Alfred Wegener
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Wegener had included in this letter (of 9 January 1918) a compilation of all the mentions he could find of his displacement theory. This list of references has been lost, but it likely contained almost all references to the theory in German and French geological and geographical periodicals, as well as Dutch periodicals; all these would have been available to him at the Geographical Institute in Sofia. The list cannot have been very long, as exhaustive literature reviews made in the early 1920s turned up about twenty items prior to the end of the war, and many of these were short acknowledgments of the existence of the hypothesis, rather than scientific engagements with its content.
The list certainly would have featured Rudzki, Dacqué, Andrée, Lundager, Semper, Diener, and Soergel, as well as perhaps Koßmat and Tornquist. All of these authors’ publications would have been available to Köppen in Hamburg, and all of them could have been read in a day or two. They would have immediately shown that, whatever reservations there might be about Wegener’s overall displacement theory, there were strong supporters of his geophysical approach, and that there were geologists who favored both displacement of the poles and displacement of the continents as necessary in any general theory of the history of Earth.
It took almost three months for Wegener to clarify these arguments sufficiently that Köppen began to understand them. They exchanged letters about once a month in March, April, and May of 1918.107 One would not say that Wegener struggled to explain this to Köppen, but he certainly labored. He spent a lot of time correcting the misunderstandings of Semper and Diener, who were under the misapprehension that the evidence for isostasy was somehow equivocal, or that there were other interpretations of gravity data than that the floor of the ocean was more dense than the continental surfaces. Wegener patiently explained that while it was true that Rudzki in his 1916 review had thought that Wegener might have overstated the size of this difference (something that Wegener was willing to admit), this did not change the overall situation. He had to explain to Köppen that the notion of a “mass defect” or a “positive or negative gravity anomaly” did not mean that something was wrong with the mass of Earth, or that gravity in some spot was somehow incorrect, but only that gravity measured in some place was either less than expected or greater than expected given the estimated distribution of mass. It was a rhetorical figure to speak of a “defect.”
Along with the gravity data, Wegener patiently explained, one had to consider geological data at the same time. If there were many possible distributions of mass that would account for the gravity observations, most of these made little geological sense. Wegener continued this line of argument to talk about the continuity of mountain ranges across the Atlantic. When two mountain ranges on opposite sides of the Atlantic had almost identical mineralogy (something accepted by geologists), the assumption was that they were the same mountain range, now separated by an ocean, either because a former Atlantic continent had sunk or because the continents had drifted apart. But, said Wegener, let us imagine that there is some measurable chance, say, 10 percent, that the mineralogy is just a coincidence. Thus, when you have two mountain ranges, the chance of coincidence in their identical mineralogy would be 1 in 100; with four mountain ranges, 1 in 10,000; and so on. With a small chance of so many geological coincidences, as well as geophysically compelling evidence that the sinking of a former Atlantic continent was impossible, the displacement theory then gained force.108
Home Leave, 1918
Eventually, Wegener just had to give up, as he had with him none of his books out of which he might have explained the numerical values for various gravity corrections and scenarios. In despair, he wrote that since Köppen could not understand explanations of these phenomena given by Helmert and Rudzki in their published work, and since he could not seem to get maps with the kind of projections that could show him the proper continental reconstructions, he would just have to wait until his planned leave in May and June in Marburg. He hoped that Köppen could come, both to discuss this and to see their new apartment. They would be moving to the outskirts of town to a high-ceilinged, floor-through apartment on the Gisselbergerstraße, facing a wooded park that ran along the bank of the river Lahn.109 He would have three weeks of leave plus a week of travel days.
Wegener was anxious to go home, naturally, but with special reason this time. He had not had leave in almost a year, and he had not seen Else since the previous November. Moreover, she had conceived a child during his last home leave in the late summer of 1917, and in early March 1918 she had given birth to a second daughter, Sophie Käte. The child was named for Alfred’s sister (who had died in childhood in 1884), and Alfred had never seen her. Moreover, Hilde was nearly four years old and barely knew her father.110
The Wegeners used the home leave to dismantle their apartment on the Biegenstraße near the train station and move to their new home approximately 3 kilometers (2 miles) to the southwest. Alfred also spent part of the leave working with Else on the finishing touches to her translation of Koch’s book on the Greenland traverse; in May the Prussian Ministry of Culture had finally awarded Wegener 1,500 marks to support publication of this book.111 It was an odd time, and their life was in every way the negative image of their life before the war. Back then Alfred had gone away for several weeks of military training each year and been home, very much at home, the rest of the time. Now he was constantly away, except for these few weeks of annual leave.
