-1217.

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a local catalogue of twins in Hamburg and its vicinity with grant support by the DFG. In addition, he initiated a number of research projects on the role of heredity in internal diseases. When the support that this department received from the DFG was terminated after 1940, it could hardly continue its research work. In the case of the Department for Inheritable Pathology – founded in the First Medical University Clinic in the Charité in Berlin at the end of the 1920s with private funds contributed by the Heidelberg internist Richard Siebeck (1883–1965) – it was the DFG’s support that permitted a certain continuity and even expansion of the research activities. The department had been directed since April 1934 by the researcher on overall bodily constitution, Friedrich Curtius (1896–1975). The DFG began supporting his research on the genetic disposition of nervous diseases beginning with the fiscal year 1927/28. Under Curtius’s direction the department was able to enjoy DFG allocations until well into the war years. Although the DFG’s support in the area of heredity and race research was not the sole source of funding, the significance of its material support is beyond question. Scientists in this field, and not least the directors of research facilities and university institutes, accordingly intensely sought to gain the favor of the DFG. It is certain that they recognized relatively rapidly the new boom in research support that occurred with the onset of National Socialism. Increasing numbers of representatives of the field approached the DFG with mounting demands and demonstrated their endeavors to make their research serve the new policy fostering research on heredity and race. Many of them let their research activities be guided by their advocacy of racial hygiene. The research activities of Ernst Rüdin are a very indicative example of the convergence of scientific activities with racial eugenic motivations. A few months after the Nazi takeover of power, Rüdin, having assumed the directorship of the DFA in Munich in 1932, took pains to point out the exceptional importance of its Genealogical Demographic Research Department for the new regime’s policy on racial hygiene: The investigations by the heredity division of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt in Munich became essential in the creation of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Sick Progeny and other public and private measures on racial hygiene in the Third Reich. But many problems concerning the inheritance of serious conditions in humans are still unsolved. They can be addressed in the foreseeable future, however, and absolutely safely by the methods developed at my institute and by means of the institute’s abundant contacts with medical practitioners and the population, if the necessary operating costs for it were granted to my institution. The nation, the party, and the government have a right to expect that this kind of research, which is suited to creating the scientific bases for action taken on racial hygiene, will not be brought to a standstill.4

Rüdin could hardly have expressed better the intimate relationship between his own research and Nazi Rassenhygiene. By drawing a link between the applicability of his research results and Nazi eugenic policy, he emphasized that his research was not just aimed at offering a service to the Nazi regime and its policy on 4 Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses. Rüdin’s exposition, 16 Aug. 1935, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (AMPG), dep. I, rep. IA/2451. Emphasis added.

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genetic health. It rather constituted the indispensable grounds for Nazi policy on racial eugenics because it spearheaded Nazi Rassenhygiene and was its driving force. From this vantage point, the perspective was reversed, for it was no longer Rüdin himself as researcher on heredity but rather “the nation, the party, and the government” who were supposedly entitled to have his research program supported. Irrespective of how strongly heredity research was politically stylized for the purposes of garnering support, the research by Rüdin and many other scientists working on genetic or racial issues with the DFG’s support manifested strong personal advocacy of racial hygiene. Many of them did more than just use their research to underpin Nazi policy promoting eugenics and racist research. They were, in fact, directly involved in its implementation and propagation. They prepared expert opinions for state agencies, acted as medical experts in the hereditary health court, or even carried out sterilization operations as practicing doctors. With the purpose of extending the range of applicability of the sterilization law, Rüdin presented results of his research on the hereditary basis of neurological diseases, which had been financially supported by the KWG as well as by the DFG: My ambition has long been to pursue hereditary research not merely on mental disorders but also on neurology. […] These sicknesses are not taken into account at all in the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Sick Progeny because they have not been consistently worked out genetically yet. The KWG, by granting of a sum of money, has given me the opportunity to create the necessary basis for an upcoming change to the present law on sterilization. For this the Notgemeinschaft granted an additional credit of RM 5,100 for the currently running year.5

At about the same time, the former head of the DFA’s clinical department, Johannes Lange (1891–1938) was conducting similar research in Silesia. He had been appointed head of the psychiatric and neurological clinic at the University of Breslau in May 1930. In his DFG application from October 1933 for the funding of “systematic family studies on nervous disorders [and types of] muscular atrophy and myotonia,” he directed attention to the insufficient research on such sicknesses, which in his opinion, just like psychiatric sicknesses, demanded that a eugenic solution be sought: In the course of the last few years, the clinic […] began systematic family studies on neurological diseases [and types of] muscular atrophy and myotonia. […] These investigations are of considerable scientific and, above all, eugenic importance. Whereas the fact that certain forms of myotonia are hereditary is now already established, there is nevertheless certainly still not enough known about the whole myotonia group, particularly not enough to answer eugenic questions. This applies very much more to the various forms of muscular atrophy, the social importance of which is a very considerable one. Whereas in the area of psychiatry, fruitful research has been conducted at the DFA by the doctors trained there with immense amounts of money, there are essentialy no systematic genetic analyses in the area of neurology. The importance of such analyses need not be explained in detail at the present time because they can be presumed as generally known.6

5 6

Rüdin’s letter, 4 Oct. 1934, AMPG, dep. I, rep. IA/2451. Emphasis added. Lange to the DFG, 25 Oct. 1933, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/12582.

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In the first edition of the official commentary on the sterilization law of 1934, neurological diseases, mentioned in connection with the discussion about sterilization in cases of severe malformation, were not foreseen as sterilization cases.7 This is where intensified efforts to research neurological diseases genetically had a notable repercussion. They led to a new “circumscription of the forms of inheritable nervous diseases affected by the law on hereditary health.”8 The second edition of this commentary on the sterilization law of 1936 already lists many neurological diseases as “sterilizable indications,” muscular atrophy and multiple sclerosis among them. Even though these researchers who received support under National Socialism were actively involved in propagating the Nazi legislation on genetics and its radicalization, respectively, the yields of their research were not always “fruitful” for the Nazi policy fostering heredity and race research. The pertinent Nazi policy often worked like rules of conduct defining the direction of research efforts. Nevertheless, at times, no clearly calculable political association existed between the results of research on racial hygiene and concrete eugenic utility for the regime. The following example will illustrate how the logic of tendentious Nazi research, that is, thoroughly inhumane research, could clash with the wish to obtain a scientifically secure diagnosis on sicknesses falling under the sterilization law. In the case of one DFG grant recipient, the assistant doctor Hans Stiasny (born 1904), the discourse on racial hygiene seems to have served as a welcome means of soliciting funding. The money that the DFG made available to him produced an unanticipated effect, however. Stiasny based his proposal to the DFG of March 1937 on the basic assumption, derived from animal experiments, that a genetic impairment should also be correlated with a disruption in spermatogenesis in humans. He expected “an essentially secure basis” to result from analyses of sperm taken from sterilized men conducted in conjunction with family research “for an assessment on the sicknesses to fall under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Sick Progeny.”9 Just shortly before, Stiasny had published in a substantial volume the results of research from three years of experience with sterilization operations at the Urban Hospital in Berlin.10 He had not always been able to establish the presumed strong reduction in the average count of normal sperm for genetically sick men compared to genetically healthy ones. He concluded that among the “genetic sicknesses regarded as very important, such as epilepsy and schizophrenia” no underaverage value was ascertainable. Completely caught up in this mentality of racial hygiene, Stiasny interpreted these findings as a dangerous problem for population policy.11 He missed the original aim of reliably detecting epileptics and schizophrenics, but that was no reason to interrupt the study. The abundant material available offered other unantici7

Gütt/Rüdin/Ruttke, Gesetz, p. 121. Lange to the DFG, 9 Mar. 1937, BAK, R 73/12582. 9 Stiasnys’s application, Mar. 1937, BAK, R 73/14972. 10 Stiasny, Erbkrankheit. 11 Ibid., p. 113. 8

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pated possibilities to this basic researcher. Stiasny was able to analyze directly not only the semen but the seminal ducts of the men made to undergo sterilization. He was able to examine sperm genesis as well as morphology and thus had an open field of research before him in which hitherto little fundamental research had been conducted.12 Embarking from his analyses on sperm from 53 sterilized men, he dedicated his second book to a thorough description of pathological sperm forms, thus marginalizing his original problem on heredity.13 Along these lines the Nazi state not only provided the conditions for research results potentially utilizable in eugenics but also for solid basic research performed on victims of Nazi racial hygiene. HEREDITY AND RACE RESEARCH DURING THE WAR When the war began, the caesura in the funding of heredity and race research was deeper than in 1933, when a radicalization and narrowing of former orientations had favored the promotion of research on racial hygiene and inheritable pathology. The establishment of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) to direct research funding toward the goals of the Four-Year Plan not only created a new institutional and staffing framework. A redistribution of the research budget also took place that had as a consequence a progressive dismantling of heredity and race research as the war continued. After 1939 even Ernst Rüdin was not spared from the cuts. Having initially been able to pursue his ambitious research plans with considerable DFG funding, by the beginning of the war at the latest he was confronted with the termination of his support by the DFG and had to fall back on other sources of money. The KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics alone, as a leading research establishment, could build on continuous, if not even rising support by the DFG and RFR. The DFG’s grant files reveal, on the whole, that many scientists tried to adapt to the new challenges determined by the war. In some important cases this led to a certain discontinuity in the substance of their research work. Within the context of the war effort, performance improvement had become a field of research that enjoyed increasing financial support. The ideal “Nazi high-performance community” (NS-Leistungsgemeinschaft) was supposed to be transferred primarily into the armaments industry so important to the war and the working energy of those employed optimally mobilized. Not only physiologists but also researchers on heredity and bodily constitution recognized this new boom in funding. They submitted proposals to the RFR and attempted thereby to create the best conditions for their broadly conceived projects. As one of the pioneers of medically oriented genetic research, Wilhelm Weitz, directed a study on the inheritability of bodily fitness as early as 1937 that was financed by the RFR’s Expert Department on Defense Medicine (Fachsparte Wehrmedizin). Weitz could 12 This field of research had previously been limited to a few gynecologists, who had mainly concentrated on the issue of sperm mobility as one criterion of fertility. 13 Stiasny, Unfruchtbarkeit.

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attract funding for analyses conducted by two of his coworkers who wanted to establish by ergometric methods “on the one hand, suitability for physical labor generally, on the other hand, also for particular jobs.” Their testing grounds were the Hamburg police and the Olympic Village in Berlin.14 In his application to the RFR, Weitz emphasized that these studies were particularly significant for the Wehrmacht,15 which the reviewer of his application tellingly underscored in red. The support of this research project proceeded under the Expert Department on Defense Medicine. Unlike Weitz, the researcher on bodily constitution Heinz Bober succeeded in obtaining funding in the middle of the war for his analyses “on work and performance suitability based on constitutional type.”16 Trained as an anthropologist, Bober had started working on heredity at the Institut für Konstitutionsforschung directed by Walter Jaensch (1889–1950) in Berlin. A research stipend for his study in anthropological physiology on periodontitis was repeatedly extended from the beginning of April 1938 until the end of 1942. When Bober was called up for active duty in May 1940, he was able to persuade the DFG and RFR to continue paying him the monthly installments of his stipend. He had established with great personal sacrifice an Institut für Konstitutionsmedizin at the women’s and children’s clinic of the Berlin nursery cooperative that he wanted to maintain along with all its funding.17 He was only able to return to his scientific work again at the beginning of 1941, when he was discharged from military service owing to an “on-duty injury.” By April 1942 he had examined 28,000 persons from different cities and concluded that “in all periodontal pathologies,18 which cannot be attributed to purely local causes, constitutional disorders exist.”19 Based on these findings he proposed a new project, to which he would later apply considerable sums granted by the DFG: In July 1942 he submitted a proposal on an “analysis of occupational suitability and fitness based on constitutional typology for armaments workers.”20 In April 1943 two new applications followed for the ongoing research as well as for studies on “the work and performance curve according to Pauli.” For this project he requested the substantial sums of 7,000 and 10,000 reichsmarks.21 In March 1944 Bober was still thinking of expanding his research with DFG sponsorship. He presented it as a direct contribution toward the new policy on occupational medicine: During the course of the analyses carried out by us on the question of performance assessment and work load, the company physicians of the participating armaments plants have

14

Cf. BAK, R 73/15598. Weitz to the DFG, 11 Oct. 1937, ibid. 16 See BAK, R 73/10352. 17 Krippenverein. Bober to the DFG, 1 Jun. 1940, ibid. 18 Paradontopathien: bacterially conditioned inflammations that manifest in largely irreversible destruction of the anchorage of the tooth (periodontium). 19 Summary of the results of the constitutional examinations on the periodontal problem, 1 Apr. 1942, ibid. 20 Bober to Breuer, 1 Jul. 1942, ibid. 21 Bober to the president of the RFR, 13 Apr. 1943, ibid. 15

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always presented to us as especially urgent the problem of assessing cardiovascular sufferers and their endurance. That is how we came to make our studies conform to these demands of working practice. Preparations were made in different armaments plants to address right away with comprehensive examinations the problem of “performance assessment and work load for cardiovascular sufferers.” To execute these examinations, the amount of 10,000 reichsmarks is required for the coming annual budget for personnel and material costs.22

Bober not only underscored that he was directly meeting the needs of plant physicians but, a little later on, also asserted that he was making it his mission “to make available to the doctor employed in a plant methods for physical performance tests and for endurance assessment.”23 His extensive adaptation to the regime’s priorities in research policy allowed him to expand his research program substantially, almost right up to the end of the war. In August 1944 he was finally granted 9,200 reichsmarks for material costs incurred by “analyses of the work input of armaments laborers with cardiovascular complaints.” Bober’s research program during the war yielded new aspects and a new problem. Other geneticists profited from the increased subsidies for cardiovascular sicknesses as well, if only to a limited degree. Since the beginning of the war the physiology of the heart and circulatory system counted among the foremost fields of research promoted by the RFR and the DFG.24 At the beginning of 1939, at the suggestion of Richard Siebeck, a large-scale “examination on the pathogenesis of raised blood pressure” was begun in the Department for Hereditary Pathology of his pupil Friedrich Curtius (1896–1975). Its aim was to establish “to what extent inherited constitution and exogenous factors (infections, toxins, etc.) are involved in the development of an increase in blood pressure.”25 This research, for which Siebeck received one paid voluntary assistant from the clinic,26 was then continuously supported during the war. On 4 May 1939 Curtius was favored with a grant of 6,000 reichsmarks for “research from the field of clinical hereditary pathology and its analysis through pathogenesis of elevated blood pressure.”27 On 26 March 1941 the approval of 6,000 reichsmarks was renewed. Even Curtius’s application for 6,000 reichsmarks in support for the same research dated 10 March 1943 was granted in the amount of 5,000 reichsmarks. This cut in the grant amount by 1,000 reichsmarks was relatively slight in view of the development of support in the area of heredity and race research as a whole. With this analysis on heightened blood pressure pathogenesis, Curtius placed new accents on his research activities, which, however, had long been concentrating on narrowly related topics. In the 1930s he had worked on the hereditary disease of the venous system and introduced the term status varicosus to express a constitutional weakness in the veins.28 From this perspective the research (taken up just at the 22

Bober to Breuer, 25 Mar. 1944, ibid. Bober to Fachsparte Medizin of the RFR, 24 Jul. 1944, ibid. 24 Cf. Neumann, Forschung. 25 Untersuchung über die Pathogenese der Blutdrucksteigerung: Curtius to the DFG, 28 Feb. 1939, BAK, R 73/10641. 26 Ibid. 27 RFR to Curtius, 4 May 1939, ibid. 28 Curtius/Pass, Untersuchungen. 23

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end of the 1930s) on raised blood pressure deepened, as it were, an already existing interest in the human bloodstream. Although Curtius attempted to meet the changed prerequisites of research funding halfway, his petition for independence for his Department of Hereditary Pathology was unsuccessful. “The question,” the Reich Ministry of Education decided, “of whether it seems advisable to separate the Department of Hereditary Pathology from the First Medical Clinic and to make it independent has to be postponed as not being of war importance until the end of the war.”29 The Reich Ministry of Employment did support Curtius, though, when the Department on Hereditary Pathology threatened to be shut down. Although racial hygiene oriented genetic research generally experienced a drop in funding at the beginning of the war, some areas related to the Nazi regime’s policy of selectivity, and also of exclusion, were able to reap larger grants. From around 1937 the RFR and DFG were significantly involved in the promotion of so-called asocial research. Since the middle of the 1930s, within the context of the sterilization practice, considerations were being made about making “asocial elements” infertile and creating a “law on antisocials.”30 The boom in support for asocial research had repercussions on its closely related field of anthropological criminology as it became increasingly entangled with “asocial research.” The DFG had initially supported anthropological criminology within the framework of its Cooperative Projects on Race Research at the end of the Weimar Republic. There was even a latent shift in orientation away from this field at the DFA in the second half of the 1930s toward the analysis of “psychopaths,” “vagrants,” and “antisocial” persons.31 During the war the funding allocated to the field of “antisocial research” was mainly concentrated on the probably most influential “gypsy researcher” of the Third Reich, Robert Ritter (1901–1951), and his collaborators at the Research Station on Race Hygiene and Population in the Reich Office of Health (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle im Reichsgesundheitsamt). Just like many other programs in the field of heredity and race research, the projects being conducted at this Research Station were not yet recognized as “important to the state and the war” when the war began. But Ritter’s intervention at the Reich Department of Criminal Investigation procured the necessary recognition for his Research Station and opened the way to continued support by the RFR and DFG. Contacts between the leadership of the German Kriminalpolizei and Ritter had existed since 1937 at the latest and were intensified further in 1939. They were based not least on their demand for records on the registration and taxation of “gypsies.”32 In 1941 Ritter shifted the accent of his Research Station insofar as a decree by the High Command of the Wehrmacht of 11 February was supposed to regulate the exclusion of “gypsies” from

29 Reichserziehungsministerium to Verwaltungsdirektor der Charité, Bundesarchiv Berlin, BDC/514. 30 On the Gemeinschaftsfremdengesetz cf. Wagner, Gesetz. 31 Cf. Cottebrune, Forschungsgemeinschaft. 32 Cf. Luchterhandt, Weg, pp. 137, 174.

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the Army, Navy, and Luftwaffe.33 The Department of Criminal Investigation was supposed to compile for this purpose special rosters separated into the categories “full-blooded gypsies” and “half-caste gypsies” (Zigeunermischlinge), providing their places of birth and addresses. Accordingly the Research Station drew up a form with the title “Affidavit” (Gutachtliche Äußerung) and abbreviations such as ZM (Zigeunermischling) and NZ (for “non-gypsy”), to facilitate standardization of this census and processing of the numerous anticipated inquiries. The official mass assessment occasioned by the Wehrmacht’s ban posed an anticipated work load that Ritter’s Research Station could only handle with a considerable increase in funding. It was against this backdrop that the RFR approved a subsidy of 18,000 reichsmarks for the Research Station’s operating costs in May 1941, which was double the amount allocated in the foregoing year. Thus, with DFG funding, Ritter and his Research Station were crucially complicit in the selection process of gypsies. Other cases of projects pursuing the goal of developing the serological diagnosis of race conducted during the war demonstrate that the DFG generously financed criminal research based on human experimentation.34 HUMAN GENETICS AFTER 1945 After 1945 the starting position for promoting the science of human heredity was downright difficult. Renamed Humangenetik, it received very little funding during the 1950s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Overall, the fact that this field was discredited cannot explain this lack of support for human genetics in Germany. It was instead the result of many factors working together. Disagreements within the profession caused the DFG’s plan to establish an Anthropology Priority Program (Schwerpunktprogramm) in 1958 to fall through. Scientific controversies mainly arose out of the dynamic development of clinical genetics, leading to a reorientation of the field. That made it more difficult to find adequate sponsorship for Humangenetik. Its traditional link with anthropology caused problems in constituting itself as an independent discipline. Into the 1960s West German human genetics developed largely separately from the paradigm of molecular biology, thus departing from the international trend in research. This divergence can be explained by structural factors as well as by an insistence on scientific tradition. German universities were not able to adequately integrate different disciplines, which was fundamental precisely in the formation of molecular biology. The primary reason why Humangenetik lagged behind in joining molecular genetics was, however, its insistence on a traditional approach based on developmental physiology and characterized by broad interpretational demands. We must ultimately attach greater weight to the impact of this tradition than to the international isolation experienced by German human geneticists, because many of them were represented at the international 33 Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Erlass dated 11 Feb. 1941, in: Allgemeine Heeresmitteilungen, 1941, pp. 82–83. 34 Cf. Cottebrune, Mensch; Trunk, Blutproben; Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen.

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conferences of the postwar period. By insisting on their own style of research, the German human geneticists, whose careers had already been made prior to 1945, encapsulated themselves from new developments in biochemical and cytological human genetics. The break in continuity in substance and methods predating 1945 only developed over the course of the 1960s with the arrival of the rising new generation of human geneticists. The DFG played a critical role in this generation’s attention to more modern methods from biochemistry and cytogenetics to the extent that it offered many stipends for training abroad and priority-program funding. The principal source of funding for many younger professionals with an inclination for cytogenetic and biochemical human genetics was the Priority Program on Biochemical Foundations of Population Genetics, promoted from 1968 on.

FEVERISH RESEARCH? – GERMAN TROPICAL MEDICINE AS REFLECTED IN ITS FUNDING BY THE EMERGENCY ASSOCIATION/GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1920–1970 Marion A. Hulverscheidt The specialty of tropical medicine was established around 1920. Pertinent professional societies, institutes, and journals were founded throughout Europe around the turn of the century.1 In the years following World War I, it was still considered a young and successful area. In particular, achievements by scientists in this field of medicine were repeatedly put forward to underscore Germany’s ability as a colonizer, and with it the necessity for such an engagement, even though it was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.2 Renowned specialists in tropical medicine participated in planning a colonial medical infrastructure in former and anticipated protectorates and colonies. Initially such medical care was set up for the European colonialists and settlers. Only in a subsequent step was the health of the local population considered by these medical colonial planners, foremost with regard to its efficiency as a work force.3 Tropical medicine also claimed successes in the pharmaceutical field. Medicines for treating sleeping sickness and malaria were presented not only as discoveries and developments by excellent German pharmaceutical research but also as feats of an internationally acclaimed tropical medicine.4 Practitioners of tropical medicine were – as they still are – more strongly tied and interlinked internationally than their clinical colleagues. This was a result of, on the one hand, their fields of scientific research on tropical diseases, and on the other hand, their international collaborations. German physicians of tropical medicine were members of various commissions within the Hygiene Commission of the League of Nations from 1920 on, and they remained there even after Germany left the League in 1933. After World War II ended, international contacts in tropical medicine were reopened with German representatives of the profession relatively early, before the World Health Organization (WHO) was even founded. The collective expertise of German tropical medicine was internationally acknowledged.5 The staffing element is particularly interesting with respect to continuities in research sponsorship by the Emergency Association for German Science (Notge1 2 3 4 5

Cf. Eckart, Idee. Besser, Germanin; Laak, Infrastruktur, p. 241. Linne, Arbeiterführer. Hulverscheidt, Chinin; idem, Financing. Hulverscheidt, Forschungslenkung.

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meinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG)/German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). Personal authorities and continuities were much more important than thematic substance. Persons known to the DFG who proposed unfamiliar topics received financial support more easily than unknown persons with a research project on an established problem in research. The extent to which misguided approvals of research funding could result from this is shown by the example of the Colonial Scholarship Program discussed in detail below. Besides the distribution of monies to persons and research projects, the DFG’s participation and awareness of ethically unrestrained research under National Socialism or, respectively, during World War II is also of interest. What stands out in this analysis of research projects on tropical medicine, is that the transgression of moral boundaries to inhumane, perverted research occurred well before the war began and also before the “seizure of power” by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1933. The malarial studies performed on inmates and patients of mental institutions and asylums can be regarded as indicative of the path taken. They introduced experimental research on humans in tropical medicine in Germany after the end of World War I. However, during the Weimar Republic the professional self-portrayal of specialists in tropical medicine was not dominated by this cooperation with psychiatry, rather by the loss of the field’s true sphere of activity – the colonial protectorates. Physicians in tropical medicine regarded themselves foremost as specialists in colonial medicine. Consequently, it is not surprising that they would display an attitude of revisionist colonialism.6 After 1933, the Nazi dictatorship and its aggressive policy of expansionism allowed German tropical medicine to reinterpret its spheres of activity in two respects. On the one hand, Germany’s chances of regaining its colonial possessions appeared promising not after Poland was attacked in 1939, but instead as early as the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938. On the other hand, the war in southern and southeastern Europe called for redoubled research efforts in tropical medicine, particularly in the area of malarial studies. The numbers of soldiers contracting malaria in the war zones in the Balkans were rising rapidly. Malaria was seventh on the list of causes of sickness among soldiers in German armies.7 Tropical medicine hence became a discipline of importance to the war, even without there being any colonial territories and without any areas of combat being in the tropical zone. Research in tropical medicine – foremost for efficient prevention and therapy of malaria – was ranked as important to the war effort and supplied preferentially with material and staff.8 The takeover of power by the National Socialists boosted the stance of colonial revisionism insofar as colonial institutes were founded or renamed. The newly founded Kolonialinstitut in Hamburg in 1939 deserves mention here as

6 Cf. in this regard esp. Eckart, Medizin; generally on the exculpatory Schuldlüge concept and myth, see Schnee, Schuldlüge; Dannert, Kolonialfrage; Jakob, Kampf. 7 Fischer, Sanitätsdienst; Eckart/Vondra, Malaria; Hulverscheidt, Malaria. 8 Hulverscheidt, Auseinandersetzungen; on malarial research by the Allies, cf. idem, Review.

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well as the German Colonial School for Agriculture in Witzenhausen.9 Training of personnel for tropical conditions, be they physicians and nursing staff or engineers, was henceforth possible and was conducted by various agencies, even when, based on their main orientation, training was not their true responsibility. The DFG numbered among such agencies. The Colonial Science Department of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR), inaugurated at the end of September 1940, was supposed to coordinate colonial research. However, it was primarily occupied with planning the training of police and civil servants for future colonies.10 Friedrich Karl Kleine, the famous specialist in tropical medicine and department head at the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin, was listed as a reviewer for medical questions on the personnel list of the RFR’s Colonial Science Department. Nevertheless, research on colonial medicine was coordinated, above all, by Sergius Breüer, the adviser for the Fachsparte Klassische Medizin, headed by Ferdinand Sauerbruch. The period after World War II brought a reorientation in the activities of German tropical medicine that encompassed research as well as clinical work. On the one hand, initial efforts in this area no longer concentrated on research directly relevant to practice. The primary focus was on virus research, which was newly defined as tropical medicine science. This was very successful. Within the context of the internationalization of German technical, social, and medical aid – hence, developmental aid – German physicians of tropical medicine were able to reuse their old plans for medical infrastructure in the colonies. International cooperation in global epidemiological tasks, as required by the WHO, was also a field in which German scientists could put to use the expertise they had gained during the war. A good relationship with the WHO facilitated, in turn, the procurement of national funding for their research.11 The DFG, even more so than the NG, played a mere subordinate role in the promotion of tropical medicine. Prominent research issues in tropical medicine, such as developing medicines against sleeping sickness, malaria, or vaccine research during the Weimar Republic, were mainly financed by industry and during the war mainly by military agencies.12 But the research projects supported by the DFG or the NG indeed reflect that important research in tropical medicine, in particular expeditions, were cofinanced by the DFG. Consequently, because scientists in tropical medicine were financially well provided for elsewhere, many research applications were not submitted to the DFG. The Hamburg Tropeninstitut (since 1942 named the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine), for example, was financially independent. A promotional association, the City of Hamburg, colonial societies, as well as firms doing business in the colonies or former colonies provided additional support for the institute’s research. Their interest in securing health care and medical services for 9 Linne, Aufstieg, p. 276. The Kolonialschule für Landwirtschaft in Witzenhausen, not far from Göttingen, had been founded earlier; cf. Brethauer, Mense, pp. 33–34; Wolff, 85 Jahre. 10 Linne, Aufstieg, p. 275; Laak, Infrastruktur. 11 Hulverscheidt, Financing; idem, Forschungslenkung. 12 Hulverscheidt, Auseinandersetzungen.

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their colonial employees was thereby met; in return, Hamburg tropical medicine received financial subsidies.13 Despite this “extramural” funding, the DFG’s staff, reviewers, and experts, as well as the RFR’s department heads were aware of what research was going on in the field. MALARIA AND TYPHUS The palette of themes treated by German specialists in tropical medicine with DFG support was limited. Three topical fields covered the majority of such scientific endeavors: malaria, typhus, and smallpox, whereby malaria, as the paradigmatic tropical disease, was treated most thoroughly. What German tropical medicine lacked after the defeat in World War I was not so much subject matter as fields of application. The credit must go to industry, especially to I. G. Farben, that German research on tropical medicine was pursued further.14 Studies on sleeping sickness, a tropical parasitic disease that afflicts people as well as cattle, was primarily supported by the Bayer company. The NG only participated as a cosponsor of research expeditions on sleeping sickness and medication trials. In the area of malarial research, tropical medicine was able to create new opportunities for malarial studies with the introduction of malaria fever therapy against progressive paralysis. Julius Wagner-Jauregg was scientifically honored with a Nobel Prize for developing it. Before the introduction of this febrile therapy, sufferers of paralysis (the late stage of syphilis), progressive crippling, psychological disorders, and even psychoses were considered incurable. This new therapeutic method not only handed a remedy to head physicians of nursing homes and medical institutions. It also offered to specialists of tropical medicine a means to carefully monitor the course of the disease on persons undergoing this malarial therapy. Before the patient was administered the infection, in most cases approval was obtained from them or their family members. This new form of treatment spread from Austria and Germany throughout Europe from 1920 on. By the end of the 1930s, however, psychiatrists and heads of health institutions and sanatoriums had become wary of such a dangerous treatment, due to its limited prognosis for success. Even so, Gerhard Rose, the head of the tropical medicine department at the Robert Koch Institute, still managed to obtain large grants from the DFG for a mosquito breeding institution for the purposes of malarial therapy in 1938. He promoted therapeutic infection with malaria by mosquito bite with the argument that transmission of other diseases was thereby less likely. In order to keep a malaria strain alive, the infection of people was necessary because the malarial pathogen only reproduces in the obligatory passage from human to mosquito to human. There is no documentation on consent having been sought from the persons infected in this way. With regard to parasitological 13 14

Wulf, Tropeninstitut. Dünschede, Forschung.

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infection and vaccine research, incorporating people into an experimental scenario – such as the typhus research performed with unscrupulous gruesomeness in the Buchenwald concentration camp – took its point of departure from the malarial research with paralytic patients. Convenient observation of the course of disease was not the only advantage that such artificial infections had for research on tropical medicine. Paralytic patients treated with malaria were very important subjects for trials of new synthetically produced malaria drugs. Patient consent was not solicited for these medication trials. The pharmaceutical industry, primarily I. G. Farben, continuously supported this research, also in wartime. Thus the chemical company was able to conduct human trials for the first synthetic malaria drugs Plasmochin and Atebrine. This collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and sanatoriums and health institutions was expanded during the war. In addition to these “subjects” at asylums and mental institutions, inmates in concentration camps and soldiers suffering from malaria in military hospitals were also administered the new medications. The DFG also financed a few trial stations and was always informed about the current state of malarial research in Germany. Although typhus is more a wartime epidemic than a tropical disease, research on it has been included in this project because it was one of the active research fields in tropical medicine. Staff members of the Hamburg Tropeninstitut erected a typhus research station in Warsaw at the beginning of World War II, before typhus had spread to the point of being determined by the military authorities as dangerous enough to necessitate a campaign against this threatening epidemic.15 Many scientists who studied tropical medicine worked on militarily relevant questions of contagious disease, because the field of tropical medicine by itself was too narrow. Research on typhus offered the institute a second pillar of support. Eugen Haagen, who was well established as a researcher on yellow fever, also conducted epidemic typhus studies on inmates of concentration camps during World War II. Rose, acting as medical inspector for the Luftwaffe, suggested the fatal typhus experiments in the Buchenwald concentration camp. MURDEROUS HUMAN TRIALS Experimentation with infectious diseases without obtaining a patient’s consent was practiced in tropical medicine even before the moral breakdown through the seizure of power by the National Socialists. Moreover, Germany was not alone in doing so. However, only in Germany were trials on paralytics undergoing malarial therapy extended to include human experimentation in concentration camps. The possibility of testing chemotherapeutic drugs on malarially inoculated paralytic inmates and patients in asylums and sanatoriums was one of the basic preconditions for the development of synthetic drug therapy for the disease. When the Nazis came to power, the ethical foundation of the field 15

Weß, Menschenversuche; idem, Tropenmedizin.

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had already eroded. The experiments conducted by Claus Schilling, the former head of the tropical medicine department of the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin, and in mental health institutions, asylums, as well as the Dachau concentration camp demonstrate, however, how much room for further radicalization still existed in this field.16 This also applies to the research by Schilling’s successor, Rose. Although he criticized his predecessor’s research approach, he still supplied him with infected mosquitos and apparatus for his experiments in the malaria testing station in the Dachau concentration camp. He also pursued his already mentioned “more sanitary” idea of malarial infection by mosquito bite, without even checking the scientific literature, and he received support by the DFG for it.17 The extreme of ethically unrestrained research was reached by Rose with a series of experiments with dangerous tropical malaria strains that he administered on defenseless, uninformed, underweight inmates of the Pfaffenrode sanatorium. He reported about these experiments to various institutions, the DFG among them. No critical inquiries were raised about them at the time, nor was any legal prosecution initiated after the war.18 Werner Schulemann, who as a former I. G. Farben researcher, and subsequently as the director of the Pharmacological Institute of the University of Bonn, had perfected the animal models of chickens, canaries, and Java rice sparrows, knew about the human experimentation going on in health institutions and asylums. Schulemann himself directed a series of trials on the effectiveness of Sontochin on soldiers in the military hospital in Bonn-Godesberg who had contracted malaria. It was only in 1964 that he protested in alarm upon finding out that a malaria chemotherapy he had developed in the late 1950s had been tested on inmates of an asylum in Romania.19 THE COLONIAL SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM Relatively little has been known about the Colonial Scholarship Program up to now. It was not a research program but financial aid for physicians wanting to undergo additional training in colonial or tropical medicine. Using the files of the DFG’s Individual Grants Program, it was possible to reconstruct the fact that this funding establishment, and in particular, Sergius Breüer, adviser (Fachreferent) of the department and later expert reviewer for the Fachsparte für Klassische Medizin, not only participated in the medical planning project for the retrieval of the tropical colonial territories or the conquest of new ones, they also assumed significant supervisory functions in it. Through planning by the Office for Colonial Policy of the Nazi Party (Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP), individual careers of 16 17

Hulverscheidt, Menschen. Hinz-Wessels/Hulverscheidt, Tropenmedizinische Abteilung; Hulverscheidt, Beteili-

gung. 18 19

Hulverscheidt, Malaria Experiments. Hulverscheidt, Forschungslenkung.

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applicant physicians were supposed to be furthered, using the DFG scholarship as the vehicle. Hence, this was more than mere cooperation with the DFG. It was a usurpation of its organizational and financial means by Nazi expansionists and planners. The overwhelming majority of these physicians were members of the Nazi Party or SS and their stipends did not involve scientific engagement. After the war, research proposals submitted by former colonial scholarship recipients were given preferential treatment by the DFG. In 1961 the idea of a colonial scholarship program or one on tropical medicine flared up one last time when the director of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg asked the president of the DFG about “orientational stipends.” These were supposed to be offered to young physicians for training in medical work and setting up state-run health care institutions in developing countries. The Thyssenstiftung was offering such stipends and he recommended that the DFG emulate it.20 Such support, he declared, was essentially important for German tropical medicine: “For the advancement of aspirants in the field tropical medicine and in connection with our plans for practical developmental aid in the area of medicine, it seems to me that the issue discussed by the president himself would be of decisive influence.”21 German specialists in tropical medicine regarded the DFG as a distribution office for financial assistance and not as an establishment for the promotion of research. There were discussions at the DFG about starting a Priority Program in the field of developmental aid but none was ever set up. Another Priority Program purely for tropical medicine proposed by members of that field was declined, above all because the applicants were not sufficiently interlinked with university institutions and originated from the financially stable Tropeninstitut in Hamburg. EXPEDITION VERSUS LABORATORY RESEARCH With regard to research in tropical medicine and its funding, whether, when, and how did the scientific orientation shift away from expeditions to laboratory work? Archival material from the DFG and the NG indicate that expeditionary research still predominated during the 1920s. The global economic crisis and inflation led to greater restraint in this area. The DFG’s explanation for suspending its support of expeditions was colored by cultural policy. Knowledge gained from expeditions were faulted for being of benefit only to the visited regions and the people living there, not to the German nation. This assessment only gradually included German research stations in tropical regions. The Tropeninstitut in Hamburg always wanted to have an annex in the tropics. Its expeditional reports continually pointed out where good research conditions existed. Potential locations for research and training sites were identified 20 Director of the Bernhard-Nocht-Institut to the appropriate Referent at the DFG, 17 Mar. 1961, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 352 8/9, pp. 1–131. 21 Ibid.

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and described within the framework of the Colonial Scholarship Program. Such sites were established in the Dominican Republic and on Fernando Pó – Bioko, an island in the Gulf of Guinea – as exceptions with major financial and material support by the DFG from 1937 to 1939. Even after World War II, when the priority issue between expedition versus laboratory medicine had been decided in favor of the latter, the desire to have an external research station for tropical medicine persisted. The Hamburg Tropeninstitut erected one in Nigeria, albeit without the financial assistance of the DFG. The issue of an external site became relevant in the negotiations for an appointment to the chair of comparative tropical medicine at Munich.22 Hans Helmuth Poppe wanted to have a permanent external annex to the Institute for Tropical Medicine established. The minister of state recommended that he apply to the DFG about funding for such an institution: “If the DFG cannot give such funding over the long term, one would have to know for what period it would consider doing so.”23 The Federal Ministries of Food and Economic Cooperation also ought to be approached for support. Poppe’s competitor Albert Herrlich did not think much of a permanent outpost. He conveyed his view on this matter to the Bavarian Ministry of Culture: The work of European institutes of tropical medicine is calculated to convey broadly ranging basic training; for theoretical instruction this task is met without problems in lectures and in the laboratory. For the practical training, the institutes in England, France, and Holland sent their assistants into the colonies, which likewise made possible very multifacetted training. Since the abolition of the colonies, these training sites must find new methods.24

He evidently regarded these far-off dependencies just as sites of training, not of research: Disregarding the financial burden, which must not be underestimated, the information available over there is far too limited. The scientists employed there can only concern themselves with the regional epidemics arising there and then do not know about other areas and other countries and do not acquire the multifacettedness necessary for their training. The preference therefore is to assign assistants research projects on a case-by-case basis and for different areas of the tropics.25

Combining a research project with training is regularly done in the field of tropical medicine. Expertise must be acquired in a particular region and disease as well as in a laboratory technique. If one compares these German efforts for an outpost in the tropics with British ones, one notices that the latter only pushed ahead from the 1930s on, even though the British Empire had given them plenty of opportunity to set up external stations in the tropics. Their attempts to create a Tropical Medical Research Committee in the Medical Research Council fell through, however, because there

22 23 24 25

Staatsminister to Poppe, 12 Aug. 1963, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, MK 69639. Ibid. Herrlich to the Kultusminister, 7 Oct. 1963, ibid. Ibid.

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was no willingness on the part of British scientists to live and work at a tropical site for a period of several years.26 COGNIZANCE AND SUPPORT BY THE DFG This is not the place to judge the extent to which the DFG incriminated itself through support and cognizance of the murderous experiments on human beings. However, it should be broached here. The organizational form of the NG and the DFG, respectively, is a registered association (eingetragener Verein). This structure was sanctioned by the state insofar as the funding institution received state funds for distribution among German scientists according to its own rules. An association actually constitutes an organization independent of the state. The DFG, with its main tasks of distributing money, guiding and promoting research was, jointly with all its boards and hence also its representatives, bound to the existing political system during the Weimar Republic as well as under Nazism and in the Federal Republic of Germany. This continuity in organization, although not spared from controversy and scrutiny, indicates that Germany adhered to this model of independent representation of science. During the reign of National Socialism the RFR occupied, used, and abused the DFG, although gradually differences developed in the separate expert departments. Of note in the area of research on tropical medicine is the collaboration with the Office for Colonial Policy of the Nazi Party, which was not a state body. This is where an abuse of position within the political system can be seen. The extent to which an abuse of power can be presumed cannot be decided here. The DFG had the responsibility of distributing money. It shifted its allocation practice away from basic research toward research of importance to warfare and its policy. The DFG supported criminally oriented applied research with funding and apparatus. Consequently, the DFG’s staff members, expert department heads and/or their reviewers, as well as the president or the plenipotentiary on epidemic research of the Reich all knew about inhumane experiments being conducted on people. In tropical medicine we find this in the research areas of malaria, typhus, and yellow fever. Yet this cognizance of inhuman experiments evoked no criticism or skeptical statements. At the Nuremberg Trials, charges were prosecuted not only for culpability, but also complicity, mute toleration, and support through silence. Even in the small field of tropical medicine, there are enough scientific facts that should require an apology – an admission of guilt concerning complicit knowledge alone. Particularly the notorious form in which the DFG’s Committee on Scientific Instrumentation (the Apparateausschuss) dealt with its past, which rather ran back seamlessly into activities during the Nazi period, demands extensive analysis.27 26 General correspondence of the Tropical Medical Research Committee of the Medical Research Council, National Archives London, FD1 1896. 27 The example of the Apparateausschuss is discussed in Hulverscheidt, Experiments.

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THE FUNDING OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS Sponsorship of young scholars and aspiring scientists is specifically anchored in the statutes of the DFG. If the focus falls on the indiviudals sponsored, then a slight distortion in the image appears, because the DFG’s statutes stipulate that only institutionally anchored scientists with a doctoral degree may submit proposals. The result is a clumping together of grant-applicant heads of university institutes, because they simply have to apply on behalf of each of their assistant medical technicians and colloborating staff members for project funding. For example, the heavy financial support granted to Werner Schulemann, Albert Herrlich, and Ernst Georg Nauck is explained by their submissions of proposals as institute heads for various projects that do not always describe their own original research plans. In addition to this clustering, another specific of research in tropical medicine can be identifiable: the same research project was funded by a series of sponsors. This phenomenon appears in projects that can be classified as on the margins of applied research. Schulemann’s research project on malaria chemotherapies was financed by I. G. Farben for a long time, then also by the military, from the late 1950s by the Bayer corporation, before reverting back to the DFG. When the reviewers demanded results and publications, Schulemann changed sponsors again and accepted support by the WHO.28 Scientists at the Hamburg Tropeninstitut were financially well provided for. In addition to support by the City of Hamburg and the promotional association for the institute, grants by the DFG were certainly welcome but not crucial to its survival. The security of a stable financial basis generated arrogance in some leading members of the institute. Without abiding by the formalities of application submission, Nocht managed to draw 20,000 reichsmarks annually, despite many cautionary notices by the DFG’s president Friedrich Schmidt-Ott. In his capacity as institute director and DFG department head, Nauck arranged that construction costs be approved, even though such application of money from the DFG was not foreseen in its statutes. A change in course at the Tropeninstitut in Hamburg came only in 1973, when it was refused a proposed Collaborative Research Center. Research support by the DFG is specially conspicuous in the case of Werner Schulemann as director of the Pharmacological Institute at the University of Bonn. After leaving industry to join the University of Bonn, Schulemann was appointed professor with life tenure in the civil service in 1937 by Hitler personally. Apart from a small dip at the beginning of the war, the DFG supported him consistently with high sums. The temporary break resulted out of doubts by the DFG reviewer Breüer as to the war importance of Schulemann’s malaria research. An accordingly solicited expert opinion certified only indirect importance to the war effort, whereupon the research money was withheld. The warrior-like style in which Schulemann formulated his subsequent research proposals jump off the 28

Hulverscheidt, Financing; idem, Forschungslenkung.

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page. Schulemann managed to keep the scientific research at his institute running during the war because he was able to cooperate successfully with the military as well as with industry.29 According to him, the funding granted by the DFG amounted to roughly one fifth of the institute budget.30 During the phase of the DFG’s nonexistence, between mid-1945 and 1949, Schulemann was examined in denazification proceedings, was ranked as a nominal supporter or “fellow traveller” (Mitläufer), and was dismissed from employment by the City of Bonn and his institute. Renewed denazification proceedings in 1948 exonerated him and he was able to retrieve his directorship at the Pharmacological Institute in Bonn.31 He obtained a grant to conduct research on toxoplasmosis from 1951 on and was successful again with one for researches in the area of malaria chemotherapy from 1960. The continuity in sponsorship based on personal reference is more than clear in the financial support of older professionals otherwise not rated particularly highly by their fellow colleagues in the field. Their grant proposals were approved, primarily, as it seems, in order to avoid scandal within the discipline.32 This explanatory background is indicated with respect to the grants for the professors emeriti Uhlenhuth, Rodenwaldt, Schulemann, and Schilling. Especially the last shows that the decision-making freedom of a self-governed organization does not always redound to its credit. The distribution of money according to the practice “for unto every one that hath shall be given” can scarcely be influenced by rules and regulations, and it seems as if the “mandarinship” of the German professoriate was not eager to move away from this. These unspoken rules of funding distribution are acceptable as long as there is enough money to go around. In times of tight budgets such a distribution practice can quickly be construed as questionable clientèlism. PHASES AND BREAKS As far the temporal breaks in the issue of research funding are concerned, the files on research in tropical medicine allow the following picture to be drawn. Until 1937 there were no major changes within the framework of grant applications and approvals, if one disregards the curtailing of allocations in the periphery of the global economic crisis of 1929/30. Yet this drop was not specific to tropical medicine. The enormous boost for proposals in tropical medicine since 1937 29

Forsbach, Fakultät. McCarthy/Freeman/Southworth, Interviews Schulemann. 31 Denazification file on Werner Schulemann, Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel, 3 Ndx.92/1/16260. 32 The support for Uhlenhuth should be thus assessed. The DFG funded a private laboratory for him as emeritus; cf. Mölders, Formeln, p. 53 and the Uhlenhuth file, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 73/15285. Likewise regarding the DFG support of the emeritus Claus Schilling; cf. Hulverscheidt, Menschen. On the support for research by Rodenwaldt on the world atlas on epidemics, cf. DFG-Archiv (DFGA), Ro 44; on Schulemann’s research on antimalarial drugs, cf. DFGA, Schu 8. 30

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can be explained by the disguised project titles from the Colonial Scholarship Program. In 1937, the founding of the first RFR and the massive reorientation of war-related science according to the Four-Year Plan was a greater caesura for the field than the “seizure of power” by Hitler and the Nazi party in 1933. This finding requires some qualification, however. The number of Jewish scientists who had been recipients of NG support until 1933 cannot be determined on the basis of the examined archival material. It appears that the existing NG files have passed through a number of purges.33 Some files or parts of them are missing. With the creation of the second RFR in 1943, a plenipotentiary on epidemic control was appointed along with the establishment of an Expert Department on Medicine. The person concerned was Walter Paul Schreiber. He was, at the same time, surgeon general and headed the Science Department and Health Headquarters of Army Medical Inspection. The activities of specialists in tropical medicine also fell within his purview. The rising number of research projects and the apparent explosion in grant amounts did not correspond to the productivity of these research projects. Hardly any progress reports, final accountings of completed research, or publications exist for projects supported by this imperial commissioner on epidemics (Reichsseuchenbeauftragter), so only general statements can be made about the direction they took. It appears as if the steering of research by Schreiber was not very productive. In 1949 the thread of research sponsorship was taken up again with the renewed founding of the DFG. A deficit persists about the immediate postwar period, however, because German research between 1945 and 1949 cannot be reconstructed on the basis of DFG files. German research on tropical medicine picked up again after 1960, perhaps triggered by the first reports issued by the Council of Sciences and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) and by the refoundings of professional societies, which offered physicians of tropical medicine an avenue for exchanges and cooperation. The field had to struggle for a long time to find its position within German medicine and German science, however, for the representatives of the field in the postwar period did not want to make a connection to the 1930s. Only after a latent period lasting into the 1950s did the discipline of tropical medicine attempt to establish itself through a professional association of its own and therefore also to promote a policy of its own. The activities of the main professional society, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Tropenmedizin (German Society for Tropical Medicine), lay idle until 1961. Its members found professional “asylum” in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Hygiene und Mikrobiologie (German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology) and the newly founded Deutsche Gesellschaft für Parasitologie (German Society for Parasitology). These professional societies are important insofar as they had, and still have, the right to present scientists as candidates for election on the DFG’s review boards. Where there is no professional society, researchers cannot take advantage of this important possibility of exerting influence on the self-governing DFG. That is why societies such as the 33

Flachowsky, Reichsforschungsrat.

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German Society for Parasitology, which because of their interdisciplinarity can be categorized under more than one established field, find it difficult to establish a lobby for promotion of their research. This glance at a small field as it is reflected in research and funding policy casts not the coryphaei in the historical limelight, not the eye-catching areas of research, but the best research organizers and the proposals surrounded by the most controversies. The communication potential on DFG panels constitute an important node within the network of scientists that has hitherto not been adequately researched. Through its fuzzy interdisciplinary line-drawing and broadened fund-raising scope to include the WHO and industrial donors, this cursorily portrayed project provides an important contribution not just to the history of the DFG but also to the history of tropical medicine and its bordering disciplines.

FRAGMENTATION, COOPERATION, INSTITUTIONALIZATION – GERMAN CANCER RESEARCH WITHIN THE FUNDING HORIZONS OF THE EMERGENCY ASSOCIATION/ GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1920–1970 Gabriele Moser Public funding of research on cancer,1 that is, noncommercial experimental medicine or scientific research, was initially dominated by rather traditional forms of sponsorship during the Weimar Republic. Essentially, this means that endowments and registered associations collected money for scientific research projects and relayed it to individual researchers or dedicated institutions. Cancer research institutions in Germany were founded at the beginning of the twentieth century: 1901 in Frankfurt am Main, 1903 in Berlin, 1906 in Heidelberg, and 1912 in Hamburg. The additional establishment of societies for cancer prevention or research occurred in parallel in 1906, also in Sweden; 1907 in Norway, Poland, and Japan; and 1910 in Switzerland.2 LOWER RANKING FOR CANCER RESEARCH IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC The founding of the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) shortly after World War I improved the situation in Germany for medical and scientific research not tied to industry. In 1920 the NG, a self-administrated body for the advancement of research, began as a supraregional institution active nation-wide to distribute state and private funding after a review process to scientists in the form of research scholarships, loaned apparatus, or grants for staffing or laboratory costs. Around 90 percent of the monies of the NG and the subsequent German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) originated from the state budget. Private donations to the NG/DFG budget as well as contributions by the Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany (Stifterverband der deutschen Wissenschaft) played a subordinate role.3 The NG/DFG supported projects 1 On the history of cancer research in Germany, cf. Eckart (ed.), Years; Wagner/Mauerberger, Krebsforschung; Moser, Forschungsgemeinschaft. 2 Cf. L’organisation de la lutte contre le cancer dans le monde, in: Fraenkel (ed.), Congrès, vol. 2, pp. 485–533. 3 Hachtmann, Erfolgsgeschichte, table 1, p. 48.

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on cancer research at universities and other scientific institutes,4 but their total number was not very high, with twenty to thirty projects per year during the 1920s, according to the NG/DFG’s published annual reports. Research projects that manifestly furthered basic research in experimental medicine in the area of cancer originated from the broad transdisciplinary area of clinical and theoretical medicine – internal medicine, pathology, physiology, immunology, etc. But they came just as often from such fields as chemistry, pharmacology, biology, zoology, or – in the case of radiology – physics, without any semantic reference to the cancer theme appearing in the project title.5 The funded research projects during the Weimar Republic6 can be summarized within four thematic blocks: first, experimental cytology with tissue cultures; second, studies on metabolic processes inside cells; third, the genesis of cancer, particularly problems involving viral cancer, parasitic cause, the influence of diet, and exogenous stimuli; and fourth, research toward setting up a tumor farm. Particularly this last establishment constituted an innovative change to the experimental landscape. Its aim was to make available to research standardized cancerous laboratory animals.7 The first projects that can clearly be categorized as cancer research supported by the NG came in 1922/23. They involved experimental research by Robert Bierich in Hamburg and Rhoda Erdmann in Berlin. In subsequent years chemotherapeutic research on carcinoma by Otto Meyerhof and Ferdinand Sauerbruch’s mixed-bag research on “parabiosis, tuberculosis, and cancer research” were funded. In 1925/26 a caesura for research funding occurred in Germany. On the one hand, the number of approvals for medical research projects at the NG rose steeply to almost two hundred. On the other hand, a form of structured research funding policy gradually developed instituting “research projects by the Emergency Association in the area of the national economy, public health, and the common weal”; these so-called Cooperative Projects (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten) were supposed to be researched interdisciplinarily.8 The attendant Denkschrift argued for the creation of a special fund totaling 5 million marks for the promotion of scientific research. From this, the area of medical research on the Physiology of Diet and Work Performance should receive 200,000 reichsmarks, and the Chemistry of the Human Body should receive 500,000 reichsmarks. Cancer research was also subsumed under this thematic category.

4 On the NG during the Weimar Republic, cf. Kirchhoff, Notgemeinschaft; as well as on the general frame within the history of science, Pfetsch, Wissenschaftspolitik. 5 An impression of the variety of thematic forms of scientific research in the area of tumors during the first third of the twentieth century is conveyed by the four-volume work Wolff, Lehre. 6 Information from the annually published progress reports by the NG (since 1930 DFG) published by Karl Siegismund in Berlin: Berichte. See also the archival collection on the DFG at the Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73. 7 Cf. Schwerin, Experimentalisierung. 8 “Forschungsaufgaben der Notgemeinschaft im Bereich der nationalen Wirtschaft, der Volksgesundheit und des Volkswohles.” For a contemporary reflection by a reviewer of the NG/ DFG, cf. Griewank, Staat.

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By the end of the 1920s, when as a consequence of the economic crises the republic was making ever deeper cuts in the state’s financial subsidies, including its research support, the real number of supported cancer research projects was also growing continuously. Set in relation to the sharp rise in the NG’s total research support from 1926 on, however, the increase in cancer research falls below the average. In the fiscal year 1926/27, three million marks were disbursed from the special fund in support of Cooperative Projects, but in all there were only six newly approved projects from experimental cancer research. They include four projects on experimental cytology and two on cancer genesis. No cancer topic was represented among the 42 new stipends in the area of medicine. While the statistics on approvals in medicine climbed from 263 in 1927/28 to 283 in 1928/29 to the maximum of 348 approved medical research projects in the fiscal year 1929/30, the statistic on cancer work fell from 14 projects in 1927/28 to 13 in 1928/29 to 11 in the fiscal year 1929/30. The relatively low number of supported research projects on cancer possibly reflected a tendency in funding policy by the NG/DFG of the 1920s to give preference to scientific and technical “cooperative researches.” For example, Air Traffic, and Research on Metals likewise each received 500,000 reichsmarks. In addition, the equipping of prestigious research expeditions lasting many years was also given privileged status. A low ranking for cancer research can furthermore be seen within medical research. In the range of support for experimental research, 860,000 reichsmarks were earmarked for “medicine (including physiological chemistry, protein research, radiology, anthropology, occupation physiology, sports physiology, occupational hygiene, and Kriminalbiologie).” But cancer research was not even explicitly mentioned. From the very beginning of the Weimar Republic cancer research was not very important to the NG, while the focus placed on research funding of prominant Cooperative Projects diverted more attention and money in the NG away from cancer research. The restrictions on expenditures imposed during the years of presidential dictatorship between 1930 and 1932/33 caused grants for cancer research in Germany to sink almost to insignificance. Physiology, by contrast, continued to be represented among the Cooperative Projects by its two subdisciplines occupational physiology and sports physiology. In 1932/33, the last annual report issued by the “old” Emergency Association, cancer research – which was largely oriented toward theoretical experiments – was finally classed under the subgroup Volksseuchen as a national epidemic next to tuberculosis, syphilis, and goiter together with immunological and serological studies. RACIST UNIVERSITY POLICY The political upheaval in 1933 had serious consequences on the whole for academia and scientific research. Calculated quantitatively, its dimensions correspond to the expulsion of 18 to 20 percent of all scientists.9 The racist univer9

Grüttner/Kinas, Vertreibung.

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sity policy of the Nazi state only exacerbated the deficit within German cancer research already perceptible during the Weimar years, because scientists stigmatized as “Jewish” and/or politically unconformable researchers lost their jobs in Germany. The affected German cancer researchers10 included Hans Sachs and Richard Werner in Heidelberg and Ludwig Halberstaedter and Ferdinand Blumenthal in Berlin, for example. Such expulsions could also converge with academic problems related to specific internal restructuring within a particular university. In Heidelberg, as early as 1932 there was no academic successor in sight for the Institute of Experimental Cancer Research, nor was there any demand for the course units on offer, as the bursar’s office files document. In Berlin the political change was used as early as May 1933 not only to refill the vacant director position at the university’s Cancer Institute, but also to push through a fundamentally new conception of the institute, one that had been controversial for a while. However, these dismissals intensified fundamentally the need to organize research in the Nazi state more rationally. Thus the “research steering” that can be identified in the DFG Cancer Research Program beginning in 193611 was, on the one hand, a reaction to the self-inflicted necessity to bundle resources in order to compensate for the resulting loss of scientific capacity. On the other hand, however, the actuality of the topic of cancer research and prevention during the Nazi period was also the result of a synchronous international development in the 1930s, when a dramatic rise in the number of cancer cases was perceived in the highly industrialized countries. It equally reflected demographic changes, improved diagnostic options, and raised awareness about statistical epidemiology.12 The Second International Congress of the Scientific and Social Campaign against Cancer from 20 to 26 September 1936 in Brussels, with a total of 475 participants and six official congress languages, emphatically documents this thematic “sensitization.”13 National Socialist Germany had sent the second largest delegation after Belgium, with sixty scientists, six of them women. Encounters between expelled cancer researchers and ones employed in Germany occurred on that occasion. The attending exiled scientists included Friedrich Dessauer, Marta Fraenkel, Sigismund Peller, and Richard Werner, besides others. Ferdinand Blumenthal, then a professor in Belgrade, spoke in the section on advances in cancer therapy directly after his former assistant and provisional successor in Berlin, Hans Auler. Official members of the German delegation, led by Prof. Max Borst, were, among others, Kurt Blome and Sergius Breüer.

10 On Heidelberg now see Eckart/Sellin/Wolgast (eds.), Universität, particularly the contribution by Neubert, Institut. On Berlin cf. Jahr (ed.), Universität, vol. 1, and vom Bruch (ed.), Universität, vol. 2; esp. Vossen, Fakultät. 11 Cf. Moser, Musterbeispiel. 12 On this Moser/Fleischhacker, People’s Health. 13 Fraenkel, Congrès. On Marta Fraenkel cf. Aschenbrenner, Fraenkel.

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THE TUMOR RESEARCH PROGRAM OF THE DFG 1936 was also a decisive year for organized cancer research in the Nazi state, because after lengthy and heated disputes between the Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and Cultural Affairs (Reichserziehungsministerium, REM) and the DFG the Tumor Research Program funded by the DFG was ratified in December. At an initial meeting in Berlin in spring 1936, representatives of the Reich Office of Health, the Imperial Board on Cancer Control,14 the DFG, and the REM agreed to coordinate research issues in the field of cancer and “to set main guidelines” for the available capabilities, according to the commentary about its aims by one contemporary. This program was designed to assist tumor research within existing structures. It was supposed to serve as a financial boost for additional positions and improved equipment at institutes working in the field of cancer research; additional research scholarships were intended to draw aspiring scientists into this field. Improving communications and collaborations among German cancer researchers was a long-term goal that, as formulated by the NG in the mid-1920s, was supposed to produce scientific Cooperative Projects (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten). Against the backdrop of the tensions between the REM and the DFG, the Foundation’s vice-president, Werner Jansen, was initially only able to release a preliminary partial budget in the course of the summer of 1936. A total of 50,000 reichsmarks could be applied to the first few cancer research projects negotiated for funding.15 Various scientists and their central projects profited by this: Adolf Butenandt, with a study on the chemistry of growth promoting compounds; Hermann Druckrey, with studies on sexual hormones; Eugen Haagen, with investigations on carcinogenic substances and virus research; Robert Bierich, with a project on the metabolism of cancer cells; Max Borst, with a project on Papilloma viruses; and Friedrich Holtz, with a design for a tumor farm.16 Ongoing projects that had already received approval for DFG money as a stipend or a so-called material loan (Sachkredit) from the NG/DFG were supposed to be checked for possible integration into the Tumor Research Program, which was in the process of being set up. At the same time, Borst and Breüer also had the option of attracting scientists to work on specific relevant research topics – a procedure similar in form to the one that was implemented in the 1960s when establishing the Priority Program on Cancer Research.17 The procedure followed in selecting the projects and personnel in this oncological program deviated sharply from the practice of individual approvals and the normal review process. The DFG solicited suggestions on research topics as 14

On the importance of the Reichsausschuss für Krebsbekämpfung, cf. Thom, Reichsausschuss. Part of the, at times, brisk exchange of letters between Sergius Breüer and the researchers he contacted is found in the file Krebsforschung (BAK, R 73/12388). The majority, however, are in the individual support files for the scientists, in the DFG collection (BAK, R 73). 16 The topics that Borst and Breüer had agreed on corresponded to the international state of the art in research, as portrayed, for instance, in the contemporary annually published Index Medicus, Fishbein et al. (eds.), Index Medicus. 17 Cf. the brief description of this procedure in Schöne, Forschungsgemeinschaft. 15

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well as on staffing from Breüer and from Borst, who chaired the Imperial Board on Cancer Control. These suggestions were then considered approved, without any further deliberation by expert reviewers. Multi-year durations were foreseen for the individual projects, in accordance with the nature of the Tumor Research Program. It was assumed that longer-term budgetary planning would be secured later, which happened in 1937. Whereas unanimity reigned over the basic goals of the Tumor Research Program that was being set up and over its very open form, the bone of contention became the kind of relationship that was supposed to exist between the REM and the DFG.18 Jansen, having personally profited by the political upheaval in 1933 with an appointment as professor for “natural medicine and regimen” and in 1935 having acquired the post of vice-president of the DFG, decided to bypass President Johannes Stark to approve a grant of 300,000 reichsmarks to the two responsible specialists Breüer and Borst for their large-scale plans to expand the Tumor Research Program. Stark refused to commit a sum of this magnitude. At the end of 1935 Jansen had been commissioned together with the second vice-president Konrad Meyer by the REM as a “supervisory authority over the Research Foundation.” He referred Stark to the ministerially decreed authority he now had over the DFG. But Stark as DFG president regarded himself as the superior authority over the DFG vice-presidents and claimed the decision-making authority for himself. Rudolf Mentzel, at that time already working under Theodor Vahlen in the REM, took the side of the vice-presidents, so that in the end they succeeded in unseating Stark, who resigned his presidential post in the DFG. One of Mentzel’s first official acts as Stark’s successor, initially on a provisional basis, was to release the promised money for the initial financing of oncological research on 15 December 1936. He had obtained permission by the Donor’s Association the day before, with the enthusiastic sanction of the former NG president Schmidt-Ott.19 Having overcome these initial difficulties in its first year 1936, the Tumor Research Program’s annual budget amounted to about 300,000 reichsmarks from 1937/38 until the beginning of the war. Although this amount also dropped in absolute terms by the end of World War II, strong support of cancer research projects was sustained at a level of about 30 percent of the entire budget for medicine. The Priority Programs on Tumor Genesis, Tumor Diagnostics, and Cancer Therapy constituted the simple divisioning of topics under which the researchers could classify themselves, along with a mixed-bag category for issues related to general constitution, disposition, heredity, and statistics. The funds were supposed to be distributed roughly according to the following key: 60 percent of the 18 Unfortunately there is neither an institutional history of the REM nor a reliable historical account of these proceedings within the DFG’s administration 1933/34. For the early period of Nazi policy on universities prior to the “imperialization” (Verreichlichung), cf. Jasch, Kultusministerium. 19 On the Donor’s Association as an institution, see Schulze, Stifterverband. Schmidt-Ott’s very active role since his dismissal as president of the funding association in June 1934 during the Nazi period has hitherto hardly been appreciated in existing historical accounts on the NG/DFG.

