Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  20

  The Expedition Leader

  GRAZ AND GREENLAND, 1929–1930

  The whole business is a big catastrophe and there is no use concealing the fact. It is now a matter of life and death.… I do not consider Sorge’s plan of setting out on 20th October with man-hauled sledges feasible; they would not get through but be frozen to death—We shall do what we can and we need not yet give up hope of things going well.… Best wishes to all, and may we meet again happy and healthy.

  ALFRED WEGENER, 62 kilometers (39 miles) inland, to Karl Weiken at Scheideck, 28 September 1930

  Wegener returned from Greenland in 1929 in an excellent mood, with a feeling that they had accomplished their aims. Else said that when she saw him on his arrival in Graz, he looked “completely rejuvenated. The hard physical work had done him nothing but good.”1 He had brought gifts from Tobias Gabrielsen, a pair of polar bear fur kamiks for Else, and a sealskin pillow decorated with colored leather, which gifts, Else said, made their presence known principally by “their terrible stench.” She had already banished his dog whip and kamiks to the backyard, and these gifts soon followed.2

  There was, however, news of trouble, and it was serious. Even though the Notgemeinschaft had authorized the expedition, the Reichstag had not appropriated the funds, and when Wegener stopped off at the headquarters of the Notgemeinschaft in Berlin on his way back to Graz, he was told that the expedition would have to be put off for at least a year. He wrote to Georgi on 6 November, saying that this news had taken him completely by surprise and that he had protested to the Notgemeinschaft, noting that they should have told him while he was in Greenland; if they had known that the main expedition was to be postponed, they would have conducted their research very differently in 1929.3

  Hence, there would have to be a political struggle. Returning to Graz, he wrote to the Notgemeinschaft explaining all the reasons for not postponing the expedition; there were equipment and stores “on the ground” in Greenland; arrangements had been made with the Danish government for the next year, not the year after. They had left experiments on ice thickness “in progress.” That these consisted entirely of bamboo wands in holes in the ground he did not elaborate; he needed all the ammunition he could find. Wegener quickly finished his remaining “preliminary report” and sent it off to Schmidt-Ott to show him what they had gone through to prepare the way for this expedition.4

  How strange Wegener found it to be back in “civilization,” with a course of lectures to teach in general meteorology, to be once more a professor, a father, a husband, a colleague, and to walk to work in clean dry clothes, past building after building the ocher color of Scheideck. There was interesting mail for him: a long letter from du Toit thanking him for a copy of the fourth edition, and noting how completely Wegener had reworked it to bring it up to date with “our current understanding.” He also told Wegener he thought it likely that the drift of Australia to the east would soon be measured, and he urged him to come to the International Geological Congress in Pretoria, South Africa, in July 1929, so that “everyone will be able to meet the man who has revolutionized our understanding of the structure and history of the earth.”5 There was also a letter from Pierre Termier, who had recently called Wegener’s theory a beautiful dream that vanishes like smoke when you try to capture it, inviting Wegener to Paris to be Austria’s representative to the 100th anniversary of the Geological Society of France in June 1930.6

  These were welcome invitations, but also souvenirs of a former world he no longer inhabited, in which he was an active theorist of continental displacements. He was still fascinated by the westward drift of Greenland and had often talked to Georgi, Loewe, and Sorge about it on the reconnaissance from which they had just returned. However, measurements of this drift would not be part of his Hauptexpedition in 1930–1931, even though he planned to bring a geodesist to do accurate latitude, longitude, and altitude measurements and they would have radios to do time signals. He had decided they could not possibly achieve the level of accuracy that the Danes had been working with in Gothaab since 1927, and he made this clear to Georgi.7

  Wegener traveled to Berlin at the end of November to press his case. Schmidt-Ott told him that he would have to give a lecture before the ensemble of funding agencies and philanthropic individuals supporting the Notgemeinschaft, on the “economic goals of Greenland exploration.” Of course, these were exactly the sorts of claims and pretensions he despised and found inimical to sound research. If one had to make such claims in order to fund research, one should admit to oneself the hypocrisy—of which he had written to Willi Meyer—of an activity much like that of “Kepler casting horoscopes.” It was an agony for him to write the lecture and give it; he found duplicity physically painful. Else said this single lecture cost him more trouble and “headaches” than all the other expedition preparations combined.8