While in Marburg, Wegener went to the university to confer with Richarz and review his situation. In May the university had petitioned the Ministry of Education once again for a professorship for Wegener in cosmic physics, but there had been no response.112 Wegener’s financial situation was even more precarious in 1918 than usual because of the extra expense of living in Sofia, and he told Richarz of his difficulties. Richarz had offered, as early as 1912, to help Wegener make ends meet out of his own private resources. Wegener was unwilling to accept charity, but Richarz, who had his own foundation, the Bernd-Richarz Stiftung, reconfigured the offer in June as a prize honoring Wegener’s scientific work, in the amount of 800 marks, to be paid out in late July. This would barely allow Else to maintain the apartment home, when combined with the stipend as extraordinary professor, but it was something.113
Wegener had only just returned to Sofia in early July when the entire staff of the Central Weather Bureau in Sofia was ordered to the western front. The Germans launched repeated offensives in the spring and summer of 1918 and had broken through the Allied lines in a number of places, although they were unable to hold all of their gains. From July to September Alfred was on the western front helping to reestablish a network of field weather stations immediately behind the ground gained by the German army in northern France, just inside the Belgian border. He was constantly on the move and often under artillery fire. The Germans were making extensive use of gas warfare in these offensives, and weather stations had to be numerous and closely packed (parallel to the front) in order to determine those areas in which the prevailing wind would send the gas toward the enemy and not toward their own lines; the weather increasingly determined the timing of attack and retreat.114
Dorpat, Estonia
Already in July 1918 it was clear to most officers on the western front that Germany would lose the war and would have to sue for peace. When this would happen was not clear, but it would happen. Wegener’s time on the western front was the most dangerous work he had done since the advance into Belgium in 1914. It was very far from the “garrison duty” to which he was supposed to be restricted; the German army in 1918 was far from observing such niceties.
At some time during the summer of 1918, Wegener began to make plans for the end of the war and his career afterward. It was increasingly likely that Germany would have to give up Alsace, and this meant that the plan that he and Kurt had formulated to relocate to the University of Straßburg was no longer tenable: it would again be a French university (renamed Strasbourg), as it had been before 1871.
In 1917 Germany had occupied all three of the Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and although the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) had ruled these nations to be independent, at the end of hostilities on the eastern front all three were still occupied by a large German army garrison. In the summer of 1918, someone in the high command of the German army determined that it would be a good idea to occupy these troops by reopening the University of Dorpat as a German institution and allowing the university students among the garrison to continue their education. This reopening as a German institution was to commence in September 1918.
Once again, it was clear that Köppen played a hand in advancing his son-in-law’s career. Köppen, who had been born and raised in Russia and was a fluent speaker of Russian, had received an honorary degree from the University of Dorpat in 1901.116 In August 1918 he had written to his colleague Boris Ismailovich Sreznevskij (1857–1934), professor of meteorology at Dorpat, presumably to arrange a “call” for Wegener. This appeal was apparently a success, as Wegener received a letter from Köppen in September 1918 announcing that he would receive such a call.117 Two weeks later, Wegener wrote to Carl Becker (1876–1933), who would later become the Prussian minister of culture, to confirm his acceptance of the offer that he should go to Dorpat and teach meteorology to German garrison troops pursuing university study.118
Wegener was still at the front in late September 1918, at Marle, in Picardy, well inside France. He was to be reassigned to the University of Dorpat in October and would proceed there after a short home leave in Marburg. Wegener settled in quickly in Dorpat in October, having found lodgings near the astronomical observatory. He wrote to Köppen on his own birthday, 1 November 1918, with news of his colleagues, his plans for a colloquium, the need to plan lectures for the winter and spring semesters, and his plans for purchasing equipment to update the meteorological observatory—since the equipment that he had was “somewhat primitive but certainly still useful.”119 The most useful part of this equipment turned out to be the typewriter in the Army Weather Service office, on which he was writing up his lectures on the investigation of the upper layers of the atmosphere, lectures he planned to give in the spring of 1919. Everything seemed to be moving along, and Kurt had confirmed that Straßburg would not remain German.120 The choice of Dorpat seemed plausible, as its atmosphere was thoroughly German, and there would be a professorship of meteorology, which might extend for him into the peace.
All of these plans and dreams concerning Dorpat came to a crashing halt as soon as they had begun. Even though it was clear that the war was ending, the German Admiralty ordered the fleet to sea at the end of October 1918, and the sailors at Wilhelmshaven mutinied. Their revolt quickly spread to Berlin, where the workers declared a republic and forced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, who relinquished the throne on 9 November. Two days later, an armistice was signed on the western front. Events moved quickly after that. On the thirteenth of November Russia annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The German evacuation of the Baltic republics began almost immediately, and the German command declared the University of Dorpat closed. Wegener was ordered to Berlin, where he arrived at the end of November, and where he was demobilized in early December. He returned to Marburg on 5 December 1918.121
In Marburg he found his wife and his two daughters living in a single room in their apartment, on Gisselbergerstraße, trying to stay warm using wood from the university’s forest to fuel their coal stove. Wegener was thirty-eight years old, and he was once again an unsalaried instructor preparing to announce courses of lectures for the winter semester 1918/1919—in general meteorology and in general astronomy. His extraordinary professorship had expired with his captain’s commission in December; he now had no salary at all. His entire publication record from 1913 through 1918 contained fewer items (and many fewer pages) than he had produced in the academic year 1911–1912. He had no data to work with, no manuscripts in process, no prospects of publication, no students, no support, and no clear research program. He was cold, exhausted, and broke. But he was home, and his war was over.
