by Philipp Blom
Weimar Physics
THE SHADOW OF THE WAR and the social climate of the 1920s may indeed have contributed to the conception and formulation of a physics in which the main tenets of logical, scientific thought—identity, causality, objectivity—are dethroned and their place usurped by ambivalence, chance, and uncertainty. While the years before the war had been a period of immense transformation and destabilization, the robustly positivist idea of nineteenth-century science continued to be a strong presence in universities, schools, and newspaper offices. After 1918, this “rationalistic dogmatism” was decried even by mathematicians. One of them, Gustav Doetsch, believed it to be “sinking with violent convulsions into its grave in order to make room for a new spirit, a new life-feeling.”12
The debate about a “German physics” ran its course and would soon die out. But there is another, more plausible and more intriguing hypothesis about the discomforting world described by mainly German physicists after 1918, an intriguing thesis put forward by the historian Paul Forman. The subatomic world described by Heisenberg and others, Forman argued, was an unpredictable and hybrid world of perspective, chance, and probable outcomes. In his view this disconcerting scenario, governed by the principle of uncertainty, had a great deal in common with the social and political realities of Weimar Germany. Science seemed to mirror society.
Forman fielded some impressive witnesses for his thesis, among others the eminent physicist Erwin Schrödinger (he of the famous cat), who wrote in 1932: “In a word, we all are members of our cultural milieu. So soon as the orientation of our interest plays any role whatsoever in a matter, the milieu, the cultural complex, the Zeitgeist, or whatever one wishes to call it, must exert its influence. In all areas of a culture there will exist common features deriving from the world view and, much more numerous still, common stylistic features—in politics, in art, in science.”13
Scientists were not outside of their society, they were part of it, and the game of perspectives continued. Seen from the vantage point of its being embedded in its cultural context, the new and puzzling quantum physics was the exact opposite of a coldly abstract theoretical game and indeed approached the intuitive qualities of the vitalist philosophy that was so fashionable after the war. If the mechanistic and rationalist worldview of the old order had led straight to the killing machines of the Western Front, the philosophy of irrational life forces created a counterbalance to this deadly rationality, and the new physics mirrored its cult of energy, willpower, and life. Nature, the younger generation of physicists seemed to claim, is not a giant clockwork, and God does play dice, after all.
The Universe Around Us
TO THE WIDER GENERAL PUBLIC, these debates about science were as irresistibly fascinating and as impenetrably opaque as the results the scientists produced. At a time when there seemed to be little left to believe in, when values and hierarchies had been swept away by the great disillusionment that followed the war, the calm arguments and mathematical formulas of science appealed hugely to the popular imagination, which was fed by a steady stream of articles and books, as well as a growing number of films focusing on scary science and mad scientists, such as Harry Pollard’s US release The Invisible Ray (1920, now lost), the 1921 Italian production L’Uomo Meccanico (The Mechanical Man), The Power God by Francis Ford (1925), and the extraordinary Soviet Martian extravaganza Aelita (1924).
While movies and novels exploited the unlimited imaginative possibilities of the new scientific magic, books by scientists did their best to explain the actual theories to an ever-wider audience. The British physicist and astronomer James Jeans made popular science books his specialty; they garnered him a great deal more fame than did his scientific work at Cambridge University. His 1929 introduction to cosmology, The Universe Around Us, sold out within a month of its publication and went through seven editions within a decade. A second book, The Mysterious Universe, published one year later, sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication and went through fifteen editions before 1939.
Science became a metaphor for society. With Germany and France in crisis and shaken by violence on the streets, Russia in the aftermath of its revolution embroiled in a horrific civil war, Italy paralyzed by the conflict between socialists and Fascists, and Austria only beginning to wake up from the loss of its huge empire, a degree of pessimism and foreboding was understandable in continental Europe, but it also, and especially, prevailed in Britain. The historian Richard Overy has pointed out that much of the scientific interest in the United Kingdom was focused on the idea of entropy, “a physical state which tended towards stasis, degeneration and extinction.”14
In Cambridge, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and his Austrian counterpart Ludwig Wittgenstein were famously advocating a combination of intellectual rigor and epistemological modesty; both men were renowned, indeed legendary, for not suffering fools gladly. But two other authors also engaged the intellectual dilemma of a time increasingly and painfully caught between a scientific approach, whose intellectual advances went counter to any intuitive understanding of the world, and the ideological vacuum created by the Great War. Both bore the same surname, Haldane, and they were in fact uncle and nephew.
