Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  Richard and Anna in that same year took over the orphanage, and Richard began his parallel career teaching Greek and Latin at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, the illustrious secondary school that the older orphans attended along with the children of Berlin’s cultural elite. Richard fed his other interests and commitments (and supplemented the astonishingly small salary paid men of his rank and education in Prussia at that time) by teaching German literature at a nearby Mädchenschule (girl’s school) and holding a chaplaincy at the criminal court in the nearby neighborhood of Moabit. At thirty, Richard had come very far very fast. At twenty-five he had been an assistant pastor in a small parish church in rural Poland; five years later, he was Herr Doktor und Hofgerichtsprediger Richard Wegener, Oberlehrer zum Grauen Kloster und Direktor des Schindlerschen Waisenhauses (Herr Doctor and Royal Court Chaplain Richard Wegener, Senior Teacher in the Gray Cloister and Director of the Schindler Orphanage).

  Before we turn from this Homeric credentialing to the substance of Richard Wegener’s intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations, of which we know a little, we might pause to summarize the suitability of the Wegeners for their chosen task, since it so strongly affected Alfred Wegener’s life and his view of the world. Consider their childhood experiences: Richard knew what it was to grow up in a crowd (eleven); Anna understood in full depth the loneliness of the orphan and the needs of such children for extra care and consolation. Neither of the Wegeners made, nor would they accept, a sharp distinction between intellectual and moral education, in full accord with the convictions of their time and class. In religion they appear to have been devout rather than pious. The Wegener children were baptized in the Werder’schen Church, a few minutes away across the canal. The superintendent of the church, Pastor Steinbach, had been a fellow student of Richard’s in his time at the University of Jena. In a brief memoir of Alfred’s childhood, written by his brother Kurt sometime after 1950, Steinbach is approvingly described as a man “engagingly free of theological dogmatism.” Kurt also noted that Steinbach and Richard Wegener had been in the same fraternity (Bursenschaft) at a time when these organizations were informal and voluntary associations, rather than competitive vehicles for social advancement. Steinbach and Richard Wegener remained close friends and visited one another frequently.11

  In secular matters the Wegeners were devoted in a comprehensive and exacting way to the development of the “whole child”—according to the high standards of Berlin’s cosmopolitan version of Bildung. This could, of course, have suffocated every child within range under an avalanche of high-minded propriety, had it not been titrated with affectionate temperament and a sense of humor; the Wegeners were affectionate with each other, and they both liked and were comfortable with children—an attitude not universally distributed among teachers and orphanage directors. Yet it would be wrong to leave the impression that the Wegeners were guided in their child-rearing practices solely by some kind of commonsensical, good-natured holism made up as they went along. Berlin in 1880 was a place and an age in which metaphysical theorizing about the nature and destiny of humanity was not only an ordinary preoccupation but also something expected to have concrete significance for everyday life, at least in the households of intellectuals. Richard Wegener was a scholar, but he was also an intellectual, believing, as intellectuals do, that to those who have a sufficient grasp of the context of events and their meaning, the most ordinary acts by the most ordinary individuals exhibit a higher significance. He sought to transmit this conviction of higher significance within everyday activities to both his offspring and the orphans he supervised.

  The metaphysical visions that animated Richard Wegener’s civilizing mission were within the great mainstream of German idealism. His embrace of idealist philosophy was a part of his journey from Brandenburg to Berlin, from parish to metropolis. By the time Richard Wegener arrived in Berlin to begin his life as a university student, the pendulum of taste had swung away from the ponderous rationalism and cosmic optimism of G. W. F. Hegel toward Arthur Schopenhauer’s bracing, frank, realistic pessimism.

