Abstract
The dark years are the last years of Austrian independence in the shadow of Nazi Germany. Haas himself was under steady attack by Nazi sympathizers, in both Austria and Germany, who wanted him as a Jew to be removed from his post at the Vienna Academy. Haas responded by writing books for the public, describing the benefits of the scientific approach versus the pseudo-scientific claims made by Nazi representatives and followers. These years were further darkened by the murder of Dollfuẞ. Afraid of traveling to Germany, Haas sent his wife to negotiate with German publishers about his publishing income. In a number of rather entertaining reports, she describes the political changes that were taking place in Germany and the German publishing world. At last, Haas has the long-awaited position in America, albeit a temporary post.
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Notes
- 1.
Moritz Schlick (1882—1936) was born in Berlin on April 14, 1882. He studied physics and completed his studies in 1904 with a doctorate under Max Planck on a topic related to light reflection. He spent the following year 1905 in Göttingen as an assistant to Woldemar Voigt, where Schlick might have met Arthur Haas. Schlick stayed only one year in Göttingen and then began to study philosophy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. From 1911 to 1921, he had a lectureship in Rostock and Kiel but in 1922, he moved to Vienna where he took over the chair of philosophy of inductive sciences. He succeeded the philosophers and physicists Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann. During this time, Moritz Schlick dealt with questions of logic, aesthetics and ethics. In addition, he published numerous works on philosophical questions of mathematics and natural science, especially on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and on philosophical epistemology. In 1924, Schlick founded a scientific discussion circle from which the Vienna Circle later developed. He undertook numerous journeys abroad, especially to the United States. Together with Philipp Frank in Prague, he published writings on the scientific world view in which the neo-positivist theses of the Vienna Circle were represented and disseminated. In 1930, Moritz Schlick's work was published with the title Fragen der Ethik. In this work, he unequivocally denied the existence of absolute ethical values. Nor did he consider the conventional notions of norms to be desirable. In contrast, he set individual goals as the “natural inclination” of man. In his ethics, Schlick more often referred to the concept of “happiness” as one of man's goals. In the early 1930s, Schlick worked with Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whom he maintained an intensive correspondence. Moritz Schlick was murdered in Vienna on June 22, 1936 by one of his former students Hans Nelböck on the way to university.
- 2.
EBH to AEH (Taormina, April 9, 1934).
- 3.
Tripoli had served since 1911 as the capital of the Italian colony of Tripolitania, which had just been expanded by the occupation of the Cyrenaica by Mussolini in 1933–1934 to form the larger colony of Libya.
- 4.
Guido Beck (1903–1988) studied physics at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate on the theory of relativity in 1925 under Hans Thirring. Shortly afterwards Beck wrote a paper on the Compton effect, which also influenced Haas’ thinking. Beck worked first at the University of Bern, then again in Vienna under Ehrenhaft, and from February 1928 for four years as first assistant to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig. In 1930/31, Beck worked at Cambridge with Ernest Rutherford, then in Copenhagen, and also in Prague with Philipp Frank before he moved to Kansas in 1934. However, he did not stay there for long but taught at the University of Odessa from 1935 to 1937, at the invitation of Jakow Iljitsch Frenkel. When the political situation in the Soviet Union darkened, Beck left via Copenhagen to France. The conquest of France by Nazi Germany endangered him as a Jew and he went to neutral Portugal in 1941 and from there to Argentina in 1943, where he taught at the University of Buenos Aires. He was an important advisor to Argentinean President Juan Perón and played a major role in the development of nuclear physics research in South America.
- 5.
Ann Tizia Leitich (1896—1976) was an Austrian reporter who lived in the US and Germany from 1921 to 1928, where she became known for her witty social reports. In 1928 she returned to Vienna where she wrote more than fifteen books on various socio-political, historical and geographical topics.
- 6.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, April 21, 1934).
- 7.
Pet form of Beatrice.
- 8.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, April 22, 1934). The birthday party was the delayed celebration of Emma Beatrice Haas’ birthday, which Arthur wanted to prepare with the children for her return.
- 9.
EBH to AEH (Rome, April 5, 1934).
- 10.
These might have been the last fights of the so-called Röhmputsch, albeit that only light weapons were used. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria (1869—1955) was a last hope for opponents of the National Socialists. His followers fought to prevent the National Socialist state by re-establishing the Kingdom of Bavaria as a corporative state. Rupprecht did indeed have contacts with SA leader Röhm but could not decide to resist. Rupprecht narrowly escaped the purges following the Röhm coup in 1934, maintained contact with opposition groups and went into exile in Italy.