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money was allocated to the field of tumor genesis and diagnosis, which meant an emphasis on basic research founded on experimental theory, while the remaining 40 percent were earmarked for research on the results of therapy and on the subordinate individual topics of heredity and statistics. However, as early as 1937/38 this “ideal” distribution of fields of research was not attained. According to the information provided by the DFG reviewer on medicine, project topics for which scientists requested supporting grants were distributed as follows: researches on the genesis of cancer obtained at 48.2 percent almost half of the entire budget, projects on diagnostics 20.5 percent, projects on problems concerning constitution, heredity, disposition, and statistics 23.8 percent. Ranked far lower were research projects on therapeutic issues at 2.9 percent.20 The remainder went to administrative and travel expenses. At that time a total of 61 scientists were supported, two of them women. Sigmund Rascher was among the stipend recipients working on tumor diagnostics. His topic, on the “Susceptibility of crystal-forming substances to organic additives,” followed an anthroposophic approach to cancer diagnosis.21 THE DFG, RFR, AND CANCER RESEARCH With the establishment of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) in March 193722 the DFG’s status changed within the state structure of research sponsorship. As Breüer formulated it, it changed from a decisive institution into a “distribution apparatus” for the money budgeted for oncology. Although the RFR was introduced in the context of preparations for rearmament and war under the Four-Year Plan, this new positioning of research did not have grave consequences for the work of medical scientists, at least not until 1942/43, when the rationing of goods had a more noticeable effect on the part of the science establishment not relevant for rearmament. The research grant applications between 1936 and 1945, most of them still addressed to either the “Emergency Association” or the “Research Foundation,” were reviewed by the DFG’s official responsible for medicine now working at the RFR, who also retained his internal DFG file code abbreviation. In place of Borst, who until the end of 1938 was still engaged in the expert reviewing process of applications, Sauerbruch was responsible for the applications as the expert department head for general medicine.23 20 Institutionalized “clinical remoteness” by basic research on theoretical experiments in Germany is surely also to blame for this low percentage rate. On this aspect cf. Hohlfeld, Establishments. 21 For an introduction, see the capital on medicine in Zander, Anthroposophie, vol. 2, pp. 1455–1578. During World War II Rascher committed gruesome medical crimes as a member of the SS and the Luftwaffe, cf. Roth, Höhen. 22 The press office of the REM published the official announcements, see: Ein Ehrentag. For their critical placement in the history of science, cf. Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft. 23 Sauerbruch was not introduced as a professional reviewer when the RFR was founded in 1937 but was already employed by the DFG since 1932 on its expert review board. See the twelfth report by the NG (DFG) from 1 Apr. 1932 to 31 Mar. 1933: Berichte, 1933, p. 106.

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However, he did not take the initiative with regards to molding the Tumor Research Program. From spring 1937 on the applicants received two letters, or one letter with two signatures if their proposals received a positive verdict. Because the RFR possessed neither legal individual status nor its own financial assets, an expert department head of the RFR could approve grants, but it was the written instruction by the DFG that initiated the remittance of the funds from the DFG’s budget or the delivery of the loaned equipment from the DFG’s Committee on Scientific Instrumentation (Apparateausschuss). The DFG was and remained the legal recipient of public/state funds. In 1942 a total of 172 medical research projects were managed by Sauerbruch in the RFR, 42 of which, therefore roughly every fourth, could be classified as cancer research. Although there were no major changes in content after the transition in professional reviewing from Borst to Sauerbruch, one thing does stand out about the Tumor Research Program: therapy research is seriously underrepresented (2.9 percent). The sharp separation that had developed in Germany between cancer research in clinical medicine and tumor research in theoretical experimentation may be responsible for the fact that its portion of the budgeted money was not completely spent. In other European countries – for example, in France and Great Britain – no such separation existed.24 Another remarkable thing is the strong support of serological cancer diagnostics. That involved developing a test method with “markers” in the blood to indicate an existing tumor in the human body.25 The problem with this method, which received much scientific notice internationally, lay – and still lies, if one considers the present-day discussions about the diagnostic value of the PSA test, for instance – in the findings being mostly too unspecific to be utilizable as a reliable indicator.26 Institutional changes occurred in 1942 when the RFR began restructuring and tightening the promotion of research with the aim of leading to a more effective use of all resources, including science. Up to that point only the reorganization of scientific and technical research on armaments had taken place, while medical research was left as it was. But this changed in 1943. In the field of cancer research Kurt Blome, until then head of the RFR’s Department on Population Policy and Cultivation of Heredity and Race, was appointed in April 1943 as plenipotentiary (Bevollmächtigter) for cancer research in the RFR. Aside from cancer research, so-called “defensive biological weapons research” was another area within his 24

Cf. on this the studies by Pinell, Fight; Austoker, History. The German cancer information service of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ) website, for instance, presents the basic problem of nonspecificity of tumor markers (www.krebsinformationsdienst.de, menu item “Tumormarker”). See also, e. g., the comprehensive list of tumor markers currently in use at the central laboratory of the Universitätsklinikum Mannheim (www.ma.uni-heidelberg.de/inst/ikc/ikc-tumormarker.html). Calcitonin, which is mentioned further down, is among them. 26 In 1936 a scientist supported within the DFG Tumor Research Program, Hermann Lehmann-Facius, developed a serodiagnostic procedure for cancer that was used as an indicator for a psychiatric disorder just a few years later. It was recently scientifically acknowledged again in this connection, cf. DeLisi, Schizophrenia, p. 98. On the historical issue of the state of knowledge in the medical sciences, cf. also Fragu, Voyage. 25

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responsibility.27 He controlled additional funds out of the Four-Year-Plan budget, which were likewise employed to support individual scientific projects on cancer research. But they also flowed into establishing a Central Institute in Nesselstedt near Posen (Poznanv), which served as a camouflage object to accommodate not only cancer specialists but also covert research on biological weapons. In 1943 and 1944 Blome approved 55 projects in all, 28 of which can be considered cancer research. They concerned, among other topics, research on the etiology of cancer, studies on “carcinoma strains in mice” as well as support for two Study Groups researching serological cancer diagnostics. These projects on cancer research are set against 11 approvals that are definitely related to biological weapons. For example, they included projects on soil decontamination, controlling potato-beetle infestations, and studying insects harmful to humans. The largest single entry, however, contained 14 grants for construction and administrative costs for the monastery in Nesselstedt near Posen in the “Warthegau” part of occupied Poland. When the plans to install a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cancer Research in Berlin fell through in 1942, Blome started to work on establishing a Central Institute for Cancer Research (Zentralinstitut für Krebsforschung) at the University of Posen in that same year. These plans included extensions in the monastery and estate in Nesselstedt. Cancer research was also conducted in Posen. For example, a Cancer Statistics Study Team that was supported from the start with funds by the DFG, and the RFR was working in the Haus der Medizinischen Institute.28 Shipment to Posen of equipment on loan from the DFG’s Committee on Scientific Instrumentation was arranged and its proper inventorization monitored. The tumor farm that had been built in Berlin with the support of the Tumor Research Program was also located in Posen beginning in the summer of 1943. Adolf Butenandt’s correspondence indicates that, after many years of quarreling in Berlin, the DFG tumor farm had, in fact, been removed to Posen, where cancer research was supposed to be conducted in the local Reichsuniversität, and this fact was known to scientists working in the sphere of cancer research. On a written inquiry by the head of the Office for Medical Science and Research about tumorous animals dated 3 July 1944, Butenandt had noted by hand in the margin: “Zentral-KrebsforschungsInstitut e. V., Posen, Königsring. Prof. Dr. Friedrich Holtz, Frohnau.”29 At that point in time, in the middle of 1944, a pharmacological division under Hans Seel was working in Posen, investigating soil decontamination measures in preliminary analyses on bacteriological warfare at the site of the Tannenberg barracks. A division on physiological biology under Friedrich Holtz – a longstanding recipient of aid by the NG and the DFG – and the division on cancer statistics under the certified roentgenologist Carl Hermann Lasch had also started 27

Cf. Moser, Forschungen. The statistician of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum regarded the introduction of caseoriented observation as a positive innovation; cf. Wagner, Cancer Registration. 29 Butenandt was an influential heavyweight on science policy not only during the Nazi period but also within the scientific landscape of the FRG until the end of the 1960s. On the Nazi period, cf. Schieder/Trunk (eds.), Butenandt; Gausemeier, Ordnungen. 28

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operations. Holtz’s project was researching whether light was a factor in triggering eye cancer in rabbits. Three other divisions of the Central Institute for Cancer Research were announced for the second half of 1944, one of which was a bacteriological and vaccine division headed by the SS Sturmbannführer Dr. med. Karl Josef Gross, who was leaving the Mauthausen concentration camp for Nesselstedt. In the existing files on the former Reichsuniversität Posen¸ this division is also referred to as “Nesselstedt II.” This archival material also contains acknowledgments of receipt of laboratory installations and hospital bed frames as well as a total of three delivery slips dated November 1944 for plague vaccines and serum from the I. G. Farben factory in Marburg, the former Behringwerke, which were signed by Kurt Blome. From this it may be concluded that “plague experimentation” in Nesselstedt could have been realized. STUDY GROUP ON CANCER RESEARCH Cancer research was promoted in other ways besides the above-described forms of camouflage research by Blome as plenipotentiary on cancer research and conventional representation by Sauerbruch in the Expert Department on General Medicine. There were also unspectacular travel grants for attendance at meetings of Study Groups. Similarly, during World War II a rather informal organizational form arose among cancer researchers wanting to convene in Berlin to discuss their ongoing research. The underlying principle of this plan was “uninhibited scientific exchanges” on issues of cancer research. It would later serve as the model for the Hinterzartener Kreis, which from 1951 on counted as the most important group of consultants in the field of cancer research in Germany. The fact that personal and professional acquaintances going back many years were continuously developed further in the postwar NG/DFG institution becomes visible in the history of the formation of the Study Group (Arbeitskreis) on Cancer Research. Its initiator was the Berlin pharmacologist Hermann Druckrey. He first contacted the pathologist Herwig Hamperl at the University of Prague about his plan for collaboration between experimental cancer researchers in diverse specialties, “for example, chemistry, pharmacology, physics, zoology, radiology, pathology, etc.” His response having been positive, Druckrey sent a draft invitation letter dated 10 October 1940 to Butenandt, who likewise supported the idea. Applying to Sauerbruch as head of the RFR’s professional division on General Medicine, Druckrey petitioned for reimbursement of the travel and accommodation costs of participants of this planned first meeting at the beginning of 1941 in the Harnack Haus in Berlin. On 20 January 1941 Sauerbruch approved a grant of 2,000 marks to cover these travel and accommodation costs by members of the Study Group on Cancer Research (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Krebsforschung), as this informally arranged meeting was referred to from that moment on in the official correspondence. Finally, on 21 and 22 February 1941, sixteen invited men met for these consultations, among them the initiators Druckrey, Hamperl, and Butenandt, as well as Boris Rajewsky, Friedrich Kröning, Ernst WaldschmidtLeitz, and Nikolai Timoféef-Ressovsky.

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With only two exceptions,30 the participants, accompanied by their coworkers, figured among the most active personalities in science organization in the Federal Republic of Germany and were acknowledged recipients of research aid by the renewed DFG or Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, MPG). Butenandt, Druckrey, Kröning, and Rajewsky had been integrated in the DFG’s Tumor Research Program from the start. Their focus lay more in the direction of pharmacology, hormone research, and above all, in mutation research or genetics than in the program’s prominent research sectors of pathology and immunology or serology. As opposed to the actors in the periphery of Blome’s research institution on cancer in Posen/Nesselstedt, these scientists would later shape the landscape of cancer research in the Federal Republic. PRIORITY PROGRAMS AFTER 1945 One of the ways in which the DFG engaged itself in promoting cancer research after the end of World War II was along the conventional route of supporting research projects by individual scientists at universities or similar institutions of higher education.31 This activity in funding research projects by means of the socalled regular Individual Grants Program (Normalverfahren) was resumed in 1949 with the refounding of the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG). This regular program did not give preference to any particular project topics, but the DFG’s parallel funding instrument beginning in 1951, the so-called Priority Program (Schwerpunktverfahren), effectively steered the choice of themes because research areas that were deemed especially pertinent were budgeted with additional funding to stimulate new project proposals.32 At the beginning of the 1950s research issues on nutrition or rheumatism received stronger emphasis from the DFG’s senators deciding on such relevant support programs, whereas the activities of its Commission on Cancer Research (Kommission für Krebsforschung) took the foreground in the field of cancer research. It ultimately led to the founding of the Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.33 Contrary to the “ideal” concept of a Priority Program, which Kurt Zierold regarded as resuming the idea of “cooperative researches” (Gemeinschaftsforschungen) from the Weimar period, in which different perspectives were supposed to work together to contribute toward an interdisciplinary inquiry into a particular subject, the Priority Program on Cancer Research was instead established in the 1960s 30 The Soviet citizen Nikolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky (1900–1981), who had conducted research in Berlin-Buch from 1925 to 1945, was arrested by the Soviet occupying force in Berlin in 1945 and interned until 1964; cf. Hoßfeld, Visier. Arnold Graffi (1910–2006) earned his habilitation degree in 1948 at Humboldt University and was a researcher at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin-Buch, cf. Wunderlich/Bielka, Graffi. 31 Cf. Stamm, Staat. For an early self-stylization, cf. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (ed.), DFG. 32 Cf. Orth, Förderprofil. 33 Mauerberger, Großforschung.

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for pragmatic reasons. In 1960 the DFG unexpectedly received an additional annual sum of two million marks from the newly established Thyssen-Stiftung (Thyssen Foundation),34 so that on short notice it had to create three different Priority Programs in medicine that the Thyssen Foundation wanted to fund. The DFG president Gerhard Hess and Günter Latsch, the DFG’s official responsible for medicine, first agreed with the Thyssen representative in the fall of 1961 on a rough framework that stipulated that projects from cardiology, virology, and cancerology would be supported. The Priority Program on Cancerologie was therefore not based on long-term planning that had developed out of deliberations on different research approaches. Instead it emerged out of the necessity to use proffered resources that otherwise threatened to expire. That was why researchers who had already received support by the DFG for cancer projects were specifically solicited and “prompted” to put together another proposal for the Priority Program on Cancer Research. The DFG relied on the professional expertise of the mentioned Hinterzartener Kreis in its choice of whom to solicit, as it did on other questions involving the scientific assessment of topics in cancer research. An Examiners Group (Prüfungsgruppe) composed of the DFG’s expert reviewers and other scientists was formed to evaluate the proposals. The funded topics within the Priority Program on Cancer Research, often for many years at a time, were predominantly “classical,” such as the importance of pathology in cancer research, the future of experimental cancer research, the role of oncogenic viruses, the immunology of tumors, and the importance of genetics in modern cancer research. At the beginning of the 1950s the DFG Senate’s Commission on Cancer Research emerged out of the Hinterzartener Kreis, which formed a central staffing core of the DFG’s revamped research support in the area of cancer research and which was firmly institutionalized in the DFG in 1951 at Druckrey’s renewed initiative. One of the Commission’s tasks was to make preparations for the founding of a center for cancer research. This form of work by a commission was an innovation introduced after World War II, just as were other commissions providing “advice to the authorities on health issues.”35 In the case of the Commission on Cancer, the institutional and financial framing conditions had to be established for researchers and research at the structural level. As early as February 1950, Druckrey sent a first memorandum to the presidents of the three supraregional research funding establishments – the MPG, DFR, and NG – in which he called for the erection of a “special cancer research institute in Germany” because “modern cancer research” required systematic and regular team work. The historically determined fragmentation into “too narrowly confined professional departments” had to be countered by the creation of a universal institute in the style

34

Birrenbach, Thyssen-Stiftung. Zierold, Forschungsförderung. This advisory capacity, which formerly did not count among the activities of the NG/DFG in this form, was accordingly a special wish of the Deutscher Forschungsrat (DFR). 35

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of a “medical research center” with a physical, chemical, biological, and medical department and a centralized catalog.36 That the moment Druckrey had chosen to present these “ideal plans” was by no means chance is apparent from a reference to press reports about a planned successor organization for clinical cancer researchers, the later German Central Committee on Cancer Control (Deutscher Zentralausschuss für Krebsbekämpfung). In view of the perpetual protracted quarrels lasting years inside and outside of the Health Department in the Federal Ministry of the Interior between the DFG, the Central Committee, and experimental cancer researchers about the then available federal funds for research, Druckrey not unjustifiably feared a revival of the competition over research funding. During this discussion process, which initially continued until 1957, the DFG positioned itself clearly on the side of experimental cancer researchers. The Hinterzartener Kreis, which had been set up by the NG and was directed by Butenandt followed by Hamperl, functioned as an advisory panel for the DFG on questions of cancer research planning. A state or “federal institute,” as Butenandt formulated it as spokesman of the DFG Commission on Cancer Research, was not intended, however, because that posed the risk of “civil service for its staff.”37 Two years later, when the consultations between the DFG, the Central Committee, and the Federal Ministry of the Interior had run aground once again, the option of creating a Max Planck Institute (MPI) was proposed again. DFG President Hess did not fail to mention in his letter to MPG President Hahn in December 1955 the funds amounting to one or two million deutschmarks that the DFG Senate had already reserved as the basis for such an institute for cancer research. Nevertheless, on 1 June 1956 the MPG decided against an MPI for Cancer Research but signaled to the DFG its willingness to support the “founding of a general cancer research institute external to the Max Planck Society.”38 Like 1942 this meant, once again, the rejection of an institution for cancer research within the scientific responsibility of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and, respectively, its successor. For a central cancer research institution to materialize, the only remaining avenue left open was a university affiliation, even though complicated negotiations could be reckoned with, particularly for appointments of nonacademic scientists.39 At the beginning of 1957 the DFG founded a Board of Trustees (Kuratorium Deutsches Krebsforschungs-Institut), whose range of responsibilities included, apart from supporting the DFG in reaching a decision on “which sites the German Research Foundation should direct the funds to,” also the task of founding a centralized institution on cancer research. Intensified efforts assured progress on the matter and the cancer experts unanimously recommended to the DFG Senate 36 Druckrey’s Denkschrift, 25 Feb. 1950 to the presidents of the MPG, DFR, and NG, archive of the DFG, Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Kommission für Krebsforschung, 6062. 37 Record of a meeting about establishing a central institute for cancer research on 18 Nov. 1955 in Bad Godesberg, ibid. 38 File notes, Dr. Zierold, 4 Jun. 1956, ibid. 39 Cf. Mauerberger, Großforschung.

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already on 5 October 1957 that the DFG’s special monies be spent on constructing a cancer research center in Heidelberg, because Karl Heinrich Bauer’s active preparatory work had created better starting conditions there. Thus, on the part of the DFG, all switches were set for the establishment of the DKFZ in Heidelberg.40 After another seven-year-long planning stage, including diverse blueprints and alteration suggestions, operational stage I could be inaugurated in 1964; the termination of the construction stage followed in 1972. A research institution was thereby created with a clear focus on experimental cancer research. The institute directors served in rotation as president for two-year terms.41 The Lettré Institute, the core premises in Heidelberg, was supplemented by institutes for experimental pathology under the direction of Heinrich Wrba, biochemistry under Erich Hecker, experimental tumor genesis and treatment under Dietrich Schmähl, nuclear medicine under Kurt Scheer, virus research under Klaus Munk, and an institute for documentation, information, and statistics under Gustav Wagner. But the DKFZ remained without a tumor clinic of its own. The DFG had committed itself to sponsoring experimental cancer research, not clinical research, which still characterizes its research support today. A glimpse at the data on supported cancer researchers before and after 1945 reveals a high degree of continuity in staffing and content, at least for the first postwar decade. This image changes only at the beginning of the 1960s and is also reflected in the composition of participants in the DFG Priority Program on Cancer Research. Among these researchers of both genders, less than 10 percent were recipients of support by the DFG and the RFR prior to 1945. A substantial shift in research perspective also became visible in the 1960s in that the Hinterzartner Kreis began to open up to the perspective of molecular medicine advocated by a new group of cancer researchers. As opposed to the successful institutional structuring of cancer research since the 1950s that led to the establishment of the DKFZ as a “national center of reference” for cancer research, directed planning in the field of cancer research started considerably later. This was based upon the survey on cancer research prepared by the DFG’s Senate/Preparatory Commission on Cancer Research42 for submission to the federal government in 1980.

40 41 42

Bauer, Denkschrift. Wagner/Mauerberger, Krebsforschung, p. 113. Boedefeld, Forschungsgemeinschaft.

CLOSE TO THE STATE AND ORIENTED TOWARD THE FUNDAMENTALS – RESEARCH ON RADIATION AND RADIOACTIVITY IN THE BIOSCIENCES 1920–1970 Alexander von Schwerin Virtually no scientific subject of the twentieth century has as political a history as radiation. In the case of atomic technology it is overt. Raised to a major project by the state and industry, radiation and its imponderables soon stood at the core of social conflicts. It was even earlier, however, that mastery over radiation acquired the character of a key technology. Interest in developing radiation technology and the requisite industrial capacities united disparate actors since the 1920s at the latest. They included physicians, scientists, technicians, and representatives of industry, politics, and not least, science policy. Radiation was a field of research cutting straight across disciplinary boundaries, encompassing physics, chemistry, medicine, pharmacology, biology, as well as such boundary fields as meteorology. Following the tracks of radiation means, above all, describing such links without which the dynamics of a material culture in technology cannot be explained.1 This kind of approach comprehends the relationship between research and research policy not in the first place as an institutional problem. It rather studies the practices of diverse actors. Radiation and its applications were considered important affairs of state even before World War II, when atomic physics created the prospect of a new, possibly decisive weapon. The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) played a significant role. Since the end of the 1920s it invested large sums in medical radiology and biophysics. The funding priority was not on innovative developments in physics and engineering, such as x-ray crystallography, xray spectroscopy, radioactive markers, or electron microscopy – all indispensable instruments along the way to molecular biology. The DFG figured as a central technical resource because it purchased expensive and rare apparatus and instruments for loaning out to researchers. This function should not be underrated in the negotiations between research, industrial interests, and the state. Its true role in research policy was that of a biopolitical institution.2 The case of radiation research allows us to reconstruct a process started in the 1920s that gradually led to a consolidation of the position of the research institution within state policies on prevention and risk. 1 On the material culture of things as a research approach in the social studies of science, cf. Rentetzi, Materials. 2 On the concept biopolitische Institution, see Hüntelmann, Geschichte, p. 275.

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In an industrial as well as technical modernity with an unfolding corporate policy, radiation was not just a subject of science and a commercial product but also an instrument of self-help (Selbstsorge), preventative governmental policy, and ultimately the object of a policy on scientifically calculated risk. The multiplication and simultaneous acceleration of circulatory radiation and its containment and channeling resulted from of the constitutive conditions of radiation as highly active and, at the same time, worryingly hazardous – in short, precarious – agencies.3 The politics of precarious substances cannot, however, be reduced to the formula of “evaluating chances and risks,” because this formula characterizes the regulative strategy of current “evaluations on technological consequences.” The fact that risk assessment and the category of risk itself are part of mechanisms of power is exemplified by the DFG and its policy at the intersection between the bioscientific regime of truth and political strategies of power. More precisely put: we can say that the DFG’s task was to transform into political options the productive, regulative, and governing potential of such ambivalent scientific objects. This, ultimately, was one decisive continuity of the DFG as an actor in science policy. INTERCONNECTING RESEARCH ON RADIATION AS A KEY TECHNOLOGY With radiation engineering the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG) possessed a key technology. Considerable hopes for medical diagnostics and therapy were already attached to x-rays and radioactive emissions from radium when the NG was founded. Medical applications of x-ray techniques during World War I boosted the field and kicked off the electrotechnical industry.4 Further explorations of this radiation and its effectiveness promised even greater utility. X-ray crystallography had also already existed for several years as a technique for visualizing the molecular structures of various materials. The ability to divulge the “Constitution of Matter” – the name of one of the NG’s funded programs – was thus within reach. After the humiliation of the lost war, such an ambitious goal for knowledge enjoyed so high a place because science, as they put it, was one of the few remaining fields in which Germany could win back its glory and stature within the foreseeable future.5

3 The ambivalence of “precarious substances” is ultimately grounded in the great interest in political instruments in modern times; their effective potency is based on the laws of nature. But the laboratory became increasingly the place where such technologies of power were produced. It was there that with some technical investment (x-)rays were first successfully generated. Nevertheless, it was not the technical artifact but the naturalness ascribed to this radiation that guaranteed their autonomy, their impressive efficiency – which inevitably made them into hazardous agencies. On the concept prekäre Stoffe, cf. Wahrig et al. (eds.), Stoffe. 4 Dommann, Durchsicht, pp. 212 f. 5 Cf. the NG’s reports: Berichte, 1924/25, p. 97; Berichte, 1927, p. 111.

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A strategy of research policy lay behind the emphasis on basic research that best permitted drawing multiple uses out of the given investments. Besides international acknowledgment, the anticipated uses from applying x-ray crystallography in industrial production were at least as highly ranked. So-called “destruction-free” materials testing was supposed to help rationalize the development and production of materials as diverse as fibers and metals and raise their effectiveness. A number of researchers profited from this basic strategy, such as the biochemists Reginald Herzog and Hermann Staudinger, who could book to their accounts major successes in explaining fiber structure, and the physicist and head of the x-ray laboratory at the Stuttgart Polytechnic, Richard Glocker, who was very adept at availing himself of different funding sources.6 It became clear that the key technology “radiation research” (Strahlenforschung) was especially valuable for the metal-processing and textile industries, for public health policy makers, industrial endowments, or other research institutions, such as the Helmholtz Society. Within this informal system of tightly interwoven funding and research networks, the negotiations among the actors was an important instance of institutional continuity. Thus, the continuity in the DFG’s policy and function can be understood as a continual translation between the interests of state actors and various interest groups.7 Material resources constituted the decisive subject matter in the creation of research alliances and exclusivities. MEDICINE BECOMES TECHNICAL – THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTATION (FROM 1920 ONWARDS) The policy by which the German Research Foundation (DFG) managed and distributed its material resources was guided by a progressive ideological and nationalistically trimmed project to make knowledge technical. The Emergency Association (NG) was not simply an organization that rescued German science from the immediate hardship of the postwar period, one whose mission exhausted itself in the preservation of an outdated scholarly ideal. The founding phase was marked by a grim repudiation of any options of direct industrial influence. They were fended off, not without pathos, in defense of the autonomy of science. Nevertheless, this did not mean the demands by either the economy or politics were being rejected. It rather thus articulated the claim of science itself to follow a modernizing policy according to its own dictate. The original motivation of a concerted effort to save science from going under in the destitution caused by the consequences of the war was therefore rapidly replaced by the emerging contours of a modernizing research policy labeled with the contemporary catch6 The “technoscientific character” of radiation science made it possible to moblize many different sources of financing. The spectrum of Glocker’s research interests shows in addition that a technical subject like metallography and biological radiology could lie side by side; cf. Maier, Forschung, p. 217. On Staudinger and Herzog see Deichmann, Flüchten. 7 Cf. Schwerin, Atomkommission.

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word “technicalization” (Technisierung) of research.8 The special committees that the NG established to serve the rising material needs of laboratory researchers were expressions of this guideline. In addition to the Material, Chemical, and Animal Procurement Committees, the Committee on Scientific Instrumentation (Apparateausschuss) was of primary importance. It arranged for the purchase and inventory of apparatus by which the growing needs of its researcher clientèl could be flexibly met.9 This loan system turned the funding association into a nodal point in increasingly technically disposed research. The particular goal of this guideline on research policy was to promote experimentation and technology in medicine, which was considered backward in this regard.10 Thus, x-ray apparatus became the symbol of this desired restructuring of research. It was, of course, far from the NG’s intention to cover the basic needs of x-ray institutes and clinics; that was the responsibility of universities and the regional Länder. The funding association rather used its creative leeway to encourage the introduction of new developments and the transfer of technologies between disciplines. Hence, it was a supplementary research policy. Making research on radiation in medicine more technical meant physics and coincided with the understanding by medical physicists and biophysicists that progress in radiology depended decisively on technical constraints, the developmental state of x-ray apparatus, and above all, on dosimetry. In this way an alliance resulted between biophysics and the NG that not only lasted a long time, but decisively influenced the field of radiation research in biology. COOPERATION AND RESEARCH – PREVENTION AND HYGIENE (FROM 1926 ONWARD) Until far into the 1930s, the “world of radiation” was surrounded by the aura of mysterious natural forces.11 The variety and effectiveness of this world of radiation ranged from radium radiation, which could be administered by means of an inhalation device, natural spring waters, or even injection, to UV light. Its exposure limits in buildings and courtyards busied city planners and social policy makers. Under the influence of the economic crisis and the – subsequent – Nazi social policy, radiation was recommended as a biopolitical means of health activation and prevention. The dominant influence of biophysicists was one of the significant factors moving research policy to follow the line of “hygienic” policy and to work increasingly toward such state interests. In the middle of the 1920s the NG swore allegiance to the goals of “the national economy, public health, and the common weal,” thereby brushing off

8

Schmidt-Ott’s discussion in the NG’s report: Berichte, 1922, p. 16. For an overview of these special committees, see the NG’s third report: Berichte, 1924, pp. 33 ff. 10 NG’s fifth report: Berichte, 1926, pp. 220 ff. 11 Helmstädter, Radiumschachtherapie. 9

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its provisional character.12 Thematic bundling was the matching research policy: “cooperative researches” (Gemeinschaftsforschungen). They numbered 33 in the areas of science and technology at the beginning of the 1930s, but their scope and working approach has yet to be examined more thoroughly.13 This broadly conceived, utility-oriented mission signaled, however, an undisguised call for political structure. By extending its interest beyond medical application, the NG manifested this “self-administrated” politicization of research policy. One visible sign was the establishment of two Special Committees on radiation research. They were composed of radiologists, subsequently also biologists, and primarily medical physicists. The “technicalization” of research and state commissioning hence culminated in a research policy that reached far beyond the clinical context with the aim of taking stock of the world of radiation as to its hygienic usefulness. At the same time the activity spectrum of these commissions reflected the genesis of biophysics fixated on foundations of biological medicine in Germany – as opposed to the USA where the Rockefeller Foundation fostered the (molecular) biology-oriented biophysical research.14 Under the influence of medical physicists, the theoretical and experimental problem of the biological effect of radiation was declared as the key problem and it demarcated a funding priority within DFG-sponsored biological radiology into the 1960s. The solution to this problem was considered urgent not least because properties were being ascribed to radiation, even by physicists, thought to be as difficult to predict as the effectiveness of known pharmaceutical substances. This physikalisches Medikament (Dessauer) obviously had a precarious agency whose effect vacillated between toxin and remedy and whose potency demanded scientifically supported control.15 Immense sums, investments, and apparatus were expended in the next decades to stabilize the fine and fragile boundary between hazard and utility, which acquired political significance precisely during the period of National Socialism. PASSION FOR PLANNING: FROM SOCIAL HYGIENE TO LIVING-SPACE BIOLOGY (1930s) During the 1930s radiation manifested itself as a topic of research policy mainly in two forms: as an agency of policy on the health of the body and as a eugenic hazard. The Special Committee on Radiation Research, in operation since 1926, concerned itself only marginally with x-rays. It rather focused its interest on light, solar radiation, artificial light sources, and cosmic rays. Research policy thereby 12

Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, p. 81. One exception is the Special Committee on Metallurgy. Maier has detailed its interwoven links with industry and the military: Maier, Forschung, pp. 243 ff. Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft, p. 34 (appendix). 14 On research politics and biophysics in the USA, see Rasmussen, Bubble. 15 Dessauer, Wirkungen, p. 42; idem, Therapie, p. 16. 13

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translated a discourse on a reformative lifestyle that took sunlight as the medium for a culture of medical self-help in a technical and interventionistic project of activation and prophylaxis. Soon the Hamburg Institute of Physical and Biological Research on Light and the Institute of Radiation Research at the University of Berlin were among the firmly established institutions reliably funded by the DFG. Both these research institutes intensely pursued the problem of the extent to which the quartz lamp and similar technical developments were suitable imitations of sunlight for application as prophylaxis against rickets among city children or in treatment of light deficiency among miners.16 The spectrum of research sponsorship extended in the direction of general radiation dietetics in response to problems posed by industrialization and the living conditions of the modern human. The Special Committee on Radiation Research (Sonderkommission für Strahlenkunde) followed the development of bioclimatology with very particular attention. This field of research emerged at the beginning of the 1930s out of the union between radiation research, meteorology, and climatology. It was initially sparked by the prestigious research expeditions to the Atlantic and the Polar Circle with the substantial support of the NG.17 This preparatory rehearsal connecting meteorology, fluid dynamics, and radiation research was regarded as innovative with an estimated high potential usefulness for the national economy, the transportation system, agriculture, and public health. Bioclimatology also attracted the interest of the state after the National Socialists entered government.18 The Viennese meteorologist Wilhelm Schmidt was considered one of the pioneers of bioclimatology. He studied the bioclimate of larger cities before he broadened his research to address a variety of ecological issues. Schmidt’s research career within the NG shows the pull effect that the new cross-sectional field developed first under the sign of holistic thinking and subsequently the biologistic worldview of the Nazis. The biology of space that established itself within a few years in Germany developed a scientifically supported notion of how the environment and modifications of a given space influenced living beings.19 This approach to the problem was at odds with the dichotomy between nature and culture. But it was not opposed to thinking in terms of hereditary biology – on the contrary. The discourse on bioclimatology extended from the climatology of the city to the “transplantation” of “racial types” into resettlement areas. Thus, precisely this interlinking between different disciplines, which the DFG was pursuing as an ideal, accelerated the formation of a field of knowledge that mixed together goals of social and racial hygiene.20 For instance, the conference on the “biology of the metropolis,” organized by the DFG meteorologist 16

NG’s fifth report: Berichte, 1926, p. 336; Schneck, Reiz. Schmidt-Ott, Erlebtes, p. 202. 18 This became apparent around 1934 at the founding of the Reich Weather Service Office; cf. Linke, Organisation. 19 This spatial thinking found a pendant in racial research on population genetics; Potthast, Rassenkreise. 20 On this Baader, Sozialhygiene. 17

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Franz Linke and the medical geneticist Bernhard de Rudder in 1940, gathered together in harmony radiologists, social hygienists, human geneticists, population psychologists, and practitioners of geomedicine.21 Bioclimatology occupied a place within the span of academically initiated research on living space without there being any audible objection. As a whole, the field delivered the technical catchwords for the National Socialists’ plans of eastward expansion and for a geopolitics based on nationality and racial biology.22 RISK POLITICS: EUGENICS AND REGULATION OF THE TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT The “frictionlessness”23 with which research accomplished its transition into the Nazi system was very largely grounded in the fact that in 1933 research policy was already receptive to the Nazi program. This is demonstrated not only by the development of bioclimatology but also by the eugenic approach to the problem of radiological application. Since the beginning of the 1930s, researchers on heredity and genetics cautioned against the danger that applying x-ray technology in medicine and engineering caused a proliferation of hereditary defects. This intervention by geneticists was effective in changing the mentality of medical practitioners. They began to concern themselves systematically for the first time with the risks of using radiation. At the same time, however, the argumentation by geneticists set the medical debate on hazards against a eugenic scale because it did not refer to individual patients but to a population-genetic abstraction: to a genetic stock of the deutsche Volk “contaminated” (verseucht) by mutations.24 This emergency scenario in hereditary biology fits exactly within the DFG’s research agenda on physical hygiene. Thus, the Cooperative Projects on Hereditary Defects by X-rays (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten über Erbschädigungen durch Röntgenstrahlen) was a predetermined affair before the Nazis declared eugenics and racial hygiene as the state doctrine. Biophysicists and geneticists were hence familiar with how the DFG approached radiation in its research policy. At the same time, the funding institution set its own mission on risk assessment by establishing the new Special Committee on dysgenetic radiation effects. The NG could count on agreement by the Reich Office of Health (Reichsgesundheitsamt), whose authority in this case would have been noncontroversial because the laborious study of the basic mechanisms of the biological effects of radiation exceeded the means of such a state institution.25 The program on genetic research that followed the DFG’s Cooperative Projects differed from the discourse on eugenics on one crucial point: Whereas eugenics and racial hygiene understood the eugenic threat as the consequence of “faulty” social evolution, such as the rural exodus or “antiselective” welfare 21 22 23 24 25

De Rudder/Linke, Biologie. On Raumforschung (research of space), Heinemann, Wissenschaft; Mai, Neustrukturierung. Reibungslosigkeit: Maier, Forschung, p. 357 with reference to Moritz Epple. Schwerin, Experimentalisierung, pp. 134 ff. Reiter to DFG, 29 Apr. 1936, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/13774.

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policy,26 the threat of mutations involved the hazards posed by a progressively more technical environment. The danger of mutations possibly arising from civilizational influences remained a long-lasting topic for DFG funding.27 The research problems treated moved continuously into questions of genetics in general, gene theory, biophysics, or evolutionary biology. Situated between Nazi hereditary hygiene, theoretical interests in biophysics, and early developmental approaches to molecular biology, within a brief period radiation and mutation genetics developed into the most innovative area within genetics.28 The NG’s primary interest was not, however, the theoretical implications of radiation and mutation genetics. Issues of application enjoyed priority and wished to be served. The high-ranking biologists appointed as reviewers saw to it that the two were linked. MOBILIZATION FOR THE WAR, PART I: OCCUPATIONAL HYGIENE AND TRANSITIONS TO RADICALIZATION Research policy on hygiene during the 1930s encompassed eugenics, social hygiene (light and city), prophylaxis (rickets control), and radiation protection in commercial businesses. This meshes well with the finding in the history of medicine that social hygiene and hereditary hygiene together occupied a place among the dominant technologies of National Socialism.29 The DFG thus stepped into the center of a project of prevention-oriented biopolitics that proclaimed technical modernity as a menacing emergency and fulfilled its – dominance bolstering – function using a strategy of administrative depoliticalization of this menace within a state-controlled disposition of security. As can be gathered from radiation protection during the 1930s, essential importance was attached to the biologization of labor. Beyond the radium industry, with its processing of natural radioactive materials, radiation techniques became more widely used in more stringent safety measures at the work place in industry in general. Damage-free materials testing was being universally applied in the entire metal-working industry, in bridge and ship building, and especially in the booming arms production.30 With DFG-supported biophysicists taking the lead, a “measuring science” established itself as a mitigating epistemic policy. For instance, it instituted in cooperation with the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront) radiation protection oriented toward a eugenically acceptable exposure limit, which was internationally unique at the time.31 26

Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen, pp. 127 ff. See Cottebrune, Mensch, pp. 154 ff. 28 On radiation genetics, cf. also Gausemeier, Ordnungen, pp. 150 ff. 29 Baader, Medizin, p. 18. 30 Maier, Forschung, pp. 404 ff. 31 Proctor also points to this development but systematically fails to note the underlying purpose of performance in Nazi policy on occupational safety measures; Proctor, War, pp. 91 ff. 27

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Priority was also given to studies by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Biophysics on the hazards posed by radioactive vapors in mining in the Erzgebirge region, which was important for autarkic policy as well as the German atomic program. Since these measurements in the shafts were supplemented by systematic biophysical experiments, it was possible to connect technical radiation protection with a regime of performance-regulating medicine for the labor force, which was a constituent core of Nazi social policy.32 The fundamentally oriented hygienification of knowledge and the interplay between the institutions of knowledge with those of social regulation served the claims for a totally stateadministered and managed body capable of work, as promoted by National Socialism under the slogan “beauty of work” (Schönheit der Arbeit), while retaining all the culling options for the irrecoverably sickened or invalid body. Within the context of a policy-driven state of emergency, research was radicalized through the institutional translation of ostensibly neutral research results into political instruments. The mobilization of research for war, set immediately in motion with the founding of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) in 1937, was another impetus in the direction of its radicalization. Among the regular recipients of DFG funding for radiation research, about 80 percent adapted their research to problems of relevance to warfare at their own initiative or in consultation either right after the founding of the RFR or at the outbreak of war in 1939. Even then, it proved advantageous to conduct basic research, for that was precisely what allowed researchers to respond surprisingly flexibly to the changed demands. “Application rhetoric,” often invoked by sociologists of science, was rather the exception. At any rate, the examples from radiation research suggest as much. The pharmacologist from Greifswald, Paul Wels, submitted to the RFR Department on Defense Medicine at his own initiative in October 1937 a proposal that his knowledge from many years’ experience on the chemical and physiological effects of UV light on the skin could be useful in research on poison gas.33 His suggestion was original and was positively received in the RFR. The mobilization for war also encouraged the radicalization of research by accelerating the transition from practices that were already criticized, but still tolerated by the collective of researchers, to increasingly unsanctioned transgressions of these limits, or to their gradual shift.34 A positive reflection of this image of stealthy radicalization is mirrored in the research supported by the DFG/ RFR. Internal protective mechanisms played less of a role than structural factors, such as the availability of resources. The gynecologist Carl Clauberg, who had previously received support by the DFG/RFR, sought collaboration with the SS – with the purpose of testing x-rays for mass sterilization – only after he had been informed about the opportunity to access “human material” in a concentration

32

On this see also Elsner/Karbe, Jáchymov, pp. 61 ff.; Friedrich, Außenstelle, p. 163. Grant file Wels, BAK, R 73/15609; Wels to Fachgliederung Wehrmedizin im RFR, 26 Oct. 1937, ibid., 15610. 34 An analysis of such cases can be found in Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen. 33

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camp.35 Networked research structures, militarization, and the coordinated division of labor between research institutions facilitated the organization of criminal research. The case of the radiologist from Frankfurt and former president of the Deutsche Röntgengesellschaft, Hans Holfelder, is also significant. Just like Himmler, he too was a member of the Artaman League and an offensively forthright anti-Semite. He never was part of the group of scholars composed of nationalistically or liberally minded biophysicists and medical practitioners who determined the DFG’s policy on radiation. Holfelder proceeded exactly oppositely to these researchers, for whom the DFG was a part of their social identity. He used the DFG only to supplement his research needs; he mainly tapped his connections in the SS.36 MOBILIZATION FOR THE WAR, PART II: MILITARIZATION OF STRUCTURES In the mobilization of research for war, a decisive element was its integration into the decision-making and research structures of war planning. This affected genetic and biophysical research on radiation protection in a model way, which was closely bound into the militarized structures of the German atomic research program.37 The conditions for it had already been set beforehand because new radiation technologies – particle accelerators – were partly developed in close cooperation between the DFG, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt), and industry.38 The mobilization for war consolidated the dispositions of radiation research – from radium industry, atomic physics, radiochemistry, biophysics, to radiology – with the RFR serving as the interface between military and civilian research planners, including industry. The networks and cooperations, structured according to the needs of military research, opened up new research avenues and effectuated the invested research resources in the area of this key technology with its characteristic multiple uses. The important example here is radioisotopes (generated by powerful accelerators) applied in biology. Whereas the Rockefeller Foundation already began to support this field in the USA in the 1930s, the RFR only took the initiative within the context of (military) atomic research.39 It became 35

DFG grant file Clauberg, BAK, R 73/10599; Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB), NS 19/1583. Holfelder was the organizer of the SS-Röntgensturm, which conducted a series of millions of preventative and selective x-ray examinations; cf. BAK, R 73/11774; personal files Holfelder, BAB. Vossen, Gesundheitsämter, pp. 408 ff. 37 Gausemeier, Ordnungen, p. 184; Karlsch, Rajewsky; Sime, Uranspaltung. 38 On the whole, the development of particle-accelerator technology was rather sluggish; cf. Weiss, Harnack-Prinzip; Karlsch, Rajewsky. Gausemeier and Schmaltz have shown that research planning was not the principal source of the problem and that biology gained noticeable momentum in modernizing structurally – becoming more technical and linking up with physical big science – particularly through its connections with industrial and military interests; Gausemeier, Ordnungen; Schmaltz, Kampfstoff-Forschung. 39 On the USA, see Kohler, Schoenheimer. 36

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evident that the expert department heads and plenipoteniaries could essentially determine the direction of research policy. Not Abraham Esau, but his successor as plenipotentiary on atomic physics, Walther Gerlach, made a program out of introducing the radioisotopic method in medicine and biology.40 The research sites used for the development of atomic bombs thus became a part of the biomedical research structure. This shows particularly plastically the exchanges of research materials between the research team at the KWI for Brain Research, the occupied Institut Chemie Nucléaire in Paris, and the Reichsuniversität in the process of being built up in Strasbourg.41 CONTINUITY: ATOMIC RESEARCH IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC Continuity was also manifest in radiation research after 1945 with regard to staffing, substance, and structure. The well-established coordination that had developed between the RFR and the administration or institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was continued in the conflict-free cooperation between the DFG and the Max Planck Society, which took over the development of radioactive indicator technology. As the first nuclear plants in the USA and Great Britain went into operation, the postwar limitations on its application in biological and medical research were lifted.42 The DFG’s first Priority Programs in the biosciences picked up where the research on problems in biological radiation conducted during the 1920s had left off. It benefited from the inter- and intra-disciplinary rivalries in the biosciences. In effect, the influence of the scientists who had already been mainly responsible for radiation protection in the atomic research program under National Socialism grew. Boris Rajewsky, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, should be pointed out in particular. Also nicknamed the “Frankfurter imperator,” Rajewsky ranked, with a total of 887,000 deutschmarks, at the very top of the list of researchers receiving above-average grant amounts during the 1950s.43 He also directed the DFG’s Priority Program on Radiology and exerted much influence (as he had under National Socialism), when policy on radiation protection gained new currency with the atomic program in the Federal Republic in the middle of the 1950s.

40

See the correspondence between Gerlach and Kuhn in the grant file Timoféeff-Ressovsky, BAK, R 73/15216. 41 See the grant file Schubert, BAK, R 73/14544; Archiv Deutsches Museum, David Irving collection; Kant, Betrachtungen; Schmaltz, Kampfstoff-Forschung, pp. 536 ff. 42 The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft organized the importation and distribution of radioactive isotopes until this task was taken over by the nuclear research center in Karlsruhe and industry during the 1950s. On the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Radioisotope Program, see Creager, Energy. 43 Hamperl to DFG, 3 Jan. 1963, BAB, B 227, FC 7565, 1a booklet no. 4; grant file Rajewsky, DFG-Archiv, Bonn. For a comparison of proposal figures, see also Orth, Förderprofil, p. 279.

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OUT OF SIGHT: MOLECULARIZATION OF BIOLOGY The molecular revolution in biology gathered speed as radioactive isotopes came into massive use. They permitted the visualization of physiological, biochemical, and molecular-biological processes.44 This molecularization was thus structurally attached to the development of atomic technology as a military technology during the Cold War, whereas the civil program “atoms for peace” (Eisenhower) only began to gain its contours over the course of the 1950s. In Germany it was initially left to the Max Planck Society to find a way to catch up with the racing developments in research on molecular biology in the USA.45 The DFG tacked back and forth between partly contradictory research trends in biophysics, genetics, and biochemistry. The DFG’s expert commissions now became a platform for a conflict that reactivated the earlier rehearsed motifs in the discourse of Germany’s “backwardness.” It not only acquired remarkably anti-American features but also unrealistic ones with regards to the research potential that the USA in fact had. At the same time, during the 1950s the DFG essentially did not make the transferral of physical techniques into biology into a program, so that its influence in this regard remained weak.46 The change in trends that started around 1960 became blatant when in 1964 the Biochemistry and Genetics Priority Programs were fused together into the Molecular Biology Priority Program. This was at a point in time when the Federal Ministry for Atomic Issues (transformed in 1962 into the Federal Ministry of Scientific Research, against the DFG’s objections) and the Volkswagen Stiftung were already supporting on a considerable scale costly apparative laboratory revampings for research in molecular biology.47 GOING FOR BIG TECHNOLOGIES: BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND THE ATOMIC PROGRAM, 1950s While the molecularization of biology turned out to be a multilayered and, in some ways not plannable process, the DFG also found its place in the Federal Republic by choosing a close proximity to the state. Secured by the acquiescence of the Allies, preparations for the Federal Republic of Germany’s atomic program were already under way before the official start in 1956.48 The DFG developed into the most important financier of atomic energy not just with its Atomic Physics Priority Program. The old guard of atomic planners also mobilized biological research for their own purposes. State priorities led to substantial resources being 44

Rheinberger, Isotopes. Deichmann, Emigration. 46 The DFG did not differ in this regard from its American counterpart, the National Research Council. Against this backdrop, the role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting molecular biology stands out and surely is not a suitable gauge for “normal” research policy. On the Rockefeller Foundation, cf. Morange, Biology, pp. 79 ff. 47 Files of the Deutsche Atomkommission, BAB, B 138; Rheinberger, Stiftung. 48 Fischer, Atomenergie, p. 55. 45

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allocated and firmly committed to research areas of relevance to the development of atomic energy. In the DFG’s political maneuverings, its scientific self-understanding as being better able to offer research planning than the state apparatus played an important role. For that reason the relationship between the Ministry for Atomic Issues and the DFG was strained. The German Atomic Commission, which was decisive for the atomic program, divided the actual work up fairly, however. Whereas atomic physics fell under the aegis of the Ministry, the DFG’s influence on research in medical biology in the area of radiation effects and protection was essentially preserved.49 For all the interinstitutional divergence of interests, the relationship between the DFG and the Federal Ministry of Defense was distinctly cooperative. It was basically accepted in 1956 that this would arise naturally, as it were, because of an existing “interlocking of personnel” between the Ministry’s research advisory boards and the DFG, and extensive cooperation in the area of basic research therefore ought to be sought.50 Seen from the international point of view, the narrow link between biological radiology and atomic research was not extraordinary. Whereas genetic hazards were at the center of international discussions, in Germany genetic research on radiation was unable to distinguish itself in tandem with atomic physics big-science structures, as was the case in the USA and Great Britain.51 Instead, the hitherto defining paradigm of physical genetics in radiation research was speedily separated from chemically and physiologically oriented approaches. This chemicalization of radiation research opened up new perspectives. The scientific promise of “radiation shielding” not only softened the imponderables of risk assessment on the atomic option that the state and industry desired, it also strengthened the bond between biological research and the science/state complex of atomic research. The preventative strategy against radiation injury – located in the individual body – or, respectively, its repair, was the product of urgent political demands of the atomic age. This is where guiding perspectives for a new kind of problematization of environmental hazards and the endangered organism emerged. RISK ASSESSMENT, OR THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF REGULATED THREAT, 1960s As opposed to the performance goals of medicine under National Socialism, in the Federal Republic technical materials took front stage in risk assessment, borne along by the DFG’s research support. In this new orientation toward the DFG’s 49

Negotiations between DFG and Atomministerium, BAB, B 227, FC 7499, no. 49, 17, booklet no. 1. 50 Note about a discussion between the president of the DFG, Hess, with Oberst Lützow, 5 Dec. 1956, BAB, B 227, FC 7499, no. 49, 13, booklet no. 1. 51 Unaffected by the situation in experimental radiation genetics, specialists on human genetics could successfully launch the (re)institutionalization of their field, heavily implicated though it was during the Nazi period, following in the wake of the atomic debate. Cf. Kröner, Förderung. On the research in the USA, Rader, Mice.

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“secret directive,” radiation research fulfilled a decisive role. The problems attached to radioactive fallout in atomic tests conducted above ground, which were aggravated further by an alarmed public, forced a reinterpretation of the environmental problem. Until then the DFG had essentially treated the problem of environmental influences as concerning nutrition, (bio-)climatology, or the working world. Risk research now stepped into the foreground and, at the same time, the spectrum of hazard sources extended as well. Since the beginning of the 1960s the discourse on risk regulation also included environmental substances such as pesticides. In this way the DFG developed into the agent of a movement toward environmental hygiene even before environmental policy became the subject of public debate.52 This should be understood in the context of the so-called green revolution, a developing mass consumption, and a state structure of social preventative mechanisms reaching beyond the world of work. It is also the germ of a comprehensive rationalized risk assessment for the processes of life in general.53 CONCLUSION – AUTONOMY OF RESEARCH AND CLAIM TO POLICY MAKING Hygiene – understood as a mode of techniques and strategies of political action – was a priority in DFG research policy since the 1920s. From the development and organization of the field of radiation research, it is possible to decipher how both the progressive technicalization of research and the DFG’s orientation toward policy on hygiene converged in the 1930s and 1940s. Together they formed a disposition of risk politics that in the 1950s was still directly linked to the state and industrial complex of atomic research. The DFG assumed the role of a relaying medium between the interests of researchers and the pressing demands of state control and regulation. As a self-proclaimed institution of basic research, it could furthermore generously delegate less challenging research projects to such “science services” as the Federal Office of Radiation Protection (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz). The DFG attained the status of a regulatory institution during the 1960s at the latest. Projects of state risk assessment were processed in an institutionalized and corporatistic form in its numerous special committees. While internal scientific conflicts were thus institutionalized at the same time, the consensus was that regulatable risks were involved, not any questioning of technical progress and its ability to be planned. Therefore, the DFG joined the planning euphoria that determined government dealings in many industrialized countries through to the middle of the 1970s. Its hygienic mission entailed keeping the risks in social policy and the economy low. That means, making “technological progress” possible. Throughout the fifty years of the DFG’s existence, “self-administration” of research did not mean abstaining from shaping society. The DFG’s mediation 52

See also Uekötter, Rauchplage, p. 468; Ditt, Anfänge. To this extent the (long-lasting) 1960s could also be described in epistemic respects as a decade of transition. Cf. Frese/Paulus/Teppe (eds.), Demokratisierung, pp. 17–21. 53

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efforts obeyed the demands of each of the officially proclaimed states of emergency or martial law, and thereby alternated between the present-day goals of the national economy, eugenics, mobilization for war, big science, and risk regulation. DFG research policy consequently always pointedly generated sovereign knowledge. At the same time, the transmission by the state of successive expert projects to the research foundation strengthened the exclusive claim by researchers to political participation – which should be understood as corporatistic, not democratic, participation.

ENZYMES, HORMONES, VITAMINS – BIOCATALYTIC RESEARCH FUNDED BY THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1920–1970 Heiko Stoff The term Wirkstoffe (biologically active substances) was understood in the first third of the twentieth century as denoting enzymes, hormones, and vitamins. Those then still hypothetical substances, also known as biocatalysts, were certainly not yet chemically defined. The concept of Wirkstoffe was not widely used before the first decade of the twentieth century and only became fit for entry into an encyclopedia after 1910. It was not easily translatable either, and as a collective designation was specific to the German-speaking region. From the 1890s until the 1920s biologists, surgeons, and physiologists conducted experiments that spelled out action from activation, distinguished effect from effectiveness, which transformed hypothetical things into pharmacological agents and manufacturable and distributable products of the pharmaceutical industry. The experimental systems of research on hormones and vitamins updated themselves with regard to developmental physiology by means of the concepts of malformation and formation, deficiency and efficiency. They were situated in this biophysiological context until late into the 1920s and, different from enzyme research, only moved into the biochemical context later on. At the core was the establishment of chemicophysical laws with a focus on the process of formation and its mastery.1 In the process a long list of already established diseases, but also new ones – such as myxoedema, acromegaly, progeria – were associated with the failure of specific glands. Correspondingly, a deficiency in unknown nutrient components was interpreted as the cause of virulent diseases, above all, in the colonies, such as beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy. A teratology or research on abnormalities, on the one hand, designated the human fate of degeneration and, on the other hand, indicated the possibility of counteracting this decay.2 Every successful experiment was also a cure; experimental and clinical activation was a pharmacological effect in which the Wirkstoffe proved to be curative substitutes at the same time. Thus, Wirkstoffe always also constituted medications; they were the “home apothecary of the organism,” as it was called in the 1920s.3 Along with the inaugural experiments taking place in the two centuries surrounding 1900, these uncertain substances were also connected to central political issues: the health situation in the Dutch and British colonies; nutritional 1 2 3

Driesch, Roux, p. 448. Zürcher, Monster, pp. 235–259. Voss, Fluidum, p. 1030.

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problems in the Army and Navy; a critique of industrialization, urbanization, and civilization; the worry about “degeneracy,” low performance, superannuation, sterility, and sexual transformations. Exploring the constitution of hormones and vitamins in experimental biology served as a highly effective approach to the problem of the weakened deficient body in a deficient society with the goal of creating a high-performance body in a high-performance society. Wirkstoffe were important to the state not just in order to control the emergencies of aging, birth, and performing ability, but also in order to optimize society in the state of emergency caused by war. They represented an important institution in the twentieth century that connected the technology of experimental biology, a chemicalization of the body, pharmacological products, and political problem-solving. According to Isabelle Stengers, a whole series of relationships exist between sciences and powers. The rather unnoticed relationships include the distribution of promotional funding for research and science as well as the question: “Who sets the priorities and according to which criteria does he do so?”4 Research funding institutions act as irritable organs of science transfer, of the translation of interests, and of the mobilization of things. The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) was such an institution. It modulated interests, capacities, and resources in Germany and thus also shaped the institutionalization, standardization, regulation, and activation of Wirkstoffe, but ultimately also molded their precariousness. The DFG functioned in the area of biocatalyst research as a medium in the transfer of interests between science, industry, and the state. Whereas the first half of the twentieth century was marked by a standardization of the natural chemicals of Wirkstoffe – their isolation and synthesis – research funding during the second half of the century centered on chemical reactions as the regulators of biosynthesis and gene expression. At the same time, interest in the reciprocal implications of deficiency and efficiency shifted from activation to precariousness. Although hormones and vitamins did not lose their value in nutrition physiology and reproductive medicine, their otherwise publicly and repeatedly updated utopian potential scarcely played a role any longer in the mobilization of research projects. The narrow concept of Wirkstoffe itself, which had constituted an inner connection between enzymes, hormones, and vitamins, began to desintegrate in the 1960s because of the abundance of different material reactions. INSTITUTIONALIZATION – A CONTEST BETWEEN LOCATIONS It is a characteristic of knowledge-based societies in the twentieth century that political, industrial, and scientific actors must, in order to attain their goals, each invest in the other field and must form financial, cognitive, apparative, staffing, institutional, or rhetorical resources for one another.5 Scientific continuity and 4 5

Stengers, Wissenschaft, p. 34. Ash, Wissenschaft, p. 32.

