Abstract
On March 12, 1938 the German army crossed the border into Austria. By the following September Gustav Bergmann had managed to send his first wife, Anna, and his daughter, Hanna, to safety in England. In October he managed to leave Austria himself. He first went to the Hague in the Netherlands to see Otto Neurath, who gave him enough money to assist his passage to New York. Bergmann’s prospects were quite uncertain at that time and it was not clear that he would ever be able to repay Neurath. Neurath told Bergmann not to worry about repayment; he merely requested that Bergmann writes something about his recollections of the Vienna Circle. Bergmann wrote the following letter on the S. S. Staatendam while enroute to New York City to begin his new life.
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Notes
Bergmann spent a large portion of 1931 in Berlin working with Albert Einstein and Walter Mayer. He entered law school soon after he had returned to Vienna.
Reference unknown.
The “brief period” to which Bergmann here refers is the period extending from 1934 up to the Anschluß in 1938. In 1934 Engelbert Dollfuß essentially dissolved the Austrian Republic and had a new constitution drawn up that reorganized Austrian society along the lines of professional-vocational “corporations”, which were to replace political parties and factions as the political representatives of individual citizens.
Literally the Triarians were the “triarii”, soldiers in the third line in the Roman army. The term is sometimes used figuratively to indicate a last line of strong and reliable defenders. In what may be a word-play Bergmann here also seems to use the term to mean “triumvirate”.
Bergmann is certainly referring here to Heidegger’s Being and Time,in which the topic of death figured prominently.
The meaning of this idiomatic expression is not clear. One of our readers has suggested that the “Terrasse” in question may have been portions of Viennese coffee-houses where outdoor seating was provided. If so then Feigl, calling Waismann a “coffee-house person”, is perhaps accusing him of being intellectually fickle, always in need of (and in search of) a new “fad”. On the other hand Feigl may have been saying that Waismann was a person who had a deep need to be loyal to someone or some idea. Either of these interpretations - which oddly seem to be both contradictory and complementary - seem to fit the context as well as this reading of the expression.
Bergmann is perhaps alluding here to Schiller’s aphorism: Wie doch ein einziger Reicher so viele Bettler in Nahrung Setzt! Wenn die Könige baun, haben die Karrner zu tun. [Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke,ed. G. Fricke and H.G. Gopfert (Munich: Hanser, 1973, vol.1, p.262] Roughly translated: How a single rich man can feed so many beggars. If the kings build then the laborers have work to do.
Bergmann met, or rather became reacquainted with, Broch while on the Staatendam. Bergmann’s writing of this letter during the crossing coincided with Broch’s work on his novel, The Death of Virgil. At the end of every day they read to each other and discussed what they had written. This continued during their first weeks in exile when they shared a small apartment in New York City.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Bergmann, G. (1993). Memories of the Vienna Circle Letter to Otto Neurath (1938). In: Stadler, F. (eds) Scientific Philosophy: Origins and Developments. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook [1993], vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2964-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2964-2_13
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