  Wegener was able to press his political and “practical” case successfully. His lecture was reprinted in one of Berlin’s major newspapers, the Berliner Tageblatt, as a lead story on the “economic goals of the exploration of Greenland.”9 He wrote to Georgi informing him of this and asking him to send some usable photos to illustrate the expedition report for the Notgemeinschaft.10 Within a few days of this request, Wegener and the Notgemeinschaft were in serious negotiation, and Wegener estimated the cost of the expedition at 328,000 marks; the expedition was once again “on.”11

  By 9 December, Georgi had still not sent any photos, and Wegener had to renew the request twice.12 This was another hint of trouble; they had agreed that they would jointly author a popular book on the reconnaissance expedition: this was Mit Motorboot und Schlitten in Grönland. Wegener would do most of the writing, but they were each to contribute something on their exploits and on their scientific work; authorship would be Alfred Wegener with “contributions” from the other three, with their names on the title page. Georgi continued to ignore the requests for photographs, nor did he comply with Wegener’s requests that he send the complete draft of his summary of the expedition’s meteorological work. Finally, Wegener had to write what was for him a rather stern letter, pointing out that the photographs did not belong to Georgi, but to the expedition, and that Georgi’s contract with the expedition and the Notgemeinschaft made this quite clear.13 He softened this with a Christmas greeting two days later, wishing him continued success and a 1930 as productive as their 1929, but Wegener was clearly troubled by Georgi’s sense that the photographs were “his.”14

  Wegener claimed that throughout the 1929 reconnaissance expedition none of them had ever exchanged a harsh word, but now that the expedition was over, there had been such words. Loewe wrote to Wegener on 21 December 1929; his letter crossed in the mail with Wegener’s demand that Georgi fulfill his obligations under the contract and release the photographs. Loewe told Wegener that he and Georgi had quarreled over Georgi’s assertion that the Mid-Ice Station was “his” to establish and to manage. Loewe said that he would not submit to the notion that Georgi had any special status. He said he would either resign from the expedition altogether or join the separate expedition to the east coast of Greenland; alternatively, Wegener could assure him that the meteorological work would be so arranged that he would never be involved in Georgi’s work.15

  The evidence was there for Wegener to see: Georgi resented being Wegener’s subordinate rather than coleader of an expedition that, in Georgi’s mind, was the inspiration for Wegener’s entire plan. Of course, Wegener had earlier had a plan of his own and had not seriously considered going to Greenland at all until Meinardus had contacted him during Easter week 1928. Behind Wegener’s back, Georgi had now claimed to Loewe that he, Georgi, was “in charge” of the Mid-Ice Station; further, he was already truculently insubordinate in not sharing his photos with Wegener until the latter (essentially) waved the signed contract in his face. The situation concerning the Mid-Ice Station had indeed been ambiguous; Wegener had suggested to Georgi that he would be in charge of th
e meteorology there (i.e., it would be “his”) but had never actually put him in charge of the scientific work of others, including Loewe.

  Wegener did not want to lose Loewe, whom he liked and trusted, and so he invited him and his wife to come and stay with the Wegener family in Graz during the month of January. When they arrived, Wegener entered into deep discussions with Loewe over the arrangements and costs of food, clothing, apparatus, and so on, and they began to work out the actual listing and calculation of the cost of the things that they would need to go to Greenland. Loewe got the unspoken message: he also would play an important and leading role and not be subordinate to Georgi. Doubtless, Wegener filled Loewe in on the troubles with the photographs and also on the difficult history of the merging of Georgi’s planned expedition with Wegener’s own.16