  Richard bought an edition of Schopenhauer’s works and admired his brilliance and honesty, but he could never reconcile himself to Schopenhauer’s arrogance and impatience with the common run of humanity. There is an admonition to Schopenhauer in one of Richard’s later books: “Grosses Genie, warum schiltst du immer ergrimmt auf die Kleinen? Wurden die Kleinen zu gross, wären die Grossen zu klein” (Great genius, why did you always rail so furiously against the little ones? If the little were greater, the greater would be diminished).12 He found a way to hold on to Schopenhauer’s honesty, clarity, and humor, while continuing to look for a hopeful and socially conscious program of action, in the philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), his own exact contemporary and a fellow Berliner.

  Richard Wegener found von Hartmann unsystematic and paradoxical but believed that his writing on modern philosophy provided entrée to some very good ideas. Von Hartmann wanted to do the impossible—to combine optimism and pessimism, rationalism and unconscious will, in short, to combine Hegel and Schopenhauer. The ultimate effect of reading this quixotic effort was to send Richard Wegener back to Kant and Schiller. He was increasingly convinced that all the tremendous activity in metaphysics in the nineteenth century had failed to resolve most of the issues raised by these thinkers at the end of the eighteenth—a conviction shared by a great many of his educated contemporaries. But he carried away from von Hartmann this eudaimonic ethics of constructive work—that happiness resides in and is constantly renewed by work.

  Richard Wegener seems to have been most attracted to the thought of Friedrich Schiller—who lived on the borderline of poetry and systematic philosophy, constantly crossing back and forth. In the work of the philosopher-poet-dramatist he found a better means of transforming the biblical narrative of man’s fall and redemption—the storybook religion of Sunday school and seminary homiletics—into a great cosmic drama of the individual’s alienated separation from the All and his return to it.

  The optimism and promise of Schiller’s worldview were finally victorious in the Wegener household. Here was the task of a thinker and a philosopher, as Richard Wegener understood it: to search for regularity buried beneath disparate appearance, to believe in and discover a single, real universal order. But there was a greater work awaiting men, beyond this philosophic reconciliation. There was the heroic task of the poet. It was not enough to gather what came before one’s own time; one faced the creative mission of going beyond one’s own finite experience. Aided by hypotheses and inventions, one should struggle to grasp the world as a whole and, simultaneously, struggle to liberate oneself from existing opinion and forge a new view of the world.

  In Schiller’s version of things, the task of life is to bring reason and sense into harmony through the Spieltrieb (spirit of play)—the aesthetic impulse, which Schiller accords full status as a third and coequal aspect of human nature. Human freedom lies not in reason but in aesthetic and creative play; we find our way in the world not by system alone but with the aid of creative insight.

  Perhaps Richard’s inclination toward Schiller was also an expression of commitment to self-cultivation and to the admiration of the classical ideals that he and Schiller so clearly shared, ideals he worked hard to pass on to his children. Whatever its fount, it supported his lifelong aspirations as a literary and drama critic and as a poet. In 1882 he published an ambitious volume of essays on German literature (his second book), Aufsätze zur Litteratur.13 In 1907, near the end of his career as an author and critic, he published a prize-winning book of drama criticism: Die Bühneneinrichtung des Shakepeareschen Theaters nach den zeitgenössischen Dramen (The production of Shakespearean theater in its contemporary setting).14

  His poetic aspirations, modest but real, culminated in the publication in 1895 of his Poetischer Fruchtgarten (A poetical kitchen-garden), a collection of lyric poems in various meters and some epigrams (including the one on Schopenhauer quo
ted above), both serious and humorous. This material was selected out of a much greater number of poetical efforts made while Alfred Wegener and his brothers and sisters were growing up, and it gives a better sense than even Richard Wegener’s academic works of the atmosphere of the household. There is a poem Theodicee, and one Hebraische; there is a poem Der Magnet, and reflections on various bible verses. These are the sorts of poems one might read to family or friends. They are earnest but unpretentious and often self-deprecating. There is a poem Butter und Ei followed immediately by one Wissenschaft und Religion. The latter two poems are both philosophical, and the former is also amusing. It concerns the envy that a lump of butter feels for egg yolks that, by jumping into a hot skillet, have given themselves a firmer character than the butter possesses. The butter, wishing to have the advantage of the egg, hurls itself into the pan—and disappears:15