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scientific change are, according to Mitchell G. Ash, most productively “understood as the reorganisation or reassemblage of resource ensembles.”6 The institutionalized cooperative relationships between science and the pharmaceutical industry that are necessary for establishing experimental cultures have meanwhile been described in some detail.7 In the interplay between research, clinic, and marketing, Wirkstoffe were attached to specific goals, to sites of activity. The latently risky active substance was harnessed within a system of medicinal regulation. Research on biocatalysts was mostly undertaken by biologists, physiologists, organic chemists, and biochemists financed by external sources in industry and the state.8 Cooperation between industry and science existed at the beginning of biocatalytic research. It was the precondition for the isolation and synthesis of hormones and vitamins as well as for their market-oriented design. But Wirkstoffe always had been of interest to the state as well, not just because it became necessary to regulate the new preparations for the medication market, rather more because the establishment and activation of the Wirkstoffe themselves were constituted through problematizations important to the state. Wirkstoffe were innovations in the economic sense and, at the same time, proposed solutions to state responsibilities concerning biological, health, and nutrition policy. The high phase of biocatalytic research during the 1920s coincided in a dramatic way with the postwar crisis in German science. The establishment of state-sponsored research in the form of the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) and its functioning as a modulating organ for industrial, state, and scientific interests proved to be critical for the constitution of biocatalytic research fixated on standardization and activation.9 International competition over isolating biocatalysts started already in the 1920s. In the area of internal thyroid secretion, the NG’s report of its activities from 1928 noted that Germany had already clearly been out-classed by the Americans and the British. German research saw itself outdone once again by Canadian scientists in the very important race to isolate insulin. It did seem, however, that thanks to Adolf Windaus’s researches in Göttingen, Germany would at least catch up with the Americans again in the area of vitamin research. Yet intense research support by the NG was nevertheless indispensable for that field.10 The “leadership in the area of biochemistry” had moved abroad, a member of the Association of German Chemists (Verein Deutscher Chemiker) declared in 1927. That was why, as the association argued to the Ministry of Culture, state subsidies for research had to be raised.11 This gained even more urgency during the scientific preparations for war and actual military research during the Third Reich. The National Socialists had 6

Ash, Changes, p. 330; idem, Wissenschaft, pp. 32, 34. Cf. Bächi, Vitamin C; Gausemeier, Ordnungen, pp. 187–220; Gaudillière, Biochemie; Oudshoorn, Natural Body; Rasmussen, Steroids; Ratmoko, Hormone. 8 Akeroyd, Research Programmes, p. 51. 9 Nipperdey/Schmugge, Jahre, pp. 16 f. 10 Anonymous, Rückblick (Medizin), pp. 104, 110 f. 11 Wimmer, Neues, pp. 376 f. 7

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stepped forward to replace the state emergency of life in modernity, an issue perpetually debated, with martial law, a politicization of life.12 The system of scientific research changed in a trenchant way with the introduction of the Four-Year Plan in the fall of 1936 and the establishment of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) in 1937. The state itself became the main party interested in research on hormones and vitamins. Pertinent research projects were supported by the RFR’s Expert Departments on Agricultural Science and General Biology, Medicine, Food Technology, Organic Chemistry, Grease Research, Epidemic Research, Cancer Research, and Veterinary Medicine. During the war years, there was a definite percentage growth in DFG funding in the area of biochemistry as a whole when compared to I. G. Farben financing.13 However, the DFG operated here less as an state organ steering research than as an irritable organ that could be activated by self-mobilized scientists through applications for support and expert opinions: abundant imaginative rhetoric that emphasized the war importance of ongoing or new research projects was, as a rule, also rewarded. Military and autarky arguments, along with ones on biological policy and productivity, proved to be equally effective. Above all, conversion to domestic raw materials, sparing manufacturing processes, or synthesis became highly significant by the beginning of the war at the latest. For example, insulin was among the medicinal substances most urgently in need of domestic substitutes from 1940 onward.14 Concrete research certainly was also supported on the treatment of soldiers, on the prevention of unfitness for service, and on alleviating the consequences of war. The biochemists in Marburg, Hans Joachim Lauber and Theodor Bersin, attempted in 1939 to maintain enzymatic processes in conserved human blood by adding suitable substances. Their aim was to make possible “thereby, more effective care of the wounded in the foremost line” of combat.15 Another study group led by Ernst Kretschmer had so-called trypsin treatments supported by the DFG in 1943/44. With a combined treatment of vitamin C and novoprotin, they succeeded in setting the intermediate metabolism to extreme parsimony and thus adapting individuals to war conditions.16 Research on Wirkstoffe not only followed the wartime logic of frugality, substitutions, and optimization, but was also highly significant for the biopolitical goals of the National Socialist state. Reference is made here to the great importance of Emil Abderhalden’s “defensive fermentation reaction,” a very controversial but apparently extremely useful method of serodiagnostics. In addition to supposedly being an indicator of pregnancy, cancer, and endocrinal deficiencies, it purportedly also made “serological racial differentiation” feasible. In 1944 Karl Horneck conducted corresponding researches on prisoners of war with DFG funds in the Institute for Racial Biology at the University of Königs-

12

Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 120 f., 175–189; Foucault, Spiel, p. 120. Deichmann, Flüchten, pp. 237 f. 14 Dyckerhoff to DFG, 21 Mar. 1940, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/10799. 15 Lauber to DFG, 26 Sep. 1939, and Lauber to DFG, 16 Oct. 1939, BAK, R 73/12601. 16 Kretschmer to DFG, 11 Dec. 1943, and Kretschmer to DFG, 24 Nov. 1944, BAK, R 73/12408. 13

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berg.17 They were also decisive in Josef Mengele’s experimentation on humans in Auschwitz.18 Research proposals could be conceived and strengthened on this basis of war importance, while it also developed new lines of research, such as nutrition and vitamin research, which received exceptional support, financially and institutionally, primarily in the years 1939 to 1945. The state of the natural sciences in general, and biology in particular, in Germany has been recounted since the end of the 1950s as a disturbing history of decline. The consequences of the war – lost patents, destroyed institutes, shortages of qualified young professionals, and inadequate equipment – were regarded as more serious than the exodus of scientists in 1933. The damage from World War II was accordingly incomparably greater than after World War I. With this account of the state of affairs, the NG began the report on its activities in March 1949. To the loss of patents, it added that of industrial research institutions, which had also largely been destroyed. This also appeared fatal, above all, because the recovery of the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as an exportorientated industrial state was fundamentally dependent on foreign trade.19 The causes of this research scenario, depicted as disastrous during the 1950s, were in particular shortages in modern apparatus, electron microscopes, and infrared spectrographs, the emigrations of leading scientists, specifically in the area of dynamic biochemistry, the international isolation, the application-oriented research policy under National Socialism, and the direct consequences of the war.20 The history of biology itself – this found expression in a DFG memorandum from 1958 – was, from then on, read as a fatally determined emergency situation in the national system of innovation.21 The decisive disadvantage for German research, the memorandum concluded, was its strict partitioning off of the disciplines, whereas modern biology was distinguished precisely by the cooperation between physics, chemistry, and biology.22 Richard Clausen summarized in 1964 a debate that was intensely being fought at the beginning of the 1960s that this lack of interdisciplinarity had led to a considerable lag behind other countries in the modern fields of research on molecular biology, molecular genetics, and metabolic physiology.23 But ultimately, it also reactived a fetish of German research policy. Bringing together different groups of researchers and disciplines to solve specific problems – cooperative research – had been a leitmotif of German research since the 1920s, primarily under National Socialism.24 Cooperative research had always been two things: a form of science organization to mediate 17 Cf. Karl Horneck’s proposal: Untersuchungen über die serologische Rassendifferenzierung beim Menschen, 6 Apr. 1944, BAK, R 73/1807; Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen, pp. 511–522. 18 Trunk, Rassenforschung. 19 NG’s report, Berichte, 1949, pp. 11 f. 20 Clausen, Stand, and Meyl, Denkschrift. On the exodus of scientists: Engel, Paradigmenwechsel, p. 341; Deichmann, Emigration. 21 Meyl, Denkschrift. 22 Ibid., p. 2. 23 Clausen, Stand, p. 12. 24 Maier (ed.), Gemeinschaftsforschung. The NG had positioned itself accordingly even before 1933; Ge., Notgemeinschaft, p. 288.

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transfers of interests, and the necessary consequence of a problem only solvable through cooperation between different disciplinary technologies. Major study teams to address questions that could only be solved interdisciplinarily were being tried out from the middle of the 1950s onward. Faced with the problematic issues of biological research, the endowment founded by Volkswagenwerk in 1962 concentrated its financial energies precisely on advancing molecular biology.25 In contrast, the DFG’s peer review system had seen to it that the need for team work and interdisciplinarity, foremost also the ability to be open to questions in molecular biology, become important criteria of research support at the beginning of the 1960s. The failure of its units to tackle important problems in research in larger teams, which had been recommended by the Council of Sciences and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) in 1961, shows, however, the considerable institutional problems that arose in their implementation.26 The DFG was as little attuned to surmounting disciplinary boundaries as universities were. It was only from 1964 to 1966 that, finally, three Priority Programs responding to this necessity were set up: Molecular Biology (1964), Cybernetics (1965), and Biochemistry of Morphogenesis (1966). In May 1964 the right expert reviewers first of all had to be found for the Molecular Biology Priority Program.27 STANDARDIZATION – PATENTS, PROFITS, PRIZES In the summer of 1940 Richard Kuhn, the Nobel laureate biochemist and head of the RFR’s Organic Chemistry Department, proclaimed that what had survived of the drive for discovery among the forefathers had meanwhile been directed at new goals of science – the biological analysis and chemical identifiation of new natural substances, which in almost unimaginably small quantities were able to induce astonishing effects on specific expressions of plant and animal life: “Cooperations between chemists and physicians, biologists, and others, who are chasing after such Wirkstoffe of life can be encountered in almost all countries on Earth. One could get the impression that these hunting grounds are truly immense.”28 But this heroic story was, above all, a fight over patents, priorities, and profits, over Nobel prizes and careers.29 In the 1920s the specific action of hormonal or vitamin preparations was hardly certain and a method of isolating them not established. With the exception of adrenaline and thyroxine, no standardized biocatalytic preparations were available. The market was dominated by impure organotherapeutic compounds 25

Rheinberger, Stiftung. Reference is made here to the exemplary rejection of a relevant proposal on “biological structural chemistry (molecular biology)” by Friedrich Cramer. Cf. Hoffmann to Cramer, 12 Jun. 1962, Cramer to DFG, 20 Feb. 1962, BAK, FC 7578 N, Units, 741/2/61, booklet no. 3. 27 DFG to Butenandt, 4 May 1964, Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (AMPG), 3rd dep., rep. 84/1, no. 429. 28 Kuhn, Entdeckung, p. 309; Kornberg, Love, p. 1. 29 Werner, Berichtswelten; Gaudillière, Biochemie. 26

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enhanced by unknown additives. It was essential to reduce these substances to their pure forms for optimal therapeutic use. Thus the pharmaceutical industry, the professional representatives of clinicians, and the relevant state organs all had a vital interest in the control, regulation, and standardization of Wirkstoffe. By the end of the 1920s, the effects existed but still no substances.30 Innovative experimental systems had been feverishly sought during the 1920s. These systems were primarily based on techniques of long-term and standardizable animal trials and increasingly precise chemical processing methods of enormous amounts of material.31 Biochemists had been cooperating with the pharmaceutical industry on this since the middle of that decade. Scientists were working for both industry and academic institutes; they had professional connections with individuals in the drug industry.32 Scientific research was as much dependent on industrial potential as the drug industry was in need of the abilities of researchers to produce marketable specialities. For this, Jean Paul Gaudillière has used the formula of an exchange between biological material and molecular structure.33 This formula would have to be extended to reflect that researchers, in turn, got patents in exchange for molecular structure, more precisely, for their particular purefied preparations.34 The decisive advance was made with standardizable testing and controlling procedures. That was why Carl Oppenheimer also spoke of an “epoch of calibrations.”35 The establishment of methods of chemical extraction and biological tests – the calibration of insulin and the Allen-Doisy test – finally also opened the international race in research.36 It initially seemed as if German research certainly could not keep up with the competition in preparing such substances in a pure state. The DFG placed its bets on the Freiburg-based Eugen Baumann and his pupils in the race to isolate the thyroid hormone. But Baumann died early and the chemical structure of the hormone was identified by Charles R. Harington and George Barger.37 The Chemical University Laboratory in Göttingen, headed by Windaus, was at the center of mobilized research. Windaus’s research team was not only financed by I. G. Farben and the Merck company but was also receiving support by the DFG over the long term.38 This productive study team was a guarantee that Germany had become competitive again in the area of vitamin research by the end of the 1920s. It eventually succeeded in isolating and synthesizing the vitamins D1, D2, and D3 and thereby produced a crucial 30

Latour, Hoffnung, p. 144. Rheinberger, Experimentalsysteme, pp. 7 ff., 25. 32 Werner, Vitamine, pp. 72 ff. 33 Gaudillière, Biochemie, p. 203. 34 Werner, Berichtswelten; idem, Vitamine, pp. 65–69. As of 1949 Kuhn, who certainly held a leading position, had acquired 31 international patents from 1928 to 1941. Prof. Dr. Richard Kuhn, Heidelberg, patents, 1 Mar. 1949, National Archives, Washington, RG 330, entry 1B, box 97. 35 Epoche der Eichungen: Oppenheimer, Chemie, p. 17. 36 Wimmer, Neues, p. 309. 37 Anonymous, Rückblick (Medizin), pp. 110 f. 38 Haas, Vigantol. 31

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innovation of significance in the fight against rickets. This was seen as evidence for the efficiency of the state policy on public health, as a symbol for the taming of Manchester capitalism.39 Windaus demonstrated his talent as an exceptional fundraiser from industrial, university, and public sources for research conducted by himself and his collaborators. Kuhn’s and Butenandt’s study groups were just as successful. They excelled as the leading institutions worldwide in isolating vitamins and sexual hormones. Butenandt even outdid his doctoral supervisor Windaus by having his research supported by I. G. Farben, Schering, and Hoffmann La Roche, in addition to grants by the DFG and the Rockefeller Foundation.40 The commonly used model was mixed financing. In 1934 Karl Heinrich Slotta reported in 1934 about the immense effort made by his research team in Breslau to isolate the corpus luteum hormone, which could only be achieved with funding by industry and the NG. The research in this area, Slotta reported, was only possible at all in “that the Emergency Association for German Science supported us most generously with animals, apparatus, chemicals, and staffing, and I. G. Farbenindustrie with the basic material.”41 The experimental systems for the descriptive chemistry of natural substances catered to the interests of industry, research, and the state for specialities, Nobel prizes, and biopolitical things. Thus German research on Wirkstoffe dominated into the 1960s also mainly through preferential sponsorship by the DFG. For this reason an unknown reviewer could still appreciate in 1962 that Peter Karlson had finally struggled his way through the chemical approach on natural substances to an explicitly biochemical problem, indeed a dynamic one, even, of molecular biology.42 REGULATION – DISCOURSES AND SYSTEMS ON THE MOLECULARIZATION OF THE LIFE SCIENCES Georges Canguilhem has pointed out that the concept of regulation itself has a history. Regulation as a physiological process describes functions that control other functions and by obeying specific constants make it possible for the organism to behave as a single whole.43 According to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the pivotal change occurred with Hans Driesch’s Die organischen Regulationen from 1901. This opened the way to an “autocritical biological regulation discourse … From then on, regulatory networks counted as the key to understanding biological functions.”44 The 1920s already encompassed a complex, variable, mutable system of influences and cooperations of the inner milieu. The NG’s review of its research from 1928 notes very generally that research interest had turned away 39

Windaus to DFG, 2 Oct. 1939, BAK, R 73/15730. Gausemeier, Ordnungen, pp. 98 ff. 41 Slotta, Schwangerschafts-Hormon, p. 912. Emphasis added. 42 Cf. Peter Karlson’s proposal, Entwicklungsphysiologie der Insektenmetamorphose und der Kaulquappenmetamorphose, 6 Apr. 1962, DFG-Archiv, Bonn (DFGA), Ka 91/12. 43 Canguilhem, Herausbildung, pp. 90–94. 44 Rheinberger, Epistemologie, p. 69. 40

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from observing the organism as a whole and toward metabolic processes in the individual component tissues of the body, indeed, even of individual cells. This, it continues, was the area “in which we have perhaps recorded the most important physiological research results of the past few years.”45 Research on Wirkstoffe was an integral part of the molecularization of the life sciences. The regulatory system itself was much more complex than suggested by the causality of the deficiency/efficiency experiments of developmental physiology. We can summarize the state of research of the 1930s thus: Active substances were universal, partly identical, and chemically related; they functioned reciprocally in antagonism and synergism. This time-consuming research approach competed, however, latest since 1936, against the approach on activation of Wirkstoffe driven by their importance to the state and the war, which was based on the conception of the specific efficiencies of Wirkstoffe. It corresponded to a fundamental and ideological controversy over activation itself. During the war years 1941 and 1942, there was an especially intense debate over whether biological properties could be ascribed to synthetic vitamins at all. They were derogatorily referred to as “vitaminoids,” because their action was never as complex as vitamins whose function is synergetic and antagonistic.46 This met with the resistance of nutritionists whose own research projects, declared as important to the war, were based on Wirkstoffe produced by the pharmaceutical industry.47 In the end, this objection could not be dismantled. Synthetic vitamins were important to the war effort but they were also undesirable as a negation of a natural diet, especially considering that their specific action was controversial. Abderhalden expressed this by closing his defense of synthetic vitamins with a song of praise to “natural food.” Biochemists and the drug industry were not pleased to hear, accordingly, that synthesis was just a product of the state of emergency in wartime. “Naturegiven food occupies first place and shall stay there for all time. Every artifice leads astray.”48 The regulation principle proved to be extremely productive, however, in connection with the problem of heredity. It was precisely the efforts with insect biocatalysts that the research teams led by Alfred Kühn and Butenandt had been practicing since the 1920s that promised solutions to the problem of biological heredity. Kühn postulated in 1941, at a research conference organized by the RFR, that the year 1932 signified a crucial break in the history of the discovery of chemically steered processes of development. In that year Wilhelm Caspari and he himself, among others, had discovered that implanting the male reproductive organ in a caterpillar had an influence on the eye pigmentation of the flour moth mutants.49 In search of the substance responsible for this genetic alteration, Kühn worked together with Butenandt in the period from 1934 to 1937.50 Through 45 46 47 48 49 50

Anon., Rückblick (Medizin), p. 107. Alter, Bewertung. Maier, Vitamine, pp. 444 f. Abderhalden, Vitamine, p. 444. Anon., Versammlungsberichte, Allgemeine Biologie, p. 30. Gausemeier, Ordnungen, pp. 98–104.

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numerous implantation trials the study groups secured the course of a chain reaction: genes activated ferments that catalyzed a metabolic substrate chain in individual steps.51 According to Rheinberger, whereas the developmental biologist Kühn was interested in the network of action chains, what mattered to Butenandt was clearly depicting and illuminating the structure. Thus it was not a matter of chance “that in the research on pigmentation by Kühn and Butenandt the substrate chain moved into the center of attention and the assumed gene ferment systems were left unanalyzed – precisely the area from which molecular genetics eventually emerged.”52 This continuously supported research project from the 1920s into the 1970s was conducted by a research unit headed by Karlson at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Tübingen and a research unit headed by Hans Piepho at the Zoological Institute in Göttingen. The primary aim in the 1950s and 1960s was purefying the hormone that activates metamorphosis; they concentrated increasingly on the area of insect hormones. The importance of this area of research, initially assumed to be sensational, was much toned down over the course of the 1950s, however.53 Thus, a successful experimental system for isolating insect hormones (ecdysone) was established that was supported continuously by the DFG through all the discontinuities in the political system. Satisfactory clarity about the genetic importance of biocatalysts was not achieved, however. Nevertheless, the ecdysone research performed at the beginning of the 1960s by Karlson and Ulrich Clever on the relation between gene expression and development using ecdysone injections brought it closer again to molecular genetics.54 Research on the molecular structure and on identical duplication of DNA was mainly being done in the USA. Research in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), on the contrary, concentrated since the end of the 1950s on realizing the coded “blueprints of life” in their chemical structure as a connecting link between molecular genetics and enzymology, which during the postwar period was pursued in particular by the pupils of Feodor Lynen, also an internationally highly acclaimed biochemist and enzyme chemist. It was biosynthesis, a problem already under intense investigation in the 1940s, that generated countless DFGfunded research projects during the 1960s in the FRG. Schools on biosynthesis and metabolic chemistry already existed in the FRG when their experimental systems became useful for problems also posed in molecular genetics. In this sense one cannot speak of a radical break between metabolic enzyme research on biosynthesis and the new concepts of enzyme regulation with reference to protein synthesis. 51

Anonymous, Versammlungsberichte, Göttinger, p. 89; Gausemeier, Ordnungen, p. 119; Rheinberger, Zusammenarbeit, p. 178. 52 Ibid., pp. 182, 190 f. 53 In 1952 Kühn himself wrote in his review of a research proposal by Detlef Bückmann on the effect of metamorphous hormones on color changes in butterfly caterpillars that the topic was worthy of support even though it was not of particularly exciting importance; cf. the opinion by the chairman of the expert board A. Kühn, 13 Sep. 1952, DFGA, Bü 41/1. 54 Clever, Genactivitäten.

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ACTIVATION – BIOPOLITICAL PRACTICES The principle of biocatalytic activation states that a close relationship exists between a living being’s development and performance and the interactions between its component parts.55 Stabilized Wirkstoffe served since the 1920s as potentials for optimizing the productivity of bodies. The common goal of hormone and vitamin administering projects was to optimize the body through heightened performance.56 The connected aim of endocrinological policy on reproduction was to raise the performance of the Volkskörper. The hormonization of the female reproductive body – its medicalization and subjugation under the eugenic order of sterilization treatment – and sterilization, so striking within the proximity of gynecology and veterinary medicine or the science of animal breeding, became one of the most important projects of Nazi biopolitics. The disciplines of gynecology and veterinary medicine developed in close interaction with each other since the 1930s. The biological findings of animal breeding were fundamentally important not just for the furtherance of agricultural breeding and livestock husbandry, Wilhelm Zorn reported in 1934 by commission of the DFG. They were also of very special significance in the biology of human beings themselves.57 In the RFR’s Expert Department on Agricultural Science and General Biology, numerous research projects were supported since 1937 on reproductive disorders and their hormonal therapies for domesticated animals. They also included research on augmenting the fattening efficiency of female pigs through hormonal sterilization. Hormonizing the female reproductive body, assuaging menstrual and menopausal complaints, and treating sterility corresponded, in turn, to sterilization for the “Prevention of Hereditarily Sick Progeny,” legalized since 1934. Endocrine reproductive medicine was performed until 1945, foremost at the women’s clinic of the Berlin Charité and the women’s clinics in Kiel, Leipzig, Marburg, and Göttingen. The majority of endocrinological researches carried out there were supported by the DFG. Carl Clauberg, one of the most important endocrinologists of the 1930s, who had been praised to the skies by Felix von Mikulicz-Radecki at the end of 1935 for a research grant by the DFG with backing reviews by Butenandt and Carl Kaufmann, vehemently continued a project on hormonal sterilization, which had been aborted around 1930 by other gynecologists, such as Ernst Philipp, even though it hardly appeared promising.58 From 1935 to 1941 Clauberg was supported by the DFG, but in 1941 this project, which he was then resolutely devoting to the “problem of mass sterilization,” led him to the center of Nazi extermination policy. Clauberg carried out this human experimentation, with the “sterilization of Jewesses” as its 55

Jacob, Die Logik, p. 266. Or as Ulrike Thoms poignantly formulated it: “Surveying, classifying, regulating – just as the policy on population, so also the policy on agriculture and nutrition under National Socialism, boils down to these terms”; Thoms, Einbruch, p. 112. 57 Zorn, Ausblick, p. 103. 58 Philipp to NG, 25 Apr. 1931, BAK, R 73/13620; Kaufmann to Greite, 5 Feb. 1937, Butenandt to DFG, 3 Dec. 1935, Mikulicz-Radecki to Mitscherlich, 22 Nov. 1935, Clauberg to Mitscherlich, 15 Nov. 1935, BAK, R 73/10599. 56

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explicit goal, in the Ravensbrück and Auschwitz concentration camps with the assistance of the SS.59 The nexus between the sterility treatment of one person and the sterilization of another – as Clauberg put it in a plan for a reproductive biology clinic – points to the core of the National Socialist policy on population. The racial hygienic project of negative eugenics was consistently executed in connection with the SS; the research and clinic on positive eugenics belonged within the range of the DFG. This is significant for the transition from Nazi Germany to the Federal Republic. The chemicalization of endocrine reproductive medicine prevailed with the first biochemically trained generation in the 1960s. The centers for endocrinological reproductive medicine continued after 1945 to be connected with the gynecologists who had already dominated this area of research since the 1930s, namely, Philipp in Kiel and Kaufmann, by then in Cologne. The University Women’s Clinic in Kiel was so copiously financed by the DFG at the beginning of the 1950s that one reviewer admonished the foundation “to conduct an equitable adjustment to the allocations to the different institutes” in future.60 This close relationship between hormonal definition and diagnostics persisted in countless projects carried out in the 1950s and 1960s with funding by the DFG on the physiology and pathology of the hormonally controlled female body. Vitaminization, in turn, connected war-related nutrition research with the principle of efficiency. Heinrich Kraut, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Occupational Physiology in Dortmund, surely spoke with authority when in 1941 he expressly attached the chemical concept of efficiency to the genealogy of the so extraordinarily expansive discipline of nutritional research. All the same, he pointed out a new possible approach to the body by attributing the manipulability of the organism’s efficiency through diet to active chemical substances – to the Wirkstoffe. Kraut concluded that it should be demanded of nutrition “that it put us in full possession of the capabilities every man needs to fulfill his professional tasks.”61 Nutrition and vitamin research were an important component of National Socialist high-performance medicine.62 Scientific research on the composition of vitamins, their essentialness, and their action started in the 1920s. But it was under National Socialism that it gathered considerable dynamics. A number of study groups were financed by the DFG, organized within the RFR, and promoted by the Reich Office of Health and the Agricultural Research Service (Forschungsdienst). These relevant research projects were headed by Arthur Scheunert in Leipzig and Wilhelm Stepp in Munich.63 The problem of their synthesis, the search for substitute products, optimal utilization of domestic sources 59 Cf. Brandt, Geheime Reichssache! original copy, Jul. 1942; idem, file note, 11 Jul. 1942, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 19/1583. 60 Ernst Philipp, Fortführung von Untersuchungen über gonadotrope Hormone, 31 Aug. 1954, DFGA, Ph 3/5. 61 Kraut/Droese, Ernährung, pp. 1 f., 7. 62 Neumann, Physiology, pp. 49–59. 63 Meyer, ombudsman of the Forschungsdienst, to Scheunert, 6 Jun. 1937; DFG to Scheunert, 12 Jun. 1937, BAK, R 73/14278. On the Agricultural Research Service, set up in May 1935, see Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 156–163; Oberkrome, Ordnung.

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of vitamins, conservation of vitamin content in preserved and dried foods, and, finally, genuine vitaminization – the vitamin enrichment of foods – became prioritized research missions of a network organized into study teams. This securing of food reserves and organizing the best possible exploitation of foodstuffs was at odds with optimal nutrition, above all, through vitamin preparations specifically for soldiers and hard laborers. The DFG funded extremely extensive series of nutrition experiments (Großgruppenernährungsversuche) on the action of vitamins in humans, which were carried out in Labor Service camps, orphanages, nationalistic political training establishments, apprentice hostels, and jails.64 Specific problems raised by wartime conditions – vitaminization, vitamin content, nutritional minimum and optimum – remained current during the postwar years as well.65 Even though decidedly negative expert opinions in the 1950s sorted out such scientifically questionable researchers as Hans-Adalbert Schweigart and Werner Kollath, Schweigart’s influential concept of Vitalstoffe and Kollath’s “whole foods” (Vollwertkost) continued to act as main discursive moments of the “phantasm of purity.”66 The “efficient nation” (leistungsfähiges Volk) remained a valid goal into the 1960s – identifiable, above all, in the person of Fritz Klose, the social hygienist in Kiel.67 For the discipline of nutritional physiology, the year 1945 certainly did not signify a break with the past. A continuity in personnel resulted in nutrition and vitamin research primarily by the generation whose careers coincided with the mobilization of nutrition policy under National Socialism.68 Numerous research institutions worked on vitamin research during the 1950s and 1960s. Compared to the war years, the research topics had not changed: working out methods for vitamin determination, analyses of vitamin content, studies about the effect on vitamins of various storage conditions, investigations on vitamin resorbence.69 What did come to an end despite the uninterrupted importance of nutrition research was the privileged position of vitamin research. BECOMING PRECARIOUS –RISK POLICIES OF BIOLOGICALLY ACTIVE SUBSTANCES From the moment they were established, Wirkstoffe became the brunt of immanent criticism.70 The potential nexus between biocatalysts and cancer, its diagnosis and triggers were given thorough treatment during the 1930s and 1940s. 64 Many articles in the periodical Die Ernährung describe these major trials. Neumann, Physiology, pp. 56–57. 65 Statement by the 2nd expert, Professor Dr. med. Kleinschmidt, 18 Jun. 1951, DFGA, Br 37/2. 66 Sarasin, “Anthrax,” p. 158. 67 F. Klose, Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft im Dienst der Ernährungsforschung (undated ms.), DFGA, AN 60290, Pflanzenschutzmittel-Kommission, vol. 1, 1958–59. 68 Spiekermann, Pfade; Thoms, Einbruch. 69 H. Hetzel, Forschungsprogramm 1960. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Ernährungswissenschaftlicher Institute AEI, 5 Jan. 1960, BAK, B 116/15513. 70 Gaudillière, Biochemie.

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Vitamins and hormones might be toxic and carcinogenic. Their effects were unforeseeable; they had to be pursued, controlled, and in any case dosed. Wirkstoffe had always been precarious substances anyway.71 The path to risk politicians was the normal biography of the biocatalyst researcher born in the first two decades of the twentieth century.72 This can be exemplified by Heinrich Karg from the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Munich. “Growth stimulation,” “hormonal control of random steering of ovary function in cattle,” or “steering of the ovary function in cattle through gestagen treatment” were the titles of his concrete projects of the 1950s and 1960s. He virtuosically related regulation, isolation, and activation and in doing so was generously supported by the DFG. According to a review panel statement, Karg addressed issues “also of great public interest besides the scientific ones.”73 Hormonal treatment for livestock fattening purposes was permitted in the USA at that time but forbidden in the FRG. Karg was therefore certainly operating in a legally controversial area, which made his research even more significant. It was in this context that Karg worked out his innovative radioimmunological testing method. The radioimmunoassay (RIA) would become of lasting importance in spotting various hormones and could be used to detect illegal hormone treatment of livestock raised for meat.74 At the first meeting of the short-lived German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsrat) on 13 May 1949, it was suggested to establish four expert commissions, one of which would work on the problem of the carcinogenic effect of food coloring, headed by Butenandt. It was supposed to construe the scientific bases of the problem, assume an advisory function toward the health authorities of the different provinces, and propose the text for a law. The commission was supposed to be composed of representatives for experimental science, clinicians and physicians, the health authorities, the dye and food coloring industry, as well as the color processing industries.75 When the Research Council merged with the NG, this concept of commissions was introduced along with it into the DFG. The dye commission was the nucleus of all the subsequent commissions dealing with food additives. The way these commissions worked was quite similar. Boards dealt with particular substances, positive lists were compiled, terminological definitions were squabbled over, laws drafted and discussed. An international consensus was sought with the other states of the European Economic Community but also with the USA. The function of these scientist-led commissions was more to modulate than to moderate. The overall goal of all these commissions was scientific preparation for and elaboration of a new law on foodstuffs. The research conducted within the framework of these commissions should not be “purely scientifically” significant, Butenandt stressed, but also of great practical 71

Wahrig et al., Matters. Rose, Politics. 73 Opinion by the review panel on the proposal by Heinrich Karg, Hormone und Hormonwirkungen in der Nutztiermast, 29 Aug. 1958, DFGA, Ka 101/3a. 74 Faber/Haid, Endokrinologie. 75 Butenandt to Eickemeyer, 15 Oct. 1949, and Heisenberg to Butenandt, 26 Aug. 1949, AMPG, III, 84/1, 338. 72

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significance.76 Vitamin and enzyme preparations were among the substances subjected to obligatory controls. The controversial problem about whether a vitamin emergency existed remained explosive and whether a concerted effort by the state to vitaminize necessarily followed, as most of its protagonists had already argued under National Socialism. Activists for vitaminization stood at loggerheads with the risk-policy cautioners of carcinogenicity and toxicity. 77 At the end of the 1960s the activation of Wirkstoffe was no longer separable from their evolving precariousness. The synchronicity of the steady support for fundamental research divested of any social element and the established commissions assigned with controlling tasks characterized the research policy of the second half of the twentieth century. The framework institutionalizing, standardizing, activating, and making the regulatory and regulatable biocatalysts precarious was henceforth extended by consumer movements, ecological parties, and a critical public mobilized by the media, which since the 1970s has participated in the determination of molecular life.

76 Statement by the expert reviewer on the application by Dr. Karl Raible, dated 2 Apr. 1954 – Ra 51/1 – for a material grant in the amount of 6,480 deutschmarks, DFGA, AN 6032, Commission on Food Conservation Control, from June 1955 to December 1956. 77 Review by Prof. Glatzel, Thiaminunterernährung in Deutschland? (Transcript of a meeting by the DFG’s Commission on Nutrition Research, 16–17 Feb. 1962 in Bad Godesberg), BAK, B 227/050496.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE AND THE BIOSCIENCES – A COMMENTARY Johanna Bleker

The entanglements of medicine and the biosciences in Nazi policy on race and extermination is an area of research that has been mapped out in very fine detail. The state of knowledge that has meanwhile been attained with regard to the actors and masterminds, topics, places, and victimized groups of medical crimes does not allow us to expect sensational new discoveries. Most recently a major project on the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society has illuminated essential features of the role of the biosciences and its protagonists. Thus, the studies presented here on the funding policy of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) in the areas of medicine and of biological research on radiation and biocatalysis do not excel in revelations of unknown facts. It is rather a matter of supplementing details or bringing information together. Instead and above all these studies seek a new and different perspective. Attention to medicine under National Socialism began, as is commonly known, with the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial (1947) followed by the Auschwitz Trial and other legal prosecutions. The last euthanasia suit was defeated in 2005. Meanwhile historians of medicine from the 1968 generation had turned the topic into a central area of research for our discipline. For them, too, the foremost question concerned the perpetrators. Every concrete statement about the activities of physicians and scientists prior to 1945 had to be pushed through against the pleas of innocence of those implicated, their families and institutions, their co-workers, pupils, or even their patients. For this reason not only the emphasis of medico-historical research lay, from the beginning, on investigations of the guilty. Moreover in their endeavor to assemble juridically water-tight evidence and to solidify assumptions of guilt, these studies often acquired rather the spirit of a public prosecutor’s interrogations than of a historian’s reserved scrutiny. The concentration on culprits made it difficult to regard persons and events in a wider historical context for fear of possibly glossing over the facts or making them look harmless and thereby playing into the hands of the “opposing side,” that means, the defenders or deniers of Nazi offences. Additionally this approach drew the main attention to the obvious transgressions in medicine and science: murders of the sick, human experimentation, participation in the genocide, and scientific participation in the racial and population policies of the Nazi state. The normal research routine with its changing priorities of interests, group formations, and goals remained unexplored. The project on “The History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970” has now provoked a change in perspective – from personalized responsibilities to

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the structural conditions, from exceptions to the daily practice of research – and it has issued a reminder to locate events historically by drawing into consideration the before and after. Along with this change in perspective goes a demystification of science. It is pulled off the untouchable pedestal of a self-generating constant of the human mind and brought down to the level of a human artifice subject to history. Given up is what – to put it simply – I would like to call the “innocence of science,” which means the deeply rooted belief that well-done science is intrinsically moral and good because it contributes to the progress of humanity, while progress eo ipso should be regarded as adding to human happiness. This paradigm, we know, has crumbled to dust under the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet it still lives on just as much in the heads of medical doctors and life scientists as it does in the minds of their hopeful clientèl. The history of medicine has long since moved away from the topos that the research conducted in the concentration camps was an expression of useless pseudoscience. Air and space research has not been the only area to unscrupulously incorporate findings gained in criminal contexts. However, characterizations of the “abuse” of science by politics and the military have stubbornly persisted, as if science “of itself ” and properly used had nothing to do with its sordid surroundings. Wolfgang Eckart and Heiko Stoff have avoided this essentialistic interpretation of science. In their concluding statements, both of them address the interplay between science and politics and thus take up the issue of how modern science functions within its historical context. Heiko Stoff regards the DFG as an “agent” between science, politics, and industry. Stoff ’s key concept is biopolitics, which, leaning on Foucault, he conceives as a technology of power and as being formed in the interplay mediated by the DFG between biological science and politics. The DFG had initially – and in reply to the crisis of the 1920s – conveyed the technicalization of biological knowledge. After 1933 or 1939 respectively, this development turned, as Stoff puts it, into a “total politicization and governmental takeover (Staatsbemächtigung) of life” that was made possible by a notion of national emergency and the invalidation of former legal norms. Thus, for instance the synthesis or substitution of Wirkstoffe was meant to improve the health and efficiency of the Volkskörper (body of the nation). What remains worthy of further discussion is whether biopolitics after 1949 was in fact, as Stoff thinks, succeeded by risk policy or whether risk policy was not likewise biopolitics (in Foucault’s sense). Wolfgang Eckart also uses the concept of biopolitics, but in a more descriptive sense, when talking about the utopia of a biopolitical dictatorship. His point is to overcome the compelling distinction between good (that is, unpolitical) and bad (hence, politically contaminated or criminally boundless) research. That is why Gabriele Moser’s inclusion of cancer research seems to me to be particularly significant. If one disregards Blohme’s project in Nesselstedt, which presumably did not materialize, work on cancer evidently was normal research that is still considered important today. With its strictly scientific orientation, it was astonishingly resistant toward the ideologically burdened approaches of hereditary pathology.

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Eckart makes the suggestion that all subfields of medical research be conceived as contributions to an instrumental modernity whose rationality, according to Riccardo Bavay, was directed toward a “progressive, tightly organized, performanceoriented society selected according to racial biological criteria.” The DFG proved to be a part of the instrumentation for achieving a modern health dictatorship. It implemented modern research structures by streamlining procedures, establishing central organizations, and concentrating resources. As a common realm of the German research elite, the DFG was just as much involved in the biopolitical rationality of the Third Reich as were its members, and thus the issue of the organization’s complicity in cognizance is basically moot: Insofar as the reviewers and expert department heads knew about them, the planned human experiments occurred with the knowledge of the DFG. This remains valid even when the direct support of research at the expense of human lives was under control of the SS. When it was a matter of supporting good science, the impeccableness and consistency of the method was the decisive criterion (apart from the reputation of the applicant), not strict adherence to universal human rights. The philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius, who, as the daughter of the pathologist Friedrich Martius and his Jewish wife Martha, came from a parental home strongly influenced by biologism, published in 1953 a text entitled, Utopias of Human Breeding. Social Darwinism and Its Consequences (Utopien der Menschenzüchtung. Der Sozialdarwinismus und seine Folgen). This is the first attempt I know of to grasp the conceptional causes or basic ideology of the Nazi crimes. ConradMartius argued that biologism led to the atomization of the person. In political and scientific calculations, a human being figured only as an atomic person, as an anonymous element within a collective, as a statistical quantity. Conrad-Martius thereby attempted to depict elements of a modernity that had begun before 1933 and did not end after 1945 and which we nowadays seek to comprehend far more expertly by concepts like “technicalization of the biosciences,” “norming and optimizing the body of the nation (Volkskörper),” or “centralization, rationalization, and differentiation.” Building upon this interpretation, science between 1933 and 1945 should not be described as the victim of a “relapse into barbary,” but rather as a motor of progress cut free from the ropes of the constitutional state. Historically, we might speak of a “perversion of modernity,” but not of “perverted science.”

V THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

BORDER GUARD AND BORDER CROSSER OF SCIENCE – THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 1920–1970 Patrick Wagner In December 1958, professor A submitted an application to the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) for financial assistance to pursue research in his specialty. The expert reviewers did not want to approve it, even though they had hardly any objections about the content. They were rather quite disturbed about the circumstance that A intended to work on the same source holdings that his colleague professor B was already examining. The DFG had been supporting the latter with a similar grant since April 1958. In their eyes, B’s research possessed “material priority” on the argument that his application had been drafted with “clear preconceptions.” His research seemed to hold out the prospect of generating innovative results and the most important professional journal, whose editor also happened to be one of the DFG reviewers, would be publishing an initial article by B on the topic shortly. First A was approached with the suggestion that he withdraw his application, but he resubmitted a modified form of it in April 1959. This put the reviewers in a quandary. On the one hand, they were pleading for a rejection of the application because it absolutely had to be prevented that B’s researches be “seriously impaired” by A’s work on the same source material. On the other hand, an “entirely negative answer” could not be given because that would “probably elicit substantial personal reactions and thereby also indirectly endanger the project” by professor B.1 The DFG’s Joint Committee had little feel for so much diplomacy, however, and roundly rejected A’s application in November 1959. Thus, before the Fischer controversy surrounding the outbreak of World War I emerged into the light of day, its outcome had already been predetermined. By being able with DFG funding to acquaint himself with the material at an early stage of his research, the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer (professor B) had an advantage over his most important rival, Egmont Zechlin, another lecturer in Hamburg (professor A). Only when three years later the Fischer controversy had reached its zenith with the publication of Fischer’s book Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961 did the DFG’s expert board remember its role as an impartial sponsor of intellectual competition and decide to grant material assistance to both Fischer and Zechlin to further their researches. Because Fischer alone had been supported up to then, the reviewers judged in 1964 that it was “appropriate, according to the 1 Synopsis of expert opinions, Oct. 1959, DFG-Archiv (DFGA), Ze 75, fol. 8604; cf. also the synopsis of expert opinions on B’s applications, DFGA, Fi 58, fols. 2332 f.

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principle ‘also hear the other side,’” to support Zechlin as well.2 The total sum that Zechlin received from the DFG by 1975 even exceeded Fischer’s – but only from the moment that his public argumentative “defeat” already seemed sealed. The expert board for history had acted in a way that in a certain manner typified the role that the DFG’s, respectively, its forerunner the Emergency Association’s (Notgemeinschaft, NG) funding practice played between 1920 and 1970 at important turning points in the humanities and social sciences. It did not decide on a central scholarly controversy but it did consciously alter the competitive conditions for rivaling trends early on in favor of one party. This did not always result in the benefit of innovation. Often enough the orientation by the DFG’s expert reviewers toward the professional mainstream, in which they themselves had matured, led to a strengthening of already established trends. Nevertheless, all the subdivisions of this research project “The History of the German Research Foundation” can define points in which DFG funding at least helped set the relay switches in the direction of new problems, methods, and institutionalizations in the studied fields. All these individual studies have additionally demonstrated that viewing these individual fields from the DFG’s perspective is a suitable way to get a clearer grasp of the phenomena of change just as of continuity in the topics, issues, categories, and methods of science. Therefore, the following overview is primarily directed at two guiding questions. First: What importance did the DFG have in the development of the humanities and social sciences between 1920 and 1970? What influence did the DFG’s actions have on this development? And second: What can be gathered about the developmental tendencies of these disciplines from the perspective of an analysis of DFG funding policy? THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DFG’S FUNDING POLICY FOR THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES With regard to the question of the DFG’s influence and the effect its funding policy had on the way that the humanities and social sciences developed, five aspects prove to be central: first, the sheer material dimension of DFG funding and its consequences; second, the DFG’s role in the formation of new disciplines or, respectively, interdisciplinary fields; third, the DFG’s function as an authority on scientific “quality control” and as a border guard at the often unclear dividing line between the humanities and other forms of cultural knowledge; fourth, the significance of the DFG’s funding practice for continuities in research and for changes in its path; and finally, fifth, the DFG’s function as a mediating authority between, on one the hand, internal disciplinary debates, needs, and logics and, on the other hand, the repercussions for fields external to that discipline – whether affecting fellow professionals from other disciplines, or affecting politics or the general public. 2 audiatur et altera pars: Gollwitzer’s opinion, 5 Aug. 1964, DFGA, Ze 75, without folio enumeration.

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At first glance, the material dimension of DFG funding policy in its simplest, statistically apprehensible form would seem to confirm the developmental tendency that many researchers in the humanities hold to be self-evident – that is, a loss of importance suffered by their disciplines within the total spectrum of research supported by the DFG. At the end of the 1920s, the portion of the DFG’s budget dedicated to the humanities and social sciences came to about 30 percent, whereas under National Socialism, it came to a nominal average of 22 percent – “nominal” insofar as it takes just the regular DFG budget covered by the Reich allocation into account. Medicine, the agricultural, natural, and engineering sciences received additional subsidies, however, from the DFG and the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat) tapping the funds of the Four-Year Plan. In the refounded NG/DFG from 1949, the humanities never again reached their peak share of the 1920s. Around 1960 their total share of DFG funding was at about 15 percent, a value that is still reflected in the annual report for 2004.3 To understand what happened here, it is helpful to take a comparative look at the DFG’s two major lines of support – the regular Individual Grants Program (Normalverfahren) to support separate research projects and the area of targeted support for cooperative groups of researchers to work on fields of interest defined by the DFG, marked since 1926 by the signet Cooperative Projects (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten) and from 1953 on Priority Programs (Schwerpunktprogramme). In the latter the humanities and social sciences were always grossly underrepresented. In the regular program, on the contrary, they were disproportionately active. In 1931, for example, 47 percent of research stipends of the Individual Grants Program went to the humanities and social sciences whereas they were just barely involved in Cooperative Projects with 5 out of a total of 148. Then in 1960 their share of the regular program amounted to 26 percent but their participation in the Priority Programs was only 5 percent. Thus, in the long run, the share held by the humanities and social sciences in DFG support dropped in inverse proportion to the importance gained by Priority Programs in its funding policy. The low representation by the humanities in the Priority Programs was not the consequence of purposeful discrimination against these disciplines on the part of the DFG panels. During the 1950s, when Priority Programs started out, even vaguely formulated proposals from the ranks of the humanities could count on approval by DFG boards. But there were very few such proposals. Even at that point in time, a relevant segment of humanists was still reluctant to plan cooperatively based research with an interdisciplinary division of labor and as a “major enterprise.” They rather conserved a style of doing science fixated on the creative individual researcher, and the DFG extended to them a comfortably furnished niche for that with its regular program. If we alter the perspective and ask how relevant NG/DFG funding may have been for scholarship in the humanities between 1920 and 1970, the first thing to remark is that this funding institution played a central role in providing for the 3 Cf. on these and the following statistical figures, Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 69, 234, 369, 408, as well as Orth, Förderprofil.

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basic furnishings of many fields over the long term. In the 1920s just as in the 1950s, subventions by the NG/DFG secured the foundation of new professional journals with specific profiles and topic groupings and hence the pluralization of innerdisciplinary communication. Its involvement in supporting editions, dictionaries, and lexicons was even more important. Since the early 1920s, almost every such relatively large enterprise that had hitherto been sponsored by the academies at its core now lived off NG/DFG funds – whether it be the Thesaurus linguae latinae, the Grimmsche Deutsche Wörterbuch, or the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The DFG continued this support of basic research for the humanities with high financial commitments even during World War II. The Grimm dictionary alone received as late as 1944/45 around 150,000 reichsmarks. By the mid-1960s, 30 percent of the monies spent by the DFG on the humanities flowed into such long-term major projects. The Latin thesaurus, with its 20 staff researchers received 250,000 deutschmarks annually at that time.4 This prioritization by the DFG of specific promotional formats privileged specific research paths and secured continuity for them over long periods of time. The support for the Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde from 1928 established the thinking about this discipline as a correlation between territory and nationality, Raum and Volk, and secured a central place for this perspective within the field for decades to come. At the same time, this view of these dictionary, editorial, and atlas projects dilutes the impression just made that the individualistic tradition of these disciplines dominated in DFG-sponsored humanities. The DFG rather attempted to create acceptance for variants of interdisciplinarily designed large-scale research also in these disciplines. The privileged promotion of the Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde, with its 37 regional offices and over 20,000 volunteer staff members, was supposed to promote not only the Volkstum paradigm, but specifically also the turn of the humanities toward a large-scale empirical and at the same time interdisciplinary style of research borrowed from methods used in the natural sciences. The same applies to the DFG-funded “war effort by the humanities” (Kriegseinsatz der Geisteswissenschaften) from 1940 on, with about 600 participant scholars from all the disciplines, and likewise to the move to link researchers from the humanities and social sciences to the research attendant to the Nazi Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost). Over the long term, though, it was less these campaign-like mobilizations than the dictionary, atlas, and edition projects that established themselves as major projects in the humanities and social sciences alongside individual researches. Nevertheless, most researchers in the humanities of relevance to the DFG took the regular route of the Individual Grants Program. Between 1949 and 1968, a total of 1,638 humanists submitted proposals within its framework – namely, an average of three per head. If one sets this value relative to the size of the still quite surveyable “population” of the humanities during this period – around 1954, the professional staff in these disciplines at West German universities counted barely 1,000 heads; in 1966 it came to 3,200 – it becomes evident that, during the first 4

Cf. Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 485–493.

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decades of the Federal Republic, the DFG was an important resource for a relevant minority among scholars in the humanities.5 Thus, we come to the second aspect to be discussed here: the DFG’s function in the formation and consolidation of individual disciplines. Two of the disciplines or, respectively, interdisciplinary fields of research examined by us can be said to have become academically established by virtue of the chance given them by DFG support. This applies to Eastern European research on national and cultural territory (Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung). The NG/DFG’s support since the late 1920s contributed toward the establishment of the new field of Ostforschung (Eastern stdies) and prepared its institutionalization at universities. But it applies much more strongly to Volkskunde (folklore). NG/DFG sponsorship of the major project Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde set the preconditions for it being able to become an academic discipline complete with professorial chairs, curricula, and scientific methodological tools. Organizationally, the atlas formed a special case because the DFG not only made money available but itself built up most of the necessary infrastructure for it as well. The headquarters of this major project was accommodated directly under the NG/DFG’s own roof at its Head Office. The new discipline was thus already symbolically conveyed from the milieu of homeland researchers into the inner core of scholarship. Sponsorship by the NG/DFG constituted a kind of notarial attestation as serious scholarship for the research supported. This was highly important at the end of the 1920s well beyond the field of folklore studies: In the interwar period the humanities were competing not only with the natural sciences but also with an abundance of other forms of knowledge – whether totalitarian ideologies, philosophies of life, or occultisms – over the role of source of meaning for society, which they had still taken for granted as being wholly their own during the Kaiserreich. In the process it proved necessary to reassure themselves again and again that the character of their own interpretation was indeed Wissenschaft (science), especially because the boundaries between science and nonscience seemed to be becoming ever starker for the supposed exact sciences while they were becoming ever more diffuse for the humanities.6 The NG/DFG therefore also had a third function for the humanities, besides assuring basic financing for specific styles of research and supporting the formation of new disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of research since the 1920s: that of patrolling its outer boundaries. A conspicuously large proportion of the vetting processes obliged the expert reviewers to deal with applications by academic outsiders, particularly during the 1920s, whose projects they faulted for lacking “scientific significance in the strictest sense” thus banishing them from the holiest of holies, academic research.7 Even under National Socialism the DFG from time to time demarcated the border between science and agitation 5 Cf. the figures for the personnel in the liberal arts in Weingart et al. (eds.), Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 81 ff. 6 [Editor’s note] The German word Wissenschaft includes the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. 7 Hauptausschussliste 4/1930–31, p. 16, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/111.

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propaganda (Agitprop) by demonstratively rejecting applications by Nazi publicists not in possession of scientific qualifications – and precisely for this reason it could serve as a source of scientific reputation: the Ancestral Heritage Foundation (Ahnenerbe) as well as the Wannseeinstitut of the SS were not so much reliant on the money granted by the DFG as on the status that came along with it, so to speak, as institutions of “genuine” research. The early 1950s represented a second high point for the DFG’s funding practice serving as a gatekeeper. At this time it was a matter of distinguishing between serious researchers in the humanities and völkische Dilettanten – to borrow the contemporary terminology by the reviewers. For example, the historian Friedrich Wagner’s project on “Europe and the Franconian spirit” fell through in 1953. The experts identified it as “the typical project of a sort of political nationalistic ‘history of mentality’ that in its conceptual jumbling can only have a disastrous influence.”8 The later inventor of the Sozialdisziplinierung model, the historian Gerhard Oestreich, was almost sorted out as a dilettante then as well. In the second half of the 1930s he had been employed in the Institute of General Theory on Defense (Institut für allgemeine Wehrlehre) at the University of Berlin, which had henceforth been considered an institution for charlatans coddled by the Wehrmacht. Against the objection of the committee chairman, Siegfried Kaehler, who insisted that Oestreich’s “dilettantism” must be “insurmountable at his age,” his mentor Fritz Hartung was finally able to persuade the expert board of history that Oestreich had meanwhile “undergone an evolution toward serious scientificness” and had distanced himself from his “proven dilettantish” former colleagues.9 In addition to such exclusions of individual cases, during the 1950s it was mainly a matter of creating an internally binding historical image of the respective field that would make further reflection on the relation between serious science and the Nazi regime obsolete by equating National Socialism with dilettantism. The most important field of boundary security was, for decades, control of entry into the pool of scientific aspirants, and in this respect it was primarily the individualistic regular grants process that possessed great importance. It was not just a matter of helping young academics through the financial drought period on their way to tenureship. By approving or declining aid, the DFG’s expert reviewers also participated in the ritual co-optation of the upcoming generation into the professorial milieu. In the reviews of projects from young scholars in 1925 just like 1955 the young scholars’ relationship with an academic mentor (and his reputation), as well as their conformity to a normatively desirable professor’s habitus, played just as much of a role in the reviews, if not more, than the quality of project proposals by young scholars. One private lecturer of political economics was supported in 1952 because, according to the reviewer, he had “definitely been carved” out of the same “wood as future professors.”10 By contrast, a psychologist was denied support in the following year because he had “made himself disliked” at his former institute and in two articles had heftily 8

Hauptausschussliste 94/1953, p. 38, BAK, B 227/140. Synopsis of expert opinions, May 1953, DFGA, Oe 9, fols. 6999 f. 10 Hauptausschussliste 39/1952, p. 5, BAK, B 227/142. 9

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criticized “academic psychology in Germany.”11 This way the DFG’s assistance to young professionals helped stave off outsiders and reproduce the authoritarian hierarchy of the Ordinarius university. Generally, it can be said that actors of the DFG regarded their promotional practice as a form of accreditation for serious science and by their decisions sought to attach criteria of quality and normative principles that they deemed essential to serious scholarship. These were primarily internal academic criteria, such as an orientation toward acknowledged inventories of knowledge and levels of research, abidance by methodological standards and semantic rules of the field – but all the while regulating the “correct” relationship with potential nonacademic receptive groups, such as politics and the public. In the interwar period, the expert reviewers in most of the humanities considered it an unquestioned component of the habitus of German academics to be ready to involve themselves to further nationalistic interests. From 1949 on, however, in obvious reaction to the experiences of National Socialism, the DFG established general apoliticalness as a criterion of serious unadulterated research. Corinna Unger demonstrated in her study on West German research on Eastern Europe that the DFG consistently confined its support to projects not reputed to have been state commissioned and whose operators viewed their activities as purely subordinate to a logic immanent to science. “Politically steered research,” a DFG reviewer noted as the advisory panel’s consensus in 1958, was “not in a position to yield objective results.”12 Although the government ministries in Bonn and their affiliated research institutions, such as the German Society for Eastern European Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde), considered it very important to procure the official stamp of scientific seriousness evidenced by a DFG grant for their own projects, in order to enhance in precisely that way their political clout, the DFG’s panels and reviewers quite consistently thwarted such desires. Decisions about the further development of an academic field were normatively so heavily charged that divergent positions were completely marginalized from the range of serious research. But – and this is the fourth aspect with reference to the DFG’s function for the humanities and social sciences – below this level of rigorous exclusion of individual approaches, the DFG’s funding practice also repeatedly influenced the developmental direction of the humanities. It influenced the continuity and transformation of the path that research was following. Linguistics exemplifies most clearly how the DFG, on the one hand, helped warrant staffing and conceptual continuities within a discipline over long periods of time and through many political caesuras. On the other hand, however, it was also able to become a factor of innovation. Both the most influential DFG reviewers of this field in the 1950s as well as the top support recipients among the specialist linguists had been serving on the expert boards and as long-time customers within the context of the NG/DFG since the 1920s. The Slavist Max Vasmer served between 1928 and 1934 as elected expert reviewer. Even after the 11

Hauptausschussliste 20/1953, p. 10, BAK B 227/149. Note by Schiel, 30 Jun. 1958, DFGA, 721.27, booklet 3. Cf. Unger, Ostforschung, pp. 271–278 and 422–425. 12

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end of the regulated peer review system, he continued to issue individual opinions up to the end of the war and then, from 1951 until 1959, served once again as an elected expert – a function he eventually “passed on” to a female student of his. After Vasmer’s generation of reviewers conducted a step-by-step pluralization of what had been deemed acceptable linguistic approaches over the course of the 1950s, the generational change of the 1960s encouraged a reorientation in strategy. Younger linguists among the top grant recipients as well as among the representatives of the field then established themselves within the DFG’s boards. They had completed their courses of study after the war, had worked abroad, and had built up intense contacts, above all with American researchers. These representatives of the “younger school” used the Priority Program on Theory Formation and Method Development in Linguistics launched by the DFG in 1969 to push through their approach of structural linguistics as a new paradigm.13 In this case, as in most others in the DFG’s funding policy – this must be stressed here – had no initiating, rather a reactive character. The reviewing and decision processes in the DFG’s boards acted as filters or amplifiers of tendencies that came out of the disciplines themselves. They could delay these tendencies or strengthen them. They influenced the competitive conditions for rival approaches (see the example of the Fischer controversy). But they invented them just as little as they would ultimately decide the debates over the direction to follow. Which preferences the DFG pursued certainly was an influential factor, however, particularly for smaller fields. Furthermore, it makes sense at this place to point out that, in fact, “two cultures” manifested themselves within the DFG during the 1950s and 1960s: the humanities and the natural sciences. This is meant to the extent that there seemed to be a much more highly developed willingness among humanists to squabble about what in their view was the right course for their disciplines to take within the framework of the reviewing process than there was among natural scientists. Some members of the DFG Senate from among the physicist ranks believed they were able to detect this: “The expert reviewers in the fields of the humanities were frequently too critical and subjective.”14 General Secretary Carl-Heinz Schiel also noted nine years later that in the humanities “conflicting opinions certainly were the rule, causing many applications to be rejected whereas, for example, in chemistry, in general, unanimous and positive opinions predominated, causing those applications to be granted much sooner.”15 This may suggest that less consensus existed about the quality criteria immanent to the fields in the humanities and that the corporate identity of these fields was more weakly developed than among natural scientists. It could perhaps ultimately be an indicator of the process of pluralization within the humanities and social sciences that during the 1950s and 1960s accompanied their detachment from nationalistic traditions and their integration into the scientific community of Western provenance. 13

Cf. Ehlers, Wille zur Relevanz. Minutes of the DFG Senate, 22 Feb. 1957, p. 22, BAK, B 227/162891. 15 Minutes of the DFG’s Joint Committee (Hauptausschuss) meeting on 7 Oct. 1966, BAK, film 1831 K. 14

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One last function of the DFG for the humanities and social sciences should be briefly discussed here: its role as an agency within which interests articulated out of one field are mediated with the expectations directed at the field from the outside. As the self-proclaimed representative for “authentic” science as well as its agency for the acquisition and distribution of state funds, the DFG was intent from the outset that the research it supported be perceivable by the public as science’s responses to urgent social needs. Support for “otherworldly and purposeless parlor science” was not its business, the DFG’s annual report from 1929 emphasized. The DFG’s top officials also understood its sponsorship of the Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde, begun in the foregoing year, as an investment about which a positive public response could be expected as a scholarly field of a folkish nature interesting to a broader lay movement.16 In general, within the period under analysis, the humanities had to accustom themselves to the rules of the game of a knowledge society. They had to get used to having their actions evaluated with increasing intensity by unacademic authorities according to unacademic criteria.17 Over the long term the DFG offered in this process five things. It acquainted scholars in the humanities with manners of speaking about the social utility of their actions by establishing the nonacademic relevancy of a project as a criterion of the reviewing process from the outset. Second, it demonstratively satisfied the nonacademic expectations of usefulness in chosen fields and thereby alleviated the expectations bearing down on research as a whole. Third, it conveyed into research nonacademic evaluation demands in the gentle form of “self-governance of science”; and fourth, it guaranteed defined niches in which some researchers in the humanities could purposefully conduct ivory-tower science remote from research that met the practical expectations of society. In sum, though, the DFG’s sponsoring practice in the examined fields in the humanities and social sciences must have, over the long term, increased the willingness of researchers to orient themselves toward nonacademic expectations of utility. Neither the broad-scale turn toward folkloric research in the 1920s, nor the Europeanization of the ethnographic perspective in the 1950s, nor the turn of linguistics at the end of the 1960s toward research approaches reacting to communication phenomena of the present day and the beginning computer age can be explained as purely intrascientific developments. The actors rather exhibited here a fine sensitivity to changes in the conditions of their reception by society, and a look in the DFG’s files documents that this sensibility was trained and supported within the framework of one of those forums. Fifth and last, the DFG attributed an existential function to the humanities from the beginning as a service within the “unity of science” which it propagated. “Education in the engineering sciences cannot dispense with the humanist touch,” according to Fritz Haber, the 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry and cofounder of the DFG’s forerunner, the NG, and the DFG’s longstanding vicepresident. The intellect of the natural and engineering scientist would “wither 16 17

Schmidt-Ott, Einführung, p. 5. Cf. Weingart, Stunde, pp. 18 f., 27–34, and 327–333.

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and go lame if fostering of the ancient humanist culture did not continue,”18 for only through the intellectual horizon of its bearers would the “expertise” of engineers and scientists transform “into leadership,” Haber emphasized once again six years later.19 That was why natural and engineering scientists depended on brisk links with the humanities. Into the 1960s the majority of natural scientists within the DFG’s top boards still viewed themselves as neohumanist scholars. This traditional self-assignment by German scientists, which Gabriele Metzler has described, taking physicists as an example, motivated those within the DFG boards to support intense funding of the humanities – on the expectation that it would provide this orientational knowledge that, as DFG President Gerhard Hess noted in 1964, “the human” (also the physicist and geologist) needed in order to find his way about in scientific technical modernity.20 From the founding of the NG in 1920 until far into the 1960s humanists and social scientists profited from this constellation with protection of sorts by the classical natural sciences. But then it gradually fell apart through a change in mentality among natural scientists in connection with generational change; a shift in weightings within the natural sciences away from physicists and toward biological scientists; and not least because of growing competition over funding as support became scarcer from the end of the 1960s on. With respect to their share of DFG funds, the humanists and social scientists held their own quite well, but their “perceived” loss of status within the DFG was considerable. In 1971 Hartmut von Hentig was already complaining in the DFG Senate that the humanities had sunk to a residual category without any distinguishing profile, and such complaints have not quieted down since.21 THE DFG GRANT FILES AND INTERNAL VIEWS ON THE SCIENTIFIC DENKKOLLEKTIVE We come to the second guiding question of this article: What do we learn about the humanities and social sciences when we examine them from the perspective of their support by the DFG? The minutes of the DFG’s committees and the texts drawn up for the reviewing process offer unique interior views on what Ludwik Fleck has called the scientific thought collective (wissenschaftliche Denkkollektive).22 In the deliberations on project proposals in the expert boards – to continue to speak in Fleck’s terms of Denkstile and Denkzwänge – the styles and compulsions of thinking within the disciplines become apparent as well as their development and evolution. These are in many respects specific to a given field. But two basic evolutionary trends are observable overall in the German humanities and social 18

Quoted in Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, p. 42. Fritz Haber, speech Über Staat und Wissenschaft in the minutes of the joint meeting of the NG’s Executive Committee (Präsidium) and the Joint Committee, 29 Jan. 1927, BAK, R 73/91, fols. 76–86, 82. 20 Hess, Förderung, p. 12; cf. Metzler, Wissenschaft. 21 Minutes of the DFG Senate meeting on 21 Oct. 1971, p. 10, BAK, B 227/171352. 22 Cf. Fleck, Entstehung. 19

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sciences: on the one hand, its growing constriction to the construct of a national self, circumscribed by the term Volk and the non-German other between 1920 and 1945; and on the other hand, its step-by-step turning away from the guiding categories of Volk, community (Gemeinschaft), and Führer toward “the West,” society (Gesellschaft), and pluralism in the early Federal Republic. The experiences of war, defeat, and revolution led as of 1918 to the advance of formulations of “crisis,” as the “dominant patterns of self-interpretation” in the German humanities.23 As these humanists perceived it, the crises in their fields coincided with the political crisis of the nation and were therefore conceived as one. German humanists from all the disciplines were responding, across the board, to the bewildering complexity of the modern world, the shattering of conventional ties and orders, by emphatically attempting to construct what was supposed a natural “whole” within their particular field that could henceforth serve as an identification container specific to the field, which as a general rule was worried about its “identity” as an academic discipline, as well as toward society as a whole. In this connection a profusion of equally vague concepts – Gestalt, Geist, Gemeinschaft, Erlebnis – circulated through the disciplines and gained a “kind of suggestive plausibility” primarily from this omnipresence.24 But das Volk became with breathtaking speed the ultimate guiding concept. During the 1920s hardly any discipline in the humanities or social sciences did not recognize the Volk, the “nation,” as the actual object of research, the true addressee of their texts, and in the end, the final judge assessing the value of any scientific activity, whereby in the latter two roles, the adjective deutsch was implied where it was not explicitly stated. The DFG also explicitly regarded the mission of their researchers in the humanities in 1932 as furthering “awareness of the powers of our Volkstum.”25 The internal aim was to reconstruct an “unalloyed” Deutschtum against the onslaught of modernity within the relevant disciplinary topic – whether it be language, material culture, traditions, philosophy, art, or history – and to present it to the current nation as an orientational ideal for a newly ascending Volk. The external aim was to pursue “antagonistic” research (Frank-Rutger Hausmann). At its center was, on the one hand, the attempt to shore up German claims of dominance in Europe with historical, linguistic, and cultural studies and, on the other, to scientifically survey the intellectual profile of potential opponents in war. Beginning with the end of the 1920s, the NG/DFG supported such research with increasing intensity. The research on the national and cultural territory (Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung) of the eastern and western European neighboring states, for example, was supposed to prove that at least their border areas were German. At the same time, as one pertinent applicant emphasized in 1928, it was supposed to strengthen “German tribal awareness” of Germanic peo23 24

Selbstdeutung: Eckel, Geisteswissenschaften, p. 367. Roughly translated as “form, intellectual spirit, community, and live experience.” Ibid.,

p. 368. 25 Denkschrift “Zur Lage der Notgemeinschaft,” Aug. 1932, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, papers of Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, vol. C 69, II (M). Emphasis added.