- 11.
AEH to EBH (Sattendorf, July 4, 1934).
- 12.
This is Maria Calabek who had been married to Ludwig Repototschnig (1891—1945) since 1931. While her husband was a member of the banned NSDAP, she was considered a sympathizer of the movement. Cf. Stefan Sienell, Das Verwaltungs- und Dienstpersonal, 221–223.
- 13.
According to the description of personal infirmities, this is the accountant Leopold Liegler (1882—1949) who had worked in the accounting department at the Academy since 1914. He had applied unsuccessfully in 1924 to succeed Kohl as first actuary. The fact that the position was taken, in his place, by Arthur Haas was probably one of the reasons for the internal dispute. The obituary in the Österreichische Zeitung of October 13, 1949, probably did not take into account the resulting anti-Semitism of the deceased but rather portrayed Liegler more as an intellectual resistance fighter, due to his past as a social democrat: “Anyone who had the opportunity at the turn of the years 1944 and 1945 to meet with the now deceased Leopold Liegler could not have believed that this terminally ill man with his weakened, crippled body would live for several more months. But in this organism dwelt a tenacious, strong spirit, sustained by the passionate desire to live to see the end of the hated Nazi rule, and this dogged will not only saved Liegler, but also caused the death candidate to recover, blossom and appear younger after the liberation of Vienna. With fiery zeal he threw himself into the work of building a new state system, which was pressing from all sides.” Cf. Stefan Sienell, Das Verwaltungs- und Dienstpersonal, 266–269.
- 14.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, July 27, 1934).
- 15.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, August 2, 1934).
- 16.
AEH to EBH (Sattendorf, August 29, 1934).
- 17.
Membership in the Vaterländische Front was requested by the government for academic and government related positions, consequently every third Austrian joined the movement. Cf. Karl Siegmund, John Dawson, Kurt Mühlberger, Kurt Gödel – das Album (Wiesbaden: Vieweg Verlag, 2006), 48.
- 18.
Arthur Haas, Die Umwandlungen der chemischen Elemente (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1935), 104.
- 19.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, November 29, 1934).
- 20.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, December 2, 1934).
- 21.
In 1929 at the instigation of Arnold Sommerfeld, Walter Gerlach (1889–1979) was appointed from his position as chair of experimental physics in Tübingen to succeed Wilhelm Wien in Munich, where Gerlach established a research field in applications of spectroscopy methods in materials analysis and also in chemistry, biology and medicine. Later he became head of the secret German uranium project, which aimed at building a nuclear reactor. After the war and his imprisonment and internment at Farm Hall by the British, Gerlach served as rector of the University of Munich from 1948 to 1951.
- 22.
EBH to AEH (Berlin, December 5, 1934).
- 23.
This was presumably Walter Jolowicz (1908—1996), son of the aforementioned Leo Jolowicz (1868—1940) who owned the Gorch Fock antiquarian bookshop and was a good friend of Arthur Haas from his Leipzig days. Leo Jolowicz had founded the Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft (Academic Publishing Company) where Haas mainly published, along with De Gruyter in Berlin. Until the 1930s, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft was the publishing house with the most Nobel Prize winners in the field of natural sciences in Germany. Walter Jolowicz together with his brother-in-law, the chief editor Kurt Jakoby, ran the Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft at the time of Emma’s visit. But already in 1938, the publishing company was “aryanized” and Walter Jolowicz emigrated to the United States where he called himself Walter Johnson. There he founded the Academic Press New York together with his brother-in-law Kurt Jakoby. However, in 1934 the academic publishing company did everything to make Emma Haas’ stay, as the wife of their successful author, as pleasant as possible; they even provided the car for her tours and trip from Berlin to Leipzig. Cf. Klaus G. Saur, Verlage im “Dritten Reich “ (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2013), 10.
- 24.
EBH to AEH (Berlin, December 9, 1934).
- 25.
Forschungen und Fortschritte (Research and Progress) were the annual reports generated by the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
- 26.
Peter Debye (1884—1966) was a Dutchman who studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at the TH Aachen and followed him to Munich. After the death of Otto Wiener in Leipzig in 1927, Debye became his successor and then became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin from 1934 to 1939. He emigrated to the United States in 1939 and became director of the Chemistry Institute at Cornell University, where he remained until the end of his life.
- 27.
