How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s "Jewish Science" [Excerpt]
In a chapter excerpted from his new book, science writer Philip Ball describes “Aryan physics” and other ludicrous ideas that accompanied the rise of Adolf Hitler
University of Chicago Press.
Reprinted with permission from Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler, by Philip Ball. The University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 2014, Philip Ball. All rights reserved.
Anti-Semitism did not just deprive German physics of some of its most valuable researchers. It also threatened to prescribe what kind of physics one could and could not do. For Nazi ideology was not merely a question of who should be allowed to live and work freely in the German state—like a virus, it worked its way into the very fabric of intellectual life. Shortly after the boycott of Jewish businesses at the start of April 1933, the Nazified German Students Association declared that literature should be cleansed of the “un-German spirit”, resulting on 10 May in the ritualistic burning of tens of thousands of books marred by Jewish intellectualism. These included works by Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin: books full of corrupt, unthinkable ideas. Into some of these pyres, baying students threw the books of Albert Einstein.
It was one thing to say that art was decadent—that its elitist abstraction or lurid imagery would lead people astray. And the “depraved” sexuality saturating the pages of Freud’s works was self-evidently contaminating. But how could a scientific theory be objectionable? How could one even develop a pseudo-moralistic position on a notion that was objectively right or wrong? Besides, hadn’t Einstein’s relativity been proven? What did it even mean to say that science could be subverted by the “Jewish spirit”?
It would be absurd, of course, to suppose that most of the book-burners had given these questions a moment’s thought. The simple fact was that Einstein was a prominent Jew, and his thoughts therefore fit for the bonfire. But Einstein’s theory was attacked on racial grounds. This assault came not by asinine ideologues in the party whose knowledge of science extended no further than a belief in fairy tales about “cosmic ice,” nor from individuals on the scientific fringe seeking official approval and support. It was orchestrated by two Nobel laureates in physics, who devised a full-blown thesis (it can’t be dignified by calling it a theory) on how stereotypical racial features are exhibited in scientific thinking. They were Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, and they wanted to become the new Führers of German physics.
The story is ugly, sad, at times comic. It illustrates the complicated interactions between science and politics in Nazi Germany, for although one might expect the “Aryan physics” (Deutsche Physik) of Stark and Lenard to have been welcomed by the National Socialists, its reception in official circles was decidedly mixed, and in the end it was ignored. The case of Deutsche Physik reveals how much of what went on in the Nazi state depended on how you played your cards rather than on what sort of hand you held. It shows how the German scientists’ pretensions of being “apolitical” did not prevent politics from infecting scientific ideas themselves, and almost overwhelming them. Perhaps most importantly, the story explodes the comforting myth that science offers insulation against profound irrationality and extremism.
Against relativity
Lenard’s anti-Semitism festered for years before the Nazi era, and as was the case with many other haters of Jews his antipathy was fuelled by a sense of exclusion and injustice. The fact is that Lenard was a rather unremarkable man: an excellent experimental scientist in his heyday, but of limited intellectual depth, and emotionally and imaginatively stunted. When circumstances contrived to carry him further than his talents should have permitted, he was forced to attribute his shortcomings to the deceptions and foolishness of others. This combination of prestige and deluded self-image is invariably poisonous. There is no better example than Lenard to show that a Nobel Prize is no guarantee of wisdom, humanity or greatness of any sort, and that, strange as it may seem, the award can occasionally provoke feelings of inadequacy.
Lenard’s anti-Semitism festered for years before the Nazi era, and as was the case with many other haters of Jews his antipathy was fuelled by a sense of exclusion and injustice. The fact is that Lenard was a rather unremarkable man: an excellent experimental scientist in his heyday, but of limited intellectual depth, and emotionally and imaginatively stunted. When circumstances contrived to carry him further than his talents should have permitted, he was forced to attribute his shortcomings to the deceptions and foolishness of others. This combination of prestige and deluded self-image is invariably poisonous. There is no better example than Lenard to show that a Nobel Prize is no guarantee of wisdom, humanity or greatness of any sort, and that, strange as it may seem, the award can occasionally provoke feelings of inadequacy.