15
The Geophysicist
HAMBURG, 1919–1920
Because of the extremely intricate paths that scientific ideas follow in the course of their development, it is often very difficult to trace their origin and growth. It is therefore not surprising that erroneous accounts abound, particularly in the works of younger investigators. Because our findings increase in value when we pursue their origins, and because this pursuit is itself extremely interesting, it is well worth the effort, now and again, to take such a retrospective view … questions of priority are very difficult to decide; therefore we may say with Mephisto: “who can say what is foolish, what is brilliant, if he has not contemplated the past?” There are of course original ideas, but they enter the stage so occasionally, and in such varied costume, and receive at first so little notice, that they generally originate and evolve in many minds, independently of one another.
WLADIMIR KÖPPEN (1920)
As soon as the Christmas vacation was over, Wegener returned to teaching in the (now) unheated lecture halls of the University of Marburg. There was no coal, although there was gas (or kerosene) in small quantities for illumination a few hours of each day. His lecture courses were titled “General Meteorology” and “Introduction to Astronomy with Illustrations and Demonstrations”—the latter a short course from February to April, in a semester calendar designed especially for returning veterans.1 Almost as soon as he returned to this academic career (many times ended and restarted), he learned that it was—at Marburg—finally really over for him. The administration had made one last attempt to procure a professorship for him, and the ministry had replied, in no uncertain terms, not only that they would not create a professorship for Wegener but also that they would forbid his reappointment as an extraordinary (associate) professor any longer, in expectation of such a future appointment. He could, of course, stay on as an instructor, but without a guaranteed salary.2 There was no animus toward Wegener, but Germany was defeated and financially staggered and had lost at least two universities: Dorpat and Straßburg. Moreover, nationalization of universities in the newly independent nation-states of Hungary, Romania, and Poland, among others, was forcing repatriation of dozens of German “professors in rank,” now without professorships or a means of making a living.
Fortunately, for Wegener, there was a way out. In November 1918, shortly after the armistice, Köppen had received a visit in Hamburg from Ernst Kohlschütter (1870–1942), whose post of Admiralitätsrat was roughly equivalent to an “Undersecretary of the Navy” in the United States. Kohlschütter stayed for two or three weeks, and he was in Hamburg to plan the future, in the postwar period, of the Deutsche Seewarte (German Naval Observatory). Kohlschütter was an astronomer and mathematician who had participated in an expedition to East Africa to make gravity measurements over the East African rift valleys; it was this expedition that had produced evidence of the negative gravity anomalies (less gravity than expected) that had so impressed Wegener and had figured in his account of splitting and rifting of the continents.3 Kohlschütter was an expert in astronomical position finding and nautical astronomy and, like Wegener, an enthusiast of improved and modified geodetic instruments.
The ostensible occasion for Kohlschütter’s visit was to sound out Köppen about a replacement for
Louis Großman (1855–1917), who had headed the Weather Forecast Division (Abteil M.) at the observatory until his death the previous year. Köppen brought the conversation around to his own replacement. He had turned seventy-two in September 1918 and would soon celebrate his fortieth year at the observatory; he was anxious to retire and pursue his scientific work. He suggested to Kohlschütter that he consider Kurt Wegener, but by Köppen’s account in a letter to Else of 2 December 1918, Kohlschütter asked instead about Alfred. Köppen told him that Alfred wanted to pursue an academic rather than government career, and he passed along three names, with Kurt heading the list.4
Kohlschütter was, nevertheless, determined to approach Alfred, and he wrote to Köppen about it. He pointed out that were Alfred to accept the position at the Seewarte, there would be several places where Alfred might give lectures in Hamburg: the Colonial Institute, the Maritime Academy, and especially the university, just then opening its doors for the first time since 1895.
Köppen in turn wrote to Else and asked her to intercede with Alfred: “What I mean is, Alfred should grab it—it won’t be easy to find an offer as good. It is very uncertain that professorships in cosmic physics or meteorology will be offered in the foreseeable future in German universities.” He went on to point out that if Alfred should take the job in Hamburg, there was nothing to stop him from accepting a call to a professorship elsewhere if such should appear.5
Neumayer had created Köppen’s position, meteorologist of the observatory, for him in 1879. Previous to that he had been head of Division III, in charge of assembling weather forecasts, but the new position was “Department Head without Department” (Abteilungsvorstand ohne Abteilung), meaning that he had no real official duties and was free to pursue scientific work. This wonderful freedom persisted until Neumayer’s retirement in 1903, when Neumayer’s naval codirector, Captain (later Admiral) Herz, won a bureaucratic struggle to make it less a scientific institute and more an administrative clearinghouse for naval affairs and took over the directorship of the observatory. He had apparently been unpopular in the navy, an achievement he duplicated at the observatory.6