The Mobilisation of Minds and the Crisis in International Science: The Krieg der Geister and the Manifesto of the 93^*

* This essay derives from an invited paper given to the 25th anniversary meeting of the Journal of War and Culture Studies, held in London in June 2015, and from research supported by the Australian Research Council.

Abstract

‘The sleep of reason begets monsters’. (Goya)

The Great War was a contest no less of minds than of machines. This proved to be as true in the sciences as in literature and the arts. Across the scientific world blew a whirlwind of nationalism that threatened the traditions of science, revealing hidden tensions that cultural historians have yet fully to assess. Such was the impact of An die Kulturwelt! Ein Aufruf, or the Appeal to the World of Culture, better known today as the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, which appeared in October 1914. In the history of modern science, few events are so widely recalled – and so often cited – as marking a tipping point beyond which Allied and American scientists saw no alternative to waging all-out war against the Central Powers. However, the scientific representation in the Manifesto has been largely neglected. This essay charts the background, reception, and consequences of the Manifesto for the wartime scientific community, and for the course of international science for decades to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Great War
• science
• nationalism
• Manifesto of the 93
• scientist intellectuals
• war of words
• post-war
• legacies

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my appreciation to the journal’s Editor and editorial staff, including Mr. Varun Ilangovan, and my thanks for the generous assistance of Dr. Eckart Krause of Hamburg University and Dr. Kimberley Webber of Sydney. This article forms part of a larger study on ‘Intellectuals and the Great War’, supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributor

Roy MacLeod is an Emeritus Professor of History, University of Sydney.

Correspondence to: Roy MacLeod, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Notes

* This essay derives from an invited paper given to the 25th anniversary meeting of the Journal of War and Culture Studies, held in London in June 2015, and from research supported by the Australian Research Council.

1 A start in relation to physics has been made, see Wolff (2003).

2 Important work includes Vom Brocke (1985) and Rasmussen (2004, 2014). The Manifesto was republished in Wehberg (1920) and in Lux (1932: 74–78), Vom Bruch (2016).

3 Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Bryce Papers, f. 51. James Bryce to Andrew Carnegie, 8 October 1914.

4 Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Bryce Papers, f. 63. Bryce to Sir George Prothero, 12 October 1914.

5 The Manifesto was signed by seventeen artists, twelve theologians, nine poets, seven jurists, seven historians, five art critics, four philosophers, four philologists, three musicians, two politicians, one theatrical manager, and seven professors of medicine. The Manifesto and signatures was reproduced in The New York Times Current History: A Monthly Magazine, 1915. Reports of the languages in which the Manifesto appeared ranges from ten to fourteen. See also Badash (1979) and Vom Bruch (2005). Danish and Swedish translations are found in the papers of many members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. For this information, I am grateful to Robert Marc Friedman (2001).

6 ‘Reply to German Professors’, The Times, 21 October 1914, 10. The letter was translated as Erklärung der Professoren Grossbritanniens an die deutschen akademischen Kreise, and was circulated widely in Germany. See Wolff (2003: 345). See also Wallace (1988).

7 Paschen famously rejected a proposal by Wilhelm Wien that Germans suppress citations to English papers in German physics journals. See Forman (2008).

8 Among the signatories, four had Nobel Prizes in Physics – Wilhelm Röntgen (1901), Phillip Lenard (1905), Wilhelm Wien (1911) and Max Planck (1918); two in Physiology and Medicine – von Behring (1901), and Ehrlich (1908); and six in Chemistry – Emil Fischer (1902), Adolf von Baeyer (1905), Wilhelm Ostwald (1909), Richard Willstätter (1915), Fritz Haber (1918) and Walther Nernst (1920). All the chemists who signed would win the Prize. Of the twelve, eight received it before the War – while two (Röntgen and von Behring) had been among the first Prize-winners in 1901. One – Willstätter (1915) – was awarded during the war and three others – Haber (1918), Planck (1918) and Nernst (1920) – after the Armistice. See Willstätter (1915); Nagendrappa (2001); Nagendrappa (2014); Bhattacharyya (2012); Kauffman and Priebe (1990); Mulligan (1999); Robinson (1953); Stoll and Hornig (1966); Abbott (1983).

9 Von Behring, Ehrlich, Haber, Willstätter, von Baeyer, and Wassermann.

10 Overwhelming the suicide of his first wife Clara Immerwahr in 1915 – the morning after which he famously left their Dahlem home to oversee the German army's chemical offensive on the Russian front.

11 The seminal biography remains Szöllösi-Janze (1998).

12 For the lasting impact of the War on science, see Kevles (1971) and MacLeod (2009, 2014).

13 In time, their movement gathered pace, and won support from a later organization – the Bund Neues Vaterland, BNV (Union for New Patriotism) – that in June 1915 petitioned the Reichstag against supporting German imperialism in Europe. Their efforts have been credited with later inspiring the European Coal and Steel Community, and much later, the European Union.

14 Swedish Academy of Science (KVA), Aarhenius Collection, Wien to C.W. Oseen, 19 November 1914 and 1 June 1915, cited in Wien (1930: 60).

15 W. Ostwald, Die Umschau, 25 September 1915, 764, 766, cited in Heilbron (2014).

16 In the original, ‘unzutreffenden Vorstellungen von der Gesinnung seiner Unterzeichner’.

17 ‘German Scholars Explain their Manifesto’, in Fred MacDonald, World War One Centennial Gallery, on-line, 2013.

18 ‘Onoranze a Luciano Orlando, Ruggiero Torelli, Eugenio Levi, Adolfo Viterbi, Professori di Matematica nelle Università Italiane Caduti in Guerra’, Seminario Matematico della Facoltà di Scienze dell'Università di Roma, 22 June 1918 (Rome: Bertero 1918) quoted in Pietro Nastasi and Rossana Tazzioli, ‘Italian Mathematicians and the First World War’, cited in Aubin and Goldstein (2015: 188).

19 Aubin and Goldstein (2015: 188).

20 Woodrow Wilson, addressing the Second Plenary Session of the Peace Conference, January 1919, in State Department, Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Peace Conference (Washington, DC: USGPO, 13 vols, 1942–47), vol. 3, 179, cited in Warner R. Schilling (1962), ‘Scientists, Foreign Policy and Politics’ in Gilpin and Wright (1964), originally published in The American Political Science Review, LVI (2), (1962), 287–300.

21 Rudyard Kipling, ‘For All We Have and Are’, was written in response to the burning of the library at Louvain.