  Dotter ward

  The Yolk would

  Bald sehr hart.

  soon be very hard

  Butter sogleich

  Butter immediately

  Da sie so weich,

  being so soft

  Wünschend sie sei

  wishing it could be

  Hart wie das Ei.

  as hard as the Egg

  Ging in die Pfann’

  jumped in the pan

  Und zerann.

  and disappeared

  Mit vollen lungen

  At the top of their lungs

  Lehren die Jungen

  we hear from the young

  im Unterricht

  instruction

  Uns das Gedicht:

  poetically expressed

  Butter und Ei

  Butter and eggs are, they find,

  Sind zweierlei.

  substances of a different kind

  The poem on science and religion takes the form of a dialogue between a diamond and pearl in a jewel casket. The pearl marvels at the diamond—once a lump of coal, but made clear by heat and pressure, then ground, polished, and made brilliant to break light into its rainbow components. The pearl is modest, but its luminous beauty is organic and unaltered through time; it grows but does not change. The diamond is science and education; the pearl, faith. The poem ends with a warning:

  Science and Religion have each their Crown

  Only so long as each remains, free from Envy, in its Sphere content,

  And finely honed character must guard against the Reefs of haughty Pride

  For even the purest Diamond is kilned from Carbon.

  Belief, alone untouched by the Stone,

  Without grinding, and like a Pearl,

  Rules its Realm.16

  The fundamental faith that reigned in Alfred Wegener’s childhood home was that of all idealist philosophy, once the fine distinctions, then so important and now so forgettable, are swept aside. There was room in the house of Kultur for science, religion, and philosophy, and for poetic creation, and plenty of work for willing hands. Individuals would find meaning in existence only by participating in enterprises and ideas much greater than themselves, and they must beware “the reefs of haughty pride.” This emphasis on work and creativity, on participation in large structures of thought and action—these were the ideas and concerns that governed life at 57 Friedrichsgracht during Alfred Wegener’s childhood in the Schindler Orphanage.

  Die Hütte

  While enjoying a favored position in the cultural heart of the empire and the pervasive influence of its cultural ideals, the Schindler Orphanage was also a world within walls. It had residences, storerooms, classrooms, kitchens, and laundries. It had a very large cobbled inner courtyard, with a small garden and some Linden trees (just able to grow in the dim light filtering down) surrounded by sitting benches, and a rear portal to a small playfield with natural turf giving access to the adjoining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings on both sides of the block.17 The Nikolai Haus (1674) behind the site of the Schindler Orphanage gives the flavor of the place with its paneled wood hallways and generous but not cavernous entryway. For the first few years of Alfred’s life, except for family outings and trips to church, he rarely left these precincts.

  By the time Alfred was born in 1880, Tony (seven) and Willi (six) were already in school, and Alfred spent the day with Kurt and his sister Käte, supervised by Anna and the resident domestics. They had the run of the family quarters, the courtyard, and the large institutional kitchen, but not the school or the dormitory. It was an attractive world, but it was bordered, constrained, and paved. The canal outside the front door gave some relief from the universal presence of stone walls, and the maritime traffic was pleasant to watch from the upstairs windows, as coal-fired steam tugs pulled barges through it all day and into the night. Nearby there was a pleasant little drawbridge across the canal and a sluice gate providing a handy waterfall. A few blocks to the east was the Imperial Palace, and in the opposite direction, at the end of the long block of the Friedrichsgracht, was the River Spree itself, just visible if you stuck your head out the window.

  In 1884, when Alfred Wegener was not quite four years old, his sister Käte died quite suddenly after a brief illness.18 Brother Kurt had turned six in April of that year and was then in school all day, so that Käte and Alfred were the last of the children remaining in the family quarters during school hours. Käte’s death deprived Alfred of his closest playmate. There is no written record or even secondhand recollection of the impact this made on him, but it was strong enough that thirty-four years later, when his own second daughter was born in the cold spring of 1918, he named her Sophie Käte.