  Wegener, however, also needed Georgi. He had only a little more than two and a half months (by mid-January) to do everything. He had to find the rest of his scientific and technical staff and put them under contract; buy, assemble, and crate their food, clothing, and housing; pay for their scientific equipment; and decide the many thousands of minute details that go into such an expedition (e.g., how many boxes of nails and how many hammers would be needed, and how far apart the ringbolts on the packing crates should sit to fit onto the hooks on an Icelandic packsaddle). Of all the members of the expedition, Georgi was the logical second-in-command, even unofficially. He was at Hamburg, was a division chief, was an expert in instrumentation and photography, and had the resources of the German Naval Observatory behind him; Wegener had known him for almost twenty years. Even if Wegener had wanted Loewe for this role, Loewe was back at Lindenberg as an assistant—out in the country at the aerological station with neither time nor support for such an undertaking.

  Wegener was in touch with Georgi almost every day and sometimes more than once a day from December 1929 until the day before their departure on 1 April 1930; Wegener would often write a letter and then supplement it with a telegram that same day. Because the observatory in Hamburg had its own radiotelegraph office (Wegener had helped set it up), this was an easy means of communication. By comparison with this correspondence with Georgi, there are only a few letters from Wegener to Loewe, and almost nothing from or to Sorge. It seems, based on the scant evidence, that Georgi was correct in assuming that he was, at the least, Wegener’s “right hand man.”

  The range of topics in Wegener’s correspondence with Georgi covers every aspect of the expedition and also places Georgi as Wegener’s closest coworker, at least during the logistic phase. Wegener constantly asked Georgi to make purchases, to help him select expedition members, to take over preparation for all the filming to be done on the main expedition, and to make sure everyone had a valid passport, and he worked through his organizational plans with Georgi on a daily basis.17

  As time grew shorter, the expedition grew larger, and the amount of equipment and supplies to be gathered and shipped grew steadily from 65,000 kilograms (143,300 pounds), to 75,000 kilograms (165,347 pounds), to 90,000 kilograms (198,416 pounds), and finally to 120,000 kilograms (264,555 pounds), not counting the weight of the men and the twenty-five Icelandic ponies. For the latter Wegener contacted his old friend and comrade from 1912–1913, Vigfus Sigurdsson (1875–1950), who agreed to come along on the expedition until the end of October 1930 and would bring two assistants with him, one an experienced wrangler (Jon Jonsson) and the other a medical student (Gudmunder Gislason).18 These three Icelanders, all of whom expected to depart for Iceland in October 1930, were not part of the eventual count of the expedition members who departed in April 1930 from Europe; the latter totaled fourteen for the West Station and Mid-Ice Station and three for East Greenland and Scoresby Sound.

  Listing the members gives us a chance to see how Wegener had decided to partition the work. Wegener, of course, was the leader of the expedition, and his scientific role would be as a glaciologist. In this work he would be assisted by Fritz Loewe, keeping him close at hand at the West Station through the course of the winter. In order to satisfy Loewe’s demand that he not have anything to do with Georgi, Wegener found another meteorologist, Rupert Holzapfel (1905–1960), a young Austrian, to handle the meteorological work at the West Station.

  Georgi and Sorge would winter at the Mid-Ice Station 300–400 kilometers (186–249 miles) inland, with Georgi doing meteorology and Sorge doing studies of ice crystals, ice temperatures, and ice thickness measurements (the latter in the summer, with seismology). Wegener also hired a young geodesist, Karl Weiken (1895–1983), from Potsdam to do the gravity measurements and the trigonometric survey, and Kurt Wölcken (1904–1992) from the Geodetic Institute in Göttingen to measure (seismically) the ice thicknesses at the West Station and across the ice cap to the middle of the ice. These men would be assisted by Hugo Jülg (1902–1988), a middle school teacher, and George Lissey (1906–1964), an engineering student; all these—with the exception of Georgi and Sorge—would winter at the West Station.

  The technical demands of the expedition were daunting enough that Wegener needed engineers, mechanics, and machinists; to commit to the propeller sleds meant committing to having expert mechanics to assemble them and make them work. The two leads here were Kurt Herdemerten (1900–1951), a mining engineer and an expert on dynamite and on building roads and shaft works, and Emil Friedrichs (1900–1982), an experienced mechanic from the observatory in Hamburg, who would take care of the engine on the Krabbe and any other mechanical work.

