Forced Emigration Research Articles

Emigration, isolation and the slow start of molecular biology in Germany

Until the 1930s Germany had been the international leader in biochemistry, chemistry, and areas of biology. After WWII, however, molecular biology as a new interdisciplinary scientific enterprise was scarcely represented in Germany for almost 20 years. Three major reasons for the low performance of molecular biology are discussed: first, the forced emigration of Jewish scientists after 1933, which not only led to the expulsion of future distinguished molecular biologists, but also to a strong decline of “dynamic biochemistry”, a field which contributed greatly to molecular biology. Second, German university structures that strongly impeded interdisciplinary research. Third, the international isolation and self-isolation of German scientists that was a major obstacle to the implementation of new fields of research developed elsewhere. Despite the fact that there was no official boycott against Germany as there had been after WWI and despite the Cold War policy of integrating Germans into the West, as a consequence of National Socialism and WWI for many years only very few German scientists gained access to the international community of molecular biologists. Max Delbrück played an important role in helping the Germans establish modern, mostly molecular, biology because he retained strong connections to Germany. Most importantly, it required a new generation of young scientists who had received part of their training in the US to establish modern molecular biology at German universities and Max Planck Institutes.

The Study of “Fossil Brains”: Tilly Edinger (1897–1967) and the Beginnings of Paleoneurology

Paleoneurology, the study of the evolution of the brain, lies at the interface of neurology and paleontology. In its modern form, it was founded in Germany in the 1920s, the product of the unique educational background and inspiration of Ottilie (“Tilly”) Edinger (1897‐1967). Before Edinger’s work, the history of the vertebrate brain was reconstructed almost exclusively by anatomists who compared the soft tissue brains of living fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Structural variations among extant groups were documented and compared; their distribution was used to suggest the sequence of anatomical innovations in time. With strong preparation in both neurology and paleontology, Edinger was able to integrate comparative anatomy and the paleontologists’ tool of stratigraphic sequence. More than anyone else, she introduced the concept of time to neurology, creating modern paleoneurology. Here we relate the broad outlines of Tilly Edinger’s life and describe how she changed the way that the evolutionary history of the vertebrate brain is reconstructed and understood. Her story is particularly compelling because she began much of her innovative work while she was enduring Nazi racial laws and terrors, completing it in exile after forced emigration from Germany. Early biography and founding of paleoneurology Tilly Edinger (Figure 1) was born in 1897 into an extended and well-to-do family that was part of the academic and cultural elite of Frankfurt am Main. Her father, Ludwig Edinger, was a pioneer comparative neurologist and the founder of Frankfurt’s first neurological research institute (Kreft 1997). Before his early death in 1918, Edinger (Figure 1) provided his daughter with many contacts within the local and greater scientific community and with a role model for a life in science. She was educated first at home by private tutors, among them French and English governesses who instilled in her a

La guerre, les Grecs d'Italie et l'affirmation d'une identité indigène. Sur la légende d'origine des Samnites

From the third quarter of the V.c. B.C. the Greeks of Magna Graecia found themselves submitted to the pressure of Italic peoples, Campanians, Lucanians, Brettians, bound to the Samnites of the Central Apennine, who were then moving into position, breaking up the former equilibrium and giving a new physiognomy to the whole area, even to the extent of taking possession of some of their cities (Cumae, Poseidônia). The original legend which then took shape to describe in the eyes of Hellenic people the identity of the populations emphasizes their military disposition, but through a ritualised process of forced emigration of youths dedicated to the god of war, something without equivalent in the Hellenic world : "sacred Springtime". That tradition thus underscored for the Greeks the barbaric nature of those peoples, but it corresponded to a vindication of identity by those Italic tribes themselves, who through it created for their own sake a myth of origin grounded in that custom felt as different from the uses of other peoples they were in contact with, in accordance with the principle of constrative identity.