These measures did, however, frequently follow concepts already developed in the days of the Weimar Republic, concepts that had only become enforceable through dictatorial measures. Such appreciation could only be possible because many closed their eyes to anti-Jewish measures and decrees.
- 28.
Herbert Cram was the son-in-law of Walter De Gruyter, the founder of the publishing house, and took over management after his death in 1923. Cram successfully managed the publishing house through the years of the Third Reich, building success through adaptation. In 1962, Cram tried to re-establish business relations with Emma Haas, which she found less charming after these developments. For more on Herbert Cram, cf. Angelika Königseder, Walter De Gruyter – Ein Wissenschaftsverlag im Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016).
- 29.
EBH to AEH (Leipzig, December 10, 1934).
- 30.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, December 12, 1934).
- 31.
This was the Villa Auersperg at Trazerberggasse 6, a single-story villa that was most probably built around 1855 after the demolition of the previous building; Vinzenz Carl Fürst v. Auersperg was the owner of this property. He was followed as owner by the industrialist family Schrantz (later Hutter & Schrantz), followed by the Jewish pediatrician and writer Dr. Otto Almoslino who established a home for Jewish children there. So it was Jewish children, often Eastern Jewish children, who found a home there and Arthur Haas thus expressed his prejudices against the increasing immigration of Polish and Galician Jews to Vienna. One year after the Anschluss, in 1939, the villa fell to the city architect Siegfried Schlosser. Dr. Otto Almoslino emigrated via Istanbul to Palestine. For further details see Ober St, Veit An Der Wein, accessed January 31, 2021, https://www.1133.at/document/view/id/1218.
- 32.
Maria Nemeth (1897—1967) was one of the leading opera voices (soprano) in Vienna during the interwar years. She was a member of the Vienna State Opera from 1924 to 1942/46.
- 33.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, December 4, 1934).
- 34.
EBH to AEH (Berlin, December 5, 1934).
- 35.
Karl Sudhoff had become a member of the NSDAP just one year earlier, in 1933. This was an opportunistic step to save his institute and life's work, a step taken by many German scientists in those days. With his eighty-first birthday, he retired for good and died four years later in 1938 in Salzwedel. Cf. Thomas Rütten, “Karl Sudhoff and ‘the Fall’ of German Medical History,” in Locating Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 95–114.
- 36.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, January 5, 1935).
- 37.
Egon von Schweidler (1873—1948) studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna after graduating from the Schottengymnasium in 1890. He received his doctorate in 1895 and became an assistant to Franz Exner. In the following years he worked with Stefan Mayer investigating the properties of various radioactive substances, in particular the effects of external magnetic fields. In 1911 he was appointed Associate Professor in Vienna but in the same year he moved to Innsbruck where he remained until 1926, before returning to Vienna as full professor at the Institute of Physics. From 1929—1933 he was secretary of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, from 1933—1938 he was secretary general and from 1939—1945 he held the office of vice president.
- 38.
Robert Lach (1874—1958) is considered a lesser-known musicologist and composer who studied under the founder of musicology in Vienna, Guido Adler (1855—1941) and became his successor in 1927, as professor at the University of Vienna. Lach’s most famous contributions to music history were recordings and descriptions of the songs of Russian prisoners of war from the First World War, which he published in three volumes through the publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences between 1926 and 1931. In doing so, he worked closely with anthropologists Rudolf Pöch and Otto Reche mentioned above, who sought to confirm the superiority of the Germanic race in their anthropological studies. [Cf. Monique Scheer, “Captive Voices: Phonographic Recordings in the German and Austrian Prisoner-of-War Camps of World War I,” in Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones, eds. Reinhard Johler, Christian Marchetti, Monique Scheer (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010), 295–302.] Lach was a close friend of Othenio Abel, whose poems he set to music for voice and piano accompaniment between 1930 and 1940. Through this collaboration, an anti-Semitic and pro-national-socialist attitude probably developed. Lach had been a member of the NSDAP since 1933 and, along with Otto Reche, belonged to a secret academic association called Bärenhöhle (Bear Cave). Organized by Othenio Abel, Bärenhöhle members pursued anti-Jewish university policies and used racist arguments to denigrate colleagues; Abel also agitated against other people of Jewish origin in his personal environment and in public life.
- 39.