Richard Burton Haldane was a distinguished politician who had served as secretary of state for war and as lord chancellor, but his busy career had not dissuaded him from also translating and writing on philosophy and science. In his book The Reign of Relativity (1921) he tackled head-on the vast implications of Einstein’s theory and the new understanding of the natural sciences for the broader realm of culture. He recognized that a new culture of skepticism had developed as a direct result of the war, and that it was accompanied by a new search for big answers that proved dangerously wanting, for “without a permeating faith of some kind, a faith that can compel in ordinary times as well as those of emergency, a people can hardly remain great.”15
The problem was that truth itself had been shown to be relative, depending on the perspective of the observer. Whereas previous generations had been more or less certain of an objective truth, an objectively knowable world, science, culture, and politics had conspired to destroy this certainty. Building on his reading of Einstein and of the British philosopher of mathematics Alfred North Whitehead, Haldane came to a conclusion that went far beyond the theory of science: “Every particular form of knowledge is relative, and is destined in the end to recognize the boundaries of its own apparent order, and to demand that we should pass over to conceptions of a new character.”16
To a time looking for answers, Haldane’s account of science and philosophy as transitory and bound to the horizon of the observer was a bitter pill to swallow, and it was not sweetened by an analysis authored by his nephew J. B. S. Haldane, an enthusiastic advocate and public defender of Darwinism, even if his strangely prophetic look at the future of science opened up great possibilities. Like his uncle, Jack Haldane was a product of his aristocratic background, but he also carried with him the experience of his generation. Commissioned into the Black Watch after having studied mathematics and classics at Oxford, he had served on the Western Front, as he related in his Daedalus, or Science and the Future, published in 1923, which begins:
As I sit down to write these pages I can see before me two scenes from my experience of the late war. The first is a glimpse of a forgotten battle of 1915. It has a curious suggestion of a rather bad cinema film. Through a blur of dust and fumes there appear, quite suddenly, great black and yellow masses of smoke which seem to be tearing up the surface of the earth and disintegrating the works of man with an almost visible hatred. These form the chief part of the picture, but somewhere in the middle distance one can see a few irrelevant looking human figures, and soon there are fewer. It is hard to believe that these are the protagonists in the battle. One would rather choose those huge substantive oily black masses which are so much more conspicuous, and suppose that the men are in reality their servants, and playing an inglorious, subordinate, and fatal part in t
he combat. It is possible, after all, that this view is correct.17
This scenario, Haldane writes, is “part of the case against science,” and it leads him to ask,
Is Samuel Butler’s . . . horrible vision correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite of machinery, an appendage of the reproductive system of huge and complicated engines which will successively usurp his activities, and end by ousting him from the mastery of this planet? Is the machine-minder engaged on repetition-work the goal and ideal to which humanity is tending? Perhaps a survey of the present trend of science may throw some light on these questions.18
The trends Haldane foresaw for humanity are striking in many ways. In four hundred years, he wrote, Britain would be covered with windmills producing its energy, which would be stored using liquid hydrogen; contraception would profoundly change sexual morality; the reproduction of plants and animals, including humans, would finally be revolutionized by science. All this was disquieting, even alarming, but
the chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.19
The rule of the natural sciences was as compelling as it was disquieting. To many people the world appeared to have lost its metaphysical anchor, the ultimate pivot of their existence.
No author gave a sharper and more coolly despairing analysis of this than the Prague insurance clerk Franz Kafka, who died of tuberculosis in an Austrian sanatorium in 1924. In his story “The Hunger Artist” Kafka pens a deviously compelling portrait of what has happened. The hunger artist was famous in the great days of his art, when entire cities followed every day of his fasts with frenzied curiosity. His manager knew to make him break off his fast after forty days, when interest was bound to wane. Much to his annoyance (he would have liked to go on fasting), the artist would then be led out of his cage and given a carefully chosen meal in front of the adoring crowd, complete with military band, only to start fasting again after a rest period. But the great days of the art of hunger are over, people stop coming to his performances, and the artist has been reduced to working in a circus, where the crowds on the way to seeing the wild animals simply lose interest in him, and eventually no one notices that he has simply fasted himself to death. The animal keeper buries the hunger artist without ceremony, relieved because now he can put a young panther, a magnificent animal, in the artist’s cage.
A quiet citizen: Many of the characters in Franz Kafka’s fiction are overwhelmed by nefarious and anonymous machinery.
On a very obvious level the hunger artist is the proverbial German Hungerkünstler, a poor artist who feeds greedily off the adulation his suffering creates and who dies as soon as his public loses interest. But the hunger artist who fasts for forty days, whose fame rests on his martyrdom, and who lives on “in seeming glory, honored by the world,” is also the pathetic brother of the Savior himself, a grubby messiah of the fairground whose dubious feats of self-denial have lost their appeal. He dies not heroically but out of lack of public interest. The art of hunger belonged to the spectacles of the past, we are told, but nowadays people have discovered other attractions. Reduced to a marginal place in the circus, the emaciated hunger artist who once commanded universal adoration tries to force people to notice him by fasting on and on, but the best he can hope for are fathers who point him out to their children, telling of times past, and in their eyes he can see “something of the new, coming, more merciful times.” In the end, however, his place is taken by a savage feline hunter, the embodiment of strength, freedom, and joy.