Wannsee Revisited

Vol. 10, No. 4 Summer 1992 WANNSEE REVISITEDl by Seymour Cain Seymour C.ain is a historian and philosopher of religion who has taught history of religions, philosophy, and humanities at various universities. He was the senior editor for religion and' philosophy in the making of the 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Brittanica. He is the author of Gabriel Marcel, a pioneer American study of Marcel's thought, and other works ,and has contributed' articles and poems to many periodicals, including Midstream, Christian Century',judaism, and Religious Studies Review. Since . 1990, as visiting scholar in history at the University of California San Diego, he has been engaged in a study of Mormonism, especially its relation to Judaism. He is currently President of San Diego Independent Scholars. 81 I have just returned from partiCIpating in the Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the German' Church Struggle, at the University of Washington, which marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference. It included some unexpected and dramatic events, such as the poignant testimony of former hidden, silent children of the Holocaust, now grown to middle age. There was also the moving dialogue of Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson of the composer and grandson of an ardent (female) NaZi, with Abraham Peck, archivist of American Jewish history, who was born of Holocaust survivors in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. Also memorable were the words of tWo widows: Sybil Niemoeller von Sell's memories of her husband, the resistant pastor and concentration camp prisoner, and the powerful address of Elizabeth Maxwell, widow of the Holocaust survivor and publisher Robert Maxwell, calling on the Christian churches to "remember the future," i.e., to atone 'This article was published in the Los Angele~' jewish News of April 1992. Used by permissio n, 82 SHOFAR effectively for their past sins against the Jewish people. Dr. Maxwell is a Protestant of French Huguenot descent. A vexing behind-the-scenes brouhaha was the attempt of Bradley R. Smith, "Director of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust," to buy space in the university's student newspaper for an advertisement stating that the Holocaust was a fiction, to appear while our conference was in session, obviously a trouble-making stunt. After much discussion and consultation the editorial board resisted the $750 temptation, rejecting the advertisement but offering to publish a guest editorial by Smith after the conference was over, preceded and succeeded by the editors' countercomments . Presumably this was intended both to provide freedom of expression and to refute a vicious canard. Wannsee figured prominently the first full day of the Scholars' Conference . It began with the showing of a film that many of us had already seen on television, including chilling German dialogue with English subtitles , accompanied by the il)formed and illuminating commentary of historian Henry R. Huttenbach of CCNY. He pointed out that Wannsee was one of three conferences called to deal drastically with the Jews, but Wannsee became the one that sticks out in historical memory. This cinematized and somewhat fictionalized presentation conforms essentially with the account in Raui Hilberg's Des/ruc/ion of the European]ews: following failure of various forced emigration programs, it was decided to solve the "jewish problem" by exterminating the Jews. The order came from Hermann Goering to Reinhardt Heydrich on july 31, 1941, placing the latter in complete charge of the I1nal solution. Deportations of Jews to the East soon followed, since, as Hilberg notes, "Heydrich was a man of decision, who liked to act I1rst and hold conferences afterwards" (p. 263 in the 1967 edition). However, Heydrich had to call a conference of the top bureaucrats in the Third Reich because of variclUs complications, such as to decide how to deal with intermarried, mixed-descent, and foreign jews, and to secure cooperation from various government agencies and the Nazi officials in charge of non-German territories. Among those invited, far down on the list, was SS Major Adolf Eichmann, the Reich Security's main expert on the jews, who plays a supporting role in the film as he did in life. The conference to plan the Hnal solution was held on January 20, 1942, in the...

A post-fission perspective of the discovery of nuclear fission

Why was nuclear fission discovered under the repressive conditions of the Third Reich and not in one of the other leading countries in science? The attempts to answer this question leads to the formulation of the hypothesis that under the very special constellation of the working relations between Hahn and Meitner, the forced emigration of Meitner was advantageous insofar as it emancipated Hahn from the physical guardianship of Meitner, and liberated his chemical competence. This was a prerequisite to recognizing the presence of Barium in the debris of Uranium decay. At the same time it liberated Meitner so that she could break with the old physicalconcepts of knowledge when accepting Hahn's chemical results, and find the correct interpretation of the experiment. Moreover, Hahn's and Strassmann's inner emigration which kept them away from participating in political activities and engagements, as well as their abstinence from competing in fashionable research (which was stimulated by the increasing political isolation of Germany) helped them to concentrate on their more restricted investigations following unfashionable lines of thinking and were among the favourable conditions for making their great discovery.

Migration Dynamics in the Interior of Ceará, Brazil

For the past century, "the problem" of the interior of the Brazilian Northeast has been defined in terms of solving the recurrent droughts by rendering them more predictable and, especially, by mitigating their disastrous effects, one of which is large-scale forced emigration. Investigation of cattle-cotton latifundia in the interior of Ceará state reveals that, in addition to migration out of the region, there is an almost ceaseless movement of agrarian workers from one estate to the next which is only partly explained by fluctuations in climate. This essay explores the total set of interrelated factors involved in the phenomenon in an attempt to account for all observable moves and whatever stability exists within the adaptive system of the "effective community."