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ples abroad.26 When the linguist Friedrich Lorentz attempted in 1927 to apply for DFG funding for his research on the Kashubian language, the reviewers exerted massive pressure on him to narrow down his originally broad-ranging project to an analysis of the German influence on Kashubian and thus to underpin German claims to West Prussia.27 Of course, before 1933 these efforts to shape the profiles of the German humanities and social sciences encountered opposition within the DFG. The Joint Committee member, Bruno Kuske, criticized many times the extent of DFG support for research on Eastern European nationality and cultural grounding. According to him, these were merely “fashionable currents” and playgrounds for dilettantes.28 Expert boards did sometimes reject nationalistic projects as scientifically insignificant, although politically welcome. The “seizure of power” by the National Socialists put an end to this pluralism. With the introduction of racist patterns of interpretation, the study of the topic Volk was conceptually radicalized in all disciplines. The previously pronounced cultural superiority of Deutschtum over its Slavic neighbors was explained in biological terms, restyling it as an inalterable phenomenon of nature. The next radicalizing step followed with the outbreak of war in 1939. Scientific legitimization of the German expansion lost relevancy, because sheer success seemed to already justify it. The humanities and social sciences offered instead to make available knowledge of concrete utility for waging the war, establishing occupational dominance, and executing the forced ethnic reordering, mainly in Eastern Europe. The peak of this development was the participation from 1941 on by a large number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the DFG-funded research affiliated with the Nazi Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost). The DFG made available a total of 510,000 reichsmarks for this major project.29 But as was generally the case in this field, the DFG as an institution did not need to be the initiator or driving force. Just a few days after the German assault on Poland, great numbers of historians, linguists, and other scholars on culture and economics already began, on their own initiative, to deluge the Nazi regime with memoranda about how to Germanize Eastern Europe with scientific precision. The DFG helped to channel, group, and coordinate such initiatives, but it did not first have to stimulate them. The policy for the past for German researchers in the humanities and social sciences after 1945 and the troublesome process of their reorientation has already been discussed from many other perspectives. The DFG’s perspective does not offer anything radically new. An analysis of the reviewing during the 1950s does show more clearly than other approaches, however, what intellectual effort this reorientation entailed – what styles of thinking, compulsory ideas, and bans the actors had to overcome – but also how hesitantly they went about it. During the first few years after the renewed founding of the NG/DFG in 1949, the experts formulated new rules for scientific semantics. A small set of concepts and catego26 27 28 29

Proposal by Julius Grébs, 10 Jan. 1928, BAK, R 73/15841. Cf. in brief the book by Ehlers, Sprachforschung. Minutes of the DFG Hauptausschuss, 30 Oct. 1930, p. 44, BAK, R 73/101. Cf. Heinemann, Wissenschaft.

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ries that “had been ridden to death in the elapsed epoch” were – thus the review of a musicological project from 1954 – henceforth considered taboo.30 At first only semantic discipline was demanded, not necessarily any distance in content from the past. The “semantic remodeling” in the humanities and social sciences followed the conceptual changes with a certain delay, primarily in the form of orientation toward “Western,” meaning at heart American theories and methods. The USA had already been a constant presence in the foundation’s files from the 1920s as a challenge. Yet these American fellow professionals still counted as competitors whom the German researchers in the humanities and social sciences could face from a basic position of superiority, albeit an increasingly precarious one. To that extent the U. S. competition even appeared useful. Around 1930 the funding of major archeological dig campaigns in the Near East, as well as research expeditions to Italy in art history could be wonderfully carried forward with the remark that they were “all the more urgent, as a strong interest is manifest on the American side and in the case of a rejection the labors of German science would be lost.”31 In the newly founded NG/DFG of 1949, however, only one issue was discussed from the outset, namely: How far ought the individual disciplines emulate the status and model of their American pendants? During the early 1950s the reviewers attempted to establish a standard and obligatory pattern to follow when dealing with the new scientific model, America. It combined the acquisition of knowledge – the importation of and familiarization with internationally acknowledged methods – with ritualized signals of critical distancing from the American interpretation of science. Whoever wanted to have their application succeed was well advised to underscore that, although American professionals in the field may perhaps be ahead with their empirical methods, a German scientist nevertheless maintained the advantage on the grounds of a correct – in other words, philosophically holistic – fundamental understanding of science. Curt Bondy, a returned emigré psychology professor in Hamburg, was deemed worthy of support in 1952 because he was introducing American testing methods into West Germany. Nevertheless, the reviewers did not want to abstain from making their positive vote dependent on having Bondy admit that such methods “do not access the lower levels of personality at all.” Bondy had not even alleged as much, either. They also demanded that he be prepared to abandon the “attitudes about the academic routine” that he was bringing back with himself “from the USA.”32 At the same time another reviewer from sociology faulted the returnee Arcadius Gurland’s proposed project for exhibiting precisely those characteristics of American sociological research that generally distinguished it negatively from conventional German science: “Much apparatus, little independent thinking.” According to the reviewer, the “rapidly advancing Americanization of the formerly so independent German social sciences” would 30

Expert opinion by Schier, 27 Jan. 1954, DFGA, Da 15, fol. 6282. According to the expert opinion on a travel grant to Ravenna from 1931, Hauptausschussliste 2/1931/32, pp. 66, BAK, R 73/114. 32 Review by Gustav Kafka, 24 Dec. 1952, DFGA, Bo 59, fol. 2787. 31

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end up stifling it with an “overgrowth” of empiricism by projects such as the one by Gurland.33 Generational change in the 1960s was needed in academia in order to transform the orientation of a supposedly more profound traditional intellectuality of German science into a critical yet unbiased curiosity toward the scientific world “out there.” Many scholars in the humanities and social sciences with study and work experience in the USA first obtained professorships and thereupon entrance to the DFG’s boards. It would be unduly overrating the DFG’s influence to describe it as the driving force behind this process of transition. Nonetheless, it was one of the arenas in which this change took place and the DFG’s files permit a particularly plastic reconstruction of it. THE DFG AS AN INTERFACE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND SOCIETY As a rule, within the period under examination, the DFG’s promotional policy reacted to tendencies in the various fields. It filtered and slowed them down, or strengthened and accelerated some to the disadvantage of others. In that way it influenced the competitive relations within the fields to a substantial degree, because the DFG’s sponsorship was of great importance to most fields in the humanities, materially as well as with regard to their sense of self-worth and relevancy. The DFG accustomed scholars in the humanities and social sciences to new research styles – such as, large-scale interdisciplinary research – and guaranteed at the same time the survival of traditional scientific ideals, such as that of the creative individual researcher. But, above all, within its boards the DFG mediated between the internal needs of fields and external expectations. The DFG was one of those interfaces at which the mutual mobilization/self-mobilization of science, politics, and the public was concretely practiced. That is why its files are an excellent source if one is interested in the reactions of researchers in the humanities and social sciences to the basic political currents of their times, whether during the völkische 1920s to the 1940s, or the “Westernizing” 1950s and 1960s.

33

Hauptausschussliste 64a/1953, p. 11, BAK, B 227/140.

THE WILL FOR RELEVANCY – STATE-SUPPORTED RESEARCH ON LINGUISTICS 1920–1970 Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers The existing sources on the sponsoring activities of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) offer a wide and fertile field for observing the converging histories of the field of linguistics and society. In the deliberations on the granting of financial support to projects in linguistics, in which representatives of the field had to reach mutual agreement with scholars from other disciplines and the state officials overseeing research funding, the immanent research logic of linguistics had to be mediated with the changing exoteric needs and expectations of a multidisciplinary audience. Hence, my study examines which linguists were granted or denied state support in the competition for limited funding in the period between 1920 and 1970 and for which point in time, for which research topics, and on the grounds of which arguments. The extraordinarily high number of cases precluded a complete documentation of all the individual grants. Instead, typical issues and central focuses of support for research in linguistics will be analyzed foremost with the goal of retracing the overarching lines of development in the relationship between the history of the field and the political upheavals in the period under study. Following this brief synopsis of my results, three guiding questions will contextualize my most important findings in three sections, each regarded from a different angle. WHAT IMAGE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS BETWEEN 1920 AND 1970 DO THE DFG’S FUNDING PROCESSES CONVEY? Even before 1914, voices demanding a radical reorientation of the field of linguistics could be heard in Germany in close connection with the epistemological crisis in which the German humanities viewed themselves as having fallen into at the close of the Kaiserreich.1 Karl Vossler, Hugo Schuchardt, and Rudolf Meringer exemplify the completely different efforts to open up new horizons of a “positivist” study of language that had hitherto mainly centered on phoneme and form, whether from the perspective of the history of the humanities or civilization, or 1 On the radical reorientation of the cognitive fields in the humanities within the context of the “crisis of historicism,” cf. Eckel, Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 12 ff.

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whether by reaching out to questions of material culture. The outcome of World War I deepened the sense of crisis in linguistics. Far into the 1930s, its internal controversies continued to be driven by movements in search of new social relevancy.2 The military defeat, collapse of the political system, and trimmed state borders all pointed out the direction in which linguistics could find and forge new meaning: in language as the seal of the greatness, permanence, and unity of German culture. The profile of linguistic projects that the DFG, or respectively, its forerunner the Emergency Association for Science (Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft, NG), supported from 1920 on also illustrates a clear focus of interest in research subjects that permitted a broadening of the horizon of linguistics to include new problems in the study of civilization. During the 1920s and 1930s, the most important emphasis by far in state sponsorship lay in the area of lexicography and research on regional languages. The intervention of cultural history in the structure of language in the area of vocabulary is most plausibly apprehended in regional variations, in the cultural spatiality connected with linguistic manifestations. In the history of this specialty, the grant priorities of the time not only demarcate an actual perspectival broadening in the field. Some of them also represent methodological innovation. The supported dialectological enterprises sought new empirical foundations by applying methods of experimental phonetics or conducting areal surveys after the model of the German linguistic atlas, Deutscher Sprachatlas.3 Project proposals that were still following the neogrammarian tradition in linguistics were increasingly denied support mainly in the 1930s. A demand for interdisciplinary and social appreciation of linguistics was also articulated in the rhetorics of the expert opinions and proposals within the funding procedure. In these texts, linguistics is frequently stylized by its representatives as empirical basic science for interdisciplinary connections in research that can be outlined as cultural history or folkloric research. By embedding linguistic projects in this encompassing research horizon, the field claimed for itself, on the one hand, a key position in the terrain occupied by the disciplines in the humanities and, on the other hand, that its results were relevant for national policy. Because this research orientation of linguistics toward political goals only encountered isolated objections in the second half of the 1920s, it can be presumed that in general it met the expectations by the interdisciplinary community of scholars and the political public for the field. Within the framework of the funding process, in which allocation of state support was negotiated, the deployment of this relevancy rhetorics was evidently functional. In the applications and reviews drawn up within the funding process beginning around 1937, and more so from 1939 onward, there is an broad prevalence 2 Knobloch, Sprachforschung, esp. the overview section there on the “Weimar crisis polyphony – an attempt to regain a solid foothold,” pp. 45 ff. 3 Internationally, the comprehensive questionnaire survey method, which was paradigmatically developed for the Deutscher Sprachatlas and for a long time was the characteristic method of German dialectology, competed particularly against the direct method employed by French dialectology.

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of “rhetorics of an instrumentalization”4 that linguistics posed in the practical service of conquest, dominion, and exploitation of foreign regions. With the outbreak of war the previously extensively supported area of dialect geography was direly bereft of state support, and research on regional linguistics, if there was any at all, was reduced to examining Germanic regions abroad. The orientation of state support of science toward results anticipating “war importance” intensified the building up of new application perspectives in linguistics research connected with utility to the military and hegemonial organization. After the NG/DFG was refounded in 1949, initially the sponsored linguistics was formed through continuity, in staffing as well as substance, with the linguistic history of civilization and ethnicity from the interwar period. Lexicography and lexicology in general remained the most important priorities in the supported research. Projects on phonological history in the neogrammarian tradition, by contrast, remained of entirely marginal importance in state-supported research. Regional linguistics during the 1950s was also a prominent focus of DFG support, although the proportion of pertinent projects did not regain the same total subsidy level for linguistics research as at the height of the dialectology wave of the 1930s. The issue of expellees, displaced ethnic Germans, temporarily created a current-day social contextual reference for this direction of research in that outdated concepts of territorially linked culture of the 1920s and 1930s reclaimed relevancy in national policy. After 1945 research on semantics in particular could distinguish itself from among the approaches in ethnographic linguistics developed in the 1930s and build up its position to a certain degree in the research routine. The hypothesized power of the mother tongue vouching for personal identity found broad acceptance, above all among nonprofessionals, in the insecure postwar society of the early Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Already at the beginning of the 1960s there was a clear shift in the profile of supported linguistics research in favor of synchronic, structural projects. The reason was a need for accelerated teacher training at universities.5 By that time, as the DFG’s grant files show, research projects on semantics had also already begun to lose plausibility among colleagues in the field. A trenchant modernization of linguistics started in the FRG in the mid-1960s, with its appreciation of international advancements in the specialty, above all, from the USA. Research from the perspective of cultural history of the humanities and folklore, which had been unquestioningly adopted from the interwar period, was displaced by a strict narrowing down of the field to the study of the language structure (Sprachsystem) and communicative regularities as well as the quest for rigid scientific methods of analysis and descriptive procedures. Research projects on automated translation and computer linguistics had an important catalytic function in this modernizing boost, because they were able to link structural basic research with an extremely promising application goal, at least for the medium term. A young generation of linguists entered the research arena as bearers of this moderniza4 5

Ash, Wissenschaft, p. 40. Weingart et al., Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 96 ff.

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tion. Most of them had earned their academic qualifications after World War II and often brought back to Germany international ideas from many years of stays abroad. One essential contribution toward the surprisingly rapid success of “modern linguistics” in the FRG was that this generation was able to bolster its self-perception and representation toward the outside world by using the “fallen behind” discourse. This sense of being behind gave impetus to policy on science and education in the FRG from the 1950s onward and with the “Sputnik shock” of 1957 at the latest was also deployed in emotional public debates. The DFG also engaged its grant instruments in the “catch-up contest” of research with the leading nations in international science, particularly with the USA. The DFG offered modern linguistics the financial and institutional backing to rapidly consolidate their positions in active research in a specific effort to encourage trends in the humanities that promised to reconnect them with the technological and methodological standards of international science. A look at state-supported research in linguistics confirms for this field the general finding that continuities outweighed discontinuities in the development of German humanities between 1920 and the mid-1960s.6 The changing referential social contexts presented by the political caesuras in 1933, 1939, and 1945 offered for linguistics new prospective applications and also determined more or less rapid shifts in research priorities, but the basic orientation toward cultural or Volkstum research was little affected by these breaks. The 1960s marked a profound change in the professional understanding that manifested as a radical break with tradition at the surface of the professional debates and research practice. The phase of polarizing outbidding of obsolete traditions in the field had essentially ended already by the mid-1970s with the broad institutional establishment of modern linguistics, making way for a smartly advancing definition of modern approaches over the further course of the 1970s. WHAT ROLE DID THE DFG PLAY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FIELD? The palette of linguistic projects that the research foundation (NG/DFG) supported ranges financially within the period under examination from long-running, expensive, and personnel-intensive major enterprises – for example, the so-called monumental works, later the Priority Programs – to pointed grants of publication subsidies or travel reimbursements – some very limited in scope. The first case permitted the materialization of research projects or editions that without extensive public support could not have happened. But the second case also set the material preconditions for research, which universities were unable to meet with their basic equipment and which the individual livelihoods and employment conditions of the applicants seemed to prohibit.

6

Eckel, Geisteswissenschaften, p. 394.

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The DFG was by no means the only source of state support for academic research. In the field of linguistic research there was, above all, the academies, various imperial or federal ministries, respectively, and some regional political agencies as well. Different from research in the natural and engineering sciences, support from private enterprises was not anywhere nearly similarly substantial until 1970. Without being able to reduce the status of the DFG to more precise preliminary figures in the total picture of state institutions for scientific support, it can be assumed that the DFG played by far the leading role in subsidizing linguistics. The majority of most expensive philological major projects, such as the Grimmsche Wörterbuch, or the Thesaurus linguae latinae, which had previously been conducted under the auspices of the academies, were funded by the NG/ DFG from 1920 on. Some were returned to the responsibility of the academies only in the 1980s. In distributing research support by ministries or other political agencies, the DFG often made available not only its administrative resources for processing the financial transactions. In its advisory capacity it sometimes also exerted influence on the concrete allocation of such financial resources. In state support of linguistics it hence was of central importance not only by virtue of the volume of its financial disbursements but also by its steering function. The research projects it supported are also instructive as concerns the development of the field as a whole. They were, as a rule, checked and sanctioned by representatives of the field voted – under National Socialism these professionals were appointed – on the DFG’s boards, which viewed itself as a “self-governing body” of German science. The projects on linguistics supported by the research foundation could thus generally claim a high degree of professional validity. The initiative for the research projects, apart from a few important exceptional cases that will be discussed later, came from the field itself. The formulation of new research goals and the delimiting of current subjects of research hence mostly lay on the side of the applicants from the discipline; the work by the foundation’s boards initially was rather reactive in character. The vetting and decision-making process on these boards functioned as an amplifier that retroactively slowed or quickened the pace of research interests articulated from the field. In this way the research support could weigh into the competitive relations of different approaches and trends in the field. Thus, the research foundation contributed toward securing precedence for the dialectological geography pursued by the Marburg school over the research program on local grammar. At the same time, the research foundation offered a discursive forum to linguistics where members of the field, that means applicants as well as reviewers, mediated the respective research interests with the – supposed – expectations of the interdisciplinary scholarly community. They were represented by the deciding Joint Committee, on the one hand, and the critical public, on the other hand. The reviewers from the field hence not only regulated with their recommendations the distribution of resources “into the interior” of the field, but they simultaneously communicated its interests “toward the outside” and made it argumentatively able to connect with an audience transcending the individual field. In this forum research projects in linguistics could gain acknowledgment, above all,

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if they were able to demonstrate interdisciplinary relevancy and nonacademic relevancy over and above their importance immanent to the field. From the beginning the research foundation pointedly invested in the communicative infrastructure of the disciplines. In linguistics it also contributed substantially toward maintaining and expanding communications within the field with publication grants, library supplies, and foremost long-term subsidies for professional journals. After initially primarily concerning itself with rescuing the existing supply of professional journals through the postwar period and inflation, in the second half of the 1920s the research foundation also occasionally promoted research specialization in the field of linguistics by supporting the founding of new professional journals with a specific profile and topic grouping. This specialization ran counter to plans under National Socialism to unite and thin out the supply of professional periodicals, which was clearly politically motivated. The DFG used the threat of withdrawing funding as an effective means to apply pressure in order to influence the content and staffing, also of linguistic philological journals. The DFG again regarded its mission as financially stabilizing a specialized periodical landscape in the 1950s. In this period as many as every second professional periodical in the area of linguistics could rely on subsidies from the DFG. Supporting upcoming generations of professionals was a strongly emphasized goal of the NG/DFG in every period. It led candidates, deemed by its expert reviewers to be personally and professionally qualified, into active research, particularly by granting stipends. With this promotion of young professionals in the Weimar Republic just as in the period after World War II, the NG/DFG thus exerted considerable influence on the recruitment of personnel, also in linguistics. After 1934 the DFG turned itself into an instrument of Nazi science policy that was directed specifically at the academic youth, and from then on it only distributed stipends to “racially” and politically correct applicants.7 Academic careers were thus made dependent on political aspects that the DFG also actively participated in implementing. Since the mid-1930s the DFG worked toward the “Aryanization” of linguistic journals, applying pressure through the denial of funding, and thus contributed toward pushing researchers entirely out of German academia, who in many cases had already been ousted from their professorships. After the war, the principle of scientific “self-governance” in the DFG meant that, with rare exceptions, the leading staff in linguistics before 1945 continued to have access to financial resources. Only in a few cases did the political past of applicants flow into the reviewing process as one aspect to be considered, leading to a kind of restrictive period being imposed on the individual concerned. A resumption in the support then mostly marked the beginning of the academic reintegration of these applicants. With its Cooperative Projects (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten) program for research aimed at serving “the common weal” (Volkswohl) in the broadest sense, the NG/ 7 This finding is legitimately emphasized in Mertens, Würdige. Albeit, Merten’s hypothesis of the absolute dominance of political aspects in research support during the Nazi period was relativized as my analysis progressed.

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DFG began from 1926 on, of its own accord, to initiate and coordinate research projects. The first Cooperative Projects in the humanities, researching the Saar region or Eastern Europe, made extensive contact with linguistic issues. In the narrower area of linguistics, however, before 1945 the DFG appeared only in the “cartel of dialect dictionaries” as a research-initiating and planning agency. Coordinated and directed through the editorial office of the Marburg Sprachatlas, from 1934 onward, the DFG conducted major linguistic research with the goal of systematically compiling a Wortgeographie of German dialects inside and outside Reich borders. As was the case with all projects on regional linguistics, the reorientation of research funding to warfare in 1939 removed the financial basis also for this paradigmatic enterprise of German dialectology. After its experiences under National Socialism, the DFG/NG, founded anew in 1949, initially purposefully pursued a purely reactive program of research funding according to which all research initiatives had to emanate from the academic fields themselves. The DFG’s promotion of research was tied to planning perspectives again when the Priority Programs were set up in the 1950s. The first Priority Program on linguistics after the war did not yet follow any homogeneous goal prescribed by the DFG. It rather formed a quite loose bracket for current research projects on dialectology, particularly on ethnic German dialects of the expellees, as well as on semantics. In the 1960s the DFG’s Executive Committee tried to stimulate application of new computer technology in the humanities and in this connection very specifically promoted expanding structural and computer-supported linguistics in the FRG. From 1969 the modernizing approaches of German linguistics were assembled within a Priority Program under the title “Theory Formation and Method Development for Linguistics” in a decided effort to provide “developmental aid” for the field. With the founding of the Senate Commission on Linguistics in 1971, the DFG granted to its mostly young representatives of “modern linguistics” a central function in planning future research in the field. In the decades between 1920 and 1970 the scientific promotion pursued by the NG/DFG mainly acted on the development of German linguistics as a retroactive regulator. It selectively supported rival approaches to linguistic research, intervened in staffing recruitment within the field, or influenced the beginning specialization by means of its support for professional journals. Under National Socialism politically motivated planning initiatives also came from the DFG. The communicative infrastructure of the field was supposed to be transformed by means of pressure, i. e., the deprivation of subsidies. In the development of topics and methods of research, the DFG itself became involved primarily in two important cases within the period examined. After 1934 it pushed through the consolidation of existing enterprises on dialect lexicography into tightly organized major research projects and initiated the expansion of this research enterprise to areas not yet worked on. In the 1960s it specifically encouraged the expansion of “modern linguistics” in the FRG. Whereas in the first case it pushed toward systematic development of an already established approach in German linguistics, in the second case it supported an initially entirely marginal renewing

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trend in the field and contributed essentially toward broadening this trend into a comprehensive modernization of linguistics as a whole in the Federal Republic. WHAT IMPORTANCE DO THIS STUDY’S FINDINGS HAVE ON PROBLEMS POSED IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE? Only in the recent past have the meanwhile quite numerous detailed studies on the history of linguistics under National Socialism been followed by comprehensive monographs taking an overarching perspective.8 The prehistory of Nazi linguistics during the Weimar Republic has already been systematically incorporated within the various frames of analysis.9 The hitherto neglected state funding of linguistic research thus offers a broad field of view by which the existing research results on linguistics under National Socialism could be confirmed and supplemented by an abundance of details on the histories of the persons, institutions, and research in the field. In contrast, only some first subaspects have been historiographically examined for the period after World War II, to a certain extent the postscript to the history of Nazi linguistics. Thus the current image of German postwar linguistics is often still thickly overlain by autobiographical accounts from those personally involved at the time.10 A closer look in the published and unpublished sources, above all for the 1950s and 1960s, gives occasion to revise and relativize canonical tenets on the history of the field. An expanded horizon of analysis to a period between World War I and the late 1960s can suggestively uncover the continuities underlying the professional developments of those decades despite the disruptive breaks in historical context. The thematic and methodological profile of state-supported research on linguistics reveals just as clearly as do the self-positionings by linguists in their proposals and reviews that the still prevalent hypothesis today, that the research conducted at the time was “enthralled with the neogrammarian tradition” continually until the 1960s, goes very wide of the mark.11 On the contrary, by 1920 at the latest, the dynamics and orientation of the field’s development can only be conceived as a move to shake off just this tradition. In the end, the proportion of research projects supported in the 1950s and 1960s still categorizable within the neogrammarian tradition of phonology and 8

For a long time the sole book on linguistics under National Socialism was limited to the aspect of racist ideology: Römer, Sprachwissenschaft. The first monograph to be able to claim to offer an overview is Hutton, Linguistics, followed not long ago by Knobloch, Sprachforschung. Frank-Rutger Hausmann’s overviews on the Romance and English languages in the Third Reich cover the linguistic research of those two disciplines; cf. Hausmann, Strudel; and idem, Anglistik. A more personal account on linguistics between 1933 and 1945 is available in the three-volume work by Maas, Verfolgung. 9 Knobloch, Sprachforschung; Ehlers, Strukturalismus. 10 A collection of informative autobiographical accounts by German linguists is presented in Gauger/Pöckel (ed.), Wege. Subjectively colored retrospectives on postwar linguistics in the FRG are contained, for example, in the jubilee issue of the journal Linguistische Berichte 200, 2004. 11 Helbig, Geschichte, p. 148; cf. e. g., also the accounts in Gauger/Pöckel (eds.), Wege.

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form history became vanishingly small. If some advocates of “modern linguistics” stepped forward as champions in the fight against the neogrammarian tradition at the end of the 1960s, they may perhaps have still been thinking of the curricula from their own student days. The focus of linguistic research had already shifted decades before into the area of cultural and folkloric studies (Kultur- und Volkstumskunde). There is still a tendency to portray postwar linguistics in the FRG according to the template of “revolutionary history.”12 Great agreement could be reached by moving the paradigm change in linguistics to the late 1960s. The revolution topos in linguistics must be identified as this field’s translated variant of the general “fallen behind” discourse, which drove science policy and public debates on education in the FRG and could mobilize considerable sponsorship in other fields as well. The DFG sources reveal that the modernization of German linguistics has a history reaching further back than the portrayals by contemporary participants suggest. It initially was not remotely triggered by the Chomskyan revolution in American linguistics but was introduced by longer-term factors in the sociology of science. The will to break with tradition at the end of the 1960s nonetheless retains its own trenchant importance in the discipline. Overall, the documentation in the DFG’s general and individual grant files, although incomplete particularly for the period before 1945, is at places still an extraordinarily rich basis for textual sources to study the field’s communication of its research logic to the discipline’s external context. Different from an analysis of professional publications, to which the historiography of linguistics today mostly still confines itself, here the societal addressees and reception must not be extrapolated from more or less hermetic professional discourses. It is intrinsic to the institution of state funding of research that the social dimension of scientific projects be typically raised in the communicative course of approval procedures. Application and review texts, for example, normally explicitly claim relevancy beyond a given specialty. The deliberations conducted by various actors on the merit of a linguistic project for funding often manifest themseves in multivocal series of texts in which the social ranking of anticipatable results of linguistic research is negotiated step by step on both sides of the argument. These relics of state funding of research are a uniquely firm foundation for an attempt to open up the historiography of linguistics to problems in the sociology of science. To this day it is, on the whole, strongly attuned to the history of ideas. The “close coupling” of linguistic science to extrascientific developments that already existed early in the twentieth century documents that the field saw its loss of social resonance as an existential crisis (Sinnkrise) and sought exoteric relevancy as the way out of it. The “loss of social distance” connected with this coupling was certainly not forced upon linguistics by the Nazi state13 but was perceived by members of the field long before 1933 as a “gain in relevancy” for their research and was consciously sought. The agenda of a “science close to life” 12 13

On this narrative of revolutionary histories, cf. Haß-Zumkehr, Linguistik. Weingart, Stunde, p. 332.

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did not first develop as an argumentational topos under National Socialism but, in linguistics, already during the Weimar Republic, and it was frequently held up against the polemical counterpart of pie-in-the-sky “syllable shifting” (Lautschieberei) by the neogrammarian school. Seen from its internal historical perspective, cultural linguistics of the 1920s exemplarily indicated that innovation certainly could accompany research directed at purposes outside the field. Germany had consolidated its economy in the mid-1920s. As soon as the NG/DFG no longer viewed its sole mission as assuring the preservation of a threatened science and began to draft a forward-looking science policy, it chose as its new program the aim of closely linking science with the other subsystems of society. As the “Memorandum on the Research Tasks of the Emergency Association for German Science in the Area of the National Economy, Public Health, and the Common Weal” asserted in 1926, “a much closer link between science and the economy” was a needed program “in order for research to cut new paths in scientific specialties.”14 For linguistics, as for other fields in the social sciences and humanities, this programmatic connection with the “common weal” resulted in its research being oriented toward nationalistic policy, with the intention that it “serve intellectual enlightenment about the uniqueness and, at the same time, the universal position of German culture.”15 Prospects for economic applications were in fact very rarely argued, comparatively speaking, in the support proceedings for research in linguistics. In state-supported linguistics research, it was rather science and politics that joined together as “resources for each other.”16 The adoption of this nationalistic perspective not only recovered for linguistics the appreciation from society it had lost, it also procured for its research endeavors in the form of state funding the tangible material and, in part, institutional basis it needed. The symptomatic sign that politics functioned as a resource for the field in the rhetoric of nationalistic relevance is that it reached its first pinnacle in expert opinions and proposals just when financial and institutional resources in the academic sector were beginning to come in short supply. The financial and competitive crisis in the (linguistic) sciences after 1929 caused a politicizing boost in the field that is commonly only associated with the later year 1933. On the contrary, a few years before, the subsiding inflation and hikes in state expenditures for research created a context that stimulated warnings from among the ranks of science itself against too direct a link between research and political goals and placed value on a distinct disassociation from society. From the grant proceedings in linguistics one can see not only the extent to which its research could profit by a closer affiliation with politics; what politics could expect from research in linguistics was, of course, also explicitly negotiated there. Just like other fields, linguistics could offer politics two services: first,

14 Denkschrift über die Forschungsaufgaben der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft im Bereich der nationalen Wirtschaft, der Volksgesundheit und des Volkswohles, fifth report: Berichte, 1926, p. 242. 15 Eleventh report by the NG: Berichte, 1932, p. 20. 16 Ash, Wissenschaft.

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through its expertise it could supply legitimacy to political ideologies, goals, and decisions; second, it could offer instrumental knowledge as a basis for political and military action. Against this background the negotiated allocation of state support can be read as a sign of the demand by politics for such research results. The elaborate vetting procedure that the research foundation had installed assured the scientific expertise its validity. Under National Socialism, state research sponsorship still adhered to the principle of peer reviewing in that, as a rule, it continued to tie the allocation of subsidies to expert opinions – albeit within a politically constrained framework – in order to secure the specific scientific character of “verified knowledge” for the expertise gained.17 It is remarkable how much even a political system based to a high degree on forced relationships, such as National Socialism was, evidently still relied on academia for legitimizing expertise. For example, it became clear from research on ethnic German linguistics, which promised to legitimize the territorial claims by the Deutsche Reich, that it was a matter of, on the one hand, winning its own population and other ethnic Germans over to its political ambitions. On the other hand, German foreign policy had to be scientifically justified before the forum of the international community of states.18 The example of ethnic German linguistics shows at the same time that the function of expertise for politics, that is, the kind of scientific knowledge used here as a resource by politics, underwent changes over time. The initiation of World War II and its preparations demarcated a sharper turn in the resource relations between linguistics and politics than did the year 1933. When, for example, at the outbreak of war the dialectologist Anneliese Bretschneider hastened to offer her linguistic expertise on the supposedly original German character of Polish regions in return for a supporting grant, the German Army had already created the facts on the ground within such a short time that no further legimization was deemed necessary. Politics had literally no more need for Bretschneider’s expertise – and neither did it have the grant money.19 During the war, linguistics shifted its function from a dominantly legitimating political resource to a primarily instrumental one, for which it was a matter of generating usable linguistic knowledge for military purposes and for the administration and exploitation of subjugated territories. From the 1950s to the 1960s a structurally comparable change also took place in the constellation of resources that represented a transition from legitimizing to instrumental expertise. As soon as the FRG had stabilized politically, had joined the community of western nations, and had begun to come to terms with the loss of the eastern territories, the nationalistic rhetoric of ethnic expellee linguistics, which had promised to demonstrate the cultural unity of the whole of greater Germany through language, was no longer able to offer politics a useful resource. Whereas, on the one hand, the expellee discourse employed in the grant applica17

Weingart, Stunde, p. 285. The DFG’s close collaboration with institutions of German foreign policy can be studied, for example, in the partly covert support of the Volkstumskampf waged also by linguistic means by ethnic Germans in Sudetenland in the Czechoslovakian Republic; cf. Ehlers, Wissenschaft. 19 For details on this exemplary process, cf. Ehlers, Dialektforschung, pp. 121 f. 18

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tion process increasingly generated aversion, on the other hand, the prospect of practical utility for linguistics in language instruction or in automated translation was able to mobilize support with increasing ease. It was surely not mere chance that both these promising prominent applications for “modern linguistics” saw their prospects in the dimension of international (linguistic) contacts. The long era of linguistics as a nationalistically oriented resource had been replaced by international modern linguistics.

SURVEYING GERMAN VOLKSKULTUR – THE “ATLAS OF GERMAN FOLKLORE” AND THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1928–1980 Friedemann Schmoll The project on the Atlas of German Folklore, the Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde, supported for over fifty years was supposed to become a model case of major research in the humanities when it started at the end of the 1920s.1 Nevertheless, it remained a special case in the history of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). This survey of German Volkskultur conducted in the Weimar Republic, under National Socialism, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and in the German Democratic Republic, and its depiction in the form of thematic maps is an example of the DFG initially not only supporting innovative research, but also significantly initiating and organizing it as its editor. In this case, the DFG acted as moderator between interests within and outside science and provided stimuli and material resources that influentially supported the process of scientification of the study of national culture or folklore (Volkskunde) in the twentieth century. In the 1920s this marginal field existed at universities merely as an appendix to philology. The hope attached to the materialization of this major project was that it would gain recognition and become established as a university science. The Atlas Project did, in fact, in many respects become the center of cognitive and institutional identity for Volkskunde, which vacillated between a guiding discipline of folklore and an exotic “orchid” in the academic landscape. From the point of view of the DFG (formerly called the Emergency Association for German Science, Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) the initiation of this project was supposed to serve as an answer to different problematic situations of the 1920s. It was used to make a historically novel link between the spheres of science, politics, and the public.2 At first interdisciplinarily conceived, the Atlas was, on the one hand, a response to the legitimization crisis of the humanities. Its methodological instrumentation (questionnaires, cartography, etc.) already committed it to the scientific ideal of the natural and social sciences and their orientation toward application.3 Furthermore, its description of German national and cultural territory inside and outside the political boundaries of the German empire, documented by questionnaires and maps, the correlations between the project and the discourses on spatial ideology after World War I, and the in1 2 3

Cf. Gansohr-Meinel, Fragen; Simon, Atlas. Cf. Weingart, Stunde; Ash, Wissenschaft; Szöllösi-Janze, Wissensgesellschaft. Hübner, Geisteswissenschaft.

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nersocietal crisis situations of the Weimar Republic – all of these factors promised to reorient a field in the humanities toward usefulness and applicability.4 Viewed in this way, this major long-term project to study the relations between “the land and its people,” between Raum and Volk, seemed largely to follow nonscientific needs and functional purposes along a “special path” specific to the Germans. The master switches were set after World War I, and it developed a plausibility that lasted until about 1970. However, this interpretation has to be compared with the international horizon of folkloric studies and European ethnologies. The German folkloric atlas project from the 1920s was the first major cartographic endeavor to base a nation on a folkloric foundation. Nevertheless, it rapidly became evident that the numerous cultural atlases in Europe in emulation of the German model were an internationally effective reflex to the new political rearrangements after World War I. Almost all the European states were washed by similar waves of ethnocartographic projects before and after World War II with the intended aim of creating a cultural overlay for the existing political map of a country.5 Under National Socialism the Atlas Project initially gained in standing – as did Volkskunde overall – as a stabilizing element of the dominant ideology. By 1936 at the latest, it began to lose its scientific innovative potential and became a primary object of controversies over science policy. During the Nazi era it served internationally as an instrument for scientific certification of a Nordic/ Germanic Kulturraum. After 1945 Friedrich Schmidt-Ott and John Meier, who in the meantime had become the aged representatives of the DFG and Volkskunde dating back to the Weimar Republic, argued for the continuation of the truncated torso of the project in an effort to reconnect with the Weimarian research traditions interrupted by National Socialism. In 1954 the DFG resolved to resume the Atlas Project under a newly adjusted conception, but this time – different from during its founding phase around 1930 – it remained an external actor and did not influence its research. In the maps appearing since 1959 in its new series, corrections were made to the substance of the research by means of critical revisions and commentary.6 Internationally, the Atlas Project became a motor for ethnographic cartography in Europe since the 1960s and hence also for supranational harmony and standards in disciplines on traditional culture, ethnography, and folklore within the frame of European ethnology. The outcome is paradoxical. The Atlas Project began by catering to a demand for scientific certification of a specific national character and should be viewed as connected with nationalistic traditionalism. It was supposed to make Germany’s special situation between a euphorically modernizing West and the East culturally plausible. After 1945 precisely the same research project was then supposed to work toward denationalizing and internationalizing the science of traditional cultures within European 4

Schmoll, Volk. Bratanic, Cartography. 6 A first, unannotated series of 120 maps appeared from 1937 to 1939; cf. Harmjanz/Röhr (eds.), Atlas. The new series, edited under the direction of Matthias Zender, was supplied with commentary and annotation; cf. Atlas, New series. 5

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ethnology. Interest on the part of the DFG in researching traditional cultural spaces slumped abruptly after 1970. The external reason is connected with the relaxation in political relations and general acceptance of the political order in Europe. Problems of cultural space were demoted to secondary rank. Internally, such issues rapidly lost relevancy due to reforms within the discipline around 1970. They were connected with a “departure from folkish life” and revisions of the concept of Volk from an ideology-critical point of view and the professional turn toward sociology, historicism, and empirical popular culture.7 AGENCY OF THE NATIONAL IMAGE OF SELF IN THE 1920S By deciding to create the Atlas Project as a long-running Cooperative Project (Gemeinschaftsarbeit), the NG/DFG supported with opulent resources an “orchid” specialty somewhere between a homeland movement and amateur science that could not even claim to be an independent discipline or cite anchorage at any university. Thus much money for a tiny field, but more: Volkskunde was at a prescientific stage of development, had no experience in conducting research of such large dimensions, and had neither precise methodological notions nor organizational plans to implement such a mammoth cartographical project. Therefore it is all the more remarkable that the DFG (with an annual budget in 1930 of 7.2 million reichsmarks, in 1936 only 2 million) supported the Atlas Project with about 100,000 reichsmarks per year, which just covered operating costs, not infrastructural investments, preliminary tests, etc. By supporting folkloric studies, which was strongly anchored in the nonscientific milieu and had an immediate presence in daily life, the NG/DFG expected to make science popular among various social audiences, as Georg Schreiber pointed out: “From the people, life should seep into science, and science for its part should have a fruitful effect by revealing and illucidating the great slumbering values within the nation.”8 In the process it was relying on a field that had been booming since the 1890s at the latest.9 Subsequently Volkskunde registered the first stages of theoretical grounding and institutional consolidation. The Zeitschrift für Volkskunde began to be issued in 1890. Numerous regional scholarly societies and scientific associations were founded that published their own periodicals, and they joined forces in the union of German associations for cultural studies, Verband Deutscher Vereine für Volkskunde. Its main program was to advocate the introduction of the scientific approach into the field. Before World War I, folkloric studies still moved within the context of multifarious and ambiguous anthropological inquiries and voices,10 but a nationalistic narrowing of the field and a basic ethnocentric readjustment followed the outcome of the war. Thus the breaks in the twentieth century after the German 7

Geiger/Jeggle/Korff (eds.), Abschied; Emmerich, Kritik. Schreiber, Notgemeinschaft, p. 56; cf. also Dietzsch, Volkskunde. 9 Deißner, Volkskunde; Bagus, Volkskultur. 10 Warneken, Volkskunde. 8

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defeats in the World Wars had far greater repercussions on the genesis of Volkskunde than the changes in political system in 1933 and 1945. At that point in time the field’s trajectory was essentially based on two traditional lines. Rooted in Romanticism and grappling with experiences of cultural loss in the modernizing processes of society, folklore was qualified as the agency for endowing a nationalistic sense and supplying interpretations and orientation in the knowledge of national culture. Another impetus came from the Enlightenment, which within the tradition of statistics and cameralism comprehended Volkskunde as a practical and instrumental science interested in the culture and ways of life of simple people, including those coming from stratas below the educated bourgeoisie. Another issue behind the Atlas Project was how modern societies should treat their premodern cultural heritage. With the development of industrial modernity, the study of folklore had formed since the 1890s as an agency for the collection and display of evidence and relics from premodern worlds. After World War I, for the Atlas Project it was no longer a matter of collecting and documenting faded traditional cultures. The intention was to revitalize them – to nurse back to health a society shaken by crisis – by engaging resources affording a sense of community and therefore a national sense of identity and assertiveness in the quest for the true, original, and unadulterated in a society characterized by internal tensions. This dual intention of endowing sense and applying culture policy made the Atlas Project for John Meier, president of the Verband, a kind of “intellectual protection of the homeland.”11 Or in Arthur Hübner’s words: “For we do not want folklore as a cold, abstract science, but as a vitalizing force.”12 The DFG obviously expected Volkskunde to provide interpretational aids to master a present that was difficult to understand because it could avail itself of plausible sense-giving vocabulary: Volk, not the masses; community, not society; origins and genuineness, not alienation; characteristic, not average. SETTING UP THE “ATLAS OF GERMAN FOLKLORE” 1928–1934 The opportunity to set up a major project caught the small field of Volkskunde unprepared institutionally as well as methodologically. The initiative had not come from the field’s own midst but from interdisciplinary research on Kulturraum and the NG/DFG.13 Thus, folkloric studies chanced upon much money and means in 1928 but had absolutely no experience in how to materialize such an enterprise. The planning and organization was begun before the founding meeting in the middle of June 1928 in Berlin,14 “probably […] the largest congress on

11

Meier, Vorwort, p. 13. Hübner, Atlas, p. 10. 13 Aubin/Frings/Müller, Kulturströmungen; on the history of science, cf. Cox/Wiegelmann (eds.), Kulturraumforschung; Oberkrome, Volksgeschichte; Ditt, Kulturraumforschung. 14 Cf. the 21-page minutes of the meeting on the planned Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde on 16–17 Jun. 1928 at the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in Berlin C2, at the palace. 12

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folkloric studies that ever convened.”15 Almost the entire scientific community in this small field gathered around the Atlas Project to research the relations between national culture and its territorial spread. The enormous effects soon became clearly apparent; the process of institutional consolidation of the discipline could be pushed forward. While the headquarters of the Atlas Project were being set up under the NG’s own roof in the Berlin Schloss, thirty-seven regional offices were established in a very brief period of time in the German Empire, in Austria, and in the German settlement areas, such as in Bessarabia and Transylvania (Siebenbürgen), in Prague, Banat, and Luxembourg. The Greater Germany tenor of the project is clear in this territorial plan incorporating ethnic German culture beyond the country’s borders.16 The Atlas organization in Austria was directly connected with the NG’s mobilization of “Austro-German scientific aid.” It was founded in 1929 at the instigation of Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, Georg Schreiber, the president of parliament Paul Löbe, and the Viennese Academy of Sciences and was supposed to strengthen a “deeper connection” (inneren Anschluß) with Austria in the promotion of science.17 Associations with research on race were rejected during the founding stage of the Atlas Project because, according to Arthur Hübner, “emotively determined prejudices mostly of an ethnic, clannish, racist kind” ran the risk of “dividing instead of uniting, creating new discriminatory and superiority feelings, new emotional separating walls based on completely untenable presuppositions.”18 At the founding meeting in June 1928 Schmidt-Ott noted “that research on race [was] already being addressed elsewhere as a Cooperative Project of the Emergency Association” and those results should be awaited.19 The regional offices inspired further research on local culture, some of which continues on to the present day in the form of state-run research agencies. The headquarters in Berlin were repeatedly viewed as the nucleus of a central institution for the study of national culture during the Weimar Republic as well as under National Socialism and even during the period of a divided Germany. Thus the Atlas Project stimulated regional as well as national research. The idea of a national space was reflected in the structure of the institution. The regional multiplicity accordingly constituted a single unit. The incorporation of local cultural studies into the movement for the “preservation of the traditional homeland” (Heimatschutz) and into other cultural political movements also became evident in the practical research of the Atlas Project as well as its character as an amateur science: Over 20,000 volunteers could be recruited within the briefest of times (79 percent of them teachers, about 8 percent clergymen) to conduct the survey

Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, Johannes Bolte papers, box 56 (Varia; Verband deutscher Vereine für Volkskunde). 15 Mitteilungen des Verbandes deutscher Vereine für Volkskunde, no. 37, Dec. 1928, p. 13. 16 On the regional offices, see Schlenger, Grundlagen, pp. 21–27. 17 For details, Schreiber, Deutschland. 18 Hübner, Volkskundeatlas, pp. 63 f. 19 Minutes of the meeting on the planned Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde, pp. 4 f., opcit.

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in school districts lying within and beyond the political borders of the German Empire.20 With regard to data collection, it was decided to use the census method using local informants for the data collection, thereby deciding against an exploratory procedure. These informants were supposed to relay the information gathered at over 20,000 locations by individual questionnaire to the regional offices. There the collected data could be put to productive use in regional research; it was also transmitted on to the Berlin headquarters.21 The point of interest was the relation between the existence of cultural phenomena and their geographic spread, not their “place in life” for people. Thus, the selection of surveying locations was concerned about the representative spatial spread – not about differences between city and countryside, and certainly not other criteria, such as social distinctions, gender, generation, etc. Another premise of this project was its centering on “German” popular culture. Neither were any questions posed about traditional cultural group phenomena classified as non-German – for instance, in multi-ethnically settled territories – nor about the significance of interethnic relations. Consequently, the subsequent maps of the covered territories of necessity had to appear “German.” Whatever did not fit under the prepared classifications remained invisible on these maps. The implementation of the Atlas Project also gave impetus to the canonization of topics in folkloric research. What material and immaterial objectivations constituted the specific character of deutsche Volkskultur? Originally, a “physiognomy of the essence of the German people”22 was supposed to be investigated in a thousand questions that could be subdivided further into an arbitrary number of subordinate questions: its peculiar “character” (Eigenart) and ways of living, strategies of dealing with life, its notional worlds and faiths. The topical fields, determined by means of trial surveys and with the assistance of advisory panels and committees, mainly related to the layout of farmlands and housing forms, nutrition, clothing, farm life and work, the course of a year (festivities and customs) and of life (birth, baptism, love and marriage, death), religion and superstition, sagas, and songs. In the beginning the project was conceived transdisciplinarily according to the Kulturraum research conducted at Bonn. It integrated prominent members of linguistics (Arthur Hübner, Theodor Frings, and Kurt Wagner), historiography (Hermann Aubin), and geography (Herbert Schlenger). This interdisciplinarity soon proved to be a hindrance, however, because it hampered the intended contouring of the discipline. This insight grew into a lasting crisis. The Atlas Project 20

Schlenger, Grundlagen, p. 60. The topics cover customary food and clothing, the regional spread of funeral rites, farming and material culture, the regulation of the daily routine by festivals and rituals, children’s games, neighborhood relations, religious conceptions, and many other facets of everyday life and special events. Today this ethnographic material, gathered between 1930 and 1935 and noted down on over four million index cards from the archive of the Atlas Project, is located in the Seminar für Volkskunde at the University of Bonn, where the office has been located since the 1950s. 22 Physiognomie des deutschen Volkswesens: Heppner, Atlas. 21

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changed visibly into the battlefield of disparate disciplines with their various interests. The institution became the location of permanent quarrels and conflicts during the course of which the folklorists found it difficult to hold their ground. Years had to pass before the option arose of using the Atlas Project primarily as a motor of disciplinary emancipation. This state of permanent crisis was also the result of the construction of an unsurveyable institution, in which different actors acted on different interests. The DFG functioned not only as the sponsoring organization but also as the project director. Aside from Schmidt-Ott, there were also Schreiber, and Eduard Wildhagen as technical director, who exerted direct influence on the research procedure. Their divergent aims crippled the project. Its original conception soon proved to be far too opulent and unrealistic. The planned 1,000 questions had to be trimmed down to 243 issued on five questionnaires between 1930 and 1935. The DFG’s financial crisis and the growing political criticism of its autocratic attitude soon placed the generously funded Atlas Project under public pressure about its legitimacy.23 After the initial euphoria, the model case for big science in cultural studies entered a phase of stagnation. The expansive conditions set for the experimental field initially generated immense productivity. However, it did not manifest firm results. The research of the Atlas Project fell short by the high expectations of the DFG and the academic and general public. There were various reasons for this. The tensions between the folklorists, the members of other disciplines, and the DFG’s representatives were irresolvable. The practical implementation of the research according to the original conception failed against its empirical unfeasibility and lack of experience with regard to the organization and steering projects of such dimensions.24 FROM THEORY FORMATION TO IDEOLOGY PRODUCTION 1934–1945 The signal for the Atlas Project to politically realign itself was not the change in government in 1933. It only took place one year later – just like in the DFG – in 1934.25 In 1933 Volkskunde was in an upswing. Its establishment at universities finally materialized under National Socialism with numerous professorship appointments. For these economic reasons, and even though leading conservative folklorists had habitually remained quite aloof to Nazism, most representatives of the field were very willing to undergo “self-mobilization”26 at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship. The assumption that the political leaders could be guided intellectually or the calculation that a science such as Volkskunde could profit 23

Cf., e. g., A. B., Volkskunde; Anonymous, Wissenschaft; Teha, Fragen. For details, Wildhagen, Atlas. 25 Cf. Zierold, Forschungsförderung, pp. 152–158; Hammerstein, Forschungsgemeinschaft, pp. 88–115. 26 Selbstmobilisierung: Mehrtens, Kollaborationsverhältnisse. 24

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from the political opportunities while retaining its autonomy27 obviously proved to be ill-fated by 1934 at the latest. The temporarily marginalized technical director of the Atlas Project, Wildhagen, now returned as vice-president of the DFG and rigidly implemented the political conformance of the project’s staffing and program. Within the field of cultural studies, this was played out not least as a generational conflict between young, ambitiously elitist, and politically inclined scientists in the periphery of Rosenberg’s Oversight Office (Amt Rosenberg) for party policy on culture and the SS Ancestral Heritage (Ahnenerbe), and older scholars such as Adolf Spamer and John Meier.28 To this was added the precarious disciplinarity of the juvenile science. Volkskunde was, after 1933, only able to step forward as a vaguely defined scientific field, in which the limits between “applied” and “scientific” cultural studies remained ambiguous. Yet Volkskunde ascended into an ideologically favored and generally accessible trademark that was not forcibly tied to specific disciplinary theoretical matters, methods, or academic patterns of socialization. By 1936 the Atlas Project fell under the purview of the Reich Association on Population Research (Reichsgemeinschaft der deutschen Volksforschung) which was affiliated with Rosenberg’s Office and in charge of organizing research in fields touching on ideological issues, such as geography, pre- and early history, and folklore. Already hampered by enduring crisis, the Atlas Project was forced to reduce its scope in 1933 because of mounting financial problems. Only the fifth questionnaire it circulated, in 1935 acquired a specifically Nazi signature committed to the study of traditional culture based on racial science. The project soon began to stagnate as a research enterprise and became more and more the object of science policy disputes between Rosenberg’s Office and the Reich Ministry of Education (REM) or Ancestral Heritage. After various quarrels about staffing competency, the Atlas Project came under the direction of the folklorist Heinrich Harmjanz in 1937 who had acquired his Habilitation degree in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). He had joined the SS Ancestral Heritage out of opposition to the ideological folklorists of Rosenberg’s Office. After serving as a referee for the humanities in the REM, he speedily managed to accumulate remarkable power as a science policy maker in the fields close to ideological issues. Apart from heading the Atlas Project, he also took over the editorship of the Zeitschrift für Volkskunde and exerted great influence on staffing policy in that field. After the first map works were published in 1937, the research conducted on the project’s own premises ceased in 1939 because of the war. The archive and library were moved to the University of Frankfurt am Main, where Harmjanz nominally occupied the professorship on folklore studies. In 1943 he lost his post at the REM as well as his functions in the Ahnenerbe after serious charges emanating from

27 On Volkskunde under National Socialism, cf. Bausinger, Volksideologie; Gerndt (ed.), Volkskunde; Jacobeit/Lixfeld/Bockhorn (eds.), Wissenschaft. 28 On the power struggles between Amt Rosenberg, the DFG, REM, and the Ahnenerbe, cf. i. a. Heiber, Frank; Bollmus, Amt; Kater, Ahnenerbe; Lutz, Amt; Lixfeld, Forschungsgemeinschaft, and idem, Ahnenerbe.

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Rosenberg’s Office implicated him in plagiarism of “Jewish” authors in passages of his Habilitation thesis.29 Volkskunde established itself at universities during the 1930s, but even this had largely been prepared by the upswing in the field during the 1920s. Notably many of the first uniquely folkloric Habilitation theses written around 1930 were dedicated to questions of cultural territory. Those young specialists included, for instance, Karl Meisen, Richard Beitl, and Bruno Schier.30 Meanwhile, some others who had helped bear the burden of qualifying the field for academia before 1933 lost their teaching certifications under National Socialist rule or were passed over in professorship appointments in favor of politically more opportune candidates.31 As the first cultural atlas in Europe, the Atlas of German Folklore provided a strong stimulus for the internationalization of national disciplines of traditional cultural disciplines even during the 1930s. Internationalizing initiatives in that decade came – apart from Germany – above all from the Skandinavian Folkslivsforskning and the Ethnologie française. Whereas after 1945 the majority of participating German folklore researchers no longer played an academic role, staffing networks were built that carried the internationalization process of folklore disciplines in Europe into the 1970s. Initially the DFG was significantly involved in its financing and content by supporting the International Association for Folklore and Ethnology (Internationaler Verband für Volksforschung) and funding the international journal Folk. Two things about these initiatives stood out from the German point of view: leadership in international opinion making about German folkloric studies, and an interest in proving the merit of a cultural “Nordic Germanic” cultural space. During the National Socialist period the Atlas Project lost its potential for scientific innovation and began increasingly to be used as an instrument of cultural politics. The extent to which it was mobilized as a resource according to a programmatic plan and was folkloristically popularized in Nazi ceremonial and festive policy cannot be resolved.32 The routine work after 1934 of conducting the surveys, and evaluating and transposing the data cartographically basically executed what had already been prepared earlier. Whether in the hands of Rosenberg or the SS Ahnenerbe, folkloric activities largely exhausted themselves in nationalistic racist declamations, internal Nazi power struggles, or discursive policing and cultural activism. The Atlas Project mirrored the turn of Volkskunde away from the processes of theory formation of the 1920s toward ideology production 29

A perusal of his Habilitation thesis (Harmjanz, Volk) indicates, however that these charges, which were repeatedly raised even after 1945, are clearly wrong. The works by Wilhelm Jerusalem, Lucien Lévi-Bruhl, Sigmund Freud, and others are duly cited in abidance by every academic rule and standard. For biographical details on Harmjanz and the plagiarism charge, see Schmoll, Harmjanz. 30 Wiegelmann/Simon, Untersuchung, p. 103. 31 For example, Richard Beitl, who had based his Habilitation thesis in Berlin on material gathered by the Atlas Project; cf. Beitl, Untersuchungen. 32 Cf. the chapter on the importance of the atlas research in fostering contemporary folklore in Schlenger, Grundlagen, pp. 151–159.

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and above all, toward goal-oriented applications, which led consistently toward the deployment of the humanities for the war. INTERNATIONALIZATION AS REHABILITATION AND THE VANISHING OF SPACE (RAUM) Because the Atlas Project had been the bone of contention between rivaling National Socialist science policy organizations, after 1945 earlier it was regarded as a hopeless example of politically corrupted science. This initially applied to Volkskunde as a whole. Shortly after the war the sociologist Heinz Maus criticized it as a questionable academic science. The study of traditional culture, Maus asserted, had always been “unclear” about “its situation in highly industrialized society” while “its own internal history demonstrates the usefulness of Volkskunde to ideologization.”33 The answer to Maus, and with it long-lasting exoneration, came from WillErich Peuckert. As a Social Democrat, he had been barred from teaching under National Socialism and therefore appeared to be beyond political suspicion. In his reply, Peuckert delineated “two Volkskunden,” according to which only “applied” German ethnohistory proved to be politically and ideologically vulnerable whereas “to a much more serious and greater degree than became externally apparent […] there existed a serious, diligent, scientific Volkskunde” […] next to the loud and dominant one in the foreground.34 This interpretational model of, on the one hand, ideological and politicized applied cultural studies and, on the other hand, a wing with scientific integrity, thus propped up the self-perception of being part of a lasting development in the legitimate study of traditional culture. The incursion of dilettantism, which had appeared in political dress, accordingly had had nothing to do with Volkskunde. Thus it was possible to proceed along the same continuous line of research on ethnic culture. After emerging from its shocked stupor of the immediate postwar period, Volkskunde self-confidently made its appearance again in the 1950s. Its methods and content were certainly not given away after its loss of political authority with the end of Nazism, not to mention its guiding ideas and concepts of the research. Neither the catastrophe of National Socialism nor the precipitous political and social changes of the 1950s could shatter its disciplinary foundations. The creed critical of “mass society” in modern civilization and hence also the anti-modernist basis of traditionalist studies as a whole seemed to continue to be plausible as concerned the diagnostic temporal ordering of the present as well as a commentary on National Socialism, which could be interpreted as the height of “mass human society” (Massenmenschentum) in the twentieth century. By harking back to the 1920s, Volkskunde also orientated itself toward a time seemingly unscratched by the contrivances of Nazism. This recourse seemed legitimate be33 34

Maus, Situation, p. 349. Emphasis added. Peuckert, Situation, p. 130. Emphasis added.

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cause this way it seemed possible to rehabilitate all the existing conventions of the field. Although they had in reality helped prepare the way to National Socialism, they did predate it. So looking back to the time before the catastrophe also held out the prospect of cleaning the slate. Significantly, it was the meanwhile elderly representatives of the NG/DFG and the Volkskunde association, Schmidt-Ott and John Meier, who lobbied for the resumption of the Atlas Project’s research from 1945 on. Both had initially tried to gain the favor of powerful National Socialist leaders in 1933; both were soon marginalized as representatives of a conservative culture of scholarship. Taking a retrospective view on National Socialism from the postwar period, both interpreted it as an illegitimate intruder from the outside and as a disruption to academic normalcy; both sought to draw links with the phase of scientific productivity of the Weimar Republic. The first attempt to have the DFG readopt and sponsor the Atlas Project failed. The DFG finally approved the continuation of the project in 1954 under the direction of Matthias Zender.35 Some corrective measures were attached to this resumption of support. The new series published by the Atlas Project since 1959 distinguished itself from the first map publications primarily in its commentaries and critical historical revisions. The DFG was willing to provide one half of the funding. The other half was assumed by the Ministries for Displaced Persons and All-German Affairs (Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, resp., innerdeutsche Beziehungen). Two influential factors provided the main boost for the project – as well as for Volkskunde overall during the 1950s. On the one hand, German refugees from Eastern Europe and the dismemberment of the German Empire created a new demand for documentation on handed down cultural traditions. The study of “expellee” culture (Vertriebenenvolkskunde) helped the field to gain new relevancy and appreciation. On the other hand, national ethnic history got caught up in the rivalry between the science policies of the two Germanies. Whereas the field was strongly promoted as a tool of an aggressive culture policy under the auspices of the East German Academy of Sciences headed by Wolfgang Steinitz, in West Germany it was initially petrified in the agonies of the postwar period at the beginning of the 1950s. But then West German Volkskunde picked up again, ever aware of the threat of lagging behind the ethnographic sciences being conducted in the Soviet sphere of influence. Thus, the rivalry between the two systems of German science was played out on the back of the Atlas Project.36 At the time, however, the Atlas Project and its materials also afforded an opportunity for remarkable cooperation between East and West Germany that was able to develop under the framing conditions of the official science policies. Despite resolute intervention by various ministries of the Federal Republic of Germany and regulations imposed by the East German institutions, the Atlas Project repeatedly formed crystallization points for cooperation between the two Germanies that ranged beyond the national orientation of the 35

Cox, Zender. An Atlas Project office directed by Reinhard Peesch was set up in Berlin in 1955 at the Volkskunde-Institut of the Akademie der Wissenschaften. 36

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field overall during the 1950s. For instance, the area of agrarian material culture generated productive research on both sides. The conservative Volkskundeverband, of all things, got landed with the charge of permitting “Soviet zonal penetration.” The Ministries for All-German Affairs and for Displaced Persons alleged that the union was letting itself be instrumentalized in favor of the interests of East German Volkskunde while its East/West cooperations – also the Atlas Project – was making available a forum for propagandistic appearances by East German science.37 At the beginning of the 1950s German ethnography returned from its isolation onto the international scene. Its copious research experience in projects such as the Atlas Project made it a leading voice in Europe on national cultural studies and from 1960 on at the latest it played an influential role in the Ethnological Atlas of Europe supported by over thirty states. The Atlas Project’s office, which had meanwhile settled in the federal capital of Bonn was, next to Zagreb, one of the two coordinating centers of the European Atlas Project. Despite years of intense preparations, this project remained a torso and limited itself to the publication of an annotated map.38 Nevertheless, it is still remarkable how this project made possible international scientific communication through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War period. It formed the crystallization point of research practice on “European ethnology,” around which researchers of traditional cultures, folklorists, ethnologists, and ethnographers organized themselves irrespective of the existing political blocks of power to which they belonged. The more rigidly dictated the Cold War relations seemed, the more livelily international ethnography flourished across the borders.39 During the 1970s, national and international interest in issues on the relationship between culture and its spaces suddenly flagged. Explicitly territorial problems even increasingly became taboo in the humanities and social sciences. Since the 1960s Volkskunde was oriented toward sociology and turned away from notions of homogeneous cultural communities and pointedly sought out social distinctions. This determined a visible shift in the Atlas Project’s importance within the field away from the center into the periphery. What in the 1920s had been downright innovative demands – methodology, transdisciplinarity, work in research associations – was regarded as antiquated. The extensive surveys had become forty years old by then and offered a snapshot of the cultural relations around 1930; hence as a source they were only of historical value. Over the course of the 1970s the DFG withdrew its support from the Atlas Project altogether. However, while interest in Volkskunde issues of ethnographically delimited cultural space had in fact dropped, the dissolution of the political power blocks after 1989, the emergence of new nation states, and the globaliza-

37 See the correspondence between the Völkerkundeverband and the ministries in the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv in Freiburg, folder 218: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volkskunde. Partly published in Müns (ed.), Problem. 38 Zender (ed.), Termine. 39 Cf. L’Ethnocartographie.