The following is recorded in the list of estates held by the Austrian National Library concerning Erich Müller von Asow: Müller von Asow (1892—1964) studied musicology, ethnology and education at the University of Leipzig from 1912 and received his doctorate in 1915 with his dissertation “Die Mingottischen Opernunternehmungen.” He then worked as an assistant director at Leipzig's New Theatre and in 1917 became artistic director of the First Modern Music Festival in Dresden. From 1926, he taught musicology as a lecturer and from 1931, he headed the music department at the Central Europe Institute in Dresden. Between 1933 and 1945 he worked as a freelance musicologist and after 1945 founded and directed the International Musicians’ Letter Archive. Müller von Asow was a specialist in musician epistolography; he initiated the Heinrich Schütz Society (1922) and the German Chopin Society (1959). He published, among other things, a Deutsches Musiker-Lexikon (1929) as well as Die Musiksammlung der Bibliothek zu Kronstadt (1930) and edited letters from Handel, Bach, Brahms and Reger. Less well known is the fact that Erich Müller von Asow often used material from the texts of Jewish colleagues for his numerous music-historical writings without seeing the necessity to quote or mention the authors. In 1934 he was co-author of Handbuch der Judenfrage, where he wrote the chapter on Jews in music. In this, he identified numerous composers and musicians as Jews and spoilers of German music. He also did not shy away from so identifying German musicians who were personally not suited to him. Cf. Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler 1845—1955 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 173–174.
- 40.
Letter of January 6, 1934 from Robert Lach to Erich Müller von Asow, reprinted in Gerhard Oberkofler, Manfred Mugrauer, Georg Knepler: Musikwissenschaftler und marxistischer Denker aus Wien (Insbruck: StudienVerlag, 2014), 69–70.
- 41.
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Musik und Theater, published by Richard Batka and Ludwig Hevesi from 1909 to 1922.
- 42.
Robert Lach, Orientalische Gesänge vol. 1 (Wien: Adolf Holzhausen, 1917).
- 43.
Victor Junk, “Orientalische Gesänge für eine Singstimme, mit Klavierbegleitung, von Robert Lach,“ Der Merker IX/8 (1918): 303; “Moderne Bewertungen sind allerdings vernichtend,“ in Peter Revers, Das Fremde und das Vertraute – Studien zur Musiktheoretischen und Musikdramatischen Ostasienrezeption (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1997), 95–97.
- 44.
Robert Lach, Gesänge russischer Kriegsgefangener vol. 1, 1929—1940, vol. 2, 1930—1939, vol. 3, 1928—1931 (Wien: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften).
- 45.
Letter by Robert Lach to Erich H. Müller (Berlin, August 24, 1933). (Quelle: ONB, Musiksammlung, Lach Robert).
- 46.
Heinrich Ritter von Srbik (1878—1951) was an historian at the University of Vienna. He held the office of Austrian Minister of Education from 1929—1930, an office that he used to appoint Robert Lach to the chair of musicology. Srbik was also a member of the anti-Semitic professors’ association Bärenhöhle, already known to us. Srbik joined the NSDAP at the beginning of National Socialist rule in Austria from 1938 to 1945. Also, from 1938 to 1945, Srbik was president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
- 47.
The Carl Schurz Foundation was established in 1930, named in honor of the late German revolutionary who was later an American senator and Secretary of the Interior. The founders were German immigrant industrialists who had built a fortune in the United States, including Ferdinand Thun, Gustav Oberlaender, Henry Janssen, and Hanns Gram, who each wished to promote and improve the teaching of German language and culture, and to foster friendship between the United States and German-speaking countries. CF. Horst Heidermann, Klaus Vollmer, Millionäre und Mäzene (Wuppertal: Köndgen, 2014).
- 48.
Request by Arthur Haas to the High Presidium of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna (February 19, 1935), (Akt 135/1935).
- 49.
EBH to AEH (München, July 29, 1935).
- 50.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, July 30, 1935).
- 51.
Heuriger is the name given to taverns in Central Austria at which local winemakers serve their new wine–also called Heuriger–under a special license, in alternate months during the growing season.
- 52.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, August 6, 1935).
- 53.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, August 8, 1935).
- 54.
AEH to President, Court Councilor Dr. Oswald Redlich (Vienna, August 8, 1935).
- 55.
AEH to EBH (Vienna, August 17, 1935).
- 56.
AEH to EBH (Paris, September 30, 1935).
- 57.
Grete Haas to EBH (Vienna, December 12, 1935).
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Wiescher, M. (2021). The Dark Years. In: Arthur E. Haas - The Hidden Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80606-4_18
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