Lenard was given the prize in 1905 for his studies of cathode rays, the “radiation” emitted from hot metals. They were manifested as a glow that emerged from a negatively charged metal plate (cathode) inside a sealed, evacuated “cathode-ray tube” and made its way to a positively charged plate. Directed on to the glass walls of the tube – or as researchers discovered, on to sheets of particular minerals – the cathode rays stimulated bright fluorescence. Like his mentor Heinrich Hertz at the University of Bonn, Lenard at first believed these rays to be fluctuations in the ether—like light, as it was then conceptualized. But while J. J. Thomson, director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, noted in 1897 that this was “the almost unanimous opinion of German physicists”, he had results that implied otherwise. Thomson showed that cathode rays have negative electric charge, being deflected by electric and magnetic fields, and he concluded that they were in fact streams of particles. They were given the name proposed some years earlier by the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney for the smallest possible unit of electrical charge: electrons. As Lenard put it, electrons are the quanta of electricity.
Lenard discovered how to enable cathode rays to escape from the vacuum chamber in which they were created, so that they could be examined more closely. He also investigated the photoelectric effect the expulsion of electrons from metals irradiated with ultraviolet light – and discovered that the energy of these electrons did not depend on the intensity of the light but only on its wavelength. When Einstein explained this result in 1905 in terms of Planck’s quantum hypothesis, Lenard felt that his discovery had been stolen. That bitterness deepened when Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect. This was not Lenard’s only early source of resentment. He felt that he should have discovered X-rays before Wilhelm Röntgen, and was sure that he would have done so if the jealousies of senior professors had not denied him better opportunities. And hadn’t he offered Röntgen advice about constructing the cathode-ray tube used for this discovery, which Röntgen didn’t even have the good grace to acknowledge?
But if the German professors selfishly and unjustly hid their intellectual debts, the English were worse. Thomson should have given him more credit for his work on the photoelectric effect, for instance. This, however, was no more than one could expect from a nation of vulgar materialists—Lenard would surely have sympathy with Napoleon’s remark about shopkeepers—who knew nothing of the heroic, selfless Germanic Kultur. James Franck later claimed that, when he was fighting at the front in the First World War, Lenard wrote to him expressing his hope that the defeat of the English would make amends for their never having cited him decently.
An operation for an illness of the lymph nodes around 1907 left Lenard less able to work, and contributed to his difficulties in keeping up with the latest developments in physics. Because he was not mathematically adept, he could not get to grips with relativity or quantum theory. As a result, he decided they were nonsense. The fact that this nonsense—whose premier architect was Einstein—was being accepted and acclaimed by physicists all over the world must therefore be the result of a conspiracy. And conspiracies and cabals were the specialty of Jews.
Einstein was the embodiment of all that Lenard detested. Where Lenard was a militaristic nationalist, Einstein was a pacifistic internationalist. Einstein was feted everywhere, while Lenard’s great merits seemed to have been forgotten. Worse, Einstein was celebrated most of all in England! And he hawked a brand of theoretical physics that frankly baffled Lenard. How convenient, then, that Einstein was a Jew, so that all of these deplorable traits could be labeled Semitic. (Of course, many of Einstein’s supporters were not Jewish, but as we shall see, Lenard and his ilk later contrived to make them “honorary Jews”.) Lenard decided that relativity was a “Jewish fraud” and that anything important in the theory had been discovered already by “Aryans.”1
Lenard criticized the theory of relativity as early as 1910, but it was not until the 1920s that his attacks began to incorporate explicitly racial elements. He started to develop the notion that there was a Jewish way of doing science, which involved spinning webs of abstract theory that lacked any roots in the firm and fertile soil of experimental work. The Jews, he said, turn debates about objective questions into personal disputes. Ironically, this supposed preference of “Aryans” for hale and hearty experiment went hand in hand with the kind of Romantic mysticism that infuses Nazi philosophy, such as it is. Lenard approved of the animistic Naturphilosophie of Goethe and Schelling, the belief in a spirit that animated all of nature. This pervasive soul of nature was the wellspring of science itself—and only Aryans, said Lenard, understood this: “It was precisely the yearning of Nordic man to investigate a hypothetical interconnectedness in nature which was the origin of natural science.”