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tion debates of the 1990s revived attention under the agenda of a “spatial turn.”40 This interest, mainly stimulated by research published in English and French, is largely unconnected with the research observations made in Volkskunde on questions of borders, periphery, center, locality, and territoriality. The current “return of Raum” makes neither critical nor affirmative reference to these researches,41 which are now only of historical interest even in German ethnology. The reestablishment of spatial issues in the cultural sciences begs the questions: What is new? What appears to be a return to conventional research approaches? In any case, much of the rediscoveries of European spaces, excitedly proclaimed by science and flanked by literature, recall old patterns. Unmistakable among them are the melancholy in face of waning cultures, the ethos of collecting and documenting, and questions about identity-bearing dimensions of spatiality.42

40 41 42

Cf. Bachmann-Medick, Turns. Wiederkehr des Raumes: Osterhammel, Wiederkehr. Emphasis added. Cf., e. g., Raabe/Sznajderman (eds.), Last & Lost.

A MIDWIFE FOR SCIENCE – THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND GERMAN ETHNOLOGY1 Christoph Seidler Not physical extinction, to the extent that it occurs, is of importance, because it is dependent on the omnipotent course of history regardless, which can neither be impeded nor averted, but psychological extinction – the loss of ethnic originalities before they are preserved for study in literature and museums. Such a loss threatens our future inductive calculations with all sorts of counterfeits and could even place at risk the ability to conduct a study of mankind.2

When the “founding father” of German Völkerkunde, the former ship doctor Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) wrote these programmatic words in 1881, the young science of ethnology already had its first consolidation stage behind itself. As had happened earlier in other European countries and the USA, in 1869 a specific interdisciplinary society of interested parties also formed in Germany: the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte). By “thinning out the ethnographic material,” its ambition was to find a clue about the great question: “Whence came humanity?” From the beginning, the “neither impedible nor avertible” course of European expansion, with its frequently catastrophic effects on “natural peoples” outside of Europe, called for haste. The rapid “securing” of ethnographic material was consequently also at the forefront for Bastian. He set out from the assumption of a uniform “idea of humans” worldwide, with a geographically varying “idea of nations.” He intentionally left the methodical evaluation of this material to his successors, however. Ethnological museums, which were established in quick succession in the 1860s, were the collection sites for this material and its scientific processing. The history of their evolution, at the meeting point between interest in unknown worlds by the educated middle class, rivalries among cities to present themselves, and economic interests of major colonial trading firms, also outlines the network that supported them financially. With the entry of the Kaiserreich into the circle of colonial powers, new buildings became necessary in many places. From 1884 until the turn of the century its museums’ holdings grew to the bursting point.

1 The terms Ethnologie and Völkerkunde were – and even now still are – frequently used synonymously. Völkerkunde was the term customarily used by the DFG to describe the field until 1970. The present English translation generally opts for the former to avoid confusion with the unrelated term Volkskunde (folklore). 2 Bastian, Völkergedanke, p. 179.

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The Völkerkundemuseum in Berlin, favored by the state with public subsidies, thus became around 1900 the biggest of its kind in the world, and German ethnologists succeeded in “soon outstripping their fellow European contestants in all fields.”3 From around 1905 the contours of diversification within the field became visible as custodians of the Berlin museum set about creating “order” in the increasingly overwhelming mass of museum holdings. In doing so they developed a first “method of ethnology” which they henceforth conceived as a “historical science.”4 The “diffusionistic” or “culturally historical” line emerged from the discovery of similar types of implements in African and Southern Pacific populations. This led to the assumption that larger cultural spheres existed. Its model was the “poverty of ideas by mankind” basically assumed by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). Historians of human culture were supposed to explain these spheres through reconstructions by retracing migratory movements and “borrowings.” Cultural morphology, developed by Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), also aspired to this goal. It sought a holistic Kulturgestalt particularly in Africa. In around that same period, the major museums in Hamburg and Berlin organized their own research expeditions after having attempted to obtain ethnographic objects of interest to them in the previous years by issuing annually updated “collecting instructions” for German travelers in the colonial regions. The prescribed aim of the largest expedition of this kind, the Hamburg expedition to the South Seas between 1906 and 1908, was “as comprehensive as possible a study of the population according to place of residence, race, mental and material culture.” Now this goal could be achieved by “schooled researchers.” The museum director in Hamburg, Georg Thilenius (1868–1937), hoped furthermore to gain from the expedition results “grounds for measures, which […] secure the preservation and reproduction of the populace.” The “native will then no longer have to be subjected to ruthless exploitation but rather, in the course of time, be calculable as a constant source of labor and be employed to their fullest utility.”5 In accordance with its comprehensive catalog of tasks, the costly expedition, financed by a Hamburg endowment, was supplied with an anthropologist and a doctor of tropical medicine in addition to ethnographers. The ethnologist Richard Thurnwald (1869–1954), who was sent to the South Seas almost at the same time on a mixed geographical, anthropological, and ethnographic mission by the Berlin museum, encountered the same problems of utilizing the native labor force along the lines of the German colonial administration. This trained lawyer and inveterate objector to cultural historical collectibles – which he occasionally scorned as “kindling wood” (Feuerholz) – was one of the first to concentrate on sociological questions. These primarily concerned the social bonds between the meanwhile peaceful autochthonous groups of inhabitants in his examined region. Besides researches on the causes of the population 3 4 5

Glenn, Wissenschaft, p. 93. Cf. Graebner, Methode. Fischer, Südsee, pp. 28 ff.

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decline, there were analyses on “native law,” which the colonial administration had partly also instigated.6 In addition to these multivocal conceptions, a regional specialization, which had already begun with the America specialists among German ethnologists, can also be ascertained. Experts on Mexico were engaged in reconstructing the prehistory of the vanished advanced Aztec civilizations. Some of Adolf Bastian’s pupils, who had concentrated on the description of Indian populations in Brazil, at that time a favored destination for Germans emigrants, received the debates over method beginning at that time rather indifferently. They described the indigenous jungle inhabitants they met with purely positivist pragmatism. Contrary to Eugen Fischer, who believed he could identify lesser races in his notorious anthropological and ethnographic study from 1908 on Rehoboth bastards in a mixed population in present-day Namibia – then German Southwest Africa – the America specialists instead saw “different upbringing” as the distinguishing mark in their object of study.7 Other members of the profession who likewise spent longer spans of time outside of Europe were the Catholic missionaries of the “Viennese school” formed around the priest Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954). In their search for “primordial monotheism” among African pygmies, they – unlike other ethnologists of their time – learned the language of their hosts. The developing plurality among research approaches already made it impossible for contemporaries “to delimit the term Völkerkunde correctly.”8 With the introduction of historical narratives in museums, however, the young discipline began to develop into a science able to interpret and explain.9 In this shaping process the field gradually freed itself from the “largely humanist agenda” of the nineteenth century and began to manifest an increasingly nationalistic and racist orientation. This process was accelerated by an intradisciplinary generational change around 1905.10 Not least through the advancing process of specialization, the “common abode of the human sciences,” represented by the scientific societies of the nineteenth century, began to crumble toward the end of World War I at the latest. In 1919, signers of an appeal to German universities complained – all rather more out of concern for their own promotion – that “at most universities ethnology is still being seen to by geographers” whereas “true mastery of any science demands full-time staffing.” They cautioned, in addition, that “in the faculties it was not always completely clear what ethnology is.”11 Ethnology did, in fact, only become anchored at universities in 1920, the year of the founding of the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG), with the installation of professorial chairs for Völkerkunde at Hamburg and Leipzig. 6

Cf. Buschmann, Colonizing. Cf. Kraus, Bildungsbürger. 8 Luschan, Anleitung, p. 2. Emphasis added. 9 Zimmerman, Science, p. 87. 10 Cf. Glenn, Traditions; Zimmerman, Anthropology; Proctor, Anthropology. 11 Quoted in Kraus, Museum, p. 19. 7

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BECOMING SCIENTIFIC AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE PECULIAR “NATIONAL CHARACTER” Yet even in the NG, ethnology was initially still assigned to the expert board for mineralogy, geography, and geology, and it was only by the intervention of Thilenius that a separate expert board was established for Völkerkunde. Besides anthropology, ethnography, and prehistory, this expert board also encompassed ethnology and “native languages.”12 Its chairman was the former missionary and linguist Carl Meinhof (1857–1944), who held the first chair for African studies in the world in Hamburg in 1909 and, with Thilenius, as expert department head, together formed a congenial decision-making duo on ethnological issues within the NG that was largely uncontested until the mid-1930s. The defeat in the World War and the end of German colonial rule not only made ethnologists suffer the loss of their original ranges of activity, as well as in most cases the end of the networks that had borne them until that point, but it also landed a stinging blow to their profession. The Allies justified the dissolution of the German colonial empire on the “mendacious contention” that “we had never taken the effort to penetrate thoroughly into the peculiar character [Eigenart of the natives] and to study it.”13 This defamatory vote on their profession in particular could not be put aside unchallenged. Consequently, the NG’s continuous funding throughout the 1920s of all ethnological approaches, even competing ones, was not just intended to consolidate the profession. Keeping the existing scientific journals alive – which included the Kolonial Rundschau – was justified by the necessity to uphold or mend “our old reputation, above all, abroad.”14 Criteria for the further development of the discipline as a science were drafted against this backdrop: Travel grants would henceforth only be approved for “research trips,” but not for collections.15 They were only intended for previously scientifically trained applicants, not for “autodidacts.” This was not stringently adhered to, however, because there was a shortage of aspiring young professionals.16 The continuing evaluations into the 1930s of findings made during the major expeditions to Africa and the South Seas that had sailed during the Kaiserreich, which was also funded by the NG, were intended to counteract this shortage. The Institute of Cultural Morphology directed by Leo Frobenius, who up until 1924 had still been looked down on as a scientific outsider, received up to 1935 the comparatively largest sums during that time and was able to establish itself as the only nonuniversity ethnological institution.17 12

Eingeborenensprachen: Cf. Stoecker, Advancement. Germann, Forschung, p. 399. 14 Georg Thilenius to Carl Meinhof, 27 Sep. 1921, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), R 73/16117. 15 NG to Hans Krieg, 2 Jul. 1923, BAK, R 73/12416. 16 Review by Thilenius, 26 Aug. 1930, DFG file on Grühl, BAK, R 73/11351. 17 The NG also shared the financing of this Kulturmorphologisches Institut with the Reich Interior Ministry and the REM; BAK, R 73/10112. 13

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By 1925 at the latest, as anthropology, which in the meantime had been transformed into human heredity (Erblehre) and racial studies (Rassenkunde), and prehistory founded their own independent scientific societies and increasingly attracted state attention and support,18 the pressure mounted for the field of ethnology to legitimize itself and set itself apart and ethnologists started a long, largely open discussion about the way their discipline should define itself and the available interpretations. Thilenius’s research, for instance, yielded the insight “that even alien nations can undergo development within a few generations that essentially has the same outcome as for civilized peoples.” He perceived in 1926 a “blurring of the boundary that had built up and strengthened the self-confidence of Europeans.” Thus, the division of the world into European “civilized nations” and non-European “natural peoples” that had long been held to be valid was beginning to become unstable. Thilenius proposed as future objects of ethnological research, on the one hand, “primitivity throughout the world” and, on the other hand, the “likewise evolving Deutschtum.”19 However, Thilenius, who after World War I had developed “an increasingly racially oriented perspective on research,”20 remained virtually the only one to conceive corresponding research projects and submit them to the NG.21 After Germany had joined the League of Nations in 1926 and research expeditions had become feasible again, the majority of projects supported by the NG attempted to resume ties with the existing research traditions in ethnology outside of Europe – with a recognizable regional prioritization favoring Africa and South America. Meanwhile, plans to turn ethnology into a topic at schools or at least to attract the interest of upper-school Gymnasium teachers failed in 1928 for “want of a uniform learned opinion and for lack of a suitable textbook.”22 According to the NG’s annual report for 1926, aside from linguistic studies and “appraising the character of foreign peoples,” the main tasks of practical research in ethnology also constituted “analyses of bodily structure and endeavors to raise the accuracy of identifying racial traits.” It justified support for Eugen Fischer’s Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie and for “dedicating measurement instruments” to voyagers.23 At the same time, however, younger scientists were complaining about the growing emphasis on anthropology in leading professional journals. They applied to the NG in 1925 jointly with American scientists, such as Franz Boas and Robert Lowie, for support for a specialized journal of their own, the Völkerkundlicher Anzeiger. According to the reviewer Karl Weule, it had “at least just as much dire necessity as an anthropological one.”24 In 1929 18

Cf. Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen. Thilenius, Völkerkunde. Emphasis added. 20 Laukötter, Kultur, p. 316. 21 NG’s report: Berichte, 1927, Rassenbiologische Untersuchungen in Niedersachen. Cf. Thilenius’s plan for a Cooperative Project to conduct an anthropological/ethnological survey of the German population, Thilenius to Schmidt-Ott, 12 Feb. 1930, BAK, R 73/169. 22 Wilking, Völkerkunde, p. 99. 23 Bericht der Notgemeinschaft 1926. 24 Weule’s review, 30 Apr. 1925, DFG file on Heydrich, BAK, R 73/16162; 16137. 19

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the younger generation mainly initiated the founding of the society Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde. At its founding meeting they self-confidently discussed “ethnology as an independent science.” The keynote report on the results of an expedition to India by the ethnologically oriented racial anthropologist Egon von Eickstedt (1892–1965) inaugurated the talks on “research trips” beyond Europe.25 The German ethnological society then also entered the Third Reich with the declaration that its field was an indispensable “addition to anthropology and racial studies.” Through analyses of their own nation and “through its findings from knowledge gained about other peoples,” it was supposedly predestined “to conduct a comprehensive survey of the peculiar character of the German nation” (Eigenart des deutschen Volkstums). In connection with recurrent calls for better anchorage of the field at universities, German ethnology made the proposal to the National Socialist state to “prepare the rising generation for a new German colonial period,” averring that it was in a position to rescue “the colonial peoples” from downfall “whilst preserving their peculiar character as best as possible.”26 This emphasis on the utility of ethnology to colonial policy certainly was following a contemporary trend. The British colonial administration, in particular, allocated more funding to ethnological studies from 1930 on. However, these were sociologically oriented throughout, along the lines of social anthropology. One of the directors of the London International African Institute, founded around 1924, was the linguist and former missionary Diedrich Westermann (1875–1956) up to the beginning of World War II. This institute, researching, in particular, issues on directing “cultural change,” also sent Thurnwald on an expedition to East Africa in 1930 that the NG co-funded.27 Whereas sociologically oriented German ethnologists still viewed themselves as part of the international community, the universalistic ambitions of the majority of their fellow German researchers in cultural history garnered increasing international criticism, and their approach was derided in the USA and Great Britain for its “metaphysical terminology.”28 The cultural historians were offended and withdrew in stubborn obstinacy to follow the traditional lines of the one-and-only serious, true deutsche Völkerkunde. They polemicized against the advocates of cultural anthropology in the USA, complaining that they were just limiting their studies to “particular phenomena.”29

25

Cf. the report on the first meeting in Leipzig in 1929, Vorstand der Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde (ed.): Bericht. 26 Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde to Bayrisches Ministerium für Volksbildung, 1 Oct. 1933; quoted from Gareis, Exotik, p. 165. Emphasis added. 27 See the NG’s progress report: Berichte, 1931. 28 Radin, Method, p. 73. 29 partikulare Phänomene: Hermann Baumann, Geschichte der Völkerkunde; unpublished manuscript, papers of Hermann Baumann, collection, private collection Prof. Klaus Müller.

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VÖLKERKUNDE DURING THE NAZI PERIOD Leading ethnologists may have welcomed the National Socialists’ rise to power, yet the transition to the Nazi period was nevertheless not entirely frictionless. In Cologne and Frankfurt Nazi employees at museums tried to use the propitious hour to dislodge the directors at their museums. As a result, the Social Democrat Julius Lips in Cologne thereupon left the country,30 while Frobenius, on the contrary, was able to hold his own. The events already hinted at the impending generational upheaval, however, and the elders recognized “the gloomy fact” that henceforth they would “have to be more careful with the youngsters than before.”31 During the 1930s new ethnological institutes appeared at the Universities of Göttingen and Jena; in 1938 the cultural historian Hermann Baumann (1902– 1970) was appointed to the Viennese institute. The relatively small number of ethnologists forced into emigration did not cause a collapse of the core scientific staff.32 The growing nationalistic emphasis on “German achievement” in research over the course of the 1930s is mirrored in the files of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). For instance, emphasis was placed on “purposeful featuring of the Germanic contribution to the study of the Earth’s surface,”33 or that the first research proposal on ethnomusicology was welcome because hitherto only researchers “of other races” (fremdrassig) had worked on this area, whose “disastrous influence” must now be “repelled and dismissed.”34 The category on race gained considerable importance in the DFG’s grant files between 1935 and 1937. Thilenius’s confidence that “prior training in racial studies” provided suitable qualification within the framework of a DFGfunded examination for due acknowledgment of “the uncircumventably necessary biological aspects of cultural history”35 generally still rested along the lines of older basic convictions that “anatomical analysis” always had promised to carry considerable explanatory power. The expert reviewer Thilenius was perceptibly ambivalent toward the radicalizing attempts by the upcoming generation. In response to them he argued in 1937 that “it could be left open whether it is already possible to pose, let alone to answer, the racial issue.” One should be happy enough just to manage “to demonstrate particular symbols as mental achievements by particular peoples.”36 How interchangeable some of these categories became, however, is revealed in the project by the young scientist Peter von Werder in 1935 to study “types of social order in West Africa.” Thilenius applauded this “new topic” as transferring “a familiar problem from European sociology to 30

Cf. Pützstück, Symphonie. Georg Thilenius to Leo Frobenius, 3 Nov. 1933, Stadtarchiv Frankfurt am Main, Magistratsakten 8081. 32 Cf. Riese, Ethnologen. 33 Review by Schrepfer, 4 Jul. 1937, DFG file on Herrmann, BAK, R 73/11632. 34 Review by Müller-Blattau, 21 Jan. 1938, DFG file on Herrmann, BAK, R 73/11222. 35 Review by Thilenius, 18 Sep. 1935, DFG file on Körner, BAK, R 73/16700. 36 Review by Thilenius, 18 Nov. 1937, DFG file on Glück, BAK, R 73/16060. 31

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a so-called natural people” for the first time. It was, in fact, one of the few funded sociologically oriented projects of this period. The finished book appeared 1937 under the title Community and Sovreignty as Types of States and Cultures (Gemeinschaft und Herrschaft als Staats- und Kulturtypen). Advertised by the publisher as a contribution toward “knowledge about the effect of basic racial predispositions on the cultural creativity and political actions of peoples,” the book was entered into the Nazi bibliography and its author became a member of the Nazi party.37 After Thilenius’s death in 1937, the publication of the first textbook on ethnology gave occasion for a hefty generational dispute. Its editor, the expert on American ethnology Konrad Theodor Preuß (1869–1938), had collected contributions by representatives of all the ethnological orientations. His pupil, Walter Krickeberg, gambling to succeed his teacher, publicly criticized that “a non-Aryan ethnologist,” Leonhard Adam, “had twice been allowed a say.”38 The ethnologist Bronisław Malinowski in England, “an outright opponent of modern Germany,” was supposedly also being “cited with acknowledgment.” The “arguments” he presented with the purpose of putting himself forward and discrediting opposing schools of thought, such as the Volksfront and “Jew friendliness,” led to the textbook being reissued in purged form in 1938. Thurnwald rewrote Adam’s contribution. The Reich Ministry of Education (REM) cautioned moderation by those involved, though, and the DFG also expressed the wish that “the various lines in ethnology […] be reconciled.”39 The same intradisciplinary animosity was also expressed in a 1937 memorandum with an ethnosociological orientation authored by Wilhelm Mühlmann (1904–1988), a pupil of Thurnwald and Thilenius. In connection with an informal candidacy for the vacant director’s post at the Cologne museum, it attested to a “serious crisis” in “outdated” German ethnology. It was supposedly “not capable” of “taking into account modern demands (namely, biological aspects),” not to mention “tackling the modern, burning ethnological issues of conformance, the spread of European civilization, racial contacts and conflicts.”40 German Völkerkunde had “fallen behind” particularly compared to Great Britain and the USA. Nor were the loss of the colonies entirely to blame for it. The main assault was directed against “unduly powerful clerical ethnology native to Vienna,” which remained cold to the “Nordic idea.” In order to give this theory a boost, in 1938 Thurnwald, Westermann, and Mühlmann petitioned the DFG to continue funding the journal Archiv für Anthropologie, orphaned since Thilenius’s death, under the editorship of Mühlmann. Because the attacked “Viennese school” had meanwhile been driven into exile and its journal Anthropos “is not continuing to appear within the territory of the Reich,” the henceforth renamed Archiv für Anthropologie und Völkerforschung “should become, all the more, a representative 37

Review by Thilenius, 4 Mar. 1935, file on von Werder, BAK, R 73/15625. A proposal by Adam, publisher of the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, for printing costs submitted to the DFG had already failed in 1935. The DFG had learned beforehand that he was “a half-Jew at least”; Stark to REM, 21 Aug. 1935, BAK, R/3/15987. 39 Griewank to Termer, 16 Aug. 1939, DFG file on Heydrich, BAK, R 73/10300. 40 Mühlmann, Wilhelm, Denkschrift to the REM, Mühlmann papers, BAK, N 1450. 38

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responsibility for German science to assume,”41 the DFG noted, and approved the proposal. In conception and method the research on “racial contacts” certainly was directed at current international questions, with which Thurnwald had acquainted himself in 1936, for example, at the Second Annual Conference on World Problems in the USA. The assessment purportedly reached there was that after decades of aggressive colonization of Africa, “only wars that we ourselves want are still being waged” on that continent. The nascent strivings for independence by the then still narrow echelon of the black elite was foreboding change, however. It was not imperialism that was in crisis, Thurnwald concluded, but contacts between blacks and whites, and what was primarily needed was “implementable planning.”42 Mühlmann had called upon the academic guild to assume “intellectual leadership” in the Nazi movement in 1933. He saw “Europe, mainly Eastern Europe,” as the primary site of a new planned ethnological orientation.43 The director of the Institute for Racial and Ethnic Studies in Leipzig, Otto Reche, concurred. He had placed his professional accent on anthropological research in Poland.44 A comprehensive Theorie des Ethnos defined the goal that Mühlman generally followed. This theory was supposed to put ethnology in a position to develop an “awareness by a people of its historical bonds and role,” using all “intentional data.” Such an awareness, “naturally, is particularly prominent where a people must assert itself in its contacts with other peoples.”45 The concepts of different “ethnic grades of maturity,” criteria for “nation building” (Volkwerdung) or, respectively, “repopulation” (Umvolkung) developed by him in the following war years as well as a specifically Jewish “sham nationality” (Scheinvolklichkeit), or the categorization of “not assimilable” population groups – whereby he was thinking of blacks in the USA – Mühlmann regarded as “problems for practical national policy to address. With his approach he wanted to turn ethnology as a whole into a “weapon” for the “German nation, wedged between East and West.”46 As almost the only German ethnologist of his day to do so, Mühlmann therefore also spoke about “national self-help” (völkische Selbsthilfe), that is, “measures of racial policy against internal groups of a state that are ethnically, culturally, or economically intolerable and racially not fusable,” for which “foremost and almost exclusively the Jewry come into consideration.”47 Mühlmann never attained the authoritative position within Völkerkunde that he was aiming for and,

41

Note in the file by Griewank, 7 Jun. 1938, BAK, R 73/10076. Emphasis added. Thurnwald, Crisis, p. 90. 43 Mühlmann, Probleme, p. 363. 44 Otto Reche headed the Institut für Rassen- und Völkerkunde at the University of Leipzig from 1936. The DFG had his proposals reviewed exclusively by anthropologists, not by ethnologists; BAK, R 73/13816. 45 Mühlmann, Methodik, p. 229. 46 Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, p. 4. 47 Mühlmann, Krieg, pp. 212–214. 42

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as a private lecturer at the University of Berlin, was also denied a professorship, despite a number of attempts.48 From 1936 on at the latest, the majority of German ethnologists supported a rapid return of the German colonies in Africa, however.49 From that time on, “lively colonial interest” likewise became a criterion in reviews of proposals, also for the DFG; slowly but surely research related to Africa outweighed projects submitted by the America specialists.50 In 1938 a proposal was submitted for the publication of Völkerkunde von Afrika by Thurnwald, Hermann Baumann, and Diedrich Westermann on the argument that the “German professional literature” did not yet possess “a modern ethnology about the dark continent,” whereas “our colonial claims” would make “such a work urgently needed.”51 This Cooperative Project did, in fact, contain all the essential points that from 1940 on were discussed in the Colonial Science Department of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) under the key word of an anticipated “natives policy.” It was submitted by a cultural historian who did not subdivide Africa into cultural groups, rather into 28 racially connotated cultural provinces.52 It was conceived in a collaboration between a former missionary and linguist and the ethnosociologist Thurnwald. Always in conformity with the guidelines issued by the Nazi Party’s Office for Colonial Policy (Kolonialpolitisches Amt) – “acknowledgment of the peculiar character of every people” and a “ban on any racial mixing”53 – the Africa specialists were not the only ones to place their expertise in this “peculiar character” at the disposal of the state for the purposes of warfare. However, only Thurnwald and Westermann developed conceptions of political order by the end of the war. They not only had practical experience dating back to the period of the German “protectorates” but their collaboration with the International Africa Institute in London made them most immediately familiar with the international debate on colonial policy. Their suggested “preservation of the national character” of the inhabitants of the African continent was correspondingly oriented toward their practical experience with the British colonies. In the foreground was the warning against “too rapid cultural change.” It was to be steered primarily by schooling policy, which followed the precept of raising “Africans as Africans”: “The European-educated native will […] necessarily become an individual with overly developed self-confidence, which calls forth the most undesirable manifestations.”54 48

Mühlmann did not submit any support proposals to the DFG during the 1940s. Frobenius’s institute also; it pointed out that “Frankfurt, which old tradition attaches to the colonial conception […] should not be ranked behind the cities Berlin and Hamburg in the mounting colonial wave”; A. Jensen to Krebs, mayor of Frankfurt, 9 Jan. 1937, Stadtarchiv Frankfurt am Main, Magistratsakten 8087. 50 Review by Westermann, 4 Oct. 1937, BAK, R 73/14357. 51 Proposal by Westermann, Baumann, and Thurnwald, 7 Jun. 1938, BAK, R 73/15646. 52 Among contemporary cultural historians, Baumann most decidedly argued for the “unity of culture and race […] because race and culture are, of course, mutually defining essences,” as he explained in Völkerkunde von Afrika. Baumann as well as Mühlmann, both the same age, were in close contact with Eugen Fischer during their training years and beyond. 53 Asmis, Eingeborenenpolitik, p. 81. 54 Westermann, Zukunft, p. 400. 49

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The French policy of assimilation accordingly had produced a “European remake” (abschattierten Europäer) but which then resembled a lifeless shell robbed of his culture. That was why “the negro should remain close to his roots” and the development of a “stiff-collared negro type” should be avoided. The details on the concrete implementation measures still needed to be investigated, but one should tend to proceed as the British did, only better, for through the unique experience after the Treaty of Versailles of itself becoming a colonized nation, nobody was better called upon than the Germans to become “at the same time master and comrade” in the regained colonies of the future.55 The projects assigned to the RFR’s Ethnology Department suffered increasingly from the mounting influence of the war, however. Baumann’s manual on African tribes Handbuch der Stämme Afrikas could not be finished. On the other hand, the Handbuch der afrikanischen Völkerkunde compiled by the Austrian Hugo Bernatzik commissioned by the Office for Colonial Policy and published in collaboration with the Frankfurt cultural morphologist, appeared in 1947. It also included contributions by some Italian and French ethnologists and the hopeful preface that “colonial ethnology” should in future contribute “toward European unity.” RACE AND CULTURE, VÖLKERKUNDE AND ETHNOLOGY When the NG resumed its work in 1949, Völkerkunde was still the overarching term used, albeit from then on it only covered “ethnography, Völkerpsychologie, and native languages.” The conventionally close institutional interlocking with anthropology was thereby broken off. For German ethnologists that neighboring field still continued to serve as an “auxiliary science.”56 Three tendencies negotiated by the NG/DFG can be ascertained up until 1950: first, securing staffing continuity through providing for the livelihoods of ethnologists who had not yet returned to “posts active in culture policy” because of past political involvement and “top experts” of the science;57 second, a careful disassociation from the “no longer current scientific style of the waning 19th century;”58 and third, the directed “resumption” of “research traditions that have contributed substantially to the reputation and standing of German

55

Cf. on this Blome, Bericht; as well as Wolff (ed.), Beiträge. Cf. also Westermann, Afrika; Thurnwald, Eingriffe. 56 Hermann Baumann, Geschichte der Völkerkunde; unpublished manuscript, papers of Hermann Baumann, collection, private collection Prof. Klaus Müller. Emphasis added. 57 Baumann, for instance, had to wait the longest for his reappointment because of his membership in the Nazi party since 1932. From 1949 on he was granted yearly stipends as well as support for his research trip to Angola until he obtained a professorship at Munich in 1955. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-Archiv (DFGA), Ba 10, fols. 1123 ff. 58 Review on the proposal by Zeitschrift für Eingeborenensprachen, 14 Nov. 1949, DFGA, Kl 10, fol. 10062.

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science,” which for a long time had meant “seeking out actually unresearched tribes.”59 In the first few years after 1945 the cultural morphologist Adolf E. Jensen (1899–1965) in Frankfurt assumed a leading role in the reorganization of postwar ethnology. His succession to the teaching post previously held by Frobenius, who died in 1938, had been blocked by the REM until 1945 with reference to his wife’s Jewish grandfather. As almost the only politically unincriminated German ethnologist, who were otherwise loyal to the Nazi party to the last, his intervention on behalf of the Nazi activist Baumann also within the NG was decisive for the latter in obtaining financial assistance over the years.60 The cultural morphologists left for Ethiopia as early as 1950 on the first German postwar expedition, also partly funded by the NG, even though one of the reviewers was still skeptical about “whether it is now already opportune to carry out such an extensive expedition while other countries are doubly watching every little thing that Germany is doing on its own steam.”61 Yet the lack of “field research” became the leitmotif of the “having fallen behind” debate held within the discipline. Because of the “time gap” that had developed “since the loss of the colonies and the halt imposed on German field research”62 at the beginning of the 1950s, it was not yet possible “to appear at the international forum with new pioneering research results” compared to the “modern ethnological research” being conducted by empirical methods in Great Britain and the USA.63 The result for practical research from 1953 on was that longer research sojourns abroad became the rule for the regionally alternating ethnological Priority Programs imposed by the DFG. It became a condition from 1952 on that the applicants take along “younger generation researchers.” In this way the DFG contributed decisively to the setting of regional priorities among their sponsored young ethnologists. In many cases continuation grants were approved for the processing of expedition data, which ended up as a Habilitation thesis for the researcher concerned. As regards subject matter, the first Priority Program concerned the “study of the remnant hunter-gatherer peoples and their adaptation to higher forms of economy.” The need for this program was justified by the argument that “in ten years many of these remnants will have disappeared.” The urgency “of salvaging the irrecoverably vanishing material evidence of the remnants of diminishing human cultures” as well as the study of cultural change or the “Europeanization as 59 Review on the Abessinia expedition by Frobenius’s institute in 1950, DFGA, Je 1, fol. 2943. 60 “By reason of the treatment he had experienced after 1933, Prof. Jensen would surely not have suggested Prof. Baumann as a stipend recipient if political reservations existed”; Dr. Hocker (DFG Head Office: Geschäftsstelle) to Prof. Kroll, who was the sole member of the Joint Committee (Hauptausschuss) to raise any doubts, 13 Feb. 1950, DFGA, Ba 10, fol. 1128. 61 DFGA, Ba 10, fol. 2944. 62 Review by Termer, 12 Mar. 1953, DFGA, Da 12, fol. 6141. 63 Review by Termer, 10 May 1950, DFGA, Sp 9, fol. 7500.

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one of the last acculturations” were the main goals set for the foreign travels of German ethnologists, the great majority of whom were oriented toward cultural history until far into the 1960s.64 The regionally alternating focuses by the Priority Programs made it possible to reach areas, such as Pakistan for example, that had been given “little attention yet by international research.” This opened up the opportunity to create “new domains for German ethnology.”65 If hitherto “entirely unexamined regions” were reached, which by then only rarely happened, taking “anthropological measurements” of the as yet unrecorded populations certainly was still part of the ethnological mission.66 Although purely anthropological research expeditions were still positively reviewed for quite a while,67 they were becoming increasingly rare, and the formerly frequent, mixed archeological/ethnological expedition or similar research trips made way for growing specialization of the subdisciplines. After 1945 the “race” category significantly lost relevance in research. Nevertheless, German ethnology continued to make use of the system of “races” developed by the anthropologist Egon von Eickstedt as an ordering category for human diversity far into the 1960s. It biologically divided humanity into “Europoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids.”68 As regards cultural policy – in the external world of the 1950s and 1960s, influenced by the Cold War, the Hallstein Doctrine, and decolonization conflicts – there was an awareness of a “wrapping up of active colonial activities, now obviously redounding to our merit.”69 The DFG was recording and meting out disciplinary measures for inappropriate conduct by scientists abroad.70 When in 1964 the scientific advisory board in the newly founded Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation was consulting about planned “educational aid” for developing nations, Baumann recommended, as the only Völkerkundler, that “residual traditions and remnant establishments from the German colonial era” be reactivated. Against the recommendations of the Addis Abeba conference on African systems of education from 1961, he also recommended a concentration on the “primary school system.”71 Also in 1964, the DFG bade farewell for the first time in its annual report to “native languages,” which henceforth became “African and Indonesian languages.” The quarrels between the ethnological schools had lost their former vehemence since the war’s end and the achievements of other orientations were being acknowledged more and more. Thurnwald founded an Institut für Ethnologie und Soziologie in 1945 in Berlin, largely ceased his publishing activities, and died in 64

Baumann, Ethnologie, p. 156. Review on the proposal by Westphal-Hellbusch, 8 Nov. 1960, DFGA, We 125, fol. 2848. 66 Proposal by Funke for a “research trip to Sumatra,” 21 Nov. 1952, DFGA, Fu 13, fol. 195. 67 Proposal by von Eickstedt to study the “racial dynamics in East Asia,” 31 Dec. 1954, DFGA, Ei 5/7. 68 Cf. Tischner (ed.), Völkerkunde. 69 Baumann, Ethnologie, p. 147. 70 “A research trip simply isn’t a military shock troop”: Dr. Kurt Krieger to Dr. Treue, 26 May 1967, DFGA, Na 10. The scientist concerned had “also profiled his professional colleagues as ‘natives,’ insofar as they were of Indian origin”; note by Dr. Treue, Na 10, fol. 14494. 71 Review by Baumann on Bildungshilfe, Oct. 1964, BAK, B 213/7025, booklet 14. 65

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1954 without having submitted another grant application to the DFG. Mühlmann, on the contrary, received a stipend in 1951 to continue his studies on “nation building” started in the 1940s, now under the research title “Ethnic Assimilation and Ethnogenesis.” The researches by Mühlmann, meanwhile appointed professor at the University of Heidelberg, on the “charismatic leadership” of Ghandi, Nkrumah, and other leaders of decolonizing movements were funded by the DFG as well as later field research in Sicily – issuing from his assimilation research on the place of origin of the first generation of guest laborers in the Federal Republic of Germany.72 As a DFG reviewer, Mühlmann sorted the applications by racial anthropologists during the 1950s. He advocated retaining the term “race” in any case as a “sociological category.” When Egon von Eickstedt applied in 1955 for the continuation of his “researches conducted before the Second World War in Southeast Asia” on the “racial dynamics of East Asia,” Mühlmann ranked the proposal as “very desirable.”73 Adolf Jensen had also supported von Eickstedt right after 1945.74 By contrast, in 1958 Mühlmann noted a “shattering intellectual sterility” in the former “racial psychologist” (Rassenseelenkundler) Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892–1974).75 On the whole, however, after 1945 German ethnology was dominated by cultural historians. Its center of balance on the “German” research tradition only began to tip at the end of the 1960s toward the rising generation of students. They were increasingly interested in international methods of research, thereby opening the door to the methodological diversity long since conventional abroad.76 For the succeeding generation of students, however, it was, among other things, a matter of changing the relationship with their objects of research. The interplay between the “student movement, university reforms, and generational change” offered them “the unexpected chance to redefine.”77 In 1957 one DFG reviewer still considered it “a most urgent desideratum” to quickly study the “cultural and linguistic heritage” in Brazil in view of the “unstoppable extinction of the native population.”78 In 1969, by contrast, at the end of turbulent proceedings during the convention of the German Ethnological Society, a resolution was passed that stated its opposition to the Indian policy being followed by the Brazilian government. At least some elements of ethnological science then regarded the “development of cooperative research and practice” as a challenge it was obliged to meet,79 and in some places Völkerkunde reached a “belated sociological turning point” in the 1970s.80 72

DFGA, file Mü 24, fols. 1541 ff. Review by Mühlmann, 14 Apr. 1955, DFGA, Ei 5, fol. 40. 74 Preuß, Zeitenwende, p. 111. 75 Review by Mühlmann, 13 May 1958, DFGA, Cl 4, fol. 1940. 76 “Many German ethnologists today, however, feel that following the relativistic cultural controversy [in the USA] is a pressing obligation”: review by Westphal-Hellbusch, 5 Oct. 1967, DFGA, file Ru 91. 77 Sigrist/Kößler, Soziologie, p. 90. 78 Review by Trimborn, 29 Aug, 1957, DFGA, file Ha 196/2. 79 Cf. Seithel, Colonialethnologie. 80 Streck, Zielsetzung, p. 239. 73

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The discipline is now commonly known in Germany as Ethnologie, and among its existing ethnological research establishments there are only three Institute für Völkerkunde left. The way the field internally defines ethnology is as a “science in the process of changing”; or else it considers itself in a crisis81 basically involving the “crisis of the West’s representation in the world.”82 Throughout the period under examination, the DFG was not only an indispensable resource for ethnology along its path away from a bundle of fields toward a recognizably independent discipline. For German Völkerkunde, which had always been a decentralized field characterized by “internal competition,”83 it was moreover also an influential arena where the style of the scientific actors was formed.

81 82 83

Fischer, Ethnologie, p. VII. Petermann, Geschichte, p. 1028. Glenn, Traditions, p. 30.

TRANSMITTALS AND TRANSFORMATIONS – RESEARCH ON THE EUROPEAN EAST AND THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1945–1975* Corinna R. Unger The history of Eastern studies (Ostforschung) prior to 1945 has received much attention in past years. Numerous studies have examined how academic experts on the East – historians, geographers, linguists, jurists, ethnologists – after World War I strove to offer scientific proof that the territories the vanquished German empire had lost in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles were historically German or Germanic regions, and that for this reason would have to be returned to Germany – also how Weimar’s vengeance joined ethnic German nationalism in questioning the validity of nation state borders by referring to the significance of supposedly transcendental entities like Volk and Deutschtum, how some experts of the East attacked nations in East Central Europe and Eastern Europe with anti-Bolshevistic and anti-Semitic accusations and postulated an aggressive German claim to supremacy, and, finally, how experts on the East participated in preparing and legitimizing the National Socialist assault on Poland by spreading a negative mood about Eastern nations in lectures, articles, and school books, or by advising political and military authorities. The fact that some of those experts during World War II were directly involved in the conquest and occupation of these territories, that they plundered archives, libraries, and museums there, wrote memorandums pleading for the “de-Jewification” of particular regions in order to solve the supposed problem of “overcrowding,” and drew up maps and lists indicating the various “ethnic groups” in order to facilitate for the SS the “Germanization” of the new Lebensraum – all this was a shocking finding in the 1990s. The fact that some of these scholars could continue their careers largely undisturbed after 1945 and became reputed, influential professors in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), caused some upset at the end of the decade.1 This debate has meanwhile settled down, and some accusations have been retracted or moderated once it became clear that insufficient proof had been supplied and that some statements had been exaggerated. In the meantime, our knowledge about the role of eastern studies and its representatives under National Socialism has become quite complete, even though new archival discover* This text is based on the conclusion to my book Ostforschung in Westdeutschland, pp. 422–439. I have revised and expanded that chapter for the present version. 1 Cf., e. g., Haar, Historiker; Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft; Schulze/Oexle (eds.), Deutsche Historiker.

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ies are continuously being added and biographical aspects continue to embellish the picture.2 Given this situation, it seemed to make sense to go a step further and inquire into the development of Eastern research after the war. Why could the discipline continue to exist and receive public support even though it was so obviously incriminated? How did it become a discipline compatible with the political and cultural premises of the FRG? How did Ostforschung transform into Eastern European studies as we know them today? And what role did the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) play in all this? In order to answer these questions I examined three issues: the staffing and institutional situation in the field of Ostforschung after the war, the concepts and interpretational models its representatives developed and implemented to study “the East,” and the understanding the researchers involved had of their discipline and what they considered an appropriate relationship between science and politics. In order to find out how the Cold War influenced academic views on East Central Europe and Eastern Europe as well as the institutional development of the discipline, I devoted one section of my book to American research on Russia and the Soviet Union as well as to American funding practices since World War II. This comparison was supposed to give contours to the DFG’s function and position in West German research sponsorship. The results of my study are summarized in the following. DERADICALIZING AND REPOLITICIZING A DISCIPLINE In the FRG after 1945 there was great indignation about the expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe and the severing of the former Eastern territories. For that reason researchers who promised to provide scientific proof of the supposedly unlawful territorial loss and who recalled the “German heritage in the East” had good prospects of obtaining public support. Although some researchers were affected by the denazification process and had to wait for a while before they could return to universities and research institutions, the majority managed to find a niche that allowed them to continue their work. Such niches were offered, above all, by institutions founded to replace those that had existed before 1945 – for instance, the Osteuropa Institut in Munich, which succeeded the Eastern European Institute in Breslau (Wrocław), or the Herder establishments in Marburg, which continued the tradition of the Nord- und Ostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Numerous historical commissions were established for the different “expellee-associated” (landsmannschaftliche) regions; like the above-mentioned institutes, these were funded by federal and provincial offices. In these nonuniversity circles, continuity was strong in terms of personnel and research topics. Precisely this continuity was the reason why this branch of Eastern studies, which focused on German heritage, could assert itself in the early FRG. Ostforschung was characterized by a völkisch nationalistic perspective on 2

Petersen, Bevölkerungsökonomie; and Mühle, Volk, offer biographical approaches.

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East Central Europe and Eastern Europe and a view confined to local “German achievements.” To be able to continue their pre-1945 work, the scholars had to deradicalize and “recivilize” their approaches. Hence, they had to put aside the racist and expansionist arguments some of them had been openly postulating during the Nazi period.3 Consequently most texts produced in the early 1950s abstained from using the radical vocabulary that before 1945 had served to degrade Eastern nations in order to bring to bear their own geopolitical interests and völkisch nationalism. Beneath this semantic level, however, the symbolic defense of German claims on the East remained a leitmotif of the nationalistically motivated strand of Ostforschung well into the second half of the 1950s. This thrust was well received, at least in part of West German society, particularly among the ranks of expellee associations and the ministries representing the FRG’s territorial and symbolic claims – the Foreign Office, the Ministry for Displaced Persons, and the Ministry for All-German Affairs. That is why they funded studies and publications that sharply criticized the relinquishment of the former German eastern territories, denied the validity of the Oder-Neisse boundary, and denounced the expulsion of the German populations from East Central Europe as a violation of international law. Less openly revisionistic but just as politically charged were projects like analyses in art history of church buildings in Silesia, in which the authors discovered characteristically German influences in Polish architecture, or studies exploring Polish town names with extremely precise documentation of their roots in the German language. The methods and concepts Eastern experts – many of them themselves expellees – employed to underpin their arguments were largely old ones. Although their region of study was no longer accessible physically, those projects seamlessly continued the research conducted during Weimar times. What were the reasons for this continuity? For one, the continuity apparently allowed scholars to uphold the validity of their research results across the political break of 1945. An abrupt reorientation of scholarship would have implied that there was indeed cause to introduce fundamental reforms, and such an impression had to be avoided at all costs. Secondly, continuing older research projects helped some individuals to master the existential experiences of war, destruction, and expulsion and to reaffirm their identities in a gravely challenging situation. Under these circumstances, upholding the idea of German civilizational supremacy had a stabilizing effect. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many representatives of Ostforschung were unwilling or unable to see that, with its antiquated perspective, their approach ultimately marginalized itself scientifically and politically. Additionally, the challenges arising out of the new political situation in Central and Eastern Europe heavily influenced the discipline. The conflict between the Western Allies and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which at the end of the 1940s turned into the Cold War, determined to a large degree the FRG’s perception of itself and other countries; similarly, it influenced the self3

Cf. Jarausch, Umkehr, p. 84.

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understanding of its Eastern experts. The “new offensive stance against the East”4 many scholars assumed in their new West German posts was basically the old one. Up to the end of the war many of them had defended the idea that Germany held a “central position” in Europe, and they had rejected the notion that Germany was part of the West. The defeat and the intensifying East/West conflict produced a willingness to approach the West and/or to identify with it, if only with reservations. Against this backdrop they rededicated their former offensive goals for East Central Europe and Eastern Europe as the “defense of the Abendland.” This concept of the West was characteristic of the Deutschtum-centered branch of Ostforschung in the early postwar period. Freed of the anti-Semitic and racist elements it had gathered under National Socialism, referring to the Abendland was a convenient way to lend meaning to the geopolitical situation in which West Germany found itself after 1945. In allusion to the boundary between the Abendland and “Asia,” which the Iron Curtain seemed to symbolize, historians such as Hermann Aubin projected the realpolitik character of the East/West conflict onto a supratemporal level, thus lending it an almost mythical quality. West German national identity could distinguish itself ex negativo in the renewed current fear of the “Bolshevist threat,” which was charged further by the fear of Russian revenge due to the German crimes committed in the East during the war. West German Eastern studies profited substantially from the Adenauer government’s unbending opposition to the USSR. Because it was extremely difficult to travel into the country and to obtain reliable information until the middle of the 1950s, existing knowledge about the Soviet Union was very valuable. Consequently, several Eastern experts became prominent advisors of the federal government and/or passed their knowledge on to Western secret service agencies. Research on the adversary formed an academic milieu, in which even experts of Eastern Europe whose pasts prevented them from following a career in academia in the FRG could find accommodation. For the secret services, it was a subordinate issue, if not indeed irrelevant, whether their informants and analysts were possibly Nazi-incriminated. Peter-Heinz Seraphim, for instance, who had become known for his anti-Semitic research on “Eastern Jewry” (Ostjudentum), was among the experts on the East on the payroll of the American secret service. West German authorities meanwhile carried the costs of the Research Service on Eastern Europe (Forschungsdienst Osteuropa) headed by the scholar of national culture and Turkologist, Gerhard von Mende. His Nazi past prevented him from continuing a university career. Instead, he coordinated from Düsseldorf the filing of reports by Eastern European emigrants about the Soviet Union’s policy on nationalities. Those experts on Eastern Europe who did not work for the secret services also managed relatively well to evade possible inquiries into their pre-1945 activities. In West German society, there was little interest in critically tackling individual and collective responsibility. Against this background, the argument gained influence that, due to the Cold War, research on “the East” was an urgent political 4

Fellner, Geschichtsbild, p. 226.

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necessity that should not be impeded by critical questions about the pasts of that field’s representatives. It would be cutting the story too short, though, to reduce the conduct of West German researchers on the East to escaping from their pasts into the present of the Cold War. The elements of continuity which characterized the professional view on the USSR and Eastern Europe are too prominent for such a generalizing statement. Werner Markert, a specialist on Russia who headed the Study Group on Eastern European Research (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Osteuropaforschung) in Tübingen, continued to pursue his assumptions developed during the war about Russia being genuinely “different in kind” and the “Russian character” being incompatible with European culture. The contemporary political developments seemed to be confirming his hypotheses. Here “democratic and reactionary anticommunism” fused “with gripping Russian hatred.”5 As formulated by Markert and others, such teleological projections lent the FRG’s enmity with the USSR an inevitable character. Under these conditions racist anti-Bolshevism rapidly transformed into an antitotalitarian kind of anticommunism. The concept of totalitarianism – the assumption that fascism and Stalinism are essentially identical, as was postulated in the mid-1950s among others by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski – on which scholars like the economist Karl C. Thalheim (Berlin) and the lawyer Reinhart Maurach (Munich) based their reasoning, facilitated this process. With its systematic analysis of criteria for authoritarian rule it offered a scientific foundation that made the defense against communism appear “objective” and endowed it with a civilizing quality. The historicizing reference to the purported essential difference between Russia and Europe was a constant motif in research of the 1950s. It did not remain without public effect: Markert and some of his like-minded colleagues translated their professional positions into recommendations on shaping West German policy on the East, which they conveyed to the Federal Chancellory through Theodor Oberländer, the Minister for Displaced Persons. Those scholars were active members of the German Society for Eastern European Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde), which regarded itself as a lobbying organization for West German affairs with Eastern Europe and followed the principle of being “objective but not neutral.”6 Old networks, which reached back to the prewar period and which had been strengthened in the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories were reactivated after the war. They became particularly visible when the Federal Institute for the Study of Marxism-Leninism was established. It was founded in Cologne in 1961 and a few years later was renamed Federal Institute for Eastern Research and International Studies (Bundesinstitut für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien). Soviet studies with a decidedly anticommunist impulse were conducted there. To the dismay of its initiators, the practical political usefulness of the institute’s analyses and publications remained limited, however. In the meantime, Eastern studies of nationalistic bent were dropped from the spectrum of subjects treated at universities. Although the denazification process 5 6

Lammersdorf, Verwestlichung, p. 973. Dietrich, Geleitwort, p. 1.

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was only partly effective, in the end, universities accommodated relatively few supporters of extreme nationalistic positions toward East Central Europe and Eastern Europe. It was here that the DFG’s corrective influence was most noticeable: Different from their fellow professionals at nonuniversity institutes receiving support by public authorities, scientists at universities were much more closely tied to the DFG and worked harder to receive financial support from it. They benefited particularly from its Priority Program on Eastern Studies (Schwerpunktprogramm für Ostforschung), which was called into existence in the early 1950s at the initiative of the Ministry of the Interior and some experts in the field and was supplied with the respectable sum of 765,000 deutschmarks. In order to acquire some of these funds, the researchers had to measure up to the DFG’s strict evaluation criteria. In general, those who failed had submitted research projects that appeared to be too closely tied to political interests. The grant application submitted by the agricultural expert Max Rolfes in 1956 was such a case. It proposed to examine the “development of the Silesian economy from 1900 to 1950 with a focus on agriculture.” The reviewers rejected his emphasis on Silesia belonging within the German cultural sphere, pointing out his “exaggerated nationalism with a faint tone from the National Socialist stock of ideas.”7 Besides the structural framing conditions set by the DFG, political developments of the postwar period also helped change the older view on East Central Europe. One example will illustrate this connection. Before 1945, the Poland historian, Herbert Ludat, may not have offered nationalistic arguments to justify Germany’s eastward expansion, but he certainly did talk about Germany’s “superiority” over Poland. His interpretation of Polish history changed conspicuously in the 1950s. Then writing from Münster, he emphasized the “complex interweaving” of the historical space of East Central Europe “with the Romanic/ Germanic community of peoples of the Christian Abendland.” He now pleaded for acknowledgment of the independence of Slavic cultures instead of writing them off as a “derivative” of German civilization.8 While Ludat thus integrated Poles in the Western community and claimed them for the West, he pictured Russia as even more alien than before, as “in every respect different” and neither capable nor willing to overcome this difference.9 In view of the threat coming from the USSR, it no longer seemed appropriate to define the relations between Germany and Poland as competitive. Instead, the common points between the two countries were stressed. With their revised interpretations of relations between states, historians like Ludat were visibly orientating themselves toward current political developments. One alternative was maintaining a conscious distance from political issues of the day. This strategy was prominent with researchers who wanted to prevent any questionable use of their research results for political purposes. It was advisable to choose a field that was as far away as possible from present-day concerns. One representative of this approach was the historian of Russia, Werner Philipp. He 7 8 9

Grant file, Archiv der DFG, Bonn-Bad Godesberg (DFGA), Ro 76/6, 1956. Ludat, Slaven, p. 10. Emphasis added. Ludat, Aufstieg, p. 12.

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was a teacher at the Eastern European Institute of the Free University in Berlin. By researching the pre-Petrine era, he found a niche which already in the Nazi period had largely protected him from being roped in politically. On the other hand, working on the pre-Petrine era was an eminently political decision. In his research Philipp questioned the teleological interpretation of Soviet history – from Mongolian dominance, through the Zarist period, to Stalinism – and underscored the importance of Russian Orthodoxy, which he considered more important than communist ideology. He and his colleagues continued along the lines of earlier German research on Russia, which primarily comprised political, institutional, and diplomatic history. By doing so they set themselves apart not only from the instrumentalized Soviet studies under National Socialism but also from the reshaped anticommunist Russian studies of the present. The Cold War undoubtedly made it harder for scholarship to maintain “political distance.” At the same time, Eastern studies could scarcely have established itself after 1945 without it. It would otherwise have soon faded out of the disciplinary spectrum. It was the exceptional political situation of the East/West conflict, together with the German territorial losses and the expulsions of ethnic Germans from East Central Europe that allowed Eastern studies to become an integral part of West German scholarship. Its beginning transformation a decade later into Eastern European studies (Osteuropaforschung) can likewise be attributed to the conditions set by the Cold War.

FROM EASTERN STUDIES TO EASTERN EUROPEAN STUDIES As decolonization proceeded, the geographic center of balance of the East/West conflict shifted to the so-called “third world.” The non-aligned states increasingly influenced the course of the international conflict. At the same time, the rivalry between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union intensified. In the process of this polycentric development, the concept of totalitarianism lost some of its interpretative force. Rather than demonstrating the totalitarian character of Eastern bloc states, it seemed more interesting to analyze their national specifics and the resulting preconditions for the success or failure of various communist systems. Sovietology, as was being pursued at the Federal Institute for Eastern Research and International Studies, for example, was the first subdiscipline of Eastern studies that fully ascribed to social scientific methods. Because it held out the prospect of contributing toward the analysis on the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet system, the line between basic and applied research became somewhat blurred. At the same time, the empirical approach promoted modeling and helped the notion gain influence that Soviet communism was an alternative model serving the modernization of society – albeit by its own, very specific means. The economic historian Hans Raupach, for instance, argued that the Soviet planned economy constituted a reaction to the geoeconomic circumstances of Eastern Europe, which demanded greater commitment by the state than in Western Europe. Raupach stated in 1965 that communist ideology played a sub-

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ordinate role in the decision on economic order. Thus, he questioned the Soviet Union’s adoption of ideologically based dogmatism.10 Convergence theory, competing against totalitarianism theory, agreed with this relativizing perspective. Its adherents were convinced that the opposites between the Eastern and the Western systems could be overcome through economic and political adaptation to the Western model, which implied the assumption that Russia’s supposed “backwardness” was not an essential trait. The fact that such a comparatively relaxed view of the USSR could evolve was essentially due to the scholarly exchange of ideas that started in the late 1950s. As the harsh West German anticommunism of the postwar years slowly lost its severity, direct insights into the socialistic way of living permitted researchers to begin to question the ideological elements of the older view on the East. This was accelerated by the generational change taking place at the same time. One observer noted in 1958 that “the younger generation, which receives the facts in the East with more distance and is not drawn to take an interest in Eastern studies by emigration or direct personal experience with Eastern influences, truly seeks out scientific problems and in the tangle of most diverse interests […] tries to arrive at objective discussions on a professional level.”11 These researchers were also the ones who during the 1960s turned their attention increasingly to Russian social history, which had hitherto been marginalized by research on Stalinism and other “officially borne” fields. Thus, they opened up entirely new, less ideologically laden perspectives on the history of Russia. At the same time, some Eastern experts began to break the silence that until that time had dominated among their ranks about the German war and extermination policy in Eastern Europe and East Central Europe. The polemically raised criticism by East Germany – which in substance was partly correct – that some Eastern experts in the Federal Republic had participated in Nazi crimes, played a role, even though West German scholars were unwilling to concede anything. However, when National Socialist policy on the East and on the Holocaust became the subject of historical studies, also in the context of the Nazi tribunals, the issue of the position held by Eastern studies and the conduct of its members prior to 1945 could scarcely be circumvented anymore. This particularly concerned West German relations with Poland. In 1959 Eugen Lemberg challenged his fellow professionals in Eastern studies to dare to “make a change” and acknowledge the “independent achievements by East Central European peoples” instead of insisting on the existence of a “Western/Eastern cultural gradient.”12 Since the beginning of the 1960s he and some of his colleagues turned increasingly to research on nationalism. They recognized the nationalism of the interwar period as the cause of recent conflicts between Germans and Slavs. The conditions for the development of Eastern studies, at once product and instrument of Weimar nationalism, thereby became historicized and contextualized. In purposeful contrast to this historically and politically charged discipline, research 10 11 12

Cf. Raupach, Grundlagen. File note, Carl-Heinz Schiel, 6 Nov. 1958, DFGA, 721.27, booklet 3. Lemberg, Bildungswesen, p. 399.

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on East Central Europe could thus establish itself while largely abstracting itself from nationalistic interests. In the end, Eastern studies turned itself into a science in the sense that it got rid of those prescientific elements that had determined its activities since Versailles. The term “depoliticization” would not do justice to this process, however. After all, Eastern European research was no apolitical discipline. It rather distinctly rested upon political premises. From the perspective of the sociology of science, Eastern studies conducted during the 1950s in light of revisionist politics and anticommunism did not differ fundamentally from Eastern European studies, funded since the arrival in power of the social-liberal coalition. Since the Russian revolution in 1917 or the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 at the latest, research on the East had always been an exceedingly political affair that was supported or obstructed by the governments involved. The success of the various approaches, subdisciplines, and groups of persons depended on how well they succeeded in accommodating themselves within the changing political cycles. Qualitative differences between traditional Eastern studies and the reformed Eastern European studies certainly are ascertainable, however. On the one hand, they stemmed from the improved availability of sources and documentation that Eastern experts benefited from, thanks to the growing permeability of the Iron Curtain. This encouraged the integration of empirical methods, with the help of which West German research put aside its often speculative character and came closer to its goal of being a “science of reality.” To this was added the researcher’s self-scrutiny of the political framework in which the research was conducted. This growing critical awareness about its own past allowed the discipline to reduce its nationally defined politicization in favor of greater academic independence.

DFG SUPPORT FOR EASTERN STUDIES Although it is difficult to argue that the DFG followed a specific policy in supporting Eastern studies, it certainly can be said that it played an important role, partly even a guiding one, in establishing the field in the Federal Republic of Germany. At the beginning of the 1950s it helped the discipline establish itself at West German universities by making funds available for libraries and research projects, providing scholarships for students, and supporting graduates in research. The Committee on Eastern Studies (Ausschuss für Ostforschung) located at the DFG supported this process by providing a forum for the fragmented discipline in which the various factions could meet and produce a certain degree of coherence in the profession about divergent methods and personnel issues. The efforts by the DFG Commission on Eastern Studies (Kommission für Ostforschung) to continue to develop the field at the end of the 1950s were largely ineffective, by contrast. The reason was that by then the majority of professorships and staff positions considered necessary existed. The rapid dissolution of this commission indicated the declining interest in the East among West Germans as well as a diminishing demand for the memorial-political potential of Deutschtum-focused Eastern studies.