Demonstrating his miracles and his suffering on a fairground, Christ himself would not stand a chance against the indifference of a crowd hungry for novelty and sensation. The great self-denier whose agony once transfixed entire peoples has been unceremoniously swept away, and in his place has been put a panther, the very image of a pure, sinuous, pitiless will to live.
In Hubble’s world, a world that was no longer at the center of the universe and in which even matter had become at once better understood and more opaque to the human mind, old prophecies were relegated to a forgotten corner of the fairground. The conflict between faith and reason, between the knowledge of experience and the knowledge of science, and between a rationalist approach to the world as represented by the science of the nineteenth century and a new, intuitive grasp on life itself was present in the scientific debates of the day and was carried into a public debate marked by pessimism and bafflement. As the hunger artist ceased being adored after the “great turnaround,” people were looking for new attractions, new explanations, new messiahs. Amid fear and hope, the fight for a very different future was beginning to take shape.
·1924·
Men Behaving Badly
I attach no importance to life
I pin not the least of life’s butterflies to importance
I do not matter to life
But the branches of salt the white branches
All the shadow bubbles
And the sea-anemones
Come down and breathe within my thoughts
—André Breton, “The Spectral Attitudes,” 1926
WHAT IS A RATIONAL RESPONSE TO LIVING IN A WORLD THAT NO longer makes sense? In Europe, a marginal but growing and highly publicized movement believed it had found the answer: nonsense. Aggressive, subversive, gleefully celebrated nonsense. Nonsense used as a weapon.
It was all art for art’s sake in the beginning, a relieved assertion of newfound freedom after the hellish experience of war—and a rejection of the beauty, the conventions, and the art of a society that had sent men to the trenches in the name of some edifying lie. An act of anarchistic and artistic opposition to the war, it had started in Zürich, in the safety of neutral Switzerland, the temporary home of, among many others, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Romain Rolland, and Lenin.
Here, in a watering hole ambitiously named Cabaret Voltaire, a group of exiles and revolutionaries met, debated, drank, played chess, and amused themselves. Their pastimes were becoming stranger by the day: they would mount shows in which they appeared onstage in bizarre costumes, howling and singing and declaiming words that they had invented on the spot and which referred to nothing. They were proud partisans of everything improvised, messy, and meaningless. Even the name of their group had been chosen precisely because it sounded like baby language and was empty of all significance: Dada.
Together with like-minded artists in Germany, the Zürich friends had the highest hopes for their new way of seeing, of chanting the world. “How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada,” wrote Hugo Ball, one of its intellectual fathers, in 1916. “How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap.”1
This “pawnshop” contained a variety of fragments of lives, images, and mislaid beliefs, all lovingly watched over and publicized by a young man from Romania who had been born Samy Rosenstock but now went by the more mysterious and alluring name Tristan Tzara, and who made it his life’s calling to spread the new gospel throughout the world via poems, essays, and manifestos. Dada spread to German cities and finally even to Paris, where it was thankfully, even greedily received by a handful of young men in search of an idiom for their rejection of the world they had grown up in. “Dada gave the Venus de Milo an enema and permitted Laocoon and his sons to relieve themselves after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python,” wrote the painter Han
s Arp, one of the spiritual fathers of the new idiom.2
In Tzara’s words they found the force they were seeking. “Dada does not mean anything,” he had announced in his “Dada Manifesto 1918.” “How can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite, formless variation: man? . . . Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation = negation . . . We are not afraid; we aren’t sentimental. We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition. . . . Every man must shout: there is a great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep, to clean.”3
Dr. Breton Loses His Patients
THE MOST DETERMINED and most intransigent of this group of young men was André Breton, a medical student who had worked with shell-shocked soldiers during the war and who was now casting around for a way to make his mark. Born in 1896 in the Paris suburb of Pantin, Breton hated the lives and values of the petty bourgeoisie with the intimate hatred of experience. He had always wanted to break out. At school, before the war, he had been drawn to the bad boys of French literature, particularly Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and a little later also to the arch-experimentalist Apollinaire. The young man began to write poetry himself, but his poetic career was interrupted when he was drafted into the army and sent for basic training to a barracks that he would later describe as “a sewer of blood, idiocy, and mud.”
Working as a medical intern at a military hospital in Nantes, Breton, then barely twenty, encountered his first shell-shock victims, as well as the writings of Sigmund Freud, which fascinated him. In 1916 he also met a convalescing soldier whose uncompromising attitudes would give his life a new direction. Jacques-Pierre Vaché, an arts student, had been injured on the Western Front and passed his time at the hospital by drawing grotesque figures on postcards. He was remarkably handsome but seemed to disdain everyone and everything around him, reason enough for Breton to be spellbound by this patient, who was one year his senior. Vaché introduced the aspiring doctor to a life of intellectual revolt against society, and their friendship grew even more intense after Vaché’s release from the hospital. Together, the two young men talked and drank at local bars and went to the cinema. They would movie-hop for hours on end, seeing fragments of many different films, out of which they would reconstruct a narrative all their own.