Lenard persisted in believing in the light-bearing ether that Einstein had rejected, saying cryptically that this elusive medium “seems already to indicate the limits of the comprehensible”. He lamented the encroachment of technology in modern life: an expression, he said, of the kind of materialism that infected both Communism and the Jewish spirit, the twin enemies of German greatness. Materialistic natural science had eclipsed the “spiritual sciences,” giving rise to the “arrogant delusion“ that humankind can achieve the “mastery of nature.” “That influence has been strengthened by the all-corrupting foreign spirit permeating physics and mathematics, “ he wrote—“foreign“ here meaning, of course, Jewish.
The enthusiasm of the Nazi regime for this brand of mysticism and pseudoscience has been well documented, although perhaps not enough has yet been made of the resonances between fascism, Naturphilosophie, the cultish mysticism of Rudolf Steiner2 and anthroposophy, and the cozy certainties of some New Age beliefs. Reified worship of nature (as opposed to respect for it) has always teetered on the brink of a fundamentally fascist ideology. Several Nazi leaders, including Hitler and Himmler, endorsed the ridiculous “cosmic ice“ theory of Austrian engineer Hans Hörbinger, which asserted that ice is the basic ingredient of the universe. Lenard’s musings on racial science and the “spirit of nature” do not really rise above this level—they show that, even by the time of his Nobel award, he had nothing more significant to contribute to science, but had indeed become its opponent.
When, in the 1920s, Einstein began to experience racially motivated criticism and abuse in the German popular and academic press, Lenard joined in gleefully. At a meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in Bad Nauheim in September 1920, Einstein and Lenard were pitched head to head in a debate about relativity.
This confrontation followed an attack on Einstein at a public meeting held in Berlin the previous month, allegedly organized by the Working Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science. There was in fact no such body, it having been concocted for the purpose by one Paul Weyland, a far-right fantasist without any real scientific training, who deplored Einstein’s theory on the sort of “common sense” grounds that cranks still choose to employ today. Weyland presaged this event with a letter in the Berlin newspaper Tägliche Rundschau recycling old accusations that Einstein had plagiarized the insights of other scientists. The meeting itself took place in the capacious Berlin Philharmonic, where Weyland’s rant was accompanied by the distribution of anti-Semitic pamphlets and swastika lapel pins.
Weyland had announced that his lecture was the first in a series of twenty that would lay bare the deceptions of relativity. In the event, only one other followed, by the equally anti-Semitic applied physicist Ludwig Glaser. The whole shabby affair aroused wide indignation: the letters of support for Einstein that appeared subsequently in the pages of the Berlin press were by no means all from his colleagues. Planck wrote to Einstein characterizing Weyland’s assault as “scarcely believable filth.” He and others feared that such things would drive Einstein to emigrate from Germany.
Einstein did remain in Berlin, but he was evidently unsettled. He went himself to Weyland’s meeting and, somewhat against his instincts and with rare misjudgment, he decided to respond publicly to the attack. His letter in the Berliner Tageblatt did at least contain a dash of humor to undercut the risk of pomposity, being titled “My Answer to the Anti-Relativity Theoretical Co. Ltd.” He admitted that the feeble criticisms of his theory did not really warrant a reply, but also pointed out that the real complaint of Weyland and his acolytes was that Einstein was “a Jew of liberal international bent.” Einstein also mentioned Lenard (who supported Weyland), saying “I admire Lenard as a master of experimental physics [but] his objections to the general theory of relativity are so superficial that I had not deemed it necessary until now to reply to them in detail.”
The exchange at Bad Nauheim was no more illuminating, and certainly no more conciliatory. After the Berlin affair, this Einstein Debatte was widely anticipated, and the hall in which it took place was packed to the galleries, not just with scientists but with journalists and curious onlookers—and Weyland—who must have been thoroughly bored and mystified by the four hours of technical talks that preceded it.