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On the whole, the DFG’s support corresponded to the general development of the discipline. Indeed only a specific selection of projects reached the DFG. Federal ministries and the Länder funded other studies. Nevertheless, it is possible to perceive a dominance of völkisch research topics in the DFG’s funding practice in the early postwar period as well as their marginalization since the late 1950s. This also applies to the gradual shift of interest to problems in the social sciences and a growth in the number of topics chosen in social history and philosophy on prerevolutionary Russian history and Marxism. Whenever new approaches emerged and new views on the East were being tested, the DFG received related proposals. This topical and temporal coincidence can be explained by the fact that, on the one hand, the reviewers represented their own field. On the other hand, the establishment of Priority Programs and Collaborative Research Centers mirrored social and political perceptions of existing problems. Thus, the Priority Program on Eastern Studies (Schwerpunktprogramm für Ostforschung) corresponded to the federal government’s wish to acquire scientifically grounded knowledge about the East, in view of the Cold War and the border and expellee issues. The exchanges with the Soviet Union the DFG temporarily organized were closely linked with state interests, which overlapped with the scholars’ aim to extend their extremely limited access to sources. Here we can observe an interdependent relationship between politics and science: On the one hand, scientific exchanges with the USSR needed state protection because of the politically volatile situation; on the other hand, the federal government depended on academia to make sure that its policy of indirect rapprochement, which these exchanges constituted, outlasted crises between the states. By focusing on the academic level, the DFG, as a politically acknowledged neutral entity, contributed toward bypassing the troubled relations between West Germany and the Soviets with the aim of establishing a steady dialog. Altogether, the DFG’s attitude toward Eastern studies reveals that it was more concerned than other sponsoring agencies about academic seriousness and autonomy. This concern is attributable to the past experiences by academics and the DFG in having voluntarily instrumentalized themselves for National Socialism. After 1945 it seemed dangerous to become too closely connected with the political sphere. Added to this was the effort by many researchers to distance themselves from fellow professionals who had acted too opportunistically during the Nazi regime or who, in their colleagues’ view, had compromised research. In this situation, the reference to high scientific standards for research helped to marginalize incriminated members of the scientific community without having to deliberate too much on the exact degree of their complicity, the circumstances of their cooperation with the regime, or the scientific quality of their research. In the case of Eastern studies, intradisciplinary knowledge about the implication of individual scholars was often more instructive than the categorizations assigned by official denazification measures. In some cases nominally compromised researchers were integrated because their work met contemporary scientific standards. In other cases, scholars tried to keep their distance from formally exonerated

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colleagues in the field because they knew about their conduct before 1945 and deemed it incompatible with the demands of democratic science. With its strict criteria for support, the DFG contributed toward establishing a standard of professionality that proved to be largely resistant to political aims. Thus the common saying that the DFG stood for science and science did not agree with politics. It was due to the DFG’s reputation arising out of these strict criteria that many parties tried to profit from its prestige. By rejecting demands by the federal ministries to cooperate, and through insisting on its reviewing system even in cases in which state interest in a specific project existed, the Head Office in Bonn stabilized its “apolitical” status. For Eastern studies this meant that it had to rid itself of too visible political interests in order to be able to secure a share in the DFG’s financial and symbolic capital. Compared with the American philanthropic endowments that initiated and financed the establishment of research on Russia and the Soviets, the DFG had significantly less freedom of movement. It was neither able to pursue particular scientific interests nor to initiate new methods and approaches independently. That was why its promotion followed conservative guidelines. At the same time, this circumstance generated greater distance from current political issues which led to the DFG-funded research being perceived by professional circles as well as by the public at large as “science for its own sake.” SCIENCE – OBJECTIVITY – EXPERTISE One characteristic of Eastern studies – if not its defining one – was its proximity to politics. The problematic relations of Germany toward the East kept this trait alive across all the political upheavals. Claims about the objective quality of those scholars’ own research was similarly prominent. To operationalize the clearly vague criterion of scientific objectivity, it is useful to distinguish between disciplinary and mechanical objectivity: The former is based on those rules of procedure and discourse that are acknowledged within the scientific community and steer the production of knowledge without necessarily being perceptible from the outside; the latter flows into a rhetoric through which scientists attempt to reassure their audience that the proportion of subjectivity in their research is so small that it in fact yields “pure knowledge.” The impression thus arises that research is reproducible in principle, whereby it is indirectly democratically legitimated.13 This dual objectivity construct suited many experts on Eastern studies in the postwar period: They not only shared an inherent interest in the discipline but additionally tried to emphasize their academic autonomy in order to distance themselves from the experiences of self-imposed or external political instrumentalization under National Socialism. In the end, the close ties between science and politics not only offered a chance to further their own careers and profes13

Cf. Porter, Trust, pp. 3 f., 228.

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sional interests, but also contained the danger of unintentional or uncontrolled politicization. This risk was attributable to the “unclear relationship between knowledge and power, the nondelimitability of roles, the interpretative flexibility of knowledge […], as well as the communicative interference between knowledge and values,” which was particularly strong in Eastern studies.14 In order to minimize the danger of falling victim to political developments of the day or the system, researchers had to maintain a minimum degree of independence. In this situation, referring to scientific objectivity was extremely useful. At the same time, the new nexus of science, democracy, and antitotalitarianism permitted them to maintain a critical stance toward the Soviet Union without appearing politically suspicious. But ultimately the objectivity postulate could hardly be monopolized. Since the 1960s researchers who did not agree with the older perspectives on Eastern Europe and East Central Europe also upheld that claim. Looking back, it seems that the frequently attached aim of smoothing the way toward understanding with the Eastern states was politically and morally more appropriate than the nationalistic lack of compromise of the postwar period. Irrespective of this, it is evident that the advocates of the new approaches tried to establish their arguments largely by relying on the same strategy their opponents had used earlier: They claimed the scientific objectivity of their own approaches and criticized the hitherto hegemonial concepts as “unscientific.” However, different from the postwar representatives of Eastern studies with its focus on German ethnicity, the unifying goal of proponents of Eastern European studies was not personal exoneration but an attempt to explicitly distance themselves from the historically burdened line of research. RUSSIAN AND SOVIET STUDIES IN THE USA AND THE FRG If one compares Eastern studies in West Germany and Russian or Soviet studies in the United States, it quickly becomes apparent that the element of ethnic nationalism did not exist in American research. This is explained by the quality of German-Slavic relations or, respectively, the lack of corresponding relations between East Central Europe and the United States. Anti-Slavic rancor and notions about an East/West cultural gradient also existed in the United States, but the American relationship with Eastern Europe and East Central Europe, as well as its research on them, remained unhampered by those aggressive elements that characterized German research. For the period after 1945 one cannot avoid seeing how much more flexible American Russian studies were due to the fact that the Americans did not look back on such a longstanding relationship marked by enmity and violence with Russia or, respectively, the USSR, as did the Germans. The ideological and political givens of the Cold War did influence U. S. research

14

Weingart, Wissenschaftssoziologie, p. 95.

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on Russia and the USSR in many respects, yet the “guilt” factor was irrelevant to the American view on the Soviet Union. In contrast to Eastern studies at West German universities, Russian and Soviet studies in the USA owed their privileged status above all to the political potential they had continuously demonstrated since its inception as enemy research during World War II. Characteristic of the discipline were close ties to the military and the secret services, excellent research facilities, such as the Russian Institute at Columbia University, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, which was financed by the Carnegie Corporation. West German Eastern studies outside of universities also partly maintained intense contacts with government authorities, yet the proportion of research for the intelligence services was considerably lower and more clearly separated from university research than in the United States. Hence, many American scholars considered treatises in the humanities about Marxism/Leninism as less relevant than studies about how the stability of the Soviet system could be undermined. The Refugee Interview Project conducted by employees of the Russian Research Center at the beginning of the 1950s in order to analyze the Soviet system of society, was paid for by the U. S. Air Force, which needed such information for its strategic planning. Studies on the “Russian character,” formed in the light of behavioralism, pursued the goal – at least on paper – of diagnosing the weaknesses of the USSR in order to be able to target those spots in case of a conflict. Whereas such conceptions in the United States corresponded to its self-image as a superpower, they would have been completely unrealistic in the FRG. Considering that the West Germans were aware that in the case of a crisis the Allies would not be in a position to prevent a Soviet invasion of the Federal Republic, it suggested itself to at least work on an “intellectual containment” of communism. Eastern studies contributed its part toward this goal. This leads to the question of the significance of anticommunism for West German and American research after 1945. Domestic anticommunism influenced American Russian studies undoubtedly more strongly than in the West German case. The number of examples of anticommunist rancor having a restrictive effect on the independence of science was distinctly lower. This was related to the fact that most West German researchers had espoused strict rejection of Bolshevism within the framework of their political and intellectual socializations. Thus, after 1945 no sanctions in academic policy were needed to push through an anticommunist consensus. In the United States the USSR’s position as a world power and its competition with American hegemonical claims stood at the fore. Domestic American anticommunism served, above all, to legitimate the primacy of foreign policy inside the country and to implement a social order that responded to the demands of the Cold War. Russian and Soviet studies conducted in America contributed toward this goal by reproducing the perception of the Soviet Union as a threatening authority, thereby underpinning the American combative pose against the USSR. Studies on the “Russian character” suggested that Soviets were basically “other” sorts of people, with whom it seemed impossible to coexist in peace. Historical articles on the continuity between czarism and Stalinism

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strengthened the impression that the Soviet Union was a genuinely expansive power. From this point of view there could be no doubt that the communist ideology exclusively served as a means to preserve or enlarge power. The resemblance between West German and American hypotheses about a continuity between Russia and the Soviet Union, about the pathological character of communism, and about the functional role of communist ideology is unmistakable. This proximity was not just determined by common membership in the Western Alliance but corresponded to a perception of Russia that was far older than the Cold War. Although there were no colonial dimensions to connect American scholars with Russia, the conviction that Russian culture differed fundamentally from Western ideas had long been anchored in the United States. The Cold War drew on these partly xenophobic perceptions and revived and intensified them. It was only with de-Stalinization and the slowing down of the Cold War that an opportunity arose to test these assumptions, many of which reached far back into the past. In the end, notions such as those about “Russian nature” often were based less on direct observations than on the discursive transmission of information. Thus, all the greater was the astonished recognition of the “normality” of Soviet society, which an entire generation of scholars shared at the beginning of the 1960s thanks to the rapidly increasing exchange of contacts. The insight that the USSR was a modernizing industrial society resembling Western nations, one in which there were heterogeneous elements, niches, and deviations from the centralistic ideological course despite the predominance of the Party, contributed crucially to the reorientation of Russian studies, which occurred almost at the same time as the one in Ostforschung. In both states, the period of construction of the disciplines was complete after about ten years, so their members could begin with the differentiation of methods and topics of research at the end of the 1950s. The pluralization of research approaches began somewhat earlier in the United States than in the FRG. Besides the superior financial provisions for the American discipline, the main explanation for the West German “tardiness” is the traditional overhang of völkische Ostforschung. This suggests that the stimulus to test new methods came from Soviet and communism studies, which had dislodged themselves relatively quickly from the nationalistically defined fixation on the past. Meanwhile, in the United States scholars were asking themselves whether the close relations between science and politics that had existed since World War II were still appropriate. An American economist advocated in 1965 a “more neutral Sovietology” and urged his fellow professionals to admit that their claim to scientific “objectivity” was difficult to reconcile with their personal and academic anchoring in the West.15 The discussions held about the objectivity postulate during the 1960s were part of a broader debate over the role of the sciences toward society and the state, which crystallized in Russian studies.

15

Wiles, Research, pp. 36 f.

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In the FRG the “new Eastern policy” (Neue Ostpolitik) took on this catalytic role. Convinced of the possibility to plan political developments with the assistance of academia, the government, jointly run by the Social Democrats and the Liberal Democrats, encouraged West German scholars to support the policy of rapprochement with East Central Europe and Eastern Europe. In this way relations with a politically close discipline were purposefully intensified at the expense of Deutschtum-focused research. With its comprehensive reform of state funding of research at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, this policy made it possible for Eastern European research (Osteuropaforschung) conducted at universities to assert itself against nonuniversity institutions. At the same time, American scholars recognized that the political importance of their work had lessened in view of the détente and the new geographic priorities of the Cold War. They used this opportunity to loosen their tight relations with the state and the military and to contemplate their own disciplinary interests. In both cases, the course of the Cold War was decisive to the development of the disciplines, without it neutralizing the elements specific to either nation: the relationship with East Central Europe and Eastern Europe, the conception of science, or the role of research in politics. The conflict between systems in some cases strengthened national criteria or permitted them to persist under new defining conditions. The fact that the Cold War exerted such great influence on the establishment and institutionalization of the disciplines at the same time provided the basis on which research could reorientate itself when the ideological and political pressure arising from the Cold War abated. ON THE SOCIAL RELEVANCE OF GERMAN OSTFORSCHUNG The history of Eastern studies shows how prominent the thinking, established since the late nineteenth century in Germany, in terms of the categories Reich, Raum, Volk, and Nation remained beyond the end of World War II. The concept of Abendland, also shaped by Eastern studies, was the most visible variant of the ideal of a social order which promised to overcome national state boundaries and create suitable conditions for a harmoniously functioning “national community.” After 1945 such kinds of “modernity-skeptical to rancor-charged” thinking about order offered West Germans an “escape […] into the illusory worlds of conjured up stability and imagined ideality.”16 The allusion to supposedly organic, timeless traditions helped reduce the drama of war, destruction, and expulsion in the individual perception. By transferring tested arguments into the context of Western democratic order, many West Germans managed to come to terms with their biographical and intellectual disjunctures and adjust to the new system more easily. The parallels between the disintegration of the British and French empires and the loss of the German eastern territories after 1945, which David Black16

Raphael, Ordnung, pp. 135 f.

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bourn has pointed out, are reflected in many ways in the manifestations and conduct of West German Ostforschung.17 In this regard it is not farfetched to interpret as postcolonial discourse the grappling with the loss of territory that many Germans had for decades viewed as “natural” room for expansion, settlement, and dominion, as expressed in Eastern studies. Seen from this perspective, Eastern studies after 1945, with its ethnic-German focus, was the last relic of colonialist and racist remodeled notions of order for the East. A German variant of “Orientalism” (Edward Said) is recognizable, because a central motive of Eastern studies constituted intellectually fencing in the apparently threatening East, to discursively master the danger supposedly coming from it, and to contrast the individual identity against it. Yet West German Ostforschung was more than a mere expression of defensive obstinacy in long-since-past illusory worlds. Its history also shows that the FRG began to divest itself earlier than is often assumed of carry-overs from National Socialism and to grapple with the consequences arising out of these. Even though the retrospective perception of continuity in personnel and conceptions is preponderant, one should not overlook that critical voices did exist since the beginning, objecting to the unreflected continuation of research, which grew louder with time and finally asserted themselves. The transformation of Eastern studies into Eastern European studies, largely freed from nationalisms, was part of a comprehensive social process of change. Without a doubt, “residues of panGerman nationalism” are to be found in numerous texts from the 1950s. Yet such attitudes were “rather attempts to hold on to an identity that had become problematic” than an expression of concrete expansionary plans.18 To the degree that a democratic liberal, “de-ideologized” moral concept anchored itself in the Federal Republic, to that same degree did the categories Volk, Nation, and Tradition lose their signifying potential. This affected in a special way nationalism, whose expression Ostforschung was in many respects. Although it was discredited after World War II and in the light of the European Union ultimately was also institutionally overcome, it was nevertheless only the successful appropriation of liberal, democratic values of Western form, “democracy as a form of life,” that put a stop to the claim of national and ethnic supremacy over East Central Europe and Eastern Europe.19 When West German experts on the East acknowledged German responsibility for the crimes committed there, this signified an essential step toward accepting and imbibing the spirit of democracy. Ultimately, “a willingness to remember, an awareness of guilt and responsibility, and a capacity for democracy [… do belong] directly together.”20 Put differently, it was only when West Germans acknowledged their part in the destruction of relations with the Eastern states and turned their attention to critical recollections that a stable democratic political culture could develop. On its basis a genuine West German identity formed that 17 18 19 20

Cf. Blackbourn, Kaiserreich, p. 324. Jarausch, Umkehr, p. 84. Lammersdorf, Verwestlichung, p. 966. Hurrelbrink, Mai, p. 33.

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was no longer reliant on competition with other supposedly inferior nations. The “decided distancing from radical nationalism” that was characteristic of the Federal Republic as a whole is mirrored particularly sharply in the irreversible turn taken by its scholars on the East away from the Ostforschung of Weimar and Nazi times.21 Eastern European studies, which successively gained ground against Ostforschung, represented analogously the growing postnationalist self-image of the Federal Republic.

21

Jarausch, Umkehr, p. 93.

AGRARIAN SELF-SUFFICIENCY AND RURAL ORDER – GERMAN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH 1920–1960 Willi Oberkrome When the research project on the German Research Foundation was started, there was astonishment that the agricultural sciences were the most heavily funded expert department of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) or, respectively, of the German Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat) in the 1930s and 1940s. Quantitatively speaking, it put medicine, chemistry, and the enigneering fields in the shade. From the outset, this situation seemed to require explanation.1 At the same time, in the planning stage of the project it became evident how accurate Margit Szöllösi-Janze’s statement was that agronomical research formed “one of the last really large dark fields within the range” of German “history of science.”2 Certainly, the fundamental studies by Volker Klemm, Susanne Heim, and others have shed much light on this darkness. They clarified the academic interest in breeding and production issues within the context of professionally fixed directives on autarkic policy. In the endeavor to secure the “nutritional freedom” of the German people, agronomists of the 1920s to 1940s accordingly explored procedures for fattening pigs and the modalities of dairy farming. They identified frost-resistant fruit varieties and robust kinds of cereals. In their laboratories and experimental areas, they analyzed baking flours and hardy potatoes. Besides that, agronomists worked on manure-stacking problems, barn ventilation, and working with rubber-tired motor tractors, etc. Such research efforts were aimed at optimizing production conditions that upon closer inspection were often difficult if not disastrous.3 Agronomical research was not wholly absorbed in such anticipatable pragmatic studies for rational production goals. The range of its disciplinary field was, in fact, far broader. It integrated discussions about agronomics on running operations and designs for marketing systems, profitability issues, and the conditions for the division of labor in European production, as well as theories on rural society and models for governing and ordering agrarian life. Under National Socialism these culminated, above all, in the extermination policy in Eastern Europe, without thereby even reaching their limits.4

1

Cf. Orth, Förderprofil. Szöllösi-Janze, Umgestaltung, p. 72. 3 Klemm, Agrarwissenschaften; Heim, Kalorien; furthermore the Forschungsdienst reports: Forschung 1938; Forschung 1942. 4 Cf. Oberkrome, Ordnung. 2

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In accordance with the contemporary self-image as well as from the retrospective of history, the agronomical sciences thus rested on three subdisciplinary supporting legs. These constituted research on production and processing, agrarian policy as an economic theory and economic farming network, and, finally, the closely related area of rural sociology. While taking into account aspects of scientific organization that the DFG deemed essential, the associated models and scientific practices of these divisions of the operations of agricultural research had to be recontructed and analytically combined within the framework of a periodization scheme that spanned the years from 1920 to 1960. How this task was approached, according to which intellectual interests and substantial priorities, will be illustrated in the following by four observations. They relate to, first, studies on agricultural production; second, the specific structure of DFG-supported agronomy; third, the agrarian policy on “arming the village” that was explored; and fourth, the sociologically corroborated “Germanization” of the East and its flanking “new form of German farming.” Two concluding theses will complete this article. AGRICULTURE AND “NUTRITIONAL FREEDOM” The intentions and methods of German agronomical research confirm the time frame set for the present project as a whole. Between 1914 and 1960 the disciplinary signature of agriculture and its subspecialties remained relatively constant. World War I marked a profound change in the field’s agenda. The naval blockade and the daily experience of shortages in cities boosted studies on economic autarky that in many respects pointed the way forward for future work. On the one hand, agronomical research directed its endeavors at the discovery, production, and optimization of substitute materials for tillage as well as for animal fodder.5 On the other hand, German agricultural experts began in 1915 to assess the agronomical potential of East Central Europe and Eastern Europe. The professionally corroborated system of exploitation by the bureaucratically-run military modelstate Ober Ost set precedents, in that it authorized ethnically “cleansed” German settlement areas and rated the indigenous labor by its relevance to the war economy. The results thus obtained had the same unmistakable repercussions – albeit somewhat reduced – on academic conceptions during the Weimar Republic of policies seeking revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, as had the parallel search for surrogates for overseas grain, concentrated feed, artificial fertilizer, etc.6 The National Socialists soon picked up on the related research being cofunded by the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, NG) under the loudly proclaimed slogan “German nutritional freedom!” After a transitional phase, the significance of which for the history of science is frequently underrated, during which an obscure effluence 5 6

Cf. Kraemer, Landwirtschaft; Wengenroth, Flucht. Cf. Häpke, Landwirtschaft; Liulevicius, War Land.

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of Richard Walter Darré’s “blood and soil” (Blut-und-Boden) ideology was beaten back and Heinrich Himmler’s favored “biologically dynamic cultivation” could be marginalized, there followed the consolidation of a conventionally professionalized, if also ideologically motivated Agrarwissenschaft.7 The term “nutritional freedom” (Nahrungsfreiheit) was aggressively revisionistically charged. The disciplines in agronomy conceived themselves more and more as scientific combatants in a nationalistic battle, a Volkstumskampf, over Germany’s continental supremacy. The emblematic Four-Year Plan economy provided them early on with a probably unique material framework to develop in this connection. Under the auspices of rearmament, all possible and impossible approaches to maximizing and standardizing established agricultural research boomed, with the intention of avoiding the errors in production, distribution, and food policy made during World War I.8 Related ambitions usually ended in disillusionment, if only because their methods were far too elaborate. The frequent hope during World War II of Germany installing a new order in European agricultural relations (which granted French agricultural zones a far more privileged place than is commonly known) did not offer a way out of this dilemma.9 Nonetheless, German science continued down the same path until into the 1950s under the dictate of refugee misery, poverty in the “rubblesociety,” and the notorious exchange deficit. It was only with the across-the-board economic recovery in the late Adenauer era that agricultural research saw occasion to give up the axioms that had bound it since 1914.10 Rapid generational change encouraged this transformation. The primacy of self-sufficiency paled more and more, as did the framing within national culture and ethnoradical textures characterizing it since the World War and Versailles, especially during the actively supported Nazi war of plunder and extermination. KNOW-HOW AND POLITICS The agronomical sciences propped themselves up on large-scale and integrated researches, which gave them their characteristic stamp for decades. Up until 1933 these included some NG-initiated Cooperative Projects (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten) that attracted a great deal of attention within the profession. After 1945 they were continued by collective studies and Priority Programs of the DFG. It was under National Socialism, however, that agricultural research experienced almost total coupling with the DFG – with regard to staff as well as institutions. Under the aegis of the Nazi multifunctionary Konrad Meyer, the Agricultural Research Service (Landwirtschaftliche Forschungsdienst) was founded in 1935 as a coordination center for agrarian analysis on behalf of “the people and nutritional freedom.” In struc7

Cf. Oberkrome, Ordnung. Cf. Göring, Ernährungssicherung. 9 Hans von der Decken’s expert opinion on food surpluses in the Ukraine, April 1942, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, N 1094 II/27; Meyer, Agrarprobleme. 10 Generally on this, Kluge, Agrarwissenschaft, pp. 36–49. 8

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ture, the Research Service anticipated the Reich Research Council, which it was tacked onto as the Expert Department (Fachsparte) on Agricultural Science and General Biology. Accordingly, the Research Service had individual empire-wide Reich Study Teams (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaften) that encompassed all the areas of agricultural activity in over a hundred Study Groups (Arbeitsgruppen) headed by top professionals in the related fields of expertise.11 The heads of these Reich Study Teams, who decided on submitted proposals, were appointed according to the Führerprinzip and as a rule were not party-member careerists. Some were internationally renowned and often also transnationally active capable individuals. Thus they guaranteed a solid combination of professional know-how and commitment to the political right for the irreproachable performance of duty, that means in this case, conformity with the regime. The names Fritz Giesecke, Georg Sessous, Jonas Schmidt, and Hans Adalbert Schweigart speak for themselves. The same also applies to Wilhelm Abel, Günther Franz, and Friedrich Lütge, who at Meyer’s instigation – and to the grief of the more passionate historians of traditionalist farming – were supposed to deliver an identity-building worldview founded on history and science.12 “ARMING THE VILLAGE” Looked at formally, the historiographic mission was the responsibility of the Study Team on Agrarian Policy and Management Theory (Agrarpolitik und Betriebslehre). It can with some legitimacy be called the royal discipline of agricultural research, because it negotiated the substance inside the agricultural shell. Drafting a catalog of measures to overcome the rural exodus, unanimously feared by politicians and disciplinary representatives, fell under its purview. All German statistics on mobility document that neither the Weimar Republic nor the Führerstaat were able to stop the migration of mostly younger people of often aboveaverage intelligence from the countryside into zones of industrial concentration. But precisely for that reason scientific advice was dear and in demand.13 Taking recourse in older notions, Nazi researchers developed procedures for “arming the village” (Aufrüstung des Dorfes), which soon scornfully expressed what was commonly connected with the “blood and soil ideology.” Teachers of agronomics put forward exactly weighed, minutely checked rationalization programs that did not omit a single area of rural life and farm production. All working operations by farmers and agricultural workers were supposed to be controlled and corrected according to current ergonomic guidelines. An astonishing number of studies were dedicated to alleviating the work of rural women by means of mechanical kitchen and washing installations, sewing machines, and even bookkeeping rec-

11 12 13

Cf. Meyer, Forschungsarbeit; Piegler (ed.), Forschungsstätten. Cf. ibid.; Dornheim, Agrargeschichte. Cf. Meyer/Thiede (eds.), Arbeitsverfassung.

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ommendations, etc. Thoroughly racist considerations – in the jargon of the day called population policy – were combined with sober economic calculations.14 One central aim of this village armament, which unwaveringly urged efficiency, simplification, and typification, consisted in reallocating arable land and removing farmyards. This was supposed to permit motorized tillage – within ideologically firm, yet also elastic boundaries. At this point unmistakable lines of continuity emerged, leading straight to the agrarian circumstances and policy making of the Federal Republic with its reforming intentions. “GERMANIZATION OF THE EAST” AND “NEW FORM OF GERMAN FARMING” After 1939 the arable land of the conquered East became the focus of extended agrarian policy making and sociological ambitions as an experimental space and testing ground for territorial village redesign. The Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost), submitted by Konrad Meyer, delivered with its “calculated killing” (Christian Gerlach) enduring troubling evidence of this assertion. Although the agrarian politicians and social researchers did not agree about all the details of “repopulating” (Umvolkung) the Ostraum, it is nevertheless beyond doubt that they often assisted the deportations and resettlements with their expertise. Whether it involved the design of Deutschtum-appropriate landscapes, optimized seed through crosses with Russian stocks, plant experiments on black Ukrainian soils, or the economic planning of cattle stocks on confiscated Polish farms, the ultimate “Germanification” (Eindeutschung) of the East was always at the center of the scientific, generously DFG-funded engagement.15 This situation becomes even more apparent in the astoundingly contorted attempts during the war to determine sociologically the so-called ideal format of the German farmer.16 This project was not just conducted to romantically thresh agrarian straw. It followed a palpable model for a “new form of German farming” (Neubildung deutschen Bauerntums), as programmatically proclaimed by Meyer and others. His purpose was “also to recognize the achievements of the rational liberal age as a positive creative element and to implant a purposefully shaped order in life.” This route was diametrically opposed to Darré’s puristic, antiurban, and largely rationality-critical Bauerntum tirades and ran counter to the senseless “protecting the farming world from the city” policies by the agricultural authorities from the early 1930s, which had to be lifted. Rather than mutual isolation, Meyer argued, a desirable “planned meeting of both in common patriotic duty” was achievable, as a suitable expression of a fighting revolutionary mentality for the good of the nation as a whole. This fusion of city and country ways of living had accordingly already made its mark in the design of the “new eastern territories” and in the scientific territorial order. Meyer recommended it as a model to be emulated gen14 15 16

Cf. Meyer, Bedeutung; idem (ed.), Gefüge; idem (ed.), Landvolk. Cf. Heinemann et al., Wissenschaft; Meyer, Einführung; idem, Planung. Gebert, Arbeitsgruppe; Schürmann, Agrarpolitik, p. 76.

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erally.17 His resolute rejection of “premodern conditions” and “mythical autarkical conceptions,” which still often define the German image of agrarian order and its sciences today, were meant in dead earnest.18 This affected foremost small farmers of the southwestern reallotment regions. This rural class was excluded from the planners’ drawing board for a “new type” of Bauerntum (Konrad Meyer). Their land holdings would be recombined into operational units without granting the least compromise. The thus released agricultural labor force would be mobilized as a settler reserve for the land acquisitions in the East. The resistance posed by those affected did not stem the tide of this restructuring euphoria.19 Even as some sociologists were starting to strike up the Song of Songs about the farmer-laborer on his small native plot, the disintegration of parceled farmland remained on the agenda to introduce a new form of farming.20 Such visions promptly disappeared into the files after 1945. This concession changed the agrarian sociological paradigm scale only superficially, however. The proclamation made from now on that the still discredited small farmers were an agrarian reference class that radiated out into society as a whole was done with the same pessimism toward civilization, often made in allusion to Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, as had already been done during the Weimar Republic. This policy was also based on intended political reform. Both of these approaches are illustrated by the collective study on the security of rural society initiated with considerable support by the DFG and the Ministry of Agriculture in Bonn in 1953.21 Its director, the religious-activist economist Constantin von Dietze, who had suffered years of persecution by the Nazis, still recalled in 1960 the tendentially antiurban Wilhelmine settlement ideas of Max Sering, as he drew the inseparable link between a mentally still intact Bauerntum and a stabile social “composition” of a rounded social “order.”22 His collaborators on the collective study gladly supported him. These DFG-sponsored experts included a number of specialists who, ten years earlier, had been avidly engaged – in the closest cooperation with Meyer – in the agrarian “new order” for Europe. The fact that they continued as before – silently omitting the race semantics – to think in Volkstum categories disturbed only a few of those interested around 1950. The participation by these Forschungsdienst specialists in this major DFG project was apparently justified by their strict repudiation of the professional “dilettantes” who after 1933 had praised alternative agriculture and condemned the doyen Liebig. Dietze’s collaborators were followers of a conventionally professionalized research operation concerned with fastidious quantification and optimized “refined” mass production. Moreover, they honored “old farm ways.” Even though the latter dropped increasingly into the background and was successively contested, a coming generation of rural sociologists – represented by Herbert Kötter, who was schooled in 17 18 19 20 21 22

Meyer, Bodenordnung, pp. 11 ff. Bernecker, Europa, p. 77. Mai, Rasse; Pyta, Menschenökonomie. Cf. Hesse, Lebenshaltung. Archiv der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, B 172/193. von Dietze, Landwirtschaft; idem, Gedenkrede.

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Theodor W. Adorno and American sociological theories – in the 1960s were able to support themselves on some methods by their “forerunners.”23 CONCLUSION First of all, the self-perception of German agronomical research was grounded since the mid-1930s in the defense of established professional standards against the challenge of alternative agricultural conceptions. The armament economy of the Four-Year Plan and the war economy boosted a rationalizing trend in the field that accelerated unambiguous recourse to handed-down disciplinary norms, procedures, and methodological commitments. The DFG-funded Agricultural Research Service, which although ideologized at the top was still pragmatically bound together, stood behind this development. Its plausibility criteria had substance as long as the concern about national self-sufficiency lasted. This also made it possible to transfer nationalistic and ethnic connotations to policy in the field during the early Federal Republic. Pointing a finger at Darré’s hereditaryfarmyard myths and Himmler’s passion for biologically dynamic farming methods, which were promptly declared to be singularly typical of Nazism, they could clear themselves of the stigma of Nazi conformity. Second, with regard to the history of the DFG, the period around 1960 is also certainly a watershed in the history of the agricultural sciences. Their Westernization and liberalization during this period in the form of axiomatic reconstruction inexorably broke new ground.24 But this break did not draw any impenetrable demarcation line between old and new agronomical research. What has occured since through professional instruction, commentary, and assessment – the end of the old Bauerntum, the elimination of small holdings under the slogan “grow or go” (wachse oder weiche), the demise of the classical European village so plastically described by Geert Mak, the brusque walling-off of the domestic European agricultural market – all of this was anticipated almost point by point during the 1930s and 1940s.25 This irritating finding is perhaps explained by Hans Günter Hockert’s suggestion to erect the structure of the topics analyzed here less “on the post-history of elapsed constellations of problems than on the prehistory of present ones.”26 It could well be worth it.

23 Archiv der DFG, Bonn/Bad Godesberg, documents on the collective study Soziale Sicherung auf dem Lande. 24 Cf. Herbert, Liberalisierung; Doering-Manteuffel, Deutschen. 25 Rieger, Bauernopfer; Thiemeyer, Pool Vert; Mak, Gott. 26 Hockerts, Zeitgeschichte, p. 17.

VI SCIENCE, SCIENCE POLICY, AND THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION

SPONSORSHIP OF SCIENCE UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM – AN ALMOST EVERYDAY STORY? A COMMENTARY ON THE RESEARCH PROGRAM “THE GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION 1920–1970”1 Reinhard Rürup In 2007 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra celebrated its 125th anniversary. A book appeared on the subject by the Canadian musicologist and opera director Misha Aster under the title “The Reich’s Orchestra.” The Berlin Philharmonic and National Socialism. In his introduction to the book Wolf Lepenies wrote: An exciting story? Only in the sense that the behavior of the world-famous orchestra essentially did not differ from the behavior of most Germans. There was no opposition to the regime – but also no enthusiasm for the party and its leadership. There was no strong antiSemitism – but also no attempt to oppose the racist madness. The Führerprinzip and achievement principle could be easily harmonized with each other after the takeover of power. The fact that one’s own musical taste hardly differed from that of the Nazis helped to shore up a quite good conscience. The sufferings and privations of the final war years assuaged any sense of guilt that would otherwise have sapped the energy to continue living and to rebuild. The Berlin Philharmonic and National Socialism – an (almost) everyday story.

This finding can easily be transposed mutatis mutandis to the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG) under National Socialism. And my impression is that, at its core, it can also claim validity in the history of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) during the Nazi period, even though it was headed by two convinced and radical National Socialists, Johannes Stark and Rudolf Mentzel. All three of these establishments received from the Nazi leadership a kind of warranty to continue operations during the process of its takeover of power. The price to pay in exchange was political “conformity” (Gleichschaltung) along the lines of the new rulers. Besides demanding the departures of politically undesirable colleagues or ones declared as “non-Aryan,” it called for no less than unconditional acknowledgment of a special social and political responsibility toward the deutsches Volk and its National Socialist leadership. The political opportunism practiced in this 1 This article is essentially the unmodified text of the concluding commentary I presented at the research program’s closing conference held in the Harnack Haus of the Max Planck Society in Dahlem, Berlin. It should be kept in mind that only a small portion of the research results were available in print at that time and in many cases I had to rely on reports prepared by the research program’s collaborators for the conference. Systematic referencing has been dispensed with also considering the fact that I refer to the oral presentations by the conference participants.

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way was rewarded by the maintenance and in some cases by the expansion of specific privileges. The Berlin Philharmonic, the KWG, and the DFG thus belonged among the beneficiaries of the Third Reich, which, in turn, made use of their national and international reputations, spearheaded by the Reichsorchester – subsumed in the civil service by Goebbels in 1934 – and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, alongside the Nobel laureates and other highly regarded researchers and scholars. Through their names and achievements they as well as the institutions they headed, willingly or unwillingly, became the billboards and propagandistic instruments of the Nazi system.

ORGANIZATION, ACTIVITIES, AND IMPORTANCE OF THE DFG 1933–1945 I start with some remarks about the complex of inadequately elaborated issues that had initially triggered the forming of the Research Project – and its financing – i. e., the issues of the DFG’s organization, activities, and importance under National Socialism. It must first be emphasized that a great deal more material, and very interesting material at that, has been gathered than would otherwise have been expected, considering the long-standing regular complaints about large gaps in what has been handed down to posterity. If one takes the results of the research program on the Nazi period in its totality, the first thing that strikes the eye is the finding that there were no big surprises or sensational revelations. On the whole, it was rather a confirmation of what had been anticipated on the basis of the state of knowledge reached thus far on the history of National Socialism and the history of science for this period. This means, first, that as already mentioned, a political “realignment” had occurred in the DFG. The consequences were a change in personnel in the most important leadership and decision-making posts, discrimination or exclusion of so-called “non-Aryans,” and the replacement of election-based academic self-governance by the Führerprinzip. Yet it also meant that, beginning in 1934 the DFG became increasingly dependent on the newly created Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and Cultural Affairs (Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung). And with the establishment of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR) in 1937, it largely lost its decision-making authority. Apart from its vestiges in the humanities, up until 1945 it was little more than an auxiliary organ of the RFR, which had been erected in the wake of the Nazi Four-Year Plan. However, in order to prevent manifest misunderstandings, of which even some of the present project reports are not entirely free, it must be emphasized that the RFR, which assumed responsibility for supporting research in medicine, the natural and engineering sciences, and agriculture and nutrition in order energetically to promote scientific and technical developments in the interest of the German Reich’s “war capability” in accordance with the political dictate, for its part, became part of the DFG’s history.

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Once again it has been confirmed, with additional material, that the DFG supported a series of research projects whose criminal character is meanwhile entirely beyond doubt. This concerns, above all, the ancillary research to the Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost), the inhumane research on racial hygiene and hereditary pathology practiced with fatal consequences, the research on “gypsies” and “asocial elements” aimed at their “culling” (Ausmerze), as well as the human experimentation conducted without the consent of the affected patients at nursing and mental institutions and prisoner-of-war and concentration camps. The DFG funded, almost as a matter of course, armament and war research projects, and even the development of new poison gases. Those who decided on the funding, no less than the applicants themselves, evidently saw no break with scientific traditions in all of this, nor any principal violation of ethical norms. What was done in these areas appeared to need no special justification, and one did not notice or did not want to notice that the control mechanisms existing before 1933 against criminal excesses in science were not functioning anymore – either on the socio-political level or in parts of the scientific community. It has been emphasized, with good reason, in various contexts by the collaborators on this research program that, when seen as a whole, the politically determined losses in personnel, the changes within the organization, and the political interests and prescriptions during the period of National Socialism did not lead to a definite drop in performance by German science. I would like to recall with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, however, that major and long-term important delays in scientific development were attached to the expulsions particularly in biochemistry, biophysics, and the nascent field of molecular biology. There is obviously also agreement that scientific standards within the DFG and the RFR remained unalterably high during the Nazi period. The expert department heads (Fachspartenleiter) who replaced the expert boards and took sole responsibility for the decisions on the proposals were throughout top-ranking qualified scientists, irrespective of whether they were resolute Nazis, as most of them were. This is an essentially true statement, although in some of the present reports there are occasional euphemisms, such as references to “peer reviewing […] carried out according to the Führerprinzip” (Patrick Wagner). Another passage about the expert department heads reads: “Their appointments merely reduced the existing review process to a single person, hence accelerating it” (Sören Flachowsky). Beyond such pithy statements and exaggerations, it appears to me that some of these research reports underestimate the deeply rooted, often even unconscious ideological and political conditioning of those who made decisions on the funding of research projects during the Nazi period.

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CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES IN RESEARCH SUPPORT 1920–1970 I thus come to the question of the yield by this research program on the general development of the DFG during the first fifty years of its existence. The program, as we know, bears the title “The History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970” (Die Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft 1920–1970). The underlying hypothesis that in an analysis of the Nazi period special attention has to be devoted to the issues of continuity with the period before 1933 and the period after 1945, if one wants to avoid misinterpretations, has, all in all, proved correct. An analogous finding was already part of the results of the research program on “The History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism.” Thus, for example, the orientation of research and research promotion toward nationalistic interests was already strongly pronounced during the Weimar Republic. And when the DFG started to set its own accents in science policy in the second half of the 1920s with its new funding instrument of interdisciplinary Cooperative Projects (Gemeinschaftsarbeiten), the primary aim was for “research projects” that (as stated in the explanatory memorandum) ought to be initiated “in the area of the national economy, public health, and the common weal.” One would surely not have hesitated also to mention armament missions in this connection if, in view of the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles, it had been politically opportune. Scientists in Germany before and after 1933 also thought in categories of the nation (Volk) – often also of racist nationalism (des Völkischen) – and nationalistic might. For that reason science policy and research sponsorship never were apolitical, even in the Weimar Republic. As a consequence, the takeover of power by the National Socialists, also within the DFG, was not conceived as the epochal turning point we regard it to be today. The fact that these trenchant changes were not noticed is particularly dreadfully apparent in the marginalizations of Jewish or, respectively, “non-Aryan” fellow professionals. Many among them were highly respected researchers, but there were considerable numbers of aspiring young scientists as well. The continuities in staffing were, if one disregards a few prominent Nazi science politicians, again conspicuously strong after the end of the Third Reich. This applies above all to the Federal Republic but is also observable in East Germany, at least with regard to personnel, as in the case of Peter Adolf Thiessen, the influential head of the RFR’s Expert Department on Chemistry. Institutionally, the DFG in the Federal German Republic quickly linked up again with the model of the Weimar Republic by forming expert boards, electing fellow professionals as reviewers, and announcing research priorities. As impressively demonstrated by a number of longitudinal-sectioned studies on DFG-support (but also by Corinna Unger’s book on the treatment of Eastern studies during the early postwar period), there were astonishingly great continuities right into the 1960s on the dominant understanding of research topics and funding necessities. I would like to recall here, however, Moritz Epple’s legitimate point that now that all these continuities have been identified, greater attention should be devoted to the discontinuities.

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Altogether, the decision that at first glance seems surprising – to treat no less than five decades of DFG history instead of just the twelve years of the Third Reich – has made sense. However, in some of these disciplinary and transdisciplinary longitudinal-sectioned studies this has made the Nazi history seem merely a – not even particularly interesting – “interim period” that is given relatively short shrift. This is not least related to the fact that the available sources on the period up to 1933, and later for the 25 years after 1945, are much more plentiful than is the case for the Nazi period. For instance, anyone interested in comparing the reviewing activities will find an abundance of material for the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic. The expert department heads during the Nazi period, on the contrary, may on occasion have solicited expert opinions, but their decisions did not need to be legitimated in detail. That is why they left behind noticeably fewer files, and only seldomly did they make their arguments explicit. In this connection I would like to draw attention to two other issues. Concerning the overall project, there lacks a rationale for the specific selection of scientific disciplines or subject groupings for detailed analysis. Of course, one cannot cover the DFG’s history across the board. It is also obvious that it is not possible to find a suitable analysts to work on every field appearing important. Nevertheless, one would like to know why, for example, research on radiation and radioactivity and on biocatalysts (enzymes, hormones, vitamins) were chosen to represent the biosciences? Or, why ethnology and linguistics (Sprachforschung) were chosen alongside Ostforschung and the Atlas of German Folklore for the part on the Humanities and Social Sciences? Otherwise major and particularly ideologically laden disciplines remain unaccounted for, such as, historical science and literature studies, philosophy and education, and even such strongly privileged subjects under the Nazis as pre- and early history. The possibility of drawing international comparisons has occasionally been alluded to, but it is notable that there is, in fact, no mention of materials now available either from the National Research Council and the National Science Foundation in the USA or from the French CNRS. The unusually heavy involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in Germany not only during the Weimar Republic, but also during the first years of the Nazi system could be compared with both the DFG’s array of funding instruments and its financial means. Rüdiger vom Bruch has also indicated, using the example of the Volkswagen Foundation’s support for molecular biology, that a comparison with other German establishments for the advancement of science would be worthwhile as well.

THE DFG RESEARCH PROGRAM’S YIELD FOR THE HISTORY OF NAZISM As concerns the Nazi period, my impression is that, in studying the DFG’s history, one has for the most part been moving on meanwhile familiar terrain. This is, of course, related to the circumstance that this research program was initiated relatively late in the day and for that reason only had a chance to produce pio-

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neering work in narrowly delimited fields of Nazi research, if at all. Obversely, the research program has evidently profoundly profited from the almost avalanchelike release of information in the last 20 to 25 years, not only about the history of the National Socialists’ crimes, but also about the social and economic history, culture and mentality, including its anterior and posterior histories. The same applies to the most recent critical reassessment of the problem of true “perpetrators,” those “implicated” in the Nazi crimes, and so-called “spectators,” as well as the heightened sensitivity for the victims of the Nazi system – not just inside German borders, but also outside of them. The studies by this research program do not change the existing image of Nazi rule and its consequences, but they do supplement it in subareas of the history of science and, of course, foremost in the area of scientific funding. This research project has once again made clear that, when dealing with National Socialism, we need two things: the ability to distinguish increasingly finely – and, in the process, tolerate contradictions – and also to reach clear, not always comfortable judgments on decisive political, scientific, and ethical issues.

THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE FUNDING AND RESEARCH IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE The advantages of being a “latecomer” in the area of Nazi history also apply, with slight restrictions, to the history of science in general, and the history of Nazi science in particular. The primary interest of the research program on the DFG’s history was no longer directed at famous individual researchers, but rather at the scientific networks; no longer at prominent discoveries and inventions, but at the evolution of research style, changes in thinking and how a field functions. As regards the Nazi period, the “old questions” are no longer asked about whoever was directly guilty. It is no longer primarily a matter of state-prosecutor-like investigations against suspected evil-doers, but of historical insights into the external preconditions, action-guiding conceptions, and daily practices in research in different political and social systems. Thus the research by this research program consistently moves on the level of research in the history of science that has meanwhile been attained. The aim is always, of course, to continue to refine methods and gain new insights, but very big leaps into new academic territory are no longer expected. As has become apparent in a number of contributions, the hitherto hardly appreciated access to the files on scientific funding offer a new, particularly worthwhile approach to the history of academic disciplines or subject-matter groupings. Anyone interested, for instance, in the debates over the professional and social relevance of particular research trends and projects will find rich source material among the DFG proposals and expert opinions, as Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers has convincingly demonstrated in the area of research on linguistics. Helmut Maier has, however, rightly drawn attention to the fact that this level of sources primarily concerns the formulation of claims to relevancy or their theoretical

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repudiation. But the actual academic, political, and social importance of the research in question must be verified by means of other instruments. It is, without a doubt, right that the history of science sponsorship cannot be properly examined if the history of science belonging to it is not delved into. The history of science and history of science promotion are inseparable. In some cases, however, I did get the impression that the authors’ interest in the history of science did unduly take front stage, with the concern about the DFG’s history rather following on the side. I would have liked to see more clearly set priorities within the framework of this research program in this regard. The true object of analysis should have been the history of the DFG, not the history of the sciences it funded. In the history of science, the concept of “basic research” has been questioned for quite a while now. Looking back on the Nazi period, for a long time there was a clearly apologetic tendency in West German research, namely, to call virtually everything done then “basic research,” whereas during the Third Reich the emphasis lay precisely on its applicability, averring its practical significance for armament and warfare. It has long been agreed that in many cases, if not in virtually all of them, even “basic research” was oriented toward application. This insight has, incidentally, already been tried out decades ago on the strategic inventions of the industrial revolution in Great Britain, using the bottleneck concept. In this context I would like to point out, finally, that Patrick Wagner has drawn upon an older thesis from Norman W. Stoner to propose within the framework of this research program a definition for “basic research” versus “applied research” that appears to me particularly helpful and fruitful: A fundamental scientist, even when he develops a torpedo, wants to gain a reputation from his scientific work primarily among his fellow colleagues in the field; the applied scientist, on the oher hand, aims at reputation and gratification, that is, acknowledgment from an extrascientific audience. That was why, within the context of the DFG of the 1920s to 1940s, German professors were able to dedicate themselves to application-oriented projects with an eye to a revision of the Treaty of Versailles and then to a German victory in World War II and yet still consider themselves basic researchers. Nationalistic goals were so unchallenged among their own ranks that they could keep their sights on the target audience of their own research: their colleagues, not the Nazi regime.

Inseparably attached to this observation is, to me, the likewise very convincing hypothesis that a specifically German scientific culture formed during the 1920s in which increasingly radical nationalism was considered a constituent element of science. In conclusion, I would like to express very briefly what does have to be said in a closing comment: This great effort was worthwhile, and we have every reason to be grateful to the German Research Foundation, the directors of the research program, and the many collaborators and coworkers for what has been achieved.

“MR. DFG” WALTHER GERLACH (1889–1979) – PHYSICIST, SCIENCE FUNCTIONARY, AND PUBLIC REPRESENTATIVE Bernd-A. Rusinek In accordance with Bourdieusian criticism, it would be “programmologically” deceitful to orient a biography toward a goal. But who would read a biography without having a complete datum of the “hero” in mind, already from the first page onward? In Walther Gerlach’s case, he was one of the most important science managers during the Third Reich, especially the war, the occupation period, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and in the last period was one of the public scientists people listened to. Walther Gerlach was a notable physicist, science historian, and respected generalist, all in one. A loyal community of his adherents and pupils still meets every year in Munich.1 It is trivial to state that there were crossroads, ruptures, and dangers in this biography. Gerlach would probably have gone into industry if the Nazi University Lecturers League had succeeded in throwing him out of the university in 1933/34. He might have been shot if the Gestapo had discovered him in the final days of the war. Misjudging the situation, he could also have gone into hiding under a false name. He could have been put in detention for a few years because of his supposed collaboration with the Gestapo and because of his real involvement with the Security Service of the SS (the Sicherheitsdienst, SD). If during the postwar period Gerlach had been viewed not only as the Reich Research Council’s (Reichsforschungsrat) potentate on physics and nuclear physics, as expert department head (Fachspartenleiter of the Reichsforschungsrat), but also as the top specialist on torpedo detonators and ship demagnetization, then after the war ended he could have become the target of one of the Allies’ “invitation” campaigns and of Operation Paperclip, and his involvement in the reestablishment of scientific self-governance would not have been possible. The history of this self-governance of science and the university would be unimaginable without Gerlach. He decisively molded the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) through his partly successful struggle against competing conceptions of organized science more closely tied to the state, politics, or to Adenauer. Without him the research-support landscape in the FRG of the 1950s would have looked different, as far as the relationship between research funding and the state is concerned. That is why, first, it makes sense if 1 The PIUM-Kreis, the club of his physics department at Munich: Physikalisches Institut der Universität München.

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the only biography within the framework of the historical project on “The History of the German Research Foundation” be written about him. Second, a Gerlach biography makes sense because he was perceived by his contemporaries as an exceptional personality. Third, with reference to the Nazi and postwar periods, no other high-ranking German science functionary during the war existed who after the war was so sought after, or fashionably put, was in such “high demand” as Walther Gerlach. This development occurred at breath-taking speed: Not even one and a half years elapsed between his hectic activities toward the end of the war in April 1945 – the rescue of physicists, the rescue of research and apparatus for the “time afterwards,” researches on a nuclear chain reaction without using enrichment centrifuges – and the nomination to elect him as president of the German bureau of standards in the British zone, the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt. Gerlach’s prestige during the early postwar period is manifest in his being offered the top posts in a majority of the German research organizations: The Research Foundation of the Land North Rhine-Westphalia, the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Forschung, NG), the bureau of standards – respectively, the federal Bundesanstalt – the Fraunhofer Society (FraunhoferGesellschaft, FG), and the German Physical Society. Gerlach only seems not to have been considered for the presidency of the Max Planck Society – but it goes without saying that he was a senator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and from 1952 until 1963 of its successor as well. He furthermore served from 1948 until 1951 as rector of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and there was the intention to elect him president of the DFG in 1954. If Gerlach had been asked in the mid-1950s which of his activities outside of his professorship were the most essential, he presumably would have named the DFG, his Kepler research, his public lectures, his concern for students, and his selection duties for the German National Foundation for Academic Study (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). Public lectures were Gerlach’s joy and one of his main interests throughout his life. He presumably would have counted his Munich talk on Goethe and his later lecture on Max Planck among the most important public orations he ever made.2 Gerlach’s talk for the Goethe bicentennial 1949 on “The Academic Province”3 made him famous in Germany and into a persona gratissima in the field of the humanities. Ten years later, the Süddeutsche Zeitung still wrote in a commemorative article that Gerlach had held “the most high-minded, modern, and honorable speech” on the occasion of Goethe’s 200th birthday in 1949 that was given in Munich at the time.4 Gerlach gave the talk on “Max Planck – His Life and Work” in 1971 in a preparatory school, the Max-Planck-Gymnasium, to several classes, teachers, and other small-town honoraries.5 The 81-year-old celebrated 2 It would be more convenient to omit such talks and publications from the biography of a physicist and to dismiss their importance and definitely grant precedence to declarations on science policy. Such hermeneutic decisionism is not justifiable. 3 Gerlach, Provinz. 4 Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1 Aug. 1959. 5 Max Planck – sein Leben und Wirken. Talk held in the Max-Planck-Gymnasium in Schorndorf, 22 Mar. 1971, Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, V, rep. 13, no. 1737.

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Planck’s scientific achievements and importance and drew a picture of the ideal scholar that was also somewhat of an optative self-image. Max Planck was a scientific and personal model for Gerlach. At his invitation, the aged Planck held one of his last public talks at the University of Bonn at the end of March. He spoke about physical, epistemological, and philosophical questions. In a Gerlach biography that would concentrate solely on DFG-board activities, the fact would be lost that, among the DFG’s top leadership, Gerlach was the one individual to be regarded as having the greatest claim to also belonging within a general cultural history of the FRG. But for two other reasons as well it is reasonable to call Gerlach “Mr. DFG” for the years from 1949 until 1961. First, this is because of the role he played during the Third Reich from 1943 to 1945 as “Reichsmarschall for Nuclear Physics”6 – and for physics in general, one would like to add – and because of his great importance for university research and its organizations from 1946 on. Thus the personality of Walther Gerlach permits one to analyze, as in a laboratory setting, the continuity-or-discontinuity issue as the main political, organizational, and mental problem of German science and research after 1918, 1933, and 1945. This issue in 1933 and 1945 also concerns the NG or, respectively, the DFG, although Gerlach emerges as a special case. The continuity-or-discontinuiy issue is two-fold because the question requiring study is how Gerlach himself arranged the transition. At the same time the role of the public in this must be evaluated. Gerlach moved like a fish in water in the sub-publics of the media, the international scientific community, science organizations, and the entire area of education, from university to adult-education facilities. Second, besides his functions as a role model for the German scientific community of the postwar period and its organizations – and for grant donors and grant recipients – and as a representative figure toward the outside and at times as a vigilant guard dog toward the inside, Walther Gerlach’s merit to the DFG lies, above all, in having pushed through during its founding and reconstruction phase and in opposition to Heisenberg’s German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsrat) a profile for the funding association along the lines of his adamant standpoint of scientific autonomy. It is not the task of a biography to work out measurable “results.” The fact that Gerlach presumably would not have mentioned the DFG as the foremost guiding characteristic of his activities as a scientist and university professor, that he was a “role model” for a scientific community that was desperately looking for presentable actors, that he would also have to be named in a general cultural history of the FRG, and that he had charisma, cannot be proved in a positivistic way or counted like levers, screws, or research commissions. Instead it is a total datum based on issues and reflections on actors, charisma, and reception. In order to elaborate on the characteristics of the actor Walther Gerlach, in order to be able to say something about his niveau, Pierre Bourdieu’s advice can be followed: the biographer should look at whom the “hero” was sitting with in the subway. 6 Goudsmit, ALSOS, p. 135. Emphasis added. Designations such as “Reichsmarschall for nuclear physics” for Walther Gerlach or “German torpedo dictator” for Ernst August Cornelius make significant allusion to the model coined for Helmholtz as “Reichskanzler für Physik.”

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Along this route of a contrastive comparison of actors from the Gerlach biography, a portrait of a group of actors can be worked out in the sector of scientific self-governance. THE HUMBOLDTIAN University Humboldtianism was less a fact than an action-guiding normative idea for Gerlach and other adherents of this concept, which perished in the 1960s. The fact that the German university never did exist according to the conceptions of a Wilhelm von Humboldt or a Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher, or hardly so, cannot refute the idea of it. The normative idea oriented according to “Humboldt” has in common with other normative ideas that it could also be used in apologia for oneself or for the structure. Gerlach lost the battle for the “Humboldt party.” He was unable to stop the trend turning universities into professional training colleges and away from the all-encompassing idea of the Studium generale. For one and a half decades of the postwar period Gerlach represented to the outside, as virtually no other actor could, the university sciences, the DFG as its vice-president, and the standpoint on science the DFG espoused under his sway. Gerlach’s standpoint on science was one of unconditional autonomism. We could boil his creed down to: science must be led by scientists – to alter a slogan from the youth movement – that is, it must be led by university researchers from the perspective of the professorial world. What should be done with the results of science is not a direct part of this creed, but assurances were supposed to be built into the science concept, mediately so to speak, namely, in Gerlach’s idea of education – Bildung. On the one hand, for him it was of intrinsic value; on the other hand, as a humanistically grounded array of cultural ties in the liberal arts, it was supposed to help prevent one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness, cynicism, and criminal utilization of research results. This notion of education, which made Gerlach an ardent advocate of the idea of the Studium generale after 1946, did not germinate only after World War II and under gentle pressure by the Western Allies; signs of it already became apparent earlier. In the 1920s Gerlach repudiated a scientist with professional twentieth-century training but lacking the nineteenth-century educational breadth. He always pulled his weight for the humanities and their funding by the DFG. His presence as a historian of science was multifarious, and he became a Kepler researcher of international rank in later years when he held the introductory talk on “Johannes Kepler’s life – the man and his works” in 1971 in Moscow and Leningrad at the XIIIth International Congress of the History of Science.7 In his Munich professorship, Gerlach was the second successor to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. His demand that universities needed nothing but “freedom, honor, money” Gerlach probably not only would have ascribed to but could just as well 7 Johannes Kepler. Leben. Mensch und Werk. Archiv des Deutschen Museums (DM), papers of Walther Gerlach, collection 80/28.

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even have coined. Gerlach was a Humboldtian. At the same time, he was a patriot. His activities never were directed against the fatherland, insofar as they were scientific and, above all, university affairs, but they were almost always directed against the state. The distinction fatherland/state is crucial when evaluating Gerlach’s activities under the Third Reich, especially during the war. Gerlach was known to be able to assert himself and to be enormously industrious. He was a scientist already in the Kaiserreich and had the best of connections within the scientific community. He seemed to be able to see through scientific frauds and was not fooled by the spirit of the times. As a scientist, science historian, and first-class Goethe expert, he gave the impression of being Humboldt’s educational ideal in person. Gerlach’s image in the early postwar period fused real biographical details with wishful projections on science and public presence. What scientist in the DFG’s vicinity would not have liked to have been a Gerlach? For the DFG and university scientists, generally, the model “Gerlach after 1945” was a first-class identity to offer that was effective externally as well as internally. It was only credible if Gerlach’s activities during the Nazi period and the war could also be accepted as a model and if he was at least not regarded as a war physicist loyally dedicated to the Führer. It is a triviality that the caesura “war’s end 1945” existed to very different degrees, if it existed at all, in the different subsectors of society.8 Hostilities were certainly not yet ended for the army of millions of prisoners of war, for instance.9 Compromised social structures remained untouched – initially only clandestinely. We encounter disavowals, subsequent interpretations of controversies (often of only slight importance in the polycratic fabric of the Nazi state) styled as “resistance,” and reorientations of a uniquely opportunistic nature. Gerlach, the most influential German physicist after Helmholtz, praiseworthily functioning during the war, seemed, by contrast, to embody positive continuity. NAZI ERA, WAR, AND “GERLACH’S BOMB” Already in 1929, the year in which he was appointed Ordentlicher Professor für Experimentalphysik at the University of Munich, Gerlach was a solid pillar of the professorial world, and he remained anchored in Bavaria even as he was accumulating calls from other universities. At the beginning of the Third Reich, from time to time labeled a Jew lackey, in Munich Gerlach stood up for the autonomy of physics against the “Party” and against the defenders of Deutsche or “Aryan” physics. He did not manage to push the Nazi ideologue and Deutscher Physiker Wilhelm Müller, successor to the world-famous theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, out of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, but he did manage largely to isolate Müller. This was not “resistance” against the Nazi state, but partly refractoriness, 8 9

Rusinek (ed.), Kriegsende. Cf. Rusinek, Krieg, pp. 122–133.

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and perhaps for that reason also successful. It was structurally related to the struggle by the Confessional Church against deutsche Christen: In either case, action was only taken when the National Socialist ideology reached out for the altars of the church or pure university science. The question is, what university professors, such as the scientist Gerlach, a cultural conservative, life-long despiser of “politics” and its sphere, may have “known” in 1933 about the future development of a National Socialist Germany. Just a few university scholars would have witnessed the “seizure of power” (Machtergreifung) as a major drama. If one views the authoritarian structures in university institutes and extramural research institutions – the ill-treatment of assistants in Tübingen and the drillmaster tenor in the bureau of standards – then the Führerprinzip from 1933 on would not seem to have been regarded everywhere as anything fundamentally new. The intriguist underground activities by the Nazi University Lecturers League perhaps only seemed to be a continuation of the familiar activist milieu, albeit with more powerful tools. The involvement of chance in the decision for or against an appointment – tenured professorship versus the “wayside ditch” (Chaussee-Graben) – the academic intrigue routine that was useful to one person and later harmful to another, and, according to Ludwig Curtius, also Althoff ’s brute force steering of universities in the ten years between 1897 and 1907 – all this accustomized one to the arbitrariness for better or for worse. So even the forced dismissals of Jewish scholars, whether or not one was an anti-Semite, was lived through less dramatically than it would seem nowadays. The fact that, compared to the Kaiserreich, more Jews than before had been able to move up in academic operations during the fourteen Weimar years may have seemed, to established faculty members, an unusual intermediary phase that would come to an end sometime. It cannot be proved, but there are reasons to presume that toward the end of the Weimar Republic there was the conception, reaching into the liberal and even into downright anti-National Socialistic professorial circles, that a “Jew problem” existed in Germany. Gerlach may have coldheartedly and analytically reported about the acute anti-Semitic discrimination at the University of Warsaw in the middle of 1939, but it is also documented that he helped Jewish colleagues, former Jewish colleagues, and even “Jew-related” colleagues during the war in a selfless manner.10 During this war, the enthusiastic university teacher was rarely at his institute in Munich. He was called up for duty in Berlin as early as January of 1940 by the Navy High Command. He served in a leadership position in the areas of torpedo guidance and demagetization and was responsible for the entire research and development (R&D) of torpedo igniters. These areas were the most directly relevant to the war that Gerlach worked on from 1939 until 1945, not on futuristic machines such as uranium enrichment, nuclear reactors, and nuclear weapons. Gerlach had qualified himself for these tasks through his work on radio position finding during World War I, his researches on light metals and magnetism 10 On this complex, see Gerlach’s report: Bericht über die Universität Warschau, May 1939, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Archiv, Munich, E-II-1429.

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conducted since the 1920s, which he continued to pursue until the end of his scientific activities, and finally his good contacts in industry. It was fortunate for him that he could connect his researches with simultaneous patriotic service for his country. Talking about Gerlach’s war means talking about his patriotism. A patriotic stance in the Third Reich during the war almost necessarily led to an objective complicitous involvement in the barbarity. Nevertheless, physicists of the once belligerent warring states naturally assumed after the war that they and their fellow professionals on the opposing side had acted out of dutiful patriotism. Right after the war, in Farm Hall, the British physicist Patrick M. S. Blackett (1897–1974)11 was the most important interlocutor with the German internees. Blackett was one of the unchallenged stars among British scientists active in the war effort. During the war Gerlach and Blackett worked on related fields as enemies.12 The latter was concerned with bomb guidance, range measurement, magnetic mines, detonators, and generally with optimizing submarine weaponry. The destruction rate achieved by British torpedo bombers in the anti-U-Boot battles rose from 2 or 3 percent in 1941 to 40 percent in 1944. In 1941 Blackett became scientific advisor to the Anti-Aircraft Command. He assembled a team of physicists and mathematicians known as “Blackett’s circus” for the R&D of radar technology. Here, too, parallels emerge with Gerlach’s science management during the war. At Farm Hall, Blackett and Gerlach interacted normally, indeed warmly. Both had apparently been patriots siding with their own homelands, and if they had seemed to each other to be traitors to their countries, they would probably have been reserved, if not hostile with each other. In the fall of 1943 Gerlach became successor to the incompetent Abraham Esau as expert department head (Fachspartenleiter) on physics and commissioner on nuclear physics at the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR). For the remaining period of over one and a half years to the end of the war, he was supreme physicist of the Third Reich, representing his field internally and externally as no other actor, wielding the mighty decision-making powers of the Führerprinzip; he was personally the proposal granter, proposal rejecter, commission assigner, expert reviewer, and decision maker, all in one. No German physicist before or after him possessed such power. Gerlach always emphasized that he applied it on behalf of the autonomy of science, the preservation of universities, and the rescue of the coming generation of scientists, thinking ahead to “the time afterward” and always staving off the possessive impulses of the state, administrations, “politics,” “the Party,” and the military. As part of an economy and a research policy on their last legs, founding Study Groups and Study Teams (Arbeitskreise und Arbeitsgemeinschaften) along the way, Gerlach was on the road, without respite, uranium and heavy-water matters in the German Reich, in Italy, and in the whole of occupied Western Europe. Here we can return to the question: What did Gerlach “know”? He knew all about the war situation from the end of 1943 until the spring of 1945, cooperating untiringly 11 12

Cf. Nye, Blackett. Ibid., pp. 76 ff.

