What I’m Reading

This post is a response to Lorelle’s latest Blog Challenge: Whatcha Reading? Blog about what you are reading, what you like to read, and why. Blogging friends, I challenge you to do the same. If you accept, let me know. We could make a regular thing of it.

I have been wanting to respond to one of Lorelle’s blogging challenges for a while. Given the increasingly large stack of books on my shelf that I am excited to read (it was a good Christmas), I thought his week’s topic was an easy place to start. So, here goes:

I’m currently reading Hilter’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact by John Cornwell. The book tackles extremely important issues regarding the role of scientists within a society and their political and moral obligations. I found myself thinking that the introduction alone would have made a fantastic reading assignment in my undergraduate engineering ethics courses.

In the introduction, Cornwell asks:

Were these cases of Germans behaving according to type as Germans? Or scientists in Germany behaving according to type as scientists?

I thought these were interesting questions considering how people often unfairly ascribe the agenda of the Nazis to the Germans as a whole. Related to this is the discussion of the complicated motivations of scientists in Nazi Germany who were torn between serving, or at least preserving Germany as their beloved homeland, and working for the Nazi regime.

Werner Heisenberg, whom Cornwell discusses at length, is the classic example of this. Heisenberg, a brilliant young physicist and revolutionary thinker in quantum theory, chose to stay in Germany after the rise of Hitler when many scientists began to flee (or wore out their welcome). He was eventually made head of atomic research in Nazi Germany, but debate continues about whether Heisenberg tried, or was evening willing, to build an atomic bomb for Germany.

Some say he deliberately prevented any chance at a German atomic bomb, but others think he was simply unable to make one. Regardless, Heisenberg faced much criticism for staying in Germany and even defending the country, if not actually becoming a proponent of the Nazi party. It’s really a tragic story.

As a fan of science history and the quantum revolution in physics, in particular, I knew most of this about Heisenberg already (I should – I read his very large biography in high school), but I didn’t know that much about other aspects of German science before and during the World Wars (like how the dye business changed the world; yeah, that’s right: the dye business).

To read Cornwell’s description of just how advanced and dominate German science was before the first World War gave me an appreciation of just how different the world could be today had Germany not gone to war (twice). I’m not talking about the human and financial costs of the wars, which certainly were incomprehensibly large, but the balance in power of the world’s scientific and technological expertise.

Where would the United States be today without the influx of German scientists? And how powerful would Germany be (assuming they remained peaceful)? I guess it is just a silly hypothetical, but it’s one that I think is fascinating.

Another thing I didn’t learn in history class was how utterly disorganized the government was in Nazi Germany. It is even described as a sort of oligarchy between Hilter and various institutions in the military and government. The result was a lot of wasted effort on their part during the war, for which the Allies should have been extremely grateful.

Hilter’s Scientists is a fascinating read, though it’s not necessarily the most enjoyable. It is easy enough to read, but the amount and scope of material covered is large and the book seems a little to densely packed at times, losing track of any over-arching narrative and almost randomly jumping from one topic to another in some places. But the result is a very thorough look at German science under Hitler.

Still reading, though…