Accounts of the debate differ. Some newspapers reported that it was conducted calmly and objectively, but others stated that Planck, who as the society’s president was obliged to be the moderator, was forced on several occasions to intervene to prevent hecklers from interrupting Einstein. In any event, neither Einstein nor Lenard was pleased with the outcome. Einstein was highly agitated afterwards—he later admitted his regrets at “losing myself in such deep humorlessness”—and his wife Elsa seems to have suffered something of a nervous breakdown. For his part, Lenard felt compelled to resign from the DPG in protest at the event, and he fixed a sign outside his office at Heidelberg announcing that the society’s members were not welcome within.
Physics for Hitler
Lenard was not the only influential scientist in the anti-Einstein camp. In 1919 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Johannes Stark for his discovery of the effect of electric fields on the energies of photons emitted from atoms as electrons jump between their quantum orbits.3 In an electric field, the energy of an electron in a particular orbit splits into a whole series of different energies: rungs of a new quantized energy ladder. Stark’s discovery of this effect was of some importance, since it revealed a further level of quantum granularity in the structure of the atom. Nevertheless, the 1919 award was perhaps one of the Nobel Committee’s least auspicious decisions, for it inflated Stark’s already ponderous sense of self-importance and entitlement.
Lenard was not the only influential scientist in the anti-Einstein camp. In 1919 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Johannes Stark for his discovery of the effect of electric fields on the energies of photons emitted from atoms as electrons jump between their quantum orbits.3 In an electric field, the energy of an electron in a particular orbit splits into a whole series of different energies: rungs of a new quantized energy ladder. Stark’s discovery of this effect was of some importance, since it revealed a further level of quantum granularity in the structure of the atom. Nevertheless, the 1919 award was perhaps one of the Nobel Committee’s least auspicious decisions, for it inflated Stark’s already ponderous sense of self-importance and entitlement.
Stark’s situation was so close to Lenard’s that it is no wonder the two men forged a firm alliance. Like Lenard, Stark was an experimentalist befuddled by the mathematical complexity that had recently entered physics. He was another extreme nationalist whose right-wing views had been hardened by the First World War. He too felt that Einstein had stolen his ideas, this time over the quantum-mechanical description of light-driven chemical reactions. (Stark never in fact fully accepted quantum theory, even though an understanding of the “Stark effect” depended on it.) And being a mediocrity who struck lucky, he found himself being passed over for academic appointments to which he was convinced he had the best claim. He attributed this to the self-interest of a “Jewish and pro-Semitic circle” centered on the (decidedly Aryan) Planck and Sommerfeld, the latter being the alleged cabal’s “enterprising business manager.”4 This circle included most of Sommerfeld’s students, not least Peter Debye, who was given the professorship at Göttingen in 1914 for which Stark had applied. Lenard’s and Stark’s enemies suggested that their definition of “Jewish science” was more or less anything that the two physicists could not understand, and that they placed in the “Jewish cabal” anyone who threatened to outclass them scientifically. But Einstein was undoubtedly perceived as the ringleader of the whole affair.
By 1922 the situation had deteriorated to such a degree that Einstein declined to speak at a session of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in Leipzig, fearing that his life might be in danger. This wasn’t paranoia. In June the Jewish foreign minister of the Weimar government Walther Rathenau, who Einstein knew well, was assassinated in Berlin by two ultra-nationalist army officers. Lenard had refused to lower the flag of his institute at Heidelberg as a mark of respect for the murdered minister, and as a result he had been dragged from his laboratory by an angry mob of students. Lenard narrowly escaped being thrown into the River Neckar, but the distressing experience only deepened his anti-Semitism. When he was reprimanded by the university, he announced his resignation in disgust. He soon withdrew it when he discovered that the shortlist for his replacement consisted of two “non-Aryans”—James Franck and Gustav Hertz,5 who had won the Nobel Prize together in 1925—and an experimentalist sympathetic to England, Hans Geiger, who had worked with Rutherford in Manchester. In the end Lenard clung on at Heidelberg until 1929, when he was replaced by Walther Bothe. Lenard’s colleagues made Bothe’s life so miserable, however, that he moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Lenard so dominated the physics institute at Heidelberg that it was named after him in 1935.