  For the fall of 1930 only, Wegener induced Kurt Schif (1905–1990), an aeronautical engineer and friend of Kurt Wegener in Berlin, to take charge of the transport and assembly of the motor sleds; the sleds would be shipped in large crates from Finland, and the aircraft engines to power them would come from Germany. After Schif’s departure in October 1930, the sleds would be in the hands of two other mechanics, Franz Kelbl (b. 1900) and Manfred Kraus (1904–1988), who would drive and repair them in the fall, spring, and summer and serve as radio operators for the expedition during the overwintering.

  The life dates given here indicate an important aspect of Wegener’s plan: he was training a new generation of German polar scientists. All of the scientific staff were PhD-holding professional scientists, were physically strong, and had to declare their willingness to participate in the backbreaking labor of transporting their equipment from the shore up to the proposed winter station at Scheideck, as well as in the massive effort to retransport 10,000 kilograms (22,046 pounds) of material to a series of depots on the ice and eventually to the Mid-Ice Station. Most of these men were half Wegener’s age, and the rest fifteen to twenty years younger than he; this was quite deliberate on Wegener’s part.19

  Wegener did not compose a memoir concerning his preparations for this expedition; what we know about them comes from his correspondence and from the reports of others, especially Else and Georgi. Else worked by his side throughout the spring, often traveling with him to Vienna, Berlin, and Copenhagen; many of the arrangements required face-to-face contact and negotiation that could not proceed by correspondence—there was not enough time. In addition to securing everything needed by the expedition, Wegener also needed permission of the Education Ministry in Vienna to have a leave with pay and to obtain replacements to teach his courses while he was in Greenland.20 In late January he and Else went to Vienna to arrange this, and they met with Exner to ask for his help. A week later, back in Graz, they learned that Exner had died of a heart attack at the end of the first week in February. “I could not believe it,” said Else; “he was only four years older than Alfred.”21

  Exner’s sudden death so soon after their meeting in Vienna must have shaken Wegener, and here he came closest to an expression of regret that he had taken on this expedition. On the first Sunday in March he took Else and the three girls cross-country skiing in the mountains near Graz. The girls were now fifteen (Hilde), twelve (Käte), and nine (Lotte).22 On this occasion, remembered Else, “Alfred asked me quite seriously
if we would all travel with him to Greenland, overwinter in Umanak, and in the spring make Greenland dogsled trips on the sea ice, which he described as the summit of bliss.”23 She was reluctant to agree, reminding him that their oldest daughter Hilde had a kidney infection for several months in the previous year and could not be so far away from medical care; it was too risky. Moreover, she and the girls would have to sit alone in Umanak in winter while Alfred was at the West Station. She added that she had no objection, however, to the family taking their summer vacation in 1931 in Greenland.24

  By the end of March, things were moving along quite well, and Wegener could be encouraged even in the midst of his near exhaustion. The kinds of letters he was writing were now different, not so much new ordering as announcing delivery of material ready for shipment to Greenland, as in his letter to the Danish Ministry for Greenland in Copenhagen, stating that he had sent 22,000 kilograms (48,502 pounds) of compressed hay (for the ponies) from Pomerania (East Prussia) to Copenhagen to be put on board the Disko. This was the same ship he had used in 1929, and it would once again carry him to Greenland.25

  Even in March 1930, and in spite of their constant collaboration, the problem with Georgi concerning authorship and photography rights had not yet been resolved. By the middle of February the book (Mit Motorboot und Schlitten) was ready to go to press, except that Georgi had still not sent the photographs, many times requested by Wegener. In fact, Wegener had to quell the suspicion of his publisher that he had another book in progress and was diverting the photographic material there.26 Toward the end of the month (24 February), Wegener wrote again to the publisher regarding Georgi’s desire to forward the photographs but withhold the copyright.27 The publisher was clearly unwilling, but by 3 March Wegener seems to have resolved the problem by telling both Georgi and Sorge that they would get photo credit underneath each picture they had taken.28