Book Review: A Story of Bernhard Schmidt

Abstract

A STORY OF BERNHARD SCHMIDT Sailing Against the Wind: A Novel. Jaan Kross. Translated from Estonian by Eric Dickens (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2012). Pp. xiv + 347. $24.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-8101-2652-7.This novel tells a story of Bernhard Schmidt. the history of astronomy Schmidt (1879-1935) is best known as the inventor of the Schmidt camera that provoked a revolution in stellar optics. An instrument maker, he was bom in Estonia (at that time part of Czarist Russia) but lived most of his life in Germany - in Mittweida and in Hamburg - and died there. During his working life he polished lenses for astronomical telescopes but also fulfilled other roles in the maintenance of mechanical and optical instruments. 1930 he invented the famous Schmidt-camera, but died before he could see the full success of his invention. The world was moving towards war and stellar optics was not the first priority in astronomy.Several key factors shaped the life of Bernhard Schmidt. First, he was from Naissaar, a small island near Tallinn - so he was a foreigner even in the capital. He might well have become a fisherman or a pilot, as had been his father and grandfathers. Second, his destiny was turned when he lost his right hand in a teenage accident with gunpowder. That disability gave him problems socially, but also forced Schmidt to develop his left hand to a sensitivity and exactness that was almost legendary. A third key factor in the life of Bernhard Schmidt was that he was largely self-taught; he received his education from the Mittweida Technical School and was always proud to be more of an artist than scientist. A fourth key factor, especially emphasized in the novel, was his Estonian origin. Despite the fact that the language of his education was German, the minority upper-class language in the Estonian territory until the end of the nineteenth century, we know that Bernhard Schmidt never forgot Estonian, for in the Observatory of Tartu Archives there is a 1926 letter written by him in Estonian.The author of the novel, Jaan Kross (1920-2007), is one of the most important Estonian writers of the second half of the twentieth century. His books about famous, or neglected but important, historical figures helped in their fictional form to keep free his readers' minds in occupied Estonia. the introduction the translator writes: In 1987, when Sailing Against the Wind was first published in what was then the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, it was by no means certain that Estonia would emerge relatively unscathed from the ruins of the Soviet Union; the monolith collapsed only a few years later (p. xi).In this multilayer novel there are of course many hidden messages; parallels between Nazi Germany and the Soviet system could not remain unnoticed by Soviet readers. …