Laue spoke on relativity in Einstein’s place at the 1922 conference, earning the abiding enmity of the “Aryan physicists.” His audience was supplied with pamphlets distributed by Stark decrying this “Jewish theory.”
When, in the following year, the National Socialists took up arms in Munich to openly challenge the complacent decadence of the Weimar government and free Germany from the Jewish stranglehold, Lenard and Stark recognized a kindred spirit and a hope for the future. In May 1924 they wrote an article called “The Hitler spirit and science.” Hitler and his comrades, they said, “appear to us as God’s gifts from times of old when races were purer, people were greater, and minds were less deluded…He is here. He has revealed himself as the Führer of the sincere. We shall follow him. The Nazi leader noted this pledge of support, and he and Rudolf Hess visited Lenard at home in 1926.”
Stark was in fact the author of his own exclusion from the academic community. Slighted by the opposition from his colleagues at Würzburg to his acceptance of a Habilitation thesis from his student Ludwig Glaser—Glaser’s study of the optical properties of porcelain was regarded as mere engineering, not true science—Stark petulantly resigned from his professorship in 1922. He set up a private laboratory in a nearby disused porcelain factory, using the money from his Nobel Prize to fund this industrial venture (which was against the Nobel Foundation’s rules). At the same time he channeled his resentment against academia generally and theoretical physics in particular into a book called The Present Crisis in German Physics. Glaser, as we saw, had already embraced his mentor’s philosophy and became a vocal propagandist of Aryan physics. He was appointed assistant to the undistinguished engineer Wilhelm Müller, Sommerfeld’s politically favored successor at Munich (see page 103). But Glaser was so virulently racist that he became a liability and was subsequently moved out of harm’s way to the fringes of the Reich—Poland and then Prague—where he thankfully fades from history.
By the late 1920s Stark’s porcelain venture had failed, and he tried to regain an academic post but was repeatedly passed over in favor of more able candidates. When Sommerfeld opposed his application for a professorship at Munich, this confirmed in Stark’s mind that Sommerfeld was a spider in the Jewish web.
How Aryans created science
For Stark and Lenard, the canker at the core of German physics was not merely the nepotism of the Jews and their lackeys, nor the obscure theories and unpatriotic internationalism of Einstein. The fundamental problem lay with a foreign and degenerate approach to science itself. The popular notion that science has a universal nature and spirit, they said, is quite wrong. In an article titled “National Socialism and Science”, Stark wrote in 1934 that science, like any other creative activity, “is conditioned by the spiritual and characterological endowments of its practitioners”. Jews did science differently from true Germans. Echoing Lenard’s fantasy, Stark claimed that while Aryans preferred to pursue an experimental physics rooted in tangible reality, the Jews wove webs of abstruse theory disconnected from experience. “Respect for facts and aptitude for exact observation”, he wrote, reside in the Nordic race. The spirit of the German enables him to observe things outside himself exactly as they are, without the interpolation of his own ideas and wishes, and his body does not shrink from the effort which the investigation of nature demands of him. The German’s love of nature and his aptitude for natural science are based on this endowment. Thus it is understandable that natural science is overwhelmingly a creation of the Nordic–Germanic blood component of the Aryan peoples.
