Science, Technology and National Socialism ed. by Monika Renneberg, Mark Walker

Abstract

196 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The text is complemented by hundreds of superb, well-captioned photographs and illustrations. One cannot imagine this book without them because they illuminate it so boldly and literally bring it to life. Similarly, the expansive notes are as interesting, analytical, and informative as the main work. Those who accompany the author on his journey into this realm of aviation and the creative imagination will be richly rewarded. Wohl has written a groundbreaking book against which all others of its kind will be measured for generations to come. Dominick A. Pisano Dr. Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Department at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. He is currently editing The Airplane in American Culture, a book of contributed essays on aviation’s influence on American society. Science, Technology and National Socialism. Edited by Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xix + 422; illustrations, notes, index. $59.95. This interesting and useful collection of sixteen essays (three of them previously published) covers a variety of technological projects and scientific developments during the National Socialist period in Germany (1933—45). It treats the ways in which engineers and, more especially, scientists reacted to the culture and politics of Nazism and provides some interesting observations about the continuity of scien­ tific and technical developments between the Nazi period and those preceding and following it, both within Germany and elsewhere, es­ pecially the United States and Russia. The technologies and disci­ plines discussed range from armaments (especially aviation and rocketry) and particle accelerators to spatial planning, biology, psychology, physics, and mathematics. While the coverage is diverse, there is extensive overlapping of topics and themes between and among many of the individual essays, and the introductory essay by the editors conveniently pulls together the various threads inter­ woven throughout the volume. Thus, the collection is much more unified than is common in such compilations. While there is no single thesis common to all of the contributions, they tend to deconstruct the projects, actions, and writings of German scientists and engineers to reveal the various ways in which the indi­ viduals involved collaborated with Nazi purposes and efforts despite their own perceptions of political neutrality. Building in many in­ stances on the previous studies of Jeffrey Herf, Karl-Heinz Ludwig, Paul Forman, and coeditor Mark Walker, the authors demonstrate with varying degrees of success the extent to which such collaboration occurred. Perhaps the best way to illustrate in brief compass both the prob­ lems and achievements of the collection is to consider the treatments TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 197 of the famous aerodynamicist Ludwig Prandtl in several of the es­ says. In two different accounts of mathematics and Nazism, Herbert Mehrtens discusses Prandtl’s actions as president of the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics when it had to face purges of its Jewish members. Mehrtens notes in one of the essays that Prandtl “actively defended the Jewish membership of the society” (p. 307), but his stress in both articles is on Prandtl’s rejection of his colleague Erich Trefftz’s advice that if the society were compelled to exclude Jewish members, its most honorable course would be to dissolve itself. Prandtl argued instead that the decision had nothing to do with honor but concerned the survival of the discipline. Mehrtens fits this and other cases, together with Prandtl’s and others’ claims to have been unpolitical, into a discussion of the ways in which scientists were indispensable to the Nazi state (and others); they need, he argues, to recognize their resultant power and accept the political responsibility that goes with it. While Mehrtens recognizes some positive aspects of Prandtl’s be­ havior in these instances, his account emphasizes the negative ones, as does a brief mention of the case by Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze in his article on “apolitical” German scholars (p. 320). Helmuth Trischler makes a similar judgment in his account of aeronautical research and Nazism, but in the process of criticizing Prandtl for his essential loyalty to the Nazi state, Trischler also demonstrates Prandtl’s personal and civil courage in disagreeing with the regime, in defending both his staff...