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with the three Army divisions, in constant contact with the developers of modern weapons systems. He knew exactly what inadequacies, damages, and losses these systems had. From 1940 he knew all the details about the German Naval forces.13 He was just as precisely informed about the scientists imprisoned in concentration camps as about forced laborers. Whether, or respectively, to what degree he was informed about the extermination policy in the East probably cannot be ascertained. We can eliminate the possibility that, having all this knowledge, Gerlach could still believe in a final victory, an Endsieg in the last half-year of war. He was not interested in a German defeat; and because it seemed to be inescapable, what mattered to him was protecting the coming generation of scientists, and once the war was lost, winning the peace. One tool of power was the label of war importance for physical research. This war importance naturally concerned, on the one hand, projects to strengthen the German Wehrmacht, but it could also be a legitimate excuse to acquire state funding or to save scientists. The physicist Pascual Jordan (1902–1980) expressly thanked Gerlach for a life-saving research mission – and at the end of the 1950s Jordan became one of Gerlach’s main political opponents. On the other hand, the war importance of some research projects had been compartmentalized to such an extent that their own scientific staffs were not able to see through it.14 In 2005 Rainer Karlsch’s book Hitlers Bombe appeared.15 This investigatively styled historical study attempts to prove that “Hitler’s bomb was a tactical nuclear weapon, whose destructive power was far below the potential of either of the American atomic bombs.” It had been successfully tested many times shortly before the end of the war, he argues, but had not attained a self-sustaining chain reaction. There had not been enough time for that. The “bomb” had been detonated in Ohrdruf in Thuringia on troop training grounds that existed until the collapse of East Germany. Hundreds of concentration camp detainees who had been forced to observe it near the explosion site had lost their lives or their vision. Karlsch opens his book, so to speak, with a bellicose Walther Gerlach. When after the Norsk Hydro breakdown there was no longer enough heavy water available and it turned out that the enrichment of uranium by means of gas centrifuges were successful, but production on a scale of relevance to the war could not even be considered, Gerlach, as the Reich’s supreme physicist and nuclear physicist had allegedly placed all his bets on the development of a nuclear weapon in

13 This is not the place to develop the issue of the “Norwegian connection” from the 1930s to the 1960s, with which German science and technology was supported beyond regime borders at war as well as at peace: in the 1930s, torpedo and submarine collaboration with the “Germanic brother nation,” as it was referred to in the Ahnenerbe of the SS; during the war, German exploitation of the heavy-water factory Norsk Hydro; after the war, under the conditions of research restrictions until 1955, the plan for a German-Dutch-Norwegian secret reactor project in Kjeller near Oslo, where the most important civilian and military research institutions of the country were concentrated; finally, at the end of the 1950s, also the training of German professionals in a Norwegian “reactor school.” 14 Author’s conversation with Prof. Alfred Boettcher (1913–2002), 30 Jul. 1999. 15 Karlsch, Bombe; cf. there for what follows.

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Stadtilm in Thuringia by means of shaped-charge technology and opted against pursuing the technically highly complicated route of centrifuge enrichment. However, an opinion issued by the Federal Bureau of Standards in Braunschweig from February 2006 has established “no sign whatsoever of a nuclear explosion in Ohrdruf, Thuringia.” The soil samples had merely yielded contaminants “that among other things are attributable to the reactor accident in Chernobyl.”16 But this issue is not decisive at all for an assessment on Walther Gerlach. It is rather a matter of what he intended to do with the avant-garde nuclear technology at the end of the war. On the one hand, purposeful obstruction of the endeavors in nuclear technology would have been unthinkable to him. On the other hand, it is hardly conceivable that he wanted victory for Hitler or Himmler or for the Nazi and SS state. We must bear in mind again the split between fatherland and the state. The state would fall, that was clear to a man of Gerlach’s perspicuity, but the fatherland should not. And if this danger threatened, it had to be a matter of improving conditions for after an unconditional surrender. What patriotic reasons existed for a man like Gerlach to push armaments projects forward right up to war’s end? First, we must consider the fear of the terrorism by the Red Army, fanned by Nazi propaganda but by no means unfounded; second, that Gerlach was a close observer of the Heimatfront, especially of the bombing war, the effects of which he got to know better than virtually any other German on his permanent travels. He noted down any major attacks, particularly on Munich, with exactitude in his diary. The effects of the Allied air raids against the German civilian population on the motivation of German scientists and engineers must be thought through more consistently than has been done thus far.17 In any case, Gerlach would not have hesitated to deploy nuclear weapons against the Red Army like the Americans did against Japan. On the question of the atomic bomb, the almost ninety-year-old wrote at length and probably for the last time a letter to his long-time friend Marie Luise (“Malu”) Rehder, who had been Otto Hahn’s private secretary at the Max Planck Society. In particular, Gerlach said that, up until 1943, he had never heard anything about what had supposedly been said about atomic bombs. Many later “reminiscences” about it, that the bomb could have been built, were retrospective constructions by German physicists in order “to defend themselves against the accusation that the subject had been so little understood that it was deemed impossible to build the bomb.” It annoyed him, Gerlach wrote, to have it put into his mouth “that with sufficient will, one could have made the bomb.” He had indeed said on the evening of 6 August 1945 in Farm Hall, under the impression of the dropping of the atomic bomb by the Americans, that they would have been able to build a reactor, if the will had been there and the internal conflicts had been overcome. Albert Speer had cited in his memoirs a letter to him, Ger-

16

See http://www.ptb.de/aktuelles/archiv/presseinfos. Cf. Friedrich, Brand; on the effects of the air raids on one city, see Rusinek, Gesellschaft, pp. 94 ff. 17

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lach, in which he held out the prospect of funding for the uranium project,18 and this letter had been preceded by Speer’s question about whether a reactor could be decisive for the war. “I had answered him […] with no: but do you want to lose the peace? It will depend on the development of this physics. Thereupon his oral and written reply that I would get the requested funds.” If one follows this thought of Gerlach’s through, then nuclear physics not only could have helped soften the conditions of an anticipated dictated peace by the Allies, but also facilitated the reconstruction of the country destroyed by bombs. Not to lose the peace, but rather to win it was one option for pushing forward the pilot project on nuclear technology up to the end of the war. The second was dependent on meeting the Allied victors with a security pledge in hand. The third was to be able to present the physics conducted in Germany during the war also as peaceful physics and to be able to make it useful in peace and for peace – in exact anticipation of the “Atoms for Peace Campaign” initiated in the USA ten years later, which would lead to the taking off of nuclear energy worldwide. In addition to “Hitler’s” or, respectively, “Gerlach’s bomb” and the peaceful application of nuclear energy, the enrichment centrifuge would have been the Germans’ third nuclear-tech joker card. Albeit at war’s end, in contrast to aircraft engineering, none of these three key technologies of nuclear engineering had matured, and the realistic policy of the Allies from the mid-1945 evidenced the otherworldliness of these joker utopias. Two main models can be distinguished in these realistic politics. On the one hand was the model August Wilhelm Quick, Ludolf Ritz, Gernot Zippe. Quick had continued his flight research after the war in France; Ritz, his fluid dynamics researches in Britain; Zippe, his centrifuge research in the Soviet Union. On the other hand was the V-2 model: The Physikalische Blätter reported in 1947 about the successful stratospheric flight of a V-2 rocket in the USA launched to take detailed photographs of the Earth’s surface. Such successes aroused unabashed pride in Germany. The politician on research policy for North Rhine-Westphalia, Leo Brandt, one of those persons highly suited as a contrasting figure to Walther Gerlach, allowed a V-2 to be displayed along with the remains of a V-1 rocket in 1953 at the Düsseldorf exhibition on “rockets in space” (Racketen im Weltraum). The Leo Brandt model is instructive because he manifests all the strategies Germany took to continue its policy on science and technology after 1945. The radar instruments he developed during the war formed the basis of radiophysical research conducted in the Stockert laborabory.19 He did not even hesitate to bring home such implicated scientists as the high-frequency pioneer Abraham Esau, Gerlach’s predecessor as expert department head on physics at the RFR, who had been sentenced to prison in The Netherlands. Esau was invited back to North Rhine-Westphalia to continue his research. Brandt instigated the 18 “On the 19th of December 1944 I already wrote to Professor Gerlach, who was commissioned with the direction of the uranium project: ‘You can count anytime on my support in overcoming the difficulties that would hamper the research. Despite the extreme strain on all forces for armament, the relatively small subsidies for your research are still possible to do.’” Cf. Speer, Erinnerungen, p. 550, note 30. 19 Cf. Wielebinski, Years, pp. 388–394.

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resumption of research on ultracentrifuges in North Rhine-Westphalia. During the phase of research restrictions he conducted a secret German/Dutch/Norwegian project on atomic reactors. He was one of the principal protagonists on the issue of German “backwardness” in scientific research, and he was one of the main agitators against the research restrictions imposed by the Allies.20 The “having fallen behind” discourse had for federal German policy on science and technology of the postwar period a whole string of functions in connection with the struggle against Allied restrictions.21 It was also a surreptitious bastion of science-and-technology-related German nationalism. It became outright with the “in-tow” policy followed by the victor powers: On their orders, German researchers abroad were supposed to conduct research and development in precisely those areas that were forbidden inside Germany. This policy discredited the whole reeducation project, generated a climate of animosity, and involuntarily certified German wartime R&D projects as serious and successful, awarding substitute Iron Crosses that could lead to a new arrogance and back to the old sense of self-righteousness. Although Gerlach also alluded to the “picking up,” “loading,” and “stowing” of German scientists and engineers, he refused to resort to concealed nationalism in the discourse on having fallen behind. Gerlach was among the few scientists or, respectively, science officials to criticize the new self-righteous tone used in the German scientific community of the postwar period and the continued force of Third-Reich jargon – lingua tertii imperii – and he shunned the thinking, actions, and rhetoric of the Cold War. THE GERLACH DEAL Walther Gerlach’s Humboldtian standpoint did not exclude cooperation with industry, by any means. He was a laboratory director at Bayer as early as 1920; he accepted industrial contracts until into the 1950s, and many of his students were employed there. Gerlach was for the scientification of industry but against the industrialization of the university sciences. How could such an emphatic university professor conduct torpedo R&D during the war and after the war become president of the Fraunhofer Society (FG)? If we wanted to explain this rationally, we could speak about a “Gerlach deal”: His successful design or constructive improvement of the torpedo detonator made it possible for him to act autonomously within the university sphere. His successful employment as expert department head on physics of the RFR was the precondition for his protection of universities, university physics, and the highly gifted upcoming generation of scientists. This process reappears mutatis mutandis also during the postwar period. One important aspect of Gerlach’s advocacy of the FG was protecting the autonomous natural sciences and humanities by integrating the FG into the DFG, 20 21

Rusinek, Forschungszentrum, pp. 121 ff. Cf. ibid., pp. 203 ff.

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installing a small applications department within the fortress of pure university sciences in order to foil “ivory tower” charges. In later years, Gerlach justified his engagement on behalf of the DFG’s project for a Thesaurus Lingua Latinae with the frustrated joke that this project was particularly close to his heart because it was one of the last entirely purposeless research projects.22 THE GERLACH DESIDERATUM Gerlach figured for the majority of German research engineers and scientists after 1945 as a referential scholar: He had dutifully served but stayed “clean.” He was a patriot but no Nazi, perhaps even an anti-Nazi. He was firmly anchored in the science and science organization of the Third Reich, and yet he was a Madonna with a shielding cloak initially for academic physics against Deutsche or “Aryan” physics, then drawing into an ever wider embrace universities, aspiring young scientists, scientific autonomy generally. Nobody could have been more energetic than Gerlach from April 1946 – at that time he received his guest professorship in Bonn – in conducting the reconstruction of universities, scientific operations, and scientific organizations. Just as up to May 1945, when the wartime fate of the Germans seemed to depend on the engineering and natural sciences, likewise from May 1945 for its peacetime fate. Whereas until April 1945 it was a matter of remediating an existentially threatening out-datedness with reference to the war, since mid-1945 it was a matter of remediating an existentially threatening out-datedness with reference to the peace. His rank as a scientist never having been really questioned, and being an extremely dynamic and charismatic leadership persona, this science manager of the final stage of war was also qualified for the postwar period. In a certain sense – but not a polemic one – Gerlach remained a kind of Nazi-era expert department head after 1945, or according to the wishes of many, he really ought to have. The Führer model, in principle, had not been rejected, just the “wrong Führer.” The continuity problem did not worry large segments of the public. Consternation would instead have arisen if the lines of continuity had been abruptly broken off. Gerlach’s employment in the RFR could be recoined as charisma after 1945. It qualified him as a science manager and let him appear to be one of the best-suited men for the reconstruction of scientific and research organizations. As on a fish ladder, Gerlach hopped upwards from pool to pool. This is an area in which the boundaries between the different political systems in twentieth-century Germany seem simply not to exist. In the earliest postwar period, in occupied Germany, there was an identificatory demand for someone like Gerlach in the scientific community.

22

Gerlach to Ehlers, 5 Jul. 1960, DM, collection 80/29.

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PUBLIC-PROTEST PERSONA – OLD GENT OF THE 1968 GENERATION On the public stages, from 1946 Walther Gerlach was what one calls in the theater business a much-played author. In April 1946, right at the beginning of his Bonn period as guest professor, just recently released from the camp in Alswede where Gerlach had been brought after his Farm Hall internment, his vibrant activities began to resurrect academic self-governance in West Germany. By that time Gerlach, born in 1889, had reached an age at which he would have been offered an early-retirement pension in the Federal Republic of the 1980s. His relatively advanced age was an advantage for Walther Gerlach after 1945. He did not need to knock on any doors; they opened on their own for this long-time insider. Shortly before he became emeritus, Gerlach explained in his autobiographical account that his was a convenient age for interfering in the structure of science organizations: “No more need to fuss about the career.” (“Rücksicht auf die Karriere brauchts nimmer.”)23 In this statement we also see a colloquial diction that contributed toward Gerlach’s popularity. Since the second half of the 1950s – and even more intensely as emeritus since October 1957 – this socially overarching prestige helped him grow into the role of public critic of federal German conditions: critic of the Adenauer state, of atomic weapons, of the atomic euphoria, and of universities, which he saw as deviating more and more from his understanding of science and education. He regarded universities, on the one hand, as authoritarianly crusted over, on the other hand, as drifting toward Americanization, without ever resolving this contradiction. Gerlach was an active member of the leftist Pugwash group and spoke out openly against the far-right Nationalist Democratic Party (NPD) and anti-Semitic currents. Many of Gerlach’s public statements seem to anticipate the ideas of 1968. From the late 1950s on, the “Munich physicist Walther Gerlach” reflected a similar image of critical public intellectuality to the “troublesome writer” Hans Magnus Enzensberger from the early 1970s or the “moral philosopher from Frankfurt Jürgen Habermas” later in that decade. Because of this dashing public display, because he was turning increasingly into an unprofessorial professor, and because he always lent an ear to students in distress, Gerlach was among the front team of “old gents” (Alte Herren) pulling for “1968.” He would be placed in the same row as Ernst Bloch (born 1885), Walter Dirks (1901), Helmut Gollwitzer (1908), Eugen Kogon (1903), Herbert Marcuse (1898), and Hans Werner Richter (1908). These old gents, fathers of a student youth movement, distinguished themselves partly by the substance of their positions, which had been taboo in the 1950s, also because Gerlach’s words about “no longer” (nimmer) having career worries applied to them. But how could Walther Gerlach, for whom the traditional German university was a sacrosanct institution, get involved in this atmosphere?

23

Walther Gerlach, Wahrheit, 1957, DM, collection 80/53.

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From his university emphasis, which was neither “rightist” nor “leftist” nor otherwise political – political only in its resolute anti-politician stance – a ramp led to notions of the politicizing 1968-students, namely, to their pathos for publicity, debating, and enlightenment and to their scornfulness of conceitedness and elitist bearing. Like the 1968ers, Gerlach campaigned against bureaucracy adverse to scholarship. Like them he criticized obsolete hierarchies at the university institutes. He cautioned against traders in the temple of academia. He espoused the problems of young aspiring academics. He resisted the logic of the Cold War. He demanded the fusion of science and ethos. Gerlach’s politically liberal, culturally conservative attitude as an Humboldtian upholding conservative values – his ethically resolute conception of science – proved to be compatible with university-related goals of a student revolt movement. Fighter against the audacities of Deutsche Physik from 1933; model scientist during the war, and identification figure for scientists of the early postwar period in the Federal Republic, for adherents of the classical idea of the German university and Bildung, and for the leftist critics of the late-Adenauer period of the FRG – these portrayed Gerlach-images are not brazen constructions. Gerlach’s image did not appear out of thin air. We must rather presuppose the building of his image in an interplay between Gerlach and the academic and general publics, as well as with his great throng of pupils. WHO ELSE? In 1943 Gerlach had become expert department head on physics because there had been no rivals and no real alternative. The situation is comparable to the one if we ask why he became the most publicly visible scientist of the just-founded DFG. What alternatives were there? Otto Hahn was too old and regarded the MPG as his home base. Heisenberg withdrew more and more after his plan for a German Research Council had failed, seeking instead with his “theory of everything” presented in 1958, the Weltformel, to satisfy most exacting demands to explain the world, and acquiring the charisma of not being of this world. The first DFG president Otto Flachsbart, in office for a short while, had no charisma at all. Coming from the not-very-brilliant Hannover Polytechnic, nobody knew him; added to that he was sick and was unable to make public appearances. And at a time when nothing less than the future of Germany’s people, if not of the world, seemed to depend on the engineering and natural sciences; the jurist and specialist in contractual terms of trade Ludwig Raiser, DFG president from 1951 until 1955, was hardly the suitable man to send to the front line and represent German science, especially considering that during the war he had also been professor at the visible Reichsuniversität in Strasbourg. These characteristics – being a front-line man, representative, magister ubique of German science – by contrast, were second nature to Walther Gerlach, as a glance through his official functions, memberships, speeches, and publications reveals. His offices and functions are almost countless, and one wonders how he managed to deal with such a multiplicity.

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MAGISTER UBIQUE Anyone looking for a symbol of the many-sided, high approachability of this public communicator Walther Gerlach will find it in the message to him in 1953 by Hellmut Vits, chairman of the board of the rayon factory Vereinigte Glanzstoffwerke AG in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. It relates how “joyfully” the sculptor Prof. Arno Breker had “reiterated” on the phone his willingness to make a bust portrait of Gerlach.24 Gerlach and Vits were lifelong friends. The major plus recommending Gerlach for so many leadership positions was that he knew everyone. A test probe ought to demonstrate this. The chairmen or vice-chairmen of the expert board on physics in the DFG from 1949 to 1961 were, listed by age, Robert W. Pohl (born 1884); Walther Kossel (born 1888); Christian Gerthsen (born 1894); Georg Joos (born 1894); Hans Kopfermann (born 1895); Marianus Czerny (born 1896); Rudolf Fleischmann (born 1903); Albrecht Unsöld (born 1905); Hans D. Jensen (born 1907); Wolfgang Paul (born 1913). Gerlach and Pohl knew each other from the period of World War I, when they were working in a military R & D study group on electron repeaters and transmitters. In this sector Gerlach had also cooperated with Kossel. Then during World War II they had been in constant contact with each other, specifically, in the area of metals research. Joos informed Gerlach at the end of 1944 about research projects that had gone awry requiring intervention. Kopfermann was deployed by Gerlach in 1944 in the development of a betatron (Elektronenschleuder), where he collaborated with the precision engineering company Siemens-Reiniger in Erlangen. Czerny had been commissioned by Gerlach in the fall of 1944 with the central direction of infrared and ultraviolet research – of relevance to the Luftwaffe for direction finding. Gerlach commissioned Fleischmann likewise in the fall of 1944 with supervising the materials science studies in nuclear physics, in which there was once again collaboration with the Krupp steelworks. Only the relationships with Gerthsen, Unsöld, and Paul seem not to have been of a special kind, that is, not to have gone beyond the conventional measure within a surveyable scientific community. People knew each other, continually met with each other, and delivered talks to each other. “WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF …?” The scientific biography has long since been rehabilitated as a genre. It has the privilege of being able to combine generalizable issues with “concretion and a diachronic perspective.”25 Everything has already been said about its value that needs to be said.26 24

Ernst Hellmut Vits to Walther Gerlach, 20 Oct. 1953, DM, collection 80/434. Herbert, Best, p. 19. 26 Cf. Szöllösi-Janze, Haber, pp. 9–15; albeit the author takes up thoughts that Hagen Schulze already presented in 1978 in his biography of Braun. Her main arguments are: Cli25

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The author of a Sombart biography wished to meet Pierre Bourdieu halfway with his profound charge that all biographies are teleological or “programmological” deceit:27 One would just have to have the biography of Werner Sombart end at different specific dates for each to add up to an entirely different biographical total. We could play along with “What would have happened if …?” and, in analogy to the biography on Werner Sombart,28 ask how Walther Gerlach would be evaluated, which Gerlach-image would we have, if his biography had broken off in 1925, 1933, 1939, 1945, or 1960: Deceased 1925: Ambitious experimental physicist from the spectroscopical Paschen school. In August 1914 evidently unimpressed by the war euphoria. During World War I in the troop of radio operators, as it were, academically qualified by “confronting the enemy.” Became acquainted with colleagues and research fields of influence to him for over a decade. Individuals: Arnold Sommerfeld and Wilhelm Wien. Research fields: Techniques of radio direction finding, radio control, radio position fixing, radio detonation. After war’s end, established a scientific laboratory in the Elberfeld dye works, formerly Friedrich Bayer & Co.; followed the classical German scholar’s career; first professorship in Frankfurt, there attaining scientific fame with the “Stern-Gerlach experiment.” Deceased 1933: Important physicist with a broad spectrum ranging from pure research to application; representative of the university standpoint in the sciences at the same time as entertaining good contacts in industry. Successor to Wilhelm Wien as chairholder at the University of Munich. Member of a series of scientific organizations, politically a rather liberal, culturally conservative attitude.29 Deceased 1939: Important physicist who combatted Deutsche and Arische Physik and was engaged at the same time in application-oriented military research; initially in collaboration with the Navy. Professedly not a Nazi. Deceased 1945: Important university and military physicist and energetic expert department head for physics in the RFR who at the same time wanted to retain the predominance of university science and keep the coming generation of scientists safe beyond war’s end – something that can be proven, but also represents a convenient exoneration. From 1940 one of the influential saviors of the German Navy and Air Force from their torpedo crisis; as plenipotentiary on nuclear physics, R & D in the nuclear energy sector right up to the end of the war.

chés underlie the criticism against biographies in the humanities; the juxtapositioning between structure and personality accordingly cannot be upheld; indeed, the biography had never been questioned in English-speaking literary arts. Christoph Cornelißen essentially lists these same arguments and adds the view expressed by Wilhelm Dilthey that after the end of the nineteenth century, historiography would always issue into the biographical; Cornelißen, Ritter, pp. 10–13. 27 Cf. Bourdieu, Illusion. 28 Cf. Lenger, Sombart, pp. 14 f. 29 That Walther Gerlach was among the co-signers of the “protest against the Richard-Wagner-city of Munich,” against Thomas Mann’s speech held on 10 Feb. 1933 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, can serve here as proof of this attitude.

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Deceased 1960: One of the important science administrators after 1945, publically influential university rector, scientist, science multi-functionary, and science popularizer with an increasingly critical view on the relationship between science and the state as well as on the internal structures of German universities.

THE RULES OF SCIENCE – SCIENCE UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE Ulrich Wengenroth For science, the years of Nazi rule were, at the same time, years of self-destruction of a reference standard. Since the late nineteenth century the German research university, just like German industrial research, had been the most efficient and, gauged by the symbolically laden awards like the Nobel prizes, also the most successful model for institutionalized science. German was the international language of science, and a doctorate in Germany often enough led to a scientific career at home. Particularly the ability of German science to rapidly regain its former leading position after the lost World War and apparently to win back lost ground strengthened the very special respect that international observers had for the scientific potential of the Reich. German science was an international referential standard. That changed within a matter of a few years, from 1933 on, and permanently so. Appalled former admirers of German science watched the self-destruction of their model and example. The scientific world used to travel to Germany to study; thereafter German scientists were fleeing their country to save their lives and their professional ideals. This also had repercussions on the meta-scientific studies of science. A sociology of knowledge already existed that examined how social preconditions and context carry and promote the acquisition of knowledge and how mental activity is socially conditioned. A new question arose with regard to how science as a social institution has to be conceived in order to be able to produce the best possible truth about the world. The spontaneous self-evidence of German science during its most brilliant period did not exist anymore. The flight and expulsion of individual practicioners in Germany of a science, whose prominent trait was understood to be universally valid and therefore worthy of being striven after by all, was greeted with international horror. The institutional composition of this science in Germany needed to become the subject of scientific examination. It was only at the moment of its politically-driven loss of this reference standard that the social structure of the standard became a topic. And that began in 1937, wholly in the tradition of German science, at Harvard.

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WEBER AT HARVARD Robert K. Merton,1 considered the founder of the sociology of science, delivered a talk in December 1937 to the American Sociological Society that was published in the following year under the title “Science and the Social Order.”2 Although Merton was not a pupil of young Talcott Parsons, he was certainly inspired in a special way by his only seven years older colleague. Parsons had earned his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1929 under Edgar Salin’s supervision, with his thesis on Der Geist des Kapitalismus bei Sombart und Weber.3 He also introduced into the American sociological debate Max Weber’s writings, who was then still relatively unknown in the USA, not least by providing a translation of Weber’s work (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).4 Merton’s dissertation, completed in 1935 and published 1938 as Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, in turn, picked up Max Weber’s unimplemented plan to study the role of Protestant values not just on the formation of capitalism but also in modern science. A slightly younger colleague of Merton, Edward Y. Hartshorne, had just completed his dissertation after a longer sojourn in Germany in the years 1935/36, The German Universities and National Socialism.5 Since 1937 Talcott Parsons was intensely preoccupied with National Socialism in the country where he received his scientific education and also collaborated on it with the U. S. Office of Strategic Services.6 His image of Nazi Germany, which he himself had not experienced as a student, was substantially influenced by Hartshorne’s thesis and accounts. Hence, Merton was the only one of the trio of young stars of Harvard sociology of the late 1930s who did not know about German universities from his own student experiences and was probably also not involved in the American policy on Germany. Nevertheless, his dissertation provided him with the best scientific tools to theorize about the troubling moral decay of German scientific operations in Weber’s tradition. Apart from Hartshorne’s dissertation, the empirical basis of his first talk was contemporary German writings on science and the university system, with many programmatic statements by National Socialist or1 This child of Eastern European immigrants was named Meyer R. Schkolnick at birth on 4 Jul. 1910. Professional stations: Harvard until 1939, thereafter Tulane University, 1941–1979 Columbia University. Died on 23 Feb. 2003. 2 Merton, Science (the source of the following quotes); reprinted with some modernized footnotes in: Merton, Sociology, pp. 254–266. 3 On the history of Parson’s Promotion at Heidelberg, see the biographical information in Münch, Soziologische Theorie, p. 41. 4 Already in 1930: Weber, Protestant. 5 Hartshorne, Universities. It appeared in London in the same year, 1937. After the war Hartshorne served in Germany as principal education officer for the American Military Government and was responsible for the reopening of universities in the American zone. In August 1946 he was shot dead in his car from out of a passing vehicle on the highway near Nuremberg while he was carrying out General Lucius Clay’s order to investigate the incomplete denazification of Bavarian universities. Parsons, Hartshorne. On Hartshorne’s activities in postwar Germany, cf. Tent, Proconsul. 6 For more details, see Gerhardt, Parsons.

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ganizations among them. Approximately one half of the citations of the printed talk refer to German texts from the period after 1933. He began in reverence of Max Weber and then developed the topic Sources of Hostility towards Science, taking as illustrations detailed citations about the actual situation in Germany. SCIENCE IN MODERNITY Merton was the first to attempt to determine a systematic connection between scientific values and institutional order: The persistent development of science occurs only in societies of a certain order, subject to a peculiar complex of tacit presuppositions and institutional constraints. What is for us a normal phenomenon which demands no explanation and secures many “self-evident” cultural values, has been in other times and still is in many places abnormal and infrequent. The continuity of science requires the active participation of interested and capable persons in scientific pursuits. This support of science is assured only by appropriate cultural conditions. It is, then, important to examine those controls which motivate scientific careers, which select and give prestige to certain scientific disciplines and reject or blur others. It will become evident that changes in institutional structure may curtail, modify or possibly prevent the pursuit of science. (p. 321)

The other times during which “‘self-evident’ cultural values” of science were not valid were those he had examined in his dissertation on the seventeenth century. The other places very clearly meant Nazi Germany, as the subsequent pages of the text highlight with numerous examples. Even so, the intention certainly was not to analyze science in Germany under the Third Reich. It was rather a general study on science in modernity which, as Merton wrote in a footnote, had been planned together with Hartshorne and which his death had prevented from coming about.7 Hence, Nazi Germany delivered the occasion and the impetus for the newly forming sociology of science. At heart, it involved making “tacit presuppositions and institutional constraints” visible and their function for science in a modern society transparent. Their collapse in what had been an exemplary German science offered the best possible starting point for analytical treatment: The situation in Germany since 1933 illustrates the ways in which logical and non-logical processes converge to modify or curtail scientific activity. In part, the hampering of science is an unintended by-product of changes in political structure and nationalistic credo. In accordance with the dogma of “race purity,” practically all persons who do not meet the politically imposed criteria of “Aryan” ancestry and of avowed sympathy with Nazi aims have been eliminated from universities and scientific institutes. Since these “outcasts” include a considerable number of eminent scientists, one indirect consequence of the racialist purge is the weakening of science in Germany. (pp. 321 f.)

The “logical and non-logical processes” are nowadays uncommon concepts. The former is to be understood as methods and results of science that oppose the 7 The footnotes of the two different versions diverge at this point. In 1938 this joint book project is announced (p. 322); in 1973 it is noted as “halted” (p. 255) owing to Hartshorne’s death.

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realization of important values from other social contexts, whereas the latter (“non-logical”) rather refers to “sentiments” of the scientific ethos that conflict with those of other institutions. In any case, Merton considered the obstruction of science in Nazi Germany as an unintended side-effect of the political structure and the nationalistic creed. Hence, science per se was not being attacked. A little later it is also made explicit: “It would be misleading to suggest that the new German State has completely repudiated science and intellect. The official attitudes toward science are clearly ambivalent and unstable.” (p. 324) What in Germany then led to the self-destructive end of the hitherto upheld “self-evident cultural values” of science? Modern science has considered the personal equation as a potential source of error and has evolved impersonal criteria for checking such error. It is now called upon to assert that certain scientists, because of their extra-scientific affiliations, are a priori incapable of anything but spurious and false theories. In some instances, scientists are required to accept the judgments of scientifically incompetent political leaders concerning matters of science. But such politically advisable tactics run counter to the institutionalized norms of science. These, however, are dismissed by the totalitarian state as “liberalistic” or “cosmopolitan” or “bourgeois” prejudices,8 inasmuch as they cannot be readily integrated with the campaign for an unquestioned political creed. From a broader perspective, the conflict is a phase of institutional dynamics. Science, which has acquired a considerable degree of autonomy and has evolved an institutional complex which engages the allegiance of scientists, now has both its traditional autonomy and its rules of the game – its ethos, in short – challenged by an external authority. (p. 327)

The clashing “institutional dynamics” in Nazi Germany contested science’s authority to organize itself according to those “rules of the game” by which it had secured, through “impersonal criteria for checking […] error,” the quality of its statements and thereby also what the academic world had formerly admired about German science. Merton named the “rules of the game” briefly as the “ethos” of science. However, this ethos is not a normative ethic coming from the outside, whether from God, nature, or human institutions, but a functional principle that guarantees that science can root out errors according to its own criteria. That means, it can produce the best possible truth in each case. That this truth can collide with the “logical” and “non-logical processes,” which, as Max Weber would say, come from other value spheres (Wertsphären), is not the object and criterion of the ethos of science. Modern science functions only if it disregards any other ethos. The epistemological process within the social context examined in the sociology of knowledge requires the social institution and its functionally based ethos – not, for instance, a transcendentally or socially based one – as its protective and orientational frame. Nonetheless, the functionally based ethos can be depicted as a normative ethic, which then, of course, proved to be incompatible with that of the authoritarian state. “The sentiments embodied in the ethos of science – characterized by such terms as intellectual honesty, integrity, organized scepti8

Frank.

In the footnote here Merton, Science, cites Ernst Krieck, Alfred Baeumler, and Walter

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cism, disinterestedness, impersonality – are outraged by the set of new sentiments which the State would impose in the sphere of scientific research” (p. 327). In the Nazi state, “impersonality” was what was flagrantly violated; “disinterestedness” and “organized scepticism” were under pressure in other societies as well, which in turn had repercussions on “intellectual honesty” and “integrity.” Scientific ethos is precisely not universal but uniquely adequate for the functionally distinguished activity called “science.” We are situated, in theoretical history, at the beginning of structural functionalism, which after World War II was developed into a comprehensive theoretical system primarily by Talcott Parsons. Merton opposed its comprehensive claim by demanding medium-range theories. And his sociology of science being formed here proved to be one. Its core message was that functionally differentiated social subsystems, such as science, need an ethos of their own to attain their limited goals, individual points of which could indeed conflict with the values of their social environment. The differentiation gains of modernity would accordingly be lost again if this specific ethos were subjugated under a comprehensive and homogeneous world of values, as was the case in premodern times and was attempted again under National Socialism. Although Merton left no doubt about how repulsed he was by National Socialism in general and by Nazi science policy in particular, he did not seek political salvation in the primacy of science. Merton was far away from being scientistic or a technocrat: “There is a tendency for scientists to assume that the social effects of science must be beneficial in the long run. This article of faith performs the function of providing a rationale for scientific research, but it is manifestly not a statement of fact. It involves the confusion of truth and social utility which is characteristically found in the non-logical penumbra of science” (p. 333). Thus, science was accordingly an exactly defined process for the acquisition of knowledge without any guarantee of completeness or of social utility. The ethos of science postulated by Merton as necessary was directed at the process, not at the moral status of the result. He was squarely following in the tradition of his fellow countryman John Dewey, who had written already ten years before: “The layman takes certain conclusions which get into circulation to be science. But the scientific inquirer knows that they constitute science only in connection with the methods by which they are reached. Even true, they are not science in virtue of their correctness, but by reason of the apparatus which is employed in reaching them.”9 Consequently there can be no question of this being an acknowledgment of the unconditional authority of science, as was repeatedly being demanded by many scientists, also precisely against the backdrop of the devastating science policy of National Socialism. To that extent scientific ethos never can be universal, for in the political process it then certainly does involve interests and 9 Dewey, Public, cited here according to the 1991 reprint with the postscript by the author from 1946, p. 163. Dewey himself presented a catalog of scientific norms in 1939, many elements of which resembled Merton’s. However, it did not have nearly the theoretical stringency and for that reason could not assert itself in the debate among sociologists of science. Cf. Dewey, Freedom, esp. pp. 142–151.

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their balancing, persons and their individual dignities, and acknowledgment of preliminary standpoints open to skeptical objection. Through the extreme case of Nazi science policy, Merton established the principal distance of science from society.10 This distance, on the one hand, made the enormous intellectual performance of modern science feasible at all; on the other hand, this is paid for by an arrogant, at times even irresponsible indolence toward social values. This, too, was already set forth by Dewey: “The glorification of ‘pure’ science under such conditions is a rationalization of an escape; it marks a construction of an asylum of refuge, a shirking of responsibility.”11 Dewey’s liberal criticism of science, like Merton’s nascent sociology of science, saw no congruency in values between science and society, but rather a distance that was understood as a functional distinction certainly harboring potential conflict. SCIENCE POLICY THROUGH DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP But what distinguished distancing between science and a liberal society – with its “peculiar complex of tacit presuppositions and institutional constraints” and the “normal phenomenon which demands no explanation and secures many ‘selfevident’ cultural values,” – in which science was evidently able to prosper, from the distancing between science and the Nazi state? Dictatorship organizes, centralizes and hence intensifies sources of revolt against science which in a liberal structure remain unorganized, diffuse and often latent. In a liberal society, integration derives primarily from the body of cultural norms toward which human activity is oriented. In a dictatorial structure, integration is effected primarily by formal organization and centralization of social control. Readiness to accept this control is instilled by speeding up the process of infusing the body politic with new cultural values, by substituting highpressure propaganda for the slower process of the diffuse inculcation of social standards. These differences in the mechanisms through which integration is typically effected permit a greater latitude for self-determination and autonomy to various institutions, including science, in the liberal than in the totalitarian structure. (p. 335)

Hence, according to Merton, it is often precisely the defamed irresoluteness and sluggishness of the liberal state, its greater tolerance of ambiguity, that create the temporal and free spaces in which the partly conflict-laden values in science and society have a chance to be able to come to some arrangement with each other and together self-determinedly change in a new direction. In order to be able to institutionalize itself at the value distance from society indispensable for its own functioning, science needs somewhat sloppy control, the degree of which can, of course, be suitably hammered out. What distinguished the science policies of democracy and dictatorship, or in the concrete historical instance, of the USA and Nazi Germany, was not in the

10 Over sixty years later Peter Weingart pointed out the far-sightedness of this diagnosis, which was only then becoming apparent; Weingart, Wissenschaftssoziologie, pp. 20 f. 11 Dewey, Public, p. 175.

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one case that science could act completely undisturbed and its ethos coincided with that of society. Rather, […] reprisals against science can more easily find expression in the Nazi state than in America, where interests are not so organized as to enforce limitations upon science when these are deemed necessary. Incompatible sentiments must be insulated from one another or integrated with each other if there is to be social stability. But such insulation becomes virtually impossible when there exists centralized control under the aegis of any one sector of social life which imposes, and attempts to enforce the obligation of adherence to its values and sentiments as a condition of continued existence. In liberal structures the absence of such centralization permits the necessary degree of insulation by guaranteeing to each sphere restricted rights of autonomy and thus enables the gradual integration of temporarily inconsistent elements. (p. 336)

The liberal ability to tolerate inconsistencies for a while is, of course, initially an expression of freedom, but – and herein lies the key to Merton’s analysis – it is also the precondition for being able to experience the potential differentiation gains of modern societies. Liberal society dares to venture deeper into the dilemma that appears between the – precisely also morally – uncertain results of autonomously regulating science and the values of other social institutions. It was this, and less the misanthropic values of individual dictatorships, that Merton regarded as the main difference between science in liberal democracies and in authoritarian regimes, albeit it appeared to him doubtful that, in the former, science could therefore count on lasting unconditional support: “The goods of science are no longer considered an unqualified blessing. Examined from this perspective, the tenet of pure science and disinterestedness has helped to prepare its own epitaph” (p. 332). This assessment fit after the atomic bomb explosions a few years later and is certainly an appropriate discourse analysis in liberal democracies today. All the same, this does not mean to say that Merton, who was anything but anti-science, thought that science – in the end, even German science under National Socialism – was itself to blame for its castigation. The subordination of scientific values under the racist, specifically anti-Semitic, social strategies of inclusion and exclusion set into sharp relief the functionally necessary distance to society that was built into the social subsystem of science, in that it completely destroyed scientific freedom as a “normal phenomenon which demands no explanation and secures many ‘self-evident’ cultural values” on one crucial point – impersonality. To Merton this prevented in the subsequent necessary analysis the return to a naive equating of scientific and democratic values and replaced it with the ambivalent relation science/society, which our present democratic societies are grappling with over issues ranging from climate change to nuclear technology and gene manipulation. Thus is described the dilemma of modern science-based society: scientific progress can only be had on the condition of ambivalency, whereas the option “no scientific progress” allows the known problems to continue to escalate. Merton chose the side of risky ambivalency. Of course, he considered it precarious, including the gravestone that science had prepared for its own ethos. Different from authoritarian ideologies, a liberal theory knows no clear resolution to dilemmas. For modern science, Merton said, this means a guarantee to exist, albeit no immunity.

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Merton’s sociology of science, in particular his scientific ethos elaborated in later publications, were subjected to intense criticism during the 1970s, when a hegemonial change was taking place from liberal to neo-Marxist thought collectives in the social sciences. In the process the functional nature of the particular scientific ethos was often overlooked and mistaken for a universal ethic whose redemption was not empirically verifiable. It is truly not surprising that people would go against an ethos. This constitutes no argument against the existence of an ethos. Without its violation it would ultimately remain invisible. Retracing this criticism in detail or even just discussing it would lead us too far astray here. The same applies to the much more extensive discussion about scientific freedom since World War II. The occasion for this brief miscellany was rather finding that the devastations of the German system of science and its values during the period of National Socialism constituted the concrete impetus for the – at that time new – question of the institutional and cultural constitution of modern science. The first answer was found in the form of a newly forming sociological subdiscipline, the sociology of science, whose research we increasingly need. As concerns the further destiny of Merton’s scientific ethos after the renewed hegemonial change from neo-Marxism to post- or second modernity (Zweitmoderne), we learn from Peter Weingart: The wholesale rejection of the ethos also proves to be somewhat premature if one regards, for example, the reaction of institutionalized science to spectacular cases of scientific fraud and doubts about the functioning ability of the peer review system. They led to codifications of the scientific ethos in the leading scientific nations that come very close to Merton’s formulations.12

The German Research Foundation’s memorandum on the “securing of good scientific practice” (Denkschrift der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft zur Sicherung guter wissenschaftlicher Praxis) may be added here as one example among many.

12

Weingart, Wissenschaftssoziologie, p. 21.

CONDITIONAL UPHEAVALS – THOUGHTS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN THE WEST GERMAN POSTWAR PERIOD Carola Sachse For a long time, studies on contemporary history have rejected the concept of a “zero hour” in the second German postwar period of the twentieth century. Whether from the perspective of politics, economics, or social history, or from the point of view of the history of mentality, culture, or remembrance – there is a need to know about the longer-term lines of continuity, path dependencies, transmittals of memories and value orientations across the demarcations of wars and changes in political system. The research program on “The History of the German Research Foundation” (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and its predecessor institutions was committed to this contemporary longue durée as part of its obligatory program from the outset, defining the half-century from 1920 until 1970 as the examination period in which to embed the scandal of DFG-funded Nazi science along with its participation in the murder of patients and Jews, war crimes, and genocide. Almost all of the individual studies on the selected scientific disciplines and fields of research within the support spectrum of the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft, NG), the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR), and the DFG presented in this volume did, in fact, use this chance to reconstruct institutional, organizational, staffing, mental, substantial, and rhetorical lines of continuity before the political epochal line of 1933 and after the one of 1945. Despite the abundance of related findings, Reinhard Rürup emphasizes the significant breaks in the system of science as a consequence of the National Socialist takeover of power and the specific changes in the relationship between science and politics during the Third Reich.1 In my commentary I also direct my gaze at the political rupture of 1945 and inquire about the importance of the social, moral, and, finally, the military breakdown of the German Reich for the subsequent development of the West German system of science. Beforehand, though, I shall illustrate by a few examples my reading of the individual studies in this volume, namely, as predominantly following the paradigm of continuity in scientific developments beyond 1945.

1

Cf. the contribution to this volume by Reinhard Rürup.

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LINES OF CONTINUITY On the basis of earlier studies on the history of science of the immediate postwar years,2 it is not surprising that in most of these individual studies, whether on mechanical engineering (Mirko Buschmann), on radiation and radioactivity research (Alexander von Schwerin), or on the agricultural sciences (Willi Oberkrome), a high degree of identity could be established in the staffing among the applicants or, respectively, the leading representatives of the relevant field before and after 1945. It is no more surprising that this continuity did not always result automatically, but rather, as Alexander Neumann emphasizes for the area of physiological research, it had to be restored with occasionally costly denazification and reappointment proceedings backed by exonerating “Persil certificates” from the scientific community involved.3 However the staffing continuity of the scientific networks may have been “construed,” these networks lasted into the early 1960s.4 Almost all the individual studies agree with this finding and refer to the generational change that then started to take place.5 Yet they do not explain its surprisingly simultaneous occurrence in all the studied scientific disciplines or the considerable quantitative extent of this phenomenon throughout. The obvious question to ask is: To what degree did the sweeping generational change – determined by age at the beginning of the 1960s – possibly have its source in the staffing change from 1933 to 1938, pushed through by the policy of racism and persecution? This had offered the non-Jewish and politically acceptable young candidates entry positions into academic careers that would only approach their terminations during the 1960s.6 Gabriele Moser, for instance, points out the lasting consequences that the generational change, imposed by the racist policy and subsequent continuity in personnel until the 1960s, had on how the substance and methods of cancer research developed. According to her analysis, the discipline of molecular biology was threatened substantially and institutionally in the middle of the 1930s by the dismissals of Jewish scientists. Cancer research reorganized within a few years. But the subsequent generation of researchers had to reestablish molecular biological research approaches within cancer research at the beginning of the 1960s.7 The politically and racially determined changes in personnel in the 1930s in the individual professional fields and the actual reappointments and denazifications after 1945 presumably differed in extent. In any case, this should be taken into account in an assessment of the postwar develop-

2 I refer, for example, to the following essay volumes: Weisbrod (ed.), Vergangenheitspolitik; vom Bruch/Gerhardt/Pawliczek (eds.), Kontinuitäten. 3 Cf. the contribution to this volume by Alexander Neumann. On the denazification policy within the Kaiser Wilhelm/Max Planck Society, cf. Sachse, Persilscheinkultur; Beyler, Wissenschaft. 4 On the fitting expression konstruierte Kontinuitäten, cf. Ash, Umbrüche. 5 Cf. vom Bruch/Pawliczek, Einleitung, p. 11. 6 Cf. Grüttner, Scienziation; idem, Säuberung, pp. 23–39, esp. pp. 28–32, 37 f. 7 Cf. the contribution to this volume by Gabriele Moser.

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ment of each field as regards its continuities in substance, method, and theory and its structures encouraging or hampering innovation. The individual studies enter new territory in the study of contemporary history of science when they manage to retrace the continuities in substance, method, and theory in the development of the science of their relevant field of investigation. The methodical and paradigmatic loop in rural sociology that Willi Oberkrome indicated, for example, is striking. Rural sociologists succeeded in linking back up with their old topoi, after setting out from Sering’s concept of internal German colonization – with the small family farm businesses – and proceeding to the capitalized large agricultural operations in Meyer’s plans for the eastern territories (Ostraum).8 In accordance with Theodor W. Adorno’s suggestions, they modified their guiding notions with the help of welcome approaches from American sociology and in that way could do justice to the changing parameters of a suburbanized West German rural society.9 West German developmental biologists and biochemists seemed less well advised, by contrast. As Heiko Stoff shows, in their research funded by the DFG into the 1970s, they held onto experimental systems developed primarily by Alfred Kühn and Adolf Butenandt in the 1930s but missed the leap into molecular biology and genetics that soon became the leading science.10 Anne Cottebrune interprets the postwar development of German human genetics similarly. The fact that it fell behind international scientific developments should be attributed less to its, in fact, partial isolation based on past policy than to its insistence on traditional thinking in developmental physiology and holistic interpretative ambitions.11 A continuity in styles of thought (Denkstile) – measured against what was held to be the state of the art of the given discipline – could evidently produce highly diverse effects.12 Their respective importance can only be gathered from the concrete scientific and contemporary contextualization. A continuity in personnel occurring at the same time is not a necessary basis for scientific innovation or stagnation after 1945, but only one among other factors. A closer analysis of the cluster of factors, as is done in the studies mentioned, would without a doubt also be worthwhile for the other areas of examination. Yet historiographic concentration on the elaboration of long lines of continuity can also impede the perception and realistic weighting of important historical changes. This seems to me to be the case in the studies on bioscientific radiation and radioactivity research (Alexander von Schwerin) and on biocatalyst research (Heiko Stoff). There it is equally convincingly reconstructed logically and chronologically how the pursuit of biopolitical goals produced problems of risk policy and how in this context bioscientific issues transformed into issues 8 Cf. also Uekötter, Gigant. On the diverging concepts of agrarian policy held by Sering and Meyer, cf. Stoehr, Sering. On the scientific underpinning of Ostraum planning, see Heim, Kalorien; Heinemann/Wagner (eds.), Wissenschaft. 9 Cf. the contribution to this volume by Willi Oberkrome. 10 Cf. the contribution to this volume by Heiko Stoff. 11 Cf. the contribution to this volume by Anne Cottebrune. 12 On the concept of Denkstil, cf. Fleck, Entstehung; Harwood, Thought.

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of risk assessment.13 Other facts, by comparison, are only marginally taken into account – for example, that in the first days of August 1945 the USA ignited the first two atomic bombs, or that the fallout of the subsequent atomic tests in both hemispheres posed a growing global problem, or that the threatening atomic war was omnipresent as a horror scenario, and last but not least, that West German nuclear research was hampered by research bans imposed by the Allies until the middle of the 1950s. For a more complex contemporary historical understanding of the incentives, motives, and scale of scientific transformations, they should be explicitly placed in the context of the political relations of power during the Cold War.14 Institutional continuities are particularly emphasized in the two studies on disciplines close to industry: mechanical engineering (Mirko Buschmann) and polymer research (Paul Erker). In both cases research support began again in the early 1950s, with the research funding divided up between industry, the federal and state governments, as well as the DFG, which was responsible for “fundamentally oriented” topics of scientific design. Many holders of professorial chairs in the technical sciences and especially in mechanical engineering again proved to be “virtuosos” on the multi-register keyboard of research financing in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).15 However, both authors note what they deem to be a “relatively quiet phase” before the early 1950s that can also be observed in other disciplines. All the same, the question remains, what in fact took place during those five-to-ten years, and whether some policy decisions first needed to be reached on industry and funding and restructurings undertaken before there could be a return to business as usual.16 The thickest line of continuity is drawn by Patrick Wagner in his survey of the DFG’s integral history from 1920 to 1970. He refers mainly to the elitist habitus of German professors expressed in their reports, proposals, expert opinions, and resolution minutes as well as those by the members of the DFG’s managing boards.17 Accordingly, until the middle of the 1950s the DFG had been an authoritarian “republic of scholars” (Gelehrtenrepublik) led by university researchers. Nationalistically minded throughout, even natural and engineering scientists regarded themselves as humanistically educated representatives of the German scientific nation with a responsibility toward a holistic understanding of science. They felt called upon to restore the leading international standing that had existed before the world wars. For this equally exclusive and authoritarian structured group, it was apparently a minor matter that, for a while, the peer reviews were 13

Cf. the contributions to this volume by Heiko Stoff and Alexander von Schwerin. The volume by Doel/Söderquist (eds.), Historiography, offers interesting methodological inspiration. See, in particular, the contributions by John Krige: The Politics of Phosphorus-32. A Cold War Fable Based on Fact, pp. 153–171; Michael Aaron Dennis: Secrecy and Science Revisited. From Politics to Historical Practice and Back, pp. 172–184; and Alexis de Greiff and Mauricio Nieto Olarte: What We Still Do Not Know about South-North Technoscientific Exchange. North-Centrism, Scientific Diffusion, and the Social Studies of Science, pp. 239–259. 15 Cf. the contributions to this volume by Mirko Buschmann and Paul Erker. 16 Cf., e. g., Carson/Gubser, Science; Carson, Heisenberg. 17 Cf. the introductory contribution to this volume by Patrick Wagner. 14

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being carried out “according to the Führerprinzip.” They alternately evaluated the merit of applications for support submitted from amongst them primarily by criteria of an applicant’s personal scientific reputation and far less according to the proposed project’s innovative content, theoretical foundation, and adequacy of method. They had remained amongst themselves even under the leadership of the autonomously acting expert department heads (Fachspartenleiter) installed by the Nazi regime. They had accepted the forced expulsion of one fifth of their fellows without comment, and they adapted themselves patriotically, as a matter of course, to the necessities imposed by the science and funding policies of a fatherland at war. This image of a predominantly mediocre, nationalistically trimmed opportunism is confirmed by existing research on the political, professional, and collegial conduct of scientists from the Kaiserreich up to the end of the Third Reich.18 This is not quite satisfying, however, insofar as the obvious irritation of the old scientific elites and lack of orientation, their laborious attempts to walk along the path stipulated by the Western Allies toward democracy, are only barely noted and not sufficiently weighted historically under the primacy of a supposed all-encompassing superposed habitual and institutional continuity in the community of university scientists united within the DFG. In actual fact, it took four years full of conflicts before the DFG was founded in 1949 as a genuinely new institution, as Karin Orth emphasizes. It combined the function of independent, democratically organized support for university research with a political advisory function and finally found its own place alongside industrial research, extra-university research institutions, and research commissions financed by government ministries.19 It took an additional decade for the structures of a modern knowledge-based society to form in the FRG and for a new conception of science to assert itself as the next generation began to take over at the end of the 1950s.20 Patrick Wagner characterizes this as a rise in appreciation for specialized research approaches compared to the previously predominant “holistic, fundamental understanding” of “expert” versus “scholar” and the belated realization that the United States could not so soon be overtaken again in its position as scientific leader. The fifteen years that had elapsed up until then seem, by comparison, to be a phase of irresolute undulation between continuity and stagnation – as a lengthy failure by German science. Having mastered the adjustment to war conditions without problems, it failed to adapt promptly to the postwar conditions. A closer analysis of the upheavals needing to be overcome after 1945 under the supervision of the Allies might better be able to reveal the contours to this ambivalent phase and inquire into its importance in the emergence of West German science.

18 Cf. Schieder, Spitzenforschung; Schüring, Kinder, pp. 230–358; Hachtmann, Wissenschaftsmanagement, esp. vol. 2, chap. 12; Sachse, Wissenschaftseliten. 19 Cf. the contribution to this volume by Karin Orth. 20 Lundgreen et al., Forschung; Trischler/vom Bruch (eds.), Forschung; Bartz, Wissenschaftsrat.

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CONDITIONAL UPHEAVALS In retrospect we have gotten used to describing the denazification of West German society as a whole, and its scientific subsystem, as inconsistent and of little effect. In view of the ultimate rehabilitation of the overwhelming majority of the scientific elites, this verdict appears obvious and is in any case justified from the moral, ethical, and legal perspective. The contempories saw things differently, as we know. Leading scientists complained about the staffing and institutional restrictions by the denazification and reappointment proceedings hampering rapid reconstruction. These occasionally could drag on for years, such as in the case of the hereditary pathologist Otmar von Verschuer (Anne Cottebrune) or the biophysicist Boris Rajewski (Alexander von Schwerin).21 Moreover they deplored the thinning out of personnel in the German scientific landscape as a consequence of the Allied campaigns such as Operation Paperclip, which were largely indifferent to the former political attitudes of their targets. They complained about the controls and bans on research, the occupation of their institute buildings, if still intact, and the confiscation of their remaining instruments. Their laments were certainly not in every case fabrications, presumptuous and intransigent though they were in view of the criminal war started and ultimately lost by Germany that lasted for six years, not least thanks to scientific support.22 At the moment we know little about the scale and short-, medium-, or long-term significance of staffing purges, infrastructural war damages, and restrictions by occupation policy on the resumption of operations in West German research in the various disciplines and fields.23 After 1945 some fields of research did, in fact, fall completely away, such as, for example, the researches surrounding what Friedemann Schmoll rightly has characterized as the politically hopelessly corrupted Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde.24 Yet advanced German aviation medicine likewise vanished, not because of its notorious share in the criminal human experimentation in concentration camp – its staff members were among the Allies’ most desired “targets” (Alexander Neumann). Tropical medicine, after all hope of getting the German colonies back again was finally lost, only reemerged in the form of a professional society in 1961 and even then it still had to push through the funding of its more recent research activities, although with the backing of the World Health Organization, against resistance by other fields of medicine (Marion Hulverscheidt). Some disciplines, in particular anthropology, which was especially contaminated 21

Cf. Sachse, Butenandt; Karlsch, Rajewski, esp. pp. 446–448. One impressive collection of such laments is contained in the unprinted commemoration of Otto Hahn’s 70th birthday 1949 entitled Die Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft und der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft 1945–1949. Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, dept. V c, rep. 4, KWG no. 1. Cf. Sachse, Science. 23 For the Kaiser Wilhelm/Max Planck Society, cf. Beyler, Wissenschaft. For the University of Berlin, Malycha, Umgang. For East Germany (DDR), Jessen, Eliten. Cf. Weisbrod (ed.), Vergangenheitspolitik; Oehler-Klein/Roelcke (eds.), Vergangenheitspolitik; Conelly/Grüttner (eds.), Autonomie. 24 Cf. the contribution to this volume by Friedemann Schmoll. 22

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by Nazi racial policy, became enduringly taboo. Cooperations with neighboring disciplines, such as ethnology (Christoph Seidler) and genetics, could not be continued or at least had to be relabeled.25 Major genetic projects on the dangers of atomic and radioactive radiation, as were taking place in the USA and Great Britain, were not possible in the FRG (Alexander Schwerin). Comparable information for other areas of study can presumably be gathered about such upheavals and discontinuities from the applications for DFG funding. Which research establishments were postponed or entirely dropped? Which ones were most emphatically wanted? Which ones were resumed in a modified form? And what preconditions had to be created for that? Conformity with the dictated democracy could not be refused but it had a price. Even beyond the denazifications, personnel sortings – precautionary distancing from overly implicated colleagues – had to be undertaken. Corinna Unger impressively shows by the example of research on the East how the old scientific community formed anew in the FRG into a university branch having to satisfy higher demands of political impeccableness and a nonuniversity branch of research institutes supported directly by the federal ministries to perform research commissioned by the ministries. Even the more deeply Nazi-implicated researchers on the East could be accommodated in the latter.26 Furthermore, she shows how this was accompanied by a differentiation of research agendas and at universities led to a quicker assimilation of research on Eastern and East Central Europe done in other Western countries, while in the institutions primarily supported by the ministries, Deutschtum-oriented and “expellee” research continued for longer. There also needed to be a trimming down of the group of perpetrators in the agronomical disciplines studied by Willi Oberkrome, whereby the political and scientific logic of the criteria found was not compelling in every case: Whoever wanted to continue to be part of the group of support-worthy DFG applicants should not have been supported too obviously by the Nazi minister of agriculture Darré and, if at all possible, should have always preferred modern use of artificial fertilizer over biologically dynamic methods of cultivation. Both these examples show that a closer analysis of the field-specific selection criteria is not just of interest for setting apart groups of persons deemed serious from less serious ones within a given field. These criteria could also indicate research agendas reformulated or cut-off after 1945, continued or newly developed lines of research, or of the more-or-less publicly advertised topical clean sweep during the supposed “quiet phase” of the early 1950s. Finding new selection criteria was a difficult process that contained all sorts of imponderables. The general findings reached by Karin Orth, Patrick Wagner, and Rüdiger vom Bruch on the newly founded DFG in 1949 indicates that for years the personality of the applicants was central in the evaluations. Whereas up to the end of the war, a sufficiently convincingly argued research project goal oriented toward the war or armament was decisive for its positive evaluation, after25 26

Cf. the contribution to this volume by Christoph Seidler. Cf. the contribution to this volume by Corinna Unger.

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wards there was no goal orientation to speak of at all. The sole criterion, according to vom Bruch, was the “reputation of the applicant within his discipline,” his prestige as a “strictly scientific researcher persona.” Evidently, the uncertainty was great about what should henceforth count as worthy of funding. Trust could only be placed in the personality of a scientifically acknowledged colleague of good repute, no longer in the scientific subject matter itself. The value system of the Kaiserzeit having been restored again, it was easy to live with, at least among the exclusive circle of the thus reestablished professorial grant applicants. The restitution of the DFG as a “barracade of wagons” for senior faculty members (Karin Orth) – those professors who had “stayed decent” – remained unchallenged until far into the 1960s, despite its certainly inhibitory effect on innovation. However, this is attributable rather to the reorientation problems of the immediate postwar period than to the enduring effect of a supposedly continuous canon of values from the close of the nineteenth century until into the 1960s. “Semantic remodeling” (semantischer Umbau) has become a topos in the treatment of the German postwar period in the history of science ever since the great study by Georg Bollenbeck and Clemens Knobloch on German studies and linguistics.27 Almost all of the individual analyses presented here can report such semantic remodeling, for instance, when Eastern research in the FRG stopped placing itself aggressively at the service of conquest of the German Volksraum and Kulturboden in the East, innocuously calling instead for the “defense of the Abendland” (Corinna Unger). Or when rural sociologists, who could henceforth openly step forward in support of small farmers and part-time agricultural businesses, did so not for the justification of their racially generative function for the deutsche Volk anymore but for their importance as preservers and stabilizers of culture for West German postwar society (Willi Oberkrome). Semantic transformation of a different kind had already been necessary earlier, particularly since the actively enforced involvement of science in the Nazi economy of autarky, armament, and war. Heiko Stoff can show for this period that, in the area of biocatalyst research, adaptation to the political goal of autarky occurred not just linguistically but yielded consequences of research strategy for biocatalysts as an “institution.” This invites a search also in the postwar period and in other fields of research for possible substantial correlates in semantic adaptations and an inquiry into their possible significance for the further development of those fields. The disappearance of a hitherto tried-and-true magic word in research policy, Gemeinschaftsarbeit – Cooperative Project – indicates a lasting sense of insecurity in research policy over broad areas of German sciences in the immediate postwar years. As many of the individual studies indicate, from the mid-1920s it had been considered the ideal form of organized research, as it was financially parsimonious, avoided duplication of labor, created synergies, and grouped together competencies. During World War II the Cooperative Project served as the signpost for Expert Departments (set up by the RFR, the Aviation and Armaments Ministries, and the Army Ordnance Office) and for collaborations between researchers from 27

Bollenbeck/Knobloch (eds.), Umbau.