For Stark and Lenard, the canker at the core of German physics was not merely the nepotism of the Jews and their lackeys, nor the obscure theories and unpatriotic internationalism of Einstein. The fundamental problem lay with a foreign and degenerate approach to science itself. The popular notion that science has a universal nature and spirit, they said, is quite wrong. In an article titled “National Socialism and Science”, Stark wrote in 1934 that science, like any other creative activity, “is conditioned by the spiritual and characterological endowments of its practitioners”. Jews did science differently from true Germans. Echoing Lenard’s fantasy, Stark claimed that while Aryans preferred to pursue an experimental physics rooted in tangible reality, the Jews wove webs of abstruse theory disconnected from experience. “Respect for facts and aptitude for exact observation”, he wrote, reside in the Nordic race. The spirit of the German enables him to observe things outside himself exactly as they are, without the interpolation of his own ideas and wishes, and his body does not shrink from the effort which the investigation of nature demands of him. The German’s love of nature and his aptitude for natural science are based on this endowment. Thus it is understandable that natural science is overwhelmingly a creation of the Nordic–Germanic blood component of the Aryan peoples.
Just look, Stark implores his readers, at all the great scientists whose portraits are presented in Lenard’s Grosse Naturforscher (Great Investigators of Nature; 1929): nearly all have “Nordic–Germanic” features (even, apparently, Italians like Galileo).
In contrast, the Jewish spirit in science “is focused upon its own ego, its own conception, and its self-interest”. The Jew is innately driven to “mix facts and imputations topsy-turvy in the endeavor to secure the court decision he desires”. Of course, the Jew can imitate the Nordic style to produce occasional noteworthy results, but not “authentic creative work”. The Jew suppresses facts that don’t suit him, and turns theory into dogma. He is a masterly self-publicist, courting and seducing the press and the public – just look at Einstein.
What Germany needs, then, is a truly German, “Aryan physics” (Deutsche Physik) that rejects the overly mathematical fabulations of relativistic physics in favor of a rigorously experimental approach. And in a formula calculated to ingratiate him to the new leaders, Stark adds that “The scientist does not exist only for himself or even for his science. Rather, in his work he must serve the nation first and foremost. For these reasons, the leading scientific positions in the National Socialist state are to be occupied not by elements alien to the Volk but only by nationally conscious German men.”
While the Aryan physicists were incapable of mounting a credible assault on Einstein’s relativity in scientific terms, Deutsche Physik offered a new line of attack: relativity threatened to undermine the very essence of the Germanic world view. Incorrectly claiming that relativity “sets aside the concept of energy”, the Nazi mathematician Bruno Thüring asserted that in this aspect one can see “something concerning the soul, world-feeling, attitudes and racial dispositions”. Einstein, he said, is not the successor of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler (the canonical Nordic–Germanic scientist) and Newton, but their “determined opponent”:
“His theory is not the keystone of a development, but a declaration of total war, waged with the purpose of destroying what lies at the basis of this development, namely, the world view of German man . . . This theory could have blossomed and flourished nowhere else but in the soil of Marxism, whose scientific expression it is, in a manner analogous to that of cubism in the plastic arts and the unmelodies and unharmonic atonality in the music of the last several years [“degenerate science”!]. Thus, in its consequences the theory of relativity appears to be less a scientific than a political problem.”
These ideas were noted and initially welcomed by Hitler. “That which is called the crisis of science”, he wrote, “is nothing more than that the gentlemen are beginning to see on their own how they have gotten on to the wrong track with their objectivity and autonomy. The simple question that precedes every scientific enterprise is: who is it who wants to know something, who is it who wants to orient himself in the world around him? It follows necessarily that there can only be the science of a particular type of humanity and of a particular age. There is very likely a Nordic science, and a National Socialist science, which are bound to be opposed to the Liberal–Jewish science, which, indeed, is no longer fulfilling its function anywhere, but is in the process of nullifying itself.”
Such declarations can scarcely leave one with an impression that the Nazis had much sympathy for – or understanding of – true science. But neither should they be read as some kind of official doctrine that guided the Nazi government’s policy on scientific research. Frequently, Hitler’s grandiose statements – on this or other matters – had as little real influence on the way affairs were conducted at the daily, prosaic level as do the proclamations of the Pope on the dealings of a local Catholic church. Indeed, Hitler purposely maintained a distance between his own views and edicts and their practical implementation. The actual response of the National Socialist authorities to Deutsche Physik was not uncritical acceptance but something rather more complex.
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