THE KAISER WILHELM SOCIETY

The Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS) was one of the most important scientific institutions in the twentieth century and for modern science. In 1911, the German state, private industry, and science came together to establish an institution consisting of scientific institutes outside the university system with world-class facilities and researchers who had been liberated from teaching obligations. The first institutes were funded largely by private donations and were devoted to subjects of interest to German industry. The German or Prussian state also contributed, with the result that the KWS was a hybrid public–private institution.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWIs) quickly established a reputation for excellence in scientific research, boasted many Nobel laureates, and became the envy of other scientists inside and outside Germany. The KWS managed to thrive through the First World War, the postwar inflation, the new German experiment with democracy, and onset of the Great Depression. When Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in 1933, the KWS was the most important institution in German science, and German science arguably led the world.

The relationship between science and society should be seen not only in terms of politics influencing science, or even science influencing politics, but more with the two serving as resources for each other, as Mitchell Ash has argued. National Socialism had a profound effect on German science, just as German scientists had a profound effect on the Third Reich.

BACKGROUND

The story of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (KWI für Physik, KWIP) begins with Albert Einstein. In 1914, Max Planck lured his young colleague to Berlin with an attractive package of positions and benefits that allowed Einstein to work without any teaching obligations. Two years later, Einstein published his work on general relativity and quickly became famous. In 1917, Einstein was given a “paper” Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) including a salary, an office, and grant money he could dispense. Four years later, Einstein received the Nobel Prize. Max von Laue, also a Nobel laureate, became the second director of the institute and handled most of the administration. Einstein was one of the few German scientists who had real political significance in Germany because of his fame, outspoken internationalism during the First World War and Weimar Republic, public advocacy of Zionism, and public criticism of anti-Semitism. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, Einstein was in the United States, where he stayed.

Max Planck, another Nobel laureate for physics who became president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, KWS) in 1930, wanted very much to establish a “real” KWIP. He managed to do this with money from the American Rockefeller Foundation, despite the Foundation's misgivings about the policies of the National Socialist (NS) government. After all, this came after the purge of the German civil service in 1933 and passage of the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935.

CONSTRUCTED CONTINUITY – MANUFACTURED SUPPRESSION

Contemporary discussion of the “zero hour” (Stunde Null) – sometime between the end of war and monetary reform – was replaced long ago by historiographic discussion of a dominating continuity, especially with regard to West German economic and science elites. On the other hand, in a 1995 article, Mitchell Ash concluded that personal continuity in the scientific community did not happen of its own accord. In fact, it was constructed with persistence and finesse in the course of the denazification of “incriminated” individuals and networks. This chapter will use this thesis to demonstrate that the associated mental procedure – in popular psychology referred to as the “repression” (“Verdrängung”) of participation in National Socialist rule, violence, and crime – was more than just an unconscious psychological process. At the same time, it was a communicative process used by the scientific elites while reconstituting their disciplines and institutions in postwar Germany. As such, it was bound to a manner of discourse that first had to be established, tested, and agreed upon; its message, however, had to be adjusted repeatedly to accommodate the changing political constellations and social contexts of the postwar era. But “repression” was not only a mental but also an active process, when scientific communities unburdened themselves of overly “incriminated” colleagues and tried to drive them out of their circles. That is, “repression” was multifaceted, a carefully and elaborately manufactured product of individuals, institutions, and networks. It was a constitutive element of the construct “continuity.”