  Alfred’s mother spoke about this pivotal event later with the reflective, matter-of-fact stoicism of a woman who risked her life with each childbed and faced immanently the loss of her children from a dozen or more childhood diseases, all today made either improbable or extinct by vaccination. She said that it was likely the close spacing of her last three children (1878, 1879, 1880) that had rendered them less vigorous than the older Tony and Willi, born earlier in the marriage. Moreover, the Großstadtluft (metropolitan air) had left the younger ones “blaß und müde” (pale and listless); these factors together had made Käte vulnerable and contributed to her death. After Käte’s death, Anna turned her grief and loss into increased solicitude for the two youngest remaining, Kurt and Alfred; she coddled and pursued them, worrying about their health and chances for survival.19

  The killer was Berlin itself. Industrial growth in the last few decades of the nineteenth century brought great chemical works, paper mills, machine shops, and textile and carpet factories to the city and its burgeoning suburbs. Much of this development occurred just to the north and east of the Museum Insel, and these factories were largely fueled by lignite, a poor-quality coal that produced huge quantities of fly ash containing about 30 percent sulfuric acid. In these decades it made a sad jest of the Berliner Luft, Berlin’s historical claim to fresh and refreshing air. The new industries swelled the population by more than 200,000 between 1871 and 1880, and increasing by another 450,000 over the next decade.20

  With Käte’s sudden death, this concern assumed the proportions of a crisis in the Wegener household, and Anna felt keenly a sense of personal responsibility—while she had cared successfully for the orphaned children of others, her own child had died. The crisis precipitated by Käte’s death had been building for some time, and it can be seen in photographs taken earlier that year (1884)—individual photos of the family and a group photo with the Adjunkten and the Zöglinge, the “pupils,” as the orphans were collectively known.

  In a group portrait of the residents of the orphanage taken that year, Anna and Richard show the toll taken by years of unrelieved responsibility for the welfare of so many others. Both have aged rapidly and markedly when compared with the photograph taken ten years earlier. Though the prettiness of her earlier pictures is still there just beneath the surface, Anna looks tired; at thirty-seven her hair has gone almost completely gray. Perhaps her memory that the t
hree youngest were “pale and listless” reflects her own sense of exhaustion at that time. Richard’s portrait shows him healthy and erect, but he too has gone gray, and a worried, myopic severity has crept into his expression, replacing some of the hopeful earnestness and foppish playfulness of earlier photos. Tony and Willi, in the group photo, are large and strong looking, while Kurt and Käte look intense and pale. Alfred, sitting in his father’s lap, has an expression evident in almost every photo ever taken of him: a sardonic, almost mocking, sharply examining stare directly into the camera—eyes that look out but cannot be seen into. If we compare them with his mother’s eyes (he has her features more than his father’s), hers are searching and open, whereas his are questioning, as they conceal what lies within.

  The Wegeners had by now been in Berlin for sixteen years and had directed the orphanage for eleven of those years, and they needed a place to retreat and refresh. But it was more than refreshment: they were homesick. Like many couples before and since who followed ambition from a small town to a large city, they found themselves remembering the advantages of their own rural childhoods, advantages that had weighed little at the time of their departure when balanced against the stifling parochialism of small village life. Now they were successful Berliners, in their forties and with a family, and they contemplated with alarm their own remaining children: well-behaved and well-to-do, certainly, but too often in poor health, and living always in a paved-over world, with scarcely a plant or tree in sight of their home, knowing their animals only from zoos and picture books, with the exception of the cart horses in the streets, squirrels in the park, and puddle ducks in the canal just outside the door. They had a grand residence and access to the manicured parks and immense cultural resources of a great capital city. But when all was said and done, they lived in an institution, and they had no home.