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universities, research institutions, industrial and military establishments.28 This is probably precisely why Gemeinschaftsarbeit became such an unsavory word in the research and funding policy of the postwar period. But astonishingly, no substitute term was found for it. As Rüdiger vom Bruch points out in his summarizing report, this word disappeared together with the object it describes. It was only in the mid-1950s that another Arbeitsgemeinschaft für industrielle Gemeinschaftsforschung reappeared or a Panel for Applied Research (Ausschuss für angewandte Forschung) was founded (Mirko Buschmann). Until the middle of the 1960s, calls to establish research priorities and Collaborative Research Centers (Sonderforschungsbereiche) remained a minority position within the different scientific communities and the DFG overall. The question remaining to be answered in connection with this finding is: What impact did the hitherto predominant promotion of individual research or, respectively, the abstention from grouping together research issues and imposing topical priorities have on scientific development in the various fields, also in international comparison? The magic word “basic research” (Grundlagenforschung) evidently became the cornerstone of the semantic remodeling in nearly all the scientific disciplines after 1945. German universities had been described at the beginning of the twentieth century as being too far removed from practice, too academic, and too inflexible toward the rapidly growing and changing demand for knowledge of modern industrial society. Since this crisis in university research, the potential applicability of a research project was an important, if not crucial argument for its actual support also during both wars. Walther Gerlach could very well conceive himself as a fundamental researcher during World War II with his new torpedo developments for the good of the fatherland. He could still consider himself as such after 1945 as well (Bernd A. Rusinek).29 He only had to strictly sunder contaminated applied research conceptually from “pure” research, quietly file away yesterday’s loudly proclaimed research orientation toward nationalistic interests, and allow instead for a genuine, “true” science and “pure” researchers inherently distant from politics.30 The “downright fervent ideologization” of basic research, as Patrick Wagner formulates it, became the whitewashing ritual of the German sciences and their researchers. Dichotomous juxtapositioning of basic and applied research was no more appropriate then than it is today as a meaningful way to delimit between research topics, issues, and approaches. Nonetheless, this was not empty rhetoric. On the one hand, it reflected the debate in the United States (recently examined by John Krige) over whether American support ought to be granted toward rebuilding the European scientific landscape damaged by the war as a whole, and if so, in what form, with which monies, and how much?31 In the atomic age of the Cold War, which was already marked by the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 28

Cf. Maier, Forschung, esp. vol. 2, chaps. 5 and 6; idem (ed.), Gemeinschaftsforschung. Cf. the contribution to this volume by Bernd A. Rusinek. 30 Adolf Butenandt, too, was a wily semantician in this regard; Cf. Stoff, Butenandt; Maier. Forschung, vol. 2, p. 952. 31 Krige, Hegemony; Sachse, Science. 29

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this was not self-evident, seen from the American perspective. Specifically those American science policy makers who did not want to dispense with a productive Western European system of sciences, tried to appease the hard-liners in their own country by letting the Europeans only play along in “basic research.” The more dangerous application-oriented research, however, would be kept on their own continent. On the other hand, references to fundamental research were also a rhetorical bid in the power play over funding in domestic politics, over the reallocation of public resources, and over the institutional reshuffling of authority over funding policy. It was not agreed from the outset which role the DFG would finally be assigned and which researches would be allowed to be funded by which institution. It does not settle the issue to label as ideological such talk about fundamental research. Instead its rhetorical function in the controversies over the institutional design of the FRG’s system of sciences, in the definition of responsibilities, and in the defense of territorial claims in research policy between the DFG, the Max Planck and Fraunhofer Societies, the Academies of Science, federal ministries, regional ministries of culture, etc. – and which framing conditions relevant to research were thereby set – must be determined and examined. In sum, the frictions, interruptions, upheavals, and discontinuities, explicitly addressed in some of the individual studies and only implicitly suggested in others, indicate that the new fine-tuning required in the relationship between science and politics in postwar Germany was connected with a variety of costly readjustment processes, costly in both time and energy. They ranged from reforming the scientific communities over the course of the denazification proceedings (politically inadequate though they were) to adapting inclusion criteria and training young professionals in view of the wartime decimation of that generation of young men, continual refugee movements, and the rapidly mounting wave of emigrations to the USA of the already qualified coming generation. This involved making funding available in the short term to distribute and steer toward material reconstruction measures. Above all, long-term restructuring was needed, with institutional restoration and/or a new ordering of the system of the sciences, initially in the Western occupied zones and later in a federal-republican rump state, with federalism forced on it by the Western Allies within redrawn provincial boundaries, even after it had partially regained state sovereignty primarily in cultural and educational policy making. Most of all, it involved adapting content to the Allied controls on research and shortly afterwards to repositioning itself in a scientific world, whose Western hemisphere was to be dominated by the USA for an unforeseeable period and as a whole was drawn into the Cold War.

THE GERMAN PROFESSOR IN THE THIRD REICH – FOUR BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES Ulrich Herbert The German university professor during the Nazi period is a controversial figure, and not just recently. Critical and mocking comments could be heard already in 1933, claiming that after the Nazis came to power all the professors had veered off onto a new course and university institutes were supposedly full of “March casualties” (Märzgefallenen). The Nazis were not quite so sure of the scholars’ loyalty, however. The SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the domestic secret service of the SS (Schutzstaffel, Nazi Defense Squadron), reported that the universities’ compliance with the new Reich was highly superficial and that from the present scholars no support could be expected at all. Hitler himself had a profound aversion to professors and intellectuals in general, as he flatly declared in November 1938 to journalists and publishers: “When I look at our intellectual ranks over here, they are unfortunately needed, of course, otherwise one day one could, I don’t know, wipe them out or something.”1 Scholarship, as a field of research and criticism, of reason and rationality, had a difficult position within the value system of the National Socialist movement which focused on totalitarianism, the Führerprinzip, national community, and blood-borne instinct. Not debate, but action was emphasized; not knowledge, but faith. These were not just appearances and proclamations. The degradation of education and scholarship, of the art of verbalization and of the ability to analyze as opposed to political reliability, energy, activism, and military habitus – not to mention “racist” predispositions – had considerable repercussions on professorship appointments as well as on editorial posts, advisory panels, and institute chairs. That was the reason why, after 1945, university professors succeeded better than other professional groups in portraying a self-image of intellectual distance, if not remoteness from or indeed resistance to the Nazi regime. This image was widespread and well received for a long time. The exceptional standing that university professors in Germany had been enjoying since the turn of the century lent them a nimbus of aloofness and remoteness from the ordinary. This image began to be questioned during the 1960s but was not systematically refuted, if only because at that time it was a matter of political confrontation between generations and not of history of the sciences and the humanities. More intense occupation with the role of university teachers during the Nazi period only started in the 1980s, albeit to different degrees, depending on the discipline. Then it could be heard that university professors had supported the Nazi regime in a very 1

Quoted in Titze, Hochschulen, pp. 209–240.

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specific way, not only ideologically, but also practically, to the point of offering political advice in planning the Nazi extermination policy. Hence, on the one hand, we have the Nazi dictatorship as an anti-academic regime and professors, who are despised and controlled by ideologues alien to academia. On the other hand, we have professors as willing designers, even as collaborators in the regime’s crimes, which itself intensely and avidly sought the expertise of scientists. How do these interpretations go together?2 In 1932 there were about 2,000 fully tenured (ordentliche) professors in Germany. It is clear that it is not possible to find all-inclusive statements about their conduct. Neither will this short survey be able to draw a complete picture. Nevertheless, on the basis of the political and professional biographies of four academic scholars – all of them very well known, indeed, famous in their fields and beyond – one can discuss particular intellectual milieus and generational influences, field-specific formations, and room they had to maneuver. These four are the historian Gerhard Ritter, the jurist Carl Schmitt, the physicist Walther Gerlach, and the ethnologist Wilhelm Mühlmann. I From the 1920s to the 1960s Ritter was, next to Friedrich Meinecke, certainly one of the most well-known historians of modern German history. After graduation from secondary school, he attended the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Leipzig and finally earned his doctorate in 1911 with his thesis The Prussian Conservatives and Bismarck’s German Politics (Die preußischen Konservativen und Bismarcks deutsche Politik.) From 1912 Ritter worked as a school teacher; in World War I he fought as an infantryman. After obtaining his Habilitation degree, as early as 1918 he was appointed to the University of Heidelberg, then 1923 to Hamburg, and 1925 to Freiburg, where he remained for the rest of his life.3 His origins in the political culture of Wilhelminism and his experiences in the war affected Ritter throughout his life. He was wounded three times, but as late as the beginning of October 1918, when the war had already been lost for a long time, he still passionately called out: “Heart, do not tremble! Do not give up hope, Germany – stand fast against the offensive, stand fast, stand fast!” Being a classical example of a conservative nationalist and a strict antirepublican, he was completely disgusted with the revolution, which he could only see as “a soldier mutiny on a grand scale.” He was not opposed to anti-Semitism either, for instance when in 1918 he referred to “sponging Jewish louts on ministerial seats.” He was a typical representative of the war-veteran Frontgeneration among German professors who denounced the peace Treaty of Versailles as an “enslavement” of the German people, despised the Weimar system, and yearned for a 2 Generally, from the very extensive literature on the sciences during the Nazi period: Adam, Hochschule; Bialas, Intellektuelle; Grüttner, Wissenschaftspolitik, pp. 555–585; KniggeTesche, Berater; Lehmann/Oexle, Nationalsozialismus; Langewiesche, Universitäten. 3 Cornelißen, Gerhard Ritter; this is also the source of the following quotes.

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strictly nationalistic government, whether as a monarchy or as an authoritarian military regime. Ritter made no secret of his opposition to the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and its fanatical mass of followers prior to 1933. But his attitude towards National Socialism was neither free of contradictions nor of acts of conformity. Although he criticized certain elements of Nazi politics – for instance, when he ranted about nationalism “being materialistically misinterpreted as mere natural inheritance from the [native] soil and blood” – he agreed very much indeed with other aspects of the new regime. The Third Reich, he declared in 1934 in a speech, could now, under the “purposeful statesmanly direction of our leaders,” complete what it “had so fortunately begun: the inner fusion of empire, state, and nation.” Criticizing the system and legitimating the system at the same time did not seem contradictory to him. This kind of judgement characterized the attitude of many national conservative university teachers during the early period of the Third Reich. These contradictions are also reflected in Ritter’s work. His major book Machtstaat und Utopie from 1940 could very well be read as a public oath of allegiance to the Nazi state and its expansionistic goals, but at the same time also as indirect criticism of totalitarian presumptions, above all, in the fields of law and the sciences. Ritter became a sought-after itinerant speaker for the Wehrmacht and even for the Party. In front of soldiers he praised the victories over Poland and France and justified the attack on the Soviet Union and the way the war was being waged by stressing the threats posed by Slavism and the Asian hordes. At the same time, however, he grew increasingly distant from the Nazi system and began to criticize its politics with surprising frankness. As with many national conservatives, his criticism was partly caused by the regime’s policy against churches and its suppression of free speech and science. But it was only when Ritter recognized that the destruction of Bismarck’s empire was to be a consequence of the war Germany had caused that he became an outright opponent. He became involved with the oppositional discussion group called the Freiburger Kreis, where he came into contact with Carl Goerdeler, and for that reason was arrested in November 1944. He was detained in prisons and concentration camps between November 1944 and April 1945. But he survived the war and after 1945 rose to become one of the leading figures in German scholarship, being basically the only one among the remaining German university teachers after 1933 who had in fact politically resisted the National Socialists. He was of prominent importance in the rebuilding of the Freiburg faculty after the war, and he applied massive pressure towards having universities quickly reopened to continue education. He generously issued exculpatory Persilscheine for incriminated academics. He did not, however, call for the return of emigrated Jewish professors to their earlier positions. As chairman of the reestablished union (Verband) of German historians in 1949, he primarily fought a battle against communism. In the Spiegel affair, he stood up in wrathful public opposition against the “so-called leftist intellectuals,” who carried “the poison of political nihilism” into society, and he campaigned with downright fanatical vehemence

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against Fritz Fischer’s hypotheses, which placed the blame for World War I on German politics. Gerhard Ritter was very exceptional among German professors because he approached opposition circles around Goerdeler. In contrast, he was typical for a large proportion of university teachers, as he initially repudiated the Nazi system, then sympathized with it, and after the second half of the war distanced himself increasingly from the regime. His professional and political demeanor after 1945 was typical as well. For that reason Ritter’s biography allows some general observations. The National Socialists were able to come to power more easily at universities than in society as a whole. That was mainly because a far greater majority of university professors was strongly nationalistic and conservative; they disassociated themselves from Weimar in repudiation of democratic parliamentarianism. It is presumably no exaggeration to say that approximately two thirds of the some 2,000 university professors in 1933 and a high proportion of supernumerary professors and private lecturers were antirepublican in attitude. The coordinates of their political worldview were foremost the opposition to Versailles and Weimar, the conviction that a revision of the outcome of World War I was a necessity, if need be militarily; the demand for a strong government not controlled by parliament; broad-ranging rejection of cultural Western modernity; and the desire to reinstate elitist structures against the leveling tendencies of a democratically socialized state. Virulent anti-Semitism was widespread but not universal among them, as was thinking in biologistic categories. Their views coincided in many respects with those of the radical, folkish right-wing, among whom the National Socialists also belonged. All the same, they remained aloof to radical activists, if only because their loud-mouthed plebian conduct starkly contradicted the habitus of a German university teacher.4 Among the student body an affinity with National Socialism was considerably more pronounced than among the professoriate. Young anti-Semitic nationalists had already asserted themselves since 1920 and the Nazi Student League (NS-Studentenbund) established itself along a broad front in 1931. The strongest support for the National Socialist takeover of power prior to 1933 at universities came from students and aspiring academics.5 Nonetheless, the professoriate also welcomed the so-called Machtergreifung, although many university teachers had strong reservations about the Nazis’ “crude mindlessness” (grobe Ungeistigkeit). A yearning for national renewal that preyed on the minds of most professors made them susceptible to the proclamation of a “national revolution,” especially considering that many of them certainly still did believe, until the summer of 1934, that not the National Socialists but the nationalist camp as a whole, among whom they surely also counted themselves, had taken over government.

4 5

Cf., e. g., Jansen, Professoren. Cf. Grüttner, Studenten; Herbert, Generation der Sachlichkeit, pp. 31–58.

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It was Eduard Spranger, one of the more prominent university teachers who distinctly disassociated himself from the Nazis, who formulated the Würzburg declaration by the Union of German Universities on 22 April 1933: The rebirth of the German nation and the rise of the new German empire means for the universities of our fatherland the fulfillment of their wishes and confirmation of their always ardently felt hopes. After the unfortunate class conflicts have fallen away, the hour has come again for universities to develop their spirit out of the profound harmony of the German national soul and to turn the multifarious struggle by this soul, oppressed by the duresse of foreign dictate, consciously toward the missions of the present.6

“Ardently felt hopes” – that could well mean many different things. It could imply acceptance of the political upheaval, while at the same time stressing the autonomy of university and scholarship. There was also the conviction, particularly widespread among humanists, that cultural modernity was finally coming to an end, as it were, via a symbiosis between Christianity and a nationalistic state or via a return of Bismarck’s empire. Finally, there was the hope among many that National Socialism would confirm the nationalistic foundations of each of their individual views on the sciences and humanities: the German literary arts (Dichtung) as the pathfinder for the new state; the Third Reich as the culmination of imperial history (Reichsgeschichte) going back for centuries; a leveraging out of the democratic constitutional state in expression of the striving for a folkish system of justice (Rechtssystem). Many scholarly writings thus correspondingly offered the basis for a far-reaching legitimization of the Nazi regime. From the spring of 1933 onward the number of Nazi Party members among university teachers grew from less than 10 percent in 1933 to over 50 percent in 1938. Motives like opportunism, careerism, or even fear of professional disadvantage were surely important. As far as we can reconstruct this, though, political reasons are no less relevant: for instance, the conviction that the still roughly hewn national movement could be intellectually steered and raised; or enthusiasm about Hitler’s rapid political successes domestically as well as abroad, mainly from 1935 on. One condition for this relatively unconfrontational conformance to the new regime was the rapid and very far-reaching removal of Jews and other political opponents from university faculties. In the first two years after the Machtergreifung, roughly 15 to 20 percent of the teaching staff at universities were dismissed – by 1938 about 30 percent, among regular tenured professors about 20 percent. This figure varied a great deal among the individual universities, however, according to the prior proportions of pro-republican and Jewish university teachers. At the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, over 32 percent of the staff were removed, in Heidelberg 24 percent, in Breslau, Freiburg, Göttingen, Hamburg, and Cologne about 20 percent. In Rostock, by contrast, it was 4 percent, and in Tübingen only 1.6 percent. This enormous wave of dismissals and expul-

6 Würzburger Erklärung des Verbandes der Deutschen Hochschulen: Quoted in Titze, Hochschulen, p. 224.

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sions occurred without any major disruptions or objections. Here, widespread coldness among German professors toward their Jewish colleagues and rejection was responsible – perhaps even more so, anti-Semitic activism by student associations, which organized campaigns against individual Jewish professors at many universities. To these factors yet another is added: The some 2,000 regular university professorships in Germany were set against roughly 3,000 certified academics in 1931 without permanent employment. In most cases the economic crisis prevented them from finding any adequate employment outside of universities. At the same time, the proportion of active National Socialists among assistants and private lecturers was far higher than among professors. The NSDAP focused on rapidly expanding its influence at universities by purposefully appointing younger private lecturers. Asked by Otto Hahn in July 1933 whether he would like to participate in calling together as many fellow professors as possible to protest against this treatment of their Jewish colleagues, Max Planck significantly replied: “If today 30 professors rise and speak up against the government’s action, then tomorrow 150 persons will come along and declare solidarity with Hitler because they want to have the post.”7 By more or less accepting the dismissals of almost one third of university teachers for political and racist reasons, however, the professoriate turned into accomplices of the regime, which they could no longer counter from the watchtower of higher moral authority and independence. We know from preserved correspondence that a significant number of conservative professors angrily and regretfully watched the fates of their Jewish, socialist, or pacifist-minded colleagues. But this was of little importance compared to the rapture about the heady successes by the National Socialists in domestic and foreign policy. The image of the apolitical professional, who in the face of the presumptions of politics withdrew completely into his field and kept himself well away from the pitfalls of the day, must be revised. To be sure, attempts to survive the regime and the war without injury and without injuring anyone else were no rarer among the professoriate than in the overall population. And private correspondence reveals today the tensions and depression connected with this for many. But considering that every third university teacher was expelled, such a picture is hardly possible without some flight from reality. If one regards the indifference of the German universities towards their dismissed fellow academics after 1945 and, above all, their defensive and shabby behavior, the notion of university faculties having been interested solely in their science, constantly staving off the regime’s politicizing attempts, begins to waver even more. Nonetheless, one could summarize the attitude of presumably the majority of German professors toward the Nazi regime until 1939 as acquiescence on the whole, often connected with individual skepticism and criticism. This constellation changed again dramatically with the beginning of the war, when patriotic reflexes among nationalists and especially among the veterans of World War I were perceptible and critical objections against one or another of Hitler’s policies 7

Quoted in Grüttner, Machtergreifung, pp. 339–353.

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took second place. Measures were now considered justified that just a few years before many professors had still viewed as shameful. Complete identification with a cornered Germany at war lost its binding force only in the final phase of the war, when the threatening defeat and progressive destruction of Germany disproved Hitler’s war policy and concern about the nation’s survival became more important than identification with the current government. In this situation, actively seeking alternatives to National Socialism, as Ritter did, was the exception to the rule, which was rather characterized by holding out, dodging, or even fleeing into the oblivion of work. But criticism of the regime did increase, although the lines of conflict between national conservative professors and the regime usually did not follow along the dividing line that we today would draw between criminal and not criminal. Someone who spoke harshly against Hitler’s church policy could be in perfect agreement about his policy against Jews. And someone who complained about the Nazis’ intellectual animosity could most energetically applaud their crusade against Slavism and Bolshevism. The uncertain relation between National Socialism and national conservatism often makes it difficult to judge precisely over cases like these. But among many national conservatives an inner alienation with the Nazi dictatorship brought forward the impression even before 1945 of being mentally disassociated with the regime and of having been that way since the beginning. This is one of the reasons for the self-assured and completely unreasonable behavior of a large proportion of university teachers after 1945. They could categorize National Socialism as a variation of cultural modernity and mass society, just like the Weimar democracy, communism, or later even the intensively perceived threat of Americanism. In opposition to these threats they constructed a link between German scolarship and a tradition that had always cautioned against such trends toward mass society and social decay. II Carl Schmitt earned his doctorate in 1910 after completing his studies in law and political science in Strasbourg with the thesis On Guilt and Types of Guilt (Über Schuld und Schuldarten.) After passing the second state examination, in 1916 he earned his degree qualifying him for academic teaching in public, administrative, and international law and state theory with his Habilitation thesis on The Value of the State and the Importance of the Individual (Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen). After a brief period of teaching at the business college in Munich, he accepted in quick succession appointments to Greifwald (1921), Bonn (1921), Berlin (Handelshochschule 1928), Cologne (1933), and finally Berlin (FriedrichWilhelms-Universität 1933–1945).8

8 The secondary sources on Schmitt are extensive. I refer to the biographical publications by Blasius, Bendersky, Gross, Koenen, Mehring (ed.), Noack, Rüthers, Stirk, and Tielke.

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Schmitt distinguished himself initially by supporting a Catholic variation of the conservative revolution and became politically engaged as a sharp critic of liberalism, Western democracy and state jurisprudence. Thus, he already counted as a particularly sharp-tongued prominent opponent of the republic in the early 1920s. At the beginning of the 1930s he assumed the role of a juridical advisor to the presidential cabinet, finding ways to hollow out the Weimar Constitution and subdue the parliamentarian democracy. In 1932 he represented the imperial government under Franz von Papen at the Constitutional Court in the case involving the “Prussian coup” (Preußenschlag). He initially repudiated the Hitler movement, mentioning it in the same breath with communists and the “godless” in his publication Legalität und Legitimität from the summer of 1932. After the change in government, however, he changed sides to the National Socialist camp. His goal, as he later put it, was “to give meaning to the word ‘National Socialism.’” He became a member of the NSDAP and was involved in formulating the Imperial Governor Law (Reichsstatthaltergesetz), was a Councillor of the Prussian State, and a member of the advisory board (Führerrat) of the Akademie für Deutsches Recht. By 1934 he had become the most influential jurist in the Nazi state. In his writings he established that “the German revolution was legal” and “formally properly in agreement with the earlier Constitution.” The central concept of National Socialist state law was “führerism”; the indispensable precondition for this was a racial equating between the Führer and his following. He justified the Nazi regime’s murders on 30 June 1934 connected with the Röhm affair with the argument that the Führer was defending the law against “the worst abuse” by meting out “immediate justice as supreme judge in the instant of peril by the authority of his führerism.” Until 1933 Schmitt certainly was able to reconcile his anti-Jewish mentality with having a large number of Jewish friends. After the National Socialists came to power, these contacts were broken and room was made for an increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism. He praised the Nuremberg Laws as “a new principle in legislation on the outlook on life,” a “legislation borne by the idea of race.” The high point of his anti-Semitic activity was the conference held in October 1936 under his direction on “Jewry in jurisprudence” (Das Judentum in der Rechtswissenschaft). This event, the “most massive demonstration of militant anti-Semitism in the history of German scholarship” (Michael Grüttner), demanded the complete exclusion of Jews from German jurisprudence because, as Schmitt declared in his opening speech, “the Jew is unproductive and sterile for the German kind of mind. He has nothing to say to us, no matter how sharp-wittedly he can conjecture or how avidly he can assimilate himself.”9 Carl Schmitt, in many respects a special figure of the Third Reich, is introduced here because his development exhibits a very particular species, namely, that of the mastermind and great intellectual who, sometimes even before January 1933, but usually only afterward, took the side of the Nazis with verve. In doing so scolars like Schmitt claimed to be leading the Nazi movement intellectu9

Schmitt, Positionen; idem, Rechtswissenschaft; idem, Der Führer.

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ally while representing their own ideas as essential, if possible, also as the official interpretation of the Nazi worldview. Hans Freyer, Ernst Krieck, Erich Rothacker, and above all Martin Heidegger represent this group. All of their prestige contributed enormously toward legitimating a regime just come in power, and to that extent they served as a model to the numerous university teachers of lesser prominence. They then stepped up to assert the new regime’s claim to power against political thinkers of other convictions and primarily against Jews at universities.10 It is indicative, however, that not a single one of the men mentioned above was acknowledged by National Socialists as a leading thinker of their movement – neither, by the way, were they by the party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, who had considerable institutional influence and huge financial means at his disposal, but little intellectual influence in the ideological world of Nazi Germany. Heidegger, isolated from his professor colleagues in Freiburg and denounced as a nihilist by other legal intellectuals, such as Krieck, withdrew from his rectorship in Freiburg in 1934 and did not dare to make any further attempts as a Nazi university policy maker. Freyer attempted to construct a Nazi philosophy, but the very fact that he tried to do so brought him into clear conflict with the life elixir of the Nazi movement: its radicalizing dynamics. Krieck’s infatuation with creating a closed system for the Nazi worldview, in which even Kant was rebuked for un-German deviations, was more and more smirked at as well. From 1936 on Schmitt also came increasingly under fire. The SS periodical Das schwarze Korps attacked him about his former friendship with Kurt von Schleicher and faulted him for formerly having associated with Jewish friends as well as for his upbringing in political Catholicism. Someone like Schmitt who had obviously joined the NSDAP because of its political utility in the view of the SS could not be the “crown jurist of the Third Reich.” Within a period of a few days he subsequently lost almost all his offices except for his chair at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin and his title as Preußischer Staatsrat. Three years later he returned to the public eye with a paper using international law to legitimate the German policy of expansion but he never reattained the importance he had enjoyed in the period between 1933 and 1936.11 After the German capitulation in 1945, Schmitt was temporarily arrested and interrogated at Nuremberg. No suit was filed however. He was one of the very few to be prohibited from continuing to teach as a professor, even though he was by no means more Nazi than many of his colleagues who were later left unscathed. Schmitt withdrew and continued to be unobtrusively active and to write numerous much-appreciated publications, such as Der Nomos der Erde, Theorie des Partisanen and Politische Theologie II. His influence on West German jurisprudence and on many teachers of state and international law was immense, among them Ernst Rudolf Huber, Ernst Forsthoff, Werner Weber, Roman Schnur, Ernst 10

On this, Grüttner, Scheitern. The important writings here are: Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Großraum-Ordnung; idem, Inter pacem; idem, Reich und Raum, pp. 201–203; idem, Völkerrechtliche Neutralität, pp. 613 ff.; idem, Großraum gegen Universalismus, pp. 333–337. Cf. Herbert, Best, pp. 271–298; Rüthers, Carl Schmitt, pp. 109 ff.; Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, pp. 243 ff.; van Laak, Gespräche, pp. 23–31. 11

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Friesenhahn, Rüdiger Altmann, Johannes Gross, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, and Wolfgang Isensee.12 III Wilhelm Mühlmann is considered one of the leading German ethnologists of the 1920s to the 1960s. He first came into contact with the nationalist youth movement during the World War and took an early interest then in the idea of a Nordic race, folkish theory, and national politics. As a 19-year old he gladly applauded Hitler’s putsch in 1923 as the prelude to the “liberation of the fatherland from foreign rule” and resolved to make “the inquiry into humans, anthropology, the historical view on racial biology” his career. In 1925 he began his studies in anthropology in Freiburg under Eugen Fischer, then transferred to Munich to study under Fritz Lenz who had the only chair for racial hygiene in Germany; afterwards he moved to Hamburg. There he first became acquainted with Völkerbiologie and ethnology. He finally completed his studies at the University of Hamburg under the ethnologist Richard Thurnwald, whose understanding of the “basic biological problems in social life” impressed him. To him, societies, nations, “Völker,” were profoundly determined by biological, by racial factors – that was what interested Mühlmann.13 In his dissertation from 1931 he analyzed a Tahitian tribe and deduced from it the negative effects of comfortable living and too long periods of peace, as well as the necessity of racial selection and elite formation. This view concurred entirely with the mainstream of his field at that time, not just in Germany. Different from other countries, however, in Germany the critical opposing voices against the racial-hygiene approach were suppressed from 1933 onwards. The opposite intellectual camp was missing, hence approaches based on sociobiological foundations gained dynamic and radicalized. Racial hygienic approaches had meanwhile been losing ground in the international scientific discourse since the 1930s and by the 1940s were considered completely outdated. In National Socialist Germany, on the contrary, racial hygiene, biological sociology, and ethnological Völkerkunde were closely attached to current political interpretations and gave political statements by the National Socialists a nimbus apparently supported by history and nature. Like many, indeed most, members of his academic generation, Mühlmann flatly rejected Western capitalist civilization. Here the research subject and political attitude were closely connected. This was why he welcomed the Nazi move12

Van Laak, Gespräche. On Mühlmann’s biography cf. Michel, Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann, pp. 69–117. On ethnology and folklore (Volkskunde) during the Nazi period generally, cf. Jacobeit, Völkische Wissenschaft; Assion, Weimarer Republik, pp. 33–86; Dow/Lixfeld, German Volkskunde; idem, Nationalsozialistische Volkskunde; Gansohr-Meinel, Fragen an das Volk; Schmoll, Vermessung. Christoph Seidler has been preparing a study on the history of German ethnology; I am obliged to him for many suggestions and helpful ideas. 13

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ment, which restored Volk, Rasse, and Nation as central referential categories. Nevertheless, for a long time Mühlmann remained rather skeptical of the NSDAP, mocking the intellectual baseness of most of the Nazi leaders and the vulgarity of the movement. However, he exuberantly applauded the National Socialists’ coming to power as a renewal of an outdated world. Intellectual persons, foremost university teachers, were called upon to “intellectually take over” the movement. Having already joined the Nazi Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung, SA) in 1934, he only became a member of the party – after his first failed attempt at a Habilitation degree – in 1937 and wore its token “proudly” and “as a sign of solidarity with my people” until 1945.14 In any case, Mühlmann was unable to find stable employment for a longer period of time. It was only in 1939 that he finally qualified for academic teaching under Fischer and accepted a lectureship in ethnology and ethnic psychology in Berlin. The “ethnosociology” approach he pursued ran counter to the “cultural historical” trend dominating the field, and he always stayed closely tied to the demands of the political present. Mühlmann regarded the field of conventional ethnology as “outdated,” “antiquated,” and “musty” and its staff as well as its content as “incapable” of tackling “the modern, vital ethnic problems.” He called for a reorientation toward the “racial biological, sociological, and psychological way of thinking.”15 The ambitious ethnologist advocated an expansion of preferred subjects of ethnological studies to Eastern and East Central Europe – a paradigm change for a field that had hitherto concentrated on so-called “unlettered peoples” (schriftlose Völker). His special interest was in the problem of “nation building” (Volkwerdung) and “ethnic degrees of maturity” among the different peoples of the Earth. From around 1942 on he studied “repopulation” (Umvolkung) and “assimilation” alternatives, whereby he particularly defined Jews as an unassimilable “sham nation” (Scheinvolk). “Sociologically,” Mühlmann concluded, Jews represent “the highest parasitism on Earth,” but they were not a race of their own in the scientific sense.16 The dynamic concept of race that he developed was criticized but there were no consequences, if only because a fixed canon of National Socialist dogmas did not exist at all and the issue about exactly how to understand the terms Volk, Rasse, and Nation was controversial and publicly discussed even during the Nazi period. In 1939 Mühlmann was only 35 years old. He embodied the type of the war-youth generation who had grown up early in the ideological world of völkisch radicalism, racist materialism, and the biologization of what is social. Men of this generation made up the majority of the young leadership elite of the SS, SD, and the headquarters of the security police (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). They differed clearly from the Wilhelmine pathos of the elder national conservatives. 14 Mühlmann, Hitler-Bewegung, pp. 129 ff.; idem, Lebenserinnerungen, unpubl. autobiographical manuscript (1948), Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), N 1450, Mühlmann collection. 15 Mühlmann, unpublished Denkschrift (1938), BAK, N 1450, Mühlmann collection. 16 Cf. Mühlmann’s main works during the Nazi period: Rassen- und Völkerkunde (1936); Methodik der Völkerkunde (1938); Krieg und Frieden (1940); Assimilation, Umvolkung, Volkwerdung (1944); Die Völker der Erde (1944).

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This type of scholar was particularly typical for those scientific fields that were then regarded as especially promising for the future. These were particularly supported by the National Socialists and were directly related to the rearmament, the securing of a basic food supply, autarky in the raw materials area, hereditary biology, and research on asocial elements.17 In the humanities, fields were particularly strengthened that set out from the concept of Volkstum and therefore offered cultural or biological evidence for the nation as an independent, natural historical subject. The Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde was an especially prominent example that fit well into the type of humanities the National Socialists wanted to support. Ethnology stood at the intersection between these developments. On the one hand, it seemed to offer approaches to a specifically race-oriented explanation of the history of nations by interpreting their development, rise, or fall as an expression of their individual racial dispositions. Widely branching interdisciplinary connections were formed. In particular, disciplines in the natural sciences, foremost biology, cooperated with the humanities. The results were not only usable for the legitimation of National Socialist policy of conquest and extermination. Racial studies, research on anthropology and linguistics were also directly integrated within this policy, as was particularly visible in the activities of the Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt). On the basis of anthropological expert opinions entire groups of people were classified and consigned to different fates, depending on the outcome of these evaluations. One of the culminations of this tie between applied research and the preparations for the politics of expansion and extermination was, without a doubt, the so-called Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost). On 28 May 1942 the agronomist and territorial planner Professor Konrad Meyer sent out a draft of a plan to redesign Eastern Europe based on folkish policy, entitled “A Short Summary of the Memorandum on Master Plan East.” The recipient was Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who had commissioned this draft in his capacity as commissioner for the “Germanization of the conquered territories.” The aim was to draw up comprehensive plans for restoring or establishing the gigantic territories of the East that Germany had conquered during the war.18 Meyer succeeded in obtaining the collaboration of well-known scientists as Walter Christaller, the regional planners Erhard Mäding and Franz Doubek, the public finance experts Felix Boesler and Max Rolfes, as well as the specialist in public law Reinhard Höhn. The scientists prepared maps for a redesigned empire including the occupied territories. They checked legal issues concerning the building of settlements, budgeted the settlement finances, and gave their opinions on the envisaged settlement structure and city plans. In the area of space and land planning, Meyer’s specialists worked out a number of innovations. These detailed proposed plans on settlement, clearing, and landscaping relied on one precondi17

Cf. Herbert, Best; Wildt, Generation. Meyer’s Kurze Zusammenfassung der Denkschrift Generalplan Ost. See also Heinemann/ Wagner, Wissenschaft; Wasser, Himmlers Raumplanung; Rössler, Generalplan Ost; Madajczyk/ Biernacki, Generalplan Ost. 18

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tion, however, that the scientists justified at length: namely, the availability of “unpeopled spaces” (menschenleere Räume) in Eastern Europe. Such preconditions first had to be created. The plans that the scientists had drawn up for this provided for extensive resettlements and expulsions of the Polish, Soviet, and Baltic populations in occupied Eastern Europe. New settlements of ethnic and Reich Germans were then supposed to contribute to the “Germanization” of broad swathes of the conquered regions and strengthen the German claim of sovereignty over the occupied East. One side-effect of these resettlements was the calculated starvation of millions of people. The total elimination of all Jews in the regions in question was already the premise of all these plans of nationalistic policy. If this plan had been completely carried out, it would have involved the killing of many millions of people from Eastern Europe: The inhabitants of the Leningrad region, for example, were supposed to be reduced by no less than three million people. During the war only a few points of this plan were initially followed: Based on the plan, from 1942 to 1943 approximately 50,000 Poles were driven out of the Zamosvcv district in the Lublin province and around 8,000 were killed. Back to Mühlmann: After 1945 he quickly reconnected with the academic world and was able to continue to pursue his career virtually undisturbed. He had nothing to fear. His friends and students testified that his research had always been free from prejudice and disregarded the official ideology. In his denazification proceeding he was ranked among Group V: fully exonerated. In 1950 Mühlmann became supernumerary professor, then regular professor in Mainz; in 1960 he accepted an appointment to Heidelberg where he founded the university Institute of Sociology and Ethnology, still today the only one of its kind in Germany. Professionally, Mühlmann kept working on his research also after the end of the war, although he did dilute some of the concepts. He continued to use the race concept, henceforth as a “sociological” race category, and Umvolkung und Volkwerdung became “ethnic assimilation and ethnogenesis.” Concrete research projects on the topic of assimilation took him on extensive field trips to Sicily during the 1960s.19 Under the conditions of the Cold War and the beginning of decolonization, however, Mühlmann’s ongoing quest for ethnological proof of the formation of social hierarchies began to expand. He transposed the internal social dividing lines between the educated middle class and laborers onto the relationship between the European states and the Third World. He regarded the populations of the developing countries as a kind of “external proletariate” compared to the European “culture-bearers of the West” (Kulturträger des Abendlandes). During these years Mühlmann also occupied new fields of research, primarily the new nationalist movements in the former colonies, which certainly earned him respect and praise from the, at that time, critical student body. He was a doctoral advisor in high demand among sociology students of the postwar years. Some of the most innovative ethnologists of the next generation, such as Hans-Peter Duerr, were among his students. 19

Mühlmann, Rassen; idem, Homo Creator; idem, Chiliasmus; idem, Mahatma Gandhi.

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IV Walther Gerlach was one of the early protagonists of the German “Youth Movement” and began studying mathematics and philosophy in the academic year of 1908/09 at Tübingen, changing to physics a year later and earning his doctorate there 1912 under Friedrich Paschen, one of the most prominent experimenters of the time and later director of the national German bureau of standards, the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt. His dissertation from 1912 analyzed radiation measurement on the basis of the so-called Stefan-Boltzmann law on the relation between radiation and temperature. After a two-year deployment as a soldier, he based his Habilitation thesis on the same idea in 1916. The topic he had chosen for his doctorate and degree for academic teaching placed Gerlach on the frontier of physical research.20 From there his path led him to quantum physics. After the war he became first assistant to Richard Wachsmuth at the University of Frankfurt am Main, founded a few years earlier. There he made his scientific breakthrough with the “Stern-Gerlach experiment,” spin quantization of silver atoms in a magnetic field. He conducted the experiment with the physicist Otto Stern (1888–1969), who was almost the same age and who, as a Jew, emigrated to the USA in 1933. While Stern was awarded the Nobel prize for the Stern-Gerlach experiment in 1943, Gerlach was left empty-handed.21 In 1925 Gerlach returned to Tübingen as the successor to his teacher Paschen. In 1929 the call to the chair for experimental physics at the University of Munich followed. Gerlach was in contact with highly esteemed scientists from Britain, France, Russia, and the USA. There were also a number of Jewish colleagues and sponsors among Gerlach’s circle of friends and acquaintances, who from 1933 on were driven away from their positions and forced to emigrate. Besides Stern, they also included Albert Einstein and James Franck. Prior to 1933 Gerlach had never been politically active for any particular party and was critical of the National Socialists’ seizure of power. He definitely considered himself a “nationalist.” But after the takeover of power he neither joined the party nor the SA or SS. As a professor in Munich he even confronted the claims and monopolizing attempts of the National Socialists in some cases. For instance, he complained that the research at the institute was suffering from constant interruptions by political activities, appeals, and demonstrations. After a visit to Poland in the spring of 1939 he criticized the lack of funding for academic libraries in Germany compared to the institute he had seen in Posen (Poznanv). He vehemently defended himself against “Aryan physics” in Munich and did not hesitate to argue about this with prominent Nazi science officials, such as the Munich lecturer for astrophysics, Wilhelm Führer. Gerlach had a profound dispute 20 I here largely follow the account by Rusinek, Gerlach. I thank Bernd A. Rusinek for numerous pointers and suggestions. For an introduction to Gerlach, cf. Bachmann, Walther Gerlach. 21 On the Stern-Gerlach experiment: Heinrich/Bachmann, Walther Gerlach. Generally on the history of physics during the Weimar and Nazi periods: Metzler, Wissenschaft; Kamp, Geschichte.

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with influential circles of the “Party” over the successor to Arnold Sommerfeld, whose professorship at Munich was regarded by the folkish and Nazi ideologues as the headquarters of “Jewish physics.” In 1940, after five years of quarreling, the appointment of the “Aryan” or Deutsche physicist Wilhelm Müller could no longer be prevented, but he was shunned by the faculty and neutralized.22 Gerlach was a loyal citizen of the Third Reich all the same. As far as we know he did not make any critical statement about the political system that went beyong the sphere of university policy. He explicitly contradicted his foreign colleagues’ impression that physics in Nazi Germany was on the decline. When the war began, his engagement in science policy making increased. In 1940 he played an important role in helping the German Navy overcome the serious torpedo crisis as organizer of the Cornelius Study Team (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), including incorporating his own R&D work at his institute in Munich. These torpedo activities qualified him for the higher office of expert department head (Fachspartenleiter) on physics and director of the Study Team on Nuclear Physics of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, RFR), the Nazi-specific continuation of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). In 1944 he counted among the top officials of the newly founded Military Research Community (Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft), and hence was among the most influential scientists of the Nazi state. He was reputed to be exceptionally effective and assertive.23 He disregarded the ideological precepts and even demanded that research in the area of relativity theory, which was being ostracized as “Jewish,” be intensified. On the other hand, he wrote in August 1944 to a colleague in the RFR: “I welcome the endeavor to apply the expertise of scientists detained in concentration camps toward fundamental research.” But even this could, with good reason, be understood as an attempt to save the lives of these colleagues. In any case, at the end of the war he was one of the most powerful science managers of the Third Reich.24 Thus he oversaw considerable sums for research. He had become “the Reichsmarschall’s plenipotentiary on nuclear physics,” and during the last ten months of the war still received another 6.2 million reichsmarks from the RFR’s funds. But most importantly, he was one of the German physicists who decisively pushed the German uranium project forward. Today we know that German physicists had advanced very far, although not all the way, to production of an atomic bomb. It has meanwhile also become apparent how much German scientists would have liked to continue the research up to the very end, that is, up to a controlled nuclear reaction. After 1945 they had misleadingly encouraged the impression that they had purposefully held themselves back in order not to have to make the atomic bomb available to the Nazi state.25 Gerlach presumably represents the most important group of German scientists in the Nazi period. These scientists, medical doctors, engineers, and technicians were extremely important to the regime and to German warfare, far more 22 23 24 25

On Deutsche Physik in Munich, see Litten, Mechanik. On the RFR, see Flachowsky, Notgemeinschaft. Gerlach to Sievers of the RFR, 29 Aug. 1944, Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 26 III 200. Walker, Nazi Science; Schaaf, Heisenberg; Karlsch, Hitlers Bombe.

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important than rune researchers, imperial historians, and folkish philosophers, which were so much in the focus during the early period of the regime. They were correspondingly supported, indeed courted, by the Reich. Far from sympathizing with the Nazis, they continued to pursue their careers after 1933, concentrating on their research projects, and were only critical of the regime insofar as it tried to constrain the freedom of their research options. Their critique was perceptible on secondary questions but on the main issues they were loyal to the regime. Many scientists, especially those in the area of the natural and engineering sciences, wanted to collaborate and also primarily to conduct research in order to help resurrect Germany, strengthen its economic and demographic military might. There were no kinds of built-in moral barriers against research projects serving Germany’s rearmament and warfare in the fullest sense. In the extreme situation of the war, this form of morally evacuated radical patriotism – even research that could have led to unforeseeable, catastrophic consequences like the uranium project – could appear legitimate for strengthening the people and the nation. This is ascertainable to an even stronger degree, for instance, in the medical human experimentation being conducted at the same time on a large scale. Considering the concrete developments during the war, many scientists were prepared to make use of methods that they presumably would have refused a few years earlier. Two aspects were crucial in this context. First, there was the possibility of being able to conduct unhampered research, also free from moral restrictions. It is erroneous to assume that research conducted with criminal means was exclusively, or even usually, superficially scientific pseudoresearch. It involved, as it were, normal medical research freed from the ethical and moral bonds of a liberal and pluralistic society. Second, the feeling of doing something for the people and the nation was decisive. In view of the significance of the tasks posed during the war, it was supposed that previously valid considerations had to be deactivated. Let us return to Gerlach, whose employment for the regime primarily concerned the area of physical research, culminating in the – albeit failed – construction of a German atomic bomb. The “time afterwards” began with Gerlach’s arrest. As expert department head on nuclear physics, he was one of the ten detained scientists at Farm Hall near London, together with Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, and Max von Laue. When they heard about the dropping of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Gerlach was devastated. He perceived the Americans’ advantage as a defeat, both scientifically and personally: since a German, namely, Hahn, had already discovered the principle, “we wanted Germany to be the first to apply it as well.”26 Shortly afterwards Gerlach was released from Farm Hall and classified as exonerated in his denazification proceedings. He first went to Bonn, then returned to his professorial chair at Munich in 1948, whereupon he became rector of the university. Thus began an exceedingly successful and varied engagement as a multifunctionary in the organizations of German science. Gerlach had not been a party 26

Hoffmann, Operation Epsilon, p. 157.

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member and after 1945 there were not many first-class German scientists who had not been. From 1949 to 1951 he was president of the Fraunhofer Society and vice-president of the Emergency Association for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft), followed by the new DFG until 1961; likewise from 1949 to 1951 and from 1955 to 1957 he was chairman of the Verband Deutscher Physikalischer Gesellschaften; and finally, from 1962 to 1972 he was chairman of the Johannes Kepler Society. The main goal of his activities in the science policy of the Federal Republic (FRG) was to maintain the autonomy of the sciences and to surmount Germany’s much-lamented lagging behind “abroad” in the fields of engineering and natural science. His central concern, however, was nuclear energy, which he advocated for civilian purposes. At the same time, he lobbied against its military application and was one of the eighteen atomic scientists in the FRG to publish the “Göttingen Declaration” on 12 April 1957 against atomic weapons in the Bundeswehr.27 With this declaration at the latest Gerlach became one of the most famous critical intellectuals of the FRG. In Hans Werner Richter’s book Bestandsaufnahme. Eine deutsche Bilanz from 1961, a sort of founding document of the New Left (Neue Linke) to which Wolfgang Abendroth, Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Peter Rühmkorf also contributed, Gerlach went into detail about scientific research under National Socialism as well as after 1945 in West Germany.28 Until his death in 1979 Gerlach was constantly publishing articles about issues in physics, science policy, and on the relationship between the sciences and morality. V The four types of German professor we have presented here naturally do not represent the whole picture. They are, above all, four extreme, explicit variants: the classical national conservative, the ambitious careerist seeking definitive power, the younger academic thinking in categories of race and Volk, and the scientist who uses the regime’s options to obtain unforeseen research potential. All of them show that German professors served the Nazi regime in various gradations ranging from enthusiatic to reluctant. In order to be able to conform the universities to the regime in such a short time, however, it was necessary to drive out one third of German faculty members of the universities and institutes beforehand and to suppress opposing scientific standpoints. German professors usually distanced themselves from the Nazis prior to 1933, but they shared a good part of their convictions and goals, although not all their methods. This approval of the whole, combined with steady criticism about the details, is the one continuous line we can observe. A second characteristic, the excessive patriotism at the outbreak of war, silenced all objections and led to the “deployment of the German humanities in war” (“Kriegseinsatz der deutschen 27 28

Radkau, Aufstieg; Kraus, Uranspaltung. Richter, Bestandsaufnahme.

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Geisteswissenschaften”). Among scientists and engineers, just as among physicians, their willingness in the face of the war grew to accept and pursue goals and methods in their sciences that in many instances would formerly have been unthinkable. Basic nationalistic orientations were not overcome with the defeat of National Socialist Germany in 1945. Rather, during the postwar years the category of what was specifically National Socialistic was reduced down to narrowly defined areas, whereas the German system of sciences and its supporting institutions were regarded as unaffected by any reorientation – even by scientists who had maintained political distance from the National Socialists. On this basis the West German university operations with regard to staffing, institutions, and concepts were reconstituted and continued to an astonishing extent. Only a few reputable scientists, regarded as being extremely implicated explicit National Socialists, could not be reemployed. The concept “Nazi-incriminated” (NS-belastet) did not mean the same thing then that it does in today’s usage: only such persons were deemed as discredited by their pasts whose behavior had injured the internal code of conduct of their academic environment – irrespective of what they had been working on and to what purpose. Carl Schmitt, already spoken of by his contemporaries as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” was deemed intolerable. Hereditary biologists, such as the so-called “gypsy researcher” Robert Ritter, whose activities had directly and indirectly cost the lives of thousands of people, continued to be employed, however. The many examples of professors who remained incorrigible until their deaths, who ignored their own roles before 1945, stylized themselves as victims of the conditions of their day, and compared denazification with Nazi crimes, can be contrasted with just as many changes, however. Here again we discern opportunism, conformity, careerism – what else? Of greater interest, however, are those surprising careers of political converts, such as that of the famous Germanist Hans Schneider/Schwerte, who changed from an ideologue of the Ahnenerbe of the SS into a leftist liberal professor of German studies. Walter Gerlach’s career is another stunning example in that context. Cases like these show, for one, the rapidly weakening bond of Darwinist Nazi ideology, which refuted itself as a failed case in point. But they also testify to the personal catastrophe that the war and defeat meant for many – so drastic as to cause them to become completely and thoroughly transformed. Yet such was not the rule. It took a long time for moral and ethical standards of a civil society to also apply to German science as a whole. The realization and insight into what should be regarded as criminal about National Socialism formed gradually over decades and grew successively. This applies to the whole society, but especially to science. It also becomes apparent that the cooperation of German science with the Nazi regime in many ways had a long preliminary period since 1918, or even since the turn of the century, and a long afterglow period that only ended in the late 1960s. But new initiatives are discernable in many disciplines already in the mid1950s that, on the one hand, demarcated the endeavors to reenter international research and, on the other hand, endeavors to resume the research trends that had

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been suppressed in Germany since 1933. These developments were supported by a generational change since the end of that decade. Old paradigms only slowly lost their force, but they no longer gave new impetus. Thus, a distinct break is connected with the 1960s related to persons, institutions, and basic scientific orientations. The question about the German professor in the Third Reich thus proves to be too narrow. First of all, the essential abberations can already be diagnosed before and after World War I. After 1933, these were disconnected from the restraining counter-forces and cumulatively reached a peak. However, they were certainly not immediately cut back after 1945 and, with regard to the quality of research as well as ethical standards, they only returned to the Western path over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. Second, the blunders and bewilderment of German professors in the first 60 years of the twentieth century mirror in exaggerated magnification not only the heights, but especially the low points of German history in those decades as a whole.

INSTITUTIONAL ABBREVIATIONS BASF BDI BRD BMA BMBW BMwF CCS CNRS CRC DAW DDR DFA DFG

DFR DKFZ FG FRG GAMM GDR HWA I. G. Farben IPM KWG KWI KWKW MPG NG NSBDT NSDAP OECD OKW

Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik – Baden Aniline and Soda Factory Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie – Federal Union of German Industry Bundesrepublik Deutschland, see FRG Bundesministerium für Atomfragen – Federal Ministry for Atomic Issues (established 1955) Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft – Federal Ministry of Education and Science (prior to 1969, BMwF) Bundesministerium für wissenschaftliche Forschung – Federal Ministry of Scientific Research (prior to 1962, BMA) Commission on Computing Systems – Kommission für Rechenanlagen der DFG Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – French National Center for Scientific Research Collaborative Research Center – Sonderforschungsbereich der DFG Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften – (East) German Academy of Sciences Deutsche Demokratische Republik, see GDR Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie – German Institution for Research on Psychiatry Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – German Research Foundation (literally Association, since 1951). (From 1929–45, Deutsche Gemeinschaft zur Erhaltung und Förderung der Forschung – German Association for the Preservation and Advancement of Research, short: Forschungsgemeinschaft) Deutscher Forschungsrat – German Research Council (1949–51, afterward reintegrated into the NG) Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum – German Cancer Research Center Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Angewandten Forschung – Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research Federal Republic of Germany (1949 to present) Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik – Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics German Democratic Republic (1949–90, former East Germany) Heereswaffenamt – Army Ordnance Office Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (chemical company) Institut für Praktische Mathematik (TH Darmstadt) Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft – Kaiser Wilhelm Society (1911–46) Kaiser Wilhelm Institute Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stiftung für kriegstechnische Wissenschaft – Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for War Technology Max-Planck-Gesellschaft – Max Planck Society (prior to 1946, KWG) Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft – Emergency Association for German Science (Berlin 1920–29; Berlin/Bonn 1949–51); forerunner of the DFG Nationalsozialistischer Bund Deutscher Technik – National Socialist League of German Technicians Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (1948–present. Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) prior to 1961) Oberkommando der Wehrmacht – High Command of the Armed Forces

470 PAR PAW REM RFR RMI RWA

SA SD SED SS TH TU VDC VDI WHO ZAMM

Institutional Abbreviations Ständiger Ausschuss für Angewandte Forschung der DFG – Permanent Panel on Applied Research Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften – Prussian Academy of Sciences Reichserziehungsministerium – Reich Ministry of Education Reichsforschungsrat – Reich Research Council (splintered off DFG in 1937) Reichsministerium des Innern – Reich Ministry of the Interior Reichsamt für Wirtschaftsaufbau – Reich Office for Economic Development (prior to 1939, Amt für Deutsche Roh- und Werkstoffe – Office for German Raw and Manufacturing Materials) Sturmabteilung – Storm Troopers (Nazi paramilitary force) Sicherheitsdienst – Security Service (Nazi and SS intelligence agency) Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands – Socialist Unity Party of Germany (of the GDR) Schutzstaffel – Defense Squadron (Nazi paramilitary force) Technische Hochschule – Polytechnic Technische Universität – Technical University Verein Deutscher Chemiker – Association of German Chemists Verein Deutscher Ingenieure – Association of German Engineers World Health Organization Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (professional journal of the GAMM)

SOURCE/ARCHIVAL DESIGNATIONS AAA AAW AMPG BAB BAK BA-MA BGD DFGA DM GLA GPStA NL SGD UA

Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts – Archive of the Foreign Office, Berlin Archiv der Akademie der Wissenschaften – Archive of the Academy of Sciences, Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft – Historical Archive of the Max Planck Society, Dahlem, Berlin Bundesarchiv Berlin – Federal Archives, Berlin branch Bundesarchiv Koblenz – Federal Archives, Koblenz branch Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv – Federal Archives, Military Archives branch in Freiburg im Breisgau Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, Steiner Publishers Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-Archiv – Archives of the German Research Foundation, Bad Godesberg, Bonn Deutsches Museum, Munich Generallandesarchiv – General Archive of the State of Baden, Karlsruhe Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz – Secret Prussian State Archives, Dahlem, Berlin Nachlaß – papers, collection Studien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, Steiner Publishers University Archive

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LIST OF AUTHORS Mitchell G. Ash is a professor of modern history, head of the history of science working group in the Department of History, and coordinator of the PhD program “The Sciences in Historical, Philosophical and Cultural Contexts” at the University of Vienna. Johanna Bleker is a professor em. of the history of medicine at the Charité medical school of the Free University and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Rüdiger vom Bruch is a professor em. of the history of science at the Institute for History, Humboldt University of Berlin. 2001–2008 he was director of the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Mirko Buschmann, Dr. phil., is a researcher employed by the Chair for the History of Technology and the Engineering Sciences at the Institute for History, Technical University in Dresden. 2004–2008 he was a project member in the DFG Research Unit “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Anne Cottebrune is a docteur de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Since 2010 she has been head of the DFG research project “Genetic Counselling in Germany 1920–1989.” Wolfgang Uwe Eckart is a professor of medical history at the University of Heidelberg and head of the subproject “Medical Research Sponsorship by the NG/DFG 1920–1970” within the framework of the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers, Dr. phil., is a lecturer of German linguistics at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). Since 2008 he has been a staff member in the DFG project “Speech Variation in Northern Germany (SiN).” Moritz Epple has been a professor of the history of science since 2003 at the Historisches Seminar, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Paul Erker is a professor of modern history and history of economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a staff researcher at the Research Institute of the Deutsche Museum, Munich. Since the fall of 2009 he has been a senior research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich. Sören Flachowsky, Dr. phil., is a member researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2000 he has been a researcher employed by the Chair for the History of Science, Humboldt University of Berlin. Thomas Hänseroth is a professor of the history of technology and the engineering sciences at the Institute for History, Technical University in Dresden. 2004–2008 he was project director in the DFG Research Unit “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2009 he has been a subproject head in Collaborative Research Center 804 “Transcendence and Common Sense.” Ulf Hashagen, Dr. rer. nat., is a member researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2011 he has been the head of the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science of the Deutsche Museum in Munich.

514

List of Authors

Ulrich Herbert is a professor of modern and recent history at the University of Freiburg and director of the School of History of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. 2001–2008 he was head of the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Marion Hulverscheidt, Dr. med., is a member researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970” (section on medical research support) at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Heidelberg. Since 2008 she has been a staff researcher at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Charité university medical school in Berlin. Günther Luxbacher, Dr. phil., is a member researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970” (section science and technology) at the Department for History of Technology at the Technical University Berlin. Since 2011 he has been a member researcher in the group “Knowledge Research” with a focus on the history of materials engineering. Gabriele Moser, Dr. phil., is a historian. 2003–2006 she was a member researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2007 she has been a researcher at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine in nonuniversity-funded projects. Alexander Neumann, Dr. phil., is a collaborator in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2005 he has been a teacher at Schiller-Gymnasium, Offenburg. Peter Nötzoldt, Dr. phil., is a member researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2008 he has been a staff researcher at the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Willi Oberkrome is a supernumerary professor of modern and recent history at the University of Freiburg. Within the framework of the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970,” he prepared the projects on the humanities and social sciences and worked on the topic complex “agricultural sciences.” Karin Orth, Dr. phil., is a research coordinator and staff researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2010 she has been a senior staff researcher at the Department of History, University of Freiburg. Reinhard Rürup is a professor em. at the Technical University, Berlin. Bernd A. Rusinek is a professor at the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, and director of the staff office archive/history of science research station at the Jülich Research Centre. Carola Sachse has been a university professor at the Institute for Contemporary History of the University of Vienna since 2004. She was formerly project director of the research program at the Max Planck Society on the “History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism.” Alexander von Schwerin, Dr. rer. med., is a staff researcher in the Section for the History of the Natural Sciences, with a focus on the history of pharmacology, at the Technical University, Braunschweig. Christoph Seidler, M. A., has been a researcher employed by the Chair for Modern and Recent History at the University of Freiburg since 2005. Friedemann Schmoll, Dr. rer. soc., is a lecturer of empirical cultural studies/folklore.

List of Authors

515

Heiko Stoff, Dr. phil., is a visiting professor of the history of science and technology at the Technical University, Braunschweig. Helmuth Trischler is head of research at the Deutsche Museum in Munich, professor of modern history and the history of technology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and codirector of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich. Corinna R. Unger, Dr. phil., was from 2002 to 2005 a member of the research group “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since 2010 she has been a professor of modern European history at Jacobs University Bremen. Patrick Wagner was until 2006 a member researcher in the research project “History of the German Research Foundation 1920–1970.” Since then he has been a professor of contemporary history at the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg. Mark Walker is the John Bigelow Professor of History at Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA. Ulrich Wengenroth has been a full professor of the history of technology at the Technical University, Munich, since 1989.

B E I T R ÄG E Z U R G E S C H I C H T E D E R D E U T S C H E N F O R S C H U NG S G E M E I N S C H A F T

Herausgegeben von Rüdiger vom Bruch und Ulrich Herbert.

Franz Steiner Verlag

ISSN 1861–1478

1.

Isabel Heinemann / Patrick Wagner (Hg.) Wissenschaft – Planung – Vertreibung Neuordnungskonzepte und Umsiedlungspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert 2006. 222 S., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-08733-9 „[Der] Band zeigt, welch hohes Maß an empirischer Dichte und analytischer Differenzierung die Forschung in diesem Bereich inzwischen erreicht hat – und er weist auch eine wichtige Perspektive künftiger Forschung auf, nämlich die konsequente Kontextualisierung der für Europa gewonnenen Erkenntnisse im globalen Rahmen.“ Christoph Jahr, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 25, 2009

2.

Wolfgang U. Eckart (Hg.) Man, Medicine and the State The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century 2006. 297 S. mit 4 Tab., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-08794-0 „Therefore, the present volume is a very welcome and important contribution to 20th century medical history. It enriches not only medical research but is also helpful for teaching students and confronting them with the historical issues of a core problem of medical ethics. The book is a good read and its value is supported by a well-done biographical index. Every history of medicine library should have it.“ Cay-Rüdiger Prüll, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 29, 2007

3.

Michael Zimmermann (Hg.) Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts 2007. IV, 591 S. mit 10 Abb., geb. ISBN 978-3-515-08917-3 „Die Herausgabe des Bandes ist äußerst

verdienstvoll und sehr zu begrüßen, zumal es sich nicht nur auf die Rekonstruktion der Geschehnisse und die Ursachenforschung beschränkt, sondern auch auf die Selbstreflexion und auf das Verstehen von Entwicklungen ‚langer Dauer‘, auf eine Archäologie der Moderne, zielt. Er beleuchtet nicht nur einen wichtigen Bereich der Geschichte der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, sondern betrachtet auch in einer bis dahin nicht gekannten Breite die Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung in Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Insofern ist das Buch eine unentbehrliche Informationsquelle und Arbeitgrundlage für künftige Forschungen zu diesem Thema.“ Hubert Kolling, Geschichte, Politik und ihre Didaktik 2008/1–2 4.

Karin Orth / Willi Oberkrome (Hg.) Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 1920–1970 Forschungsförderung im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Politik 2010. 549 S., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-09652-2 „Insgesamt bietet der Sammelband auf breiter Quellenbasis eine beeindruckende Fülle neuer Erkenntnisse zur DFGGeschichte. Die zahlreichen, qualitativ überzeugenden Beiträge regen zur vertiefenden Lektüre der Ergebnisse der Forschergruppe an, die als Monographien und Sammelbände bereits vorliegen oder noch erscheinen werden.“ Florian Schmaltz, Neue Politische Literatur 56, 2011

5.

Helmuth Trischler / Mark Walker (Hg.) Physics and Politics Research and Research Support in Twentieth Century Germany in International Perspective 2010. 285 S., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-09601-0

Similar to the German enterprise of science

and technology, in the humanities and so-

as a whole, the German Research Foundation

cial sciences, medicine, and the biosciences.

(DFG) – originally conceived as an “Emergency

Initially this path was revisionistic, after 1933

Association for German Science” (Notgemein-

racist and politically expansionistic, and finally,

schaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft) in 1920 –

westernized and conservative. Additional sur-

for decades considered itself as the politically

veys on the history of the foundation as an

authorized agency for the promotion of a patri-

organization and interdisciplinary overviews by

otically accentuated science.

the editors raise the issues of the liberalization

The authors delineate the course followed by

of German research and its extragovernmental

this research foundation in the fields of science

funding during the 1960s.

www.steiner-verlag.de Franz Steiner Verlag

ISBN 978-3-515-10195-0