Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  By the end of the summer of 1901, Kurt and Alfred were climbing continuously and joyously in the Zillertal region to the east of the Brenner Pass—the best snow and ice climbing in Austria. The geology and meteorology they pursued were of a practical sort—safe and unsafe rock and ice, and the endless variety of mountain weather. At altitude, conditions change with an exciting and sometimes alarming suddenness. A walk along a ridge in bright sunlight can give way in a few moments to a shrouding and bewildering fog, caused by only a fractional change in temperature and humidity. Summer thunderstorms develop rapidly, and one can feel the updrafts and, as the rumble comes closer, the static electricity, making the hair stand up all over one’s body, with the rock all around glowing with a crackling blue aura. Sunbathing and a peaceful calm can give way in minutes to a drizzle or a snow flurry in a sharp wind, plunging the windchill below freezing. There is, on the other hand, the regular and delightful experience of passing through cloud layers into the sunshine and looking down on the clouds below—often several thousand feet below. Understanding, accepting, and overcoming these challenges and then enjoying the pure sense of being alive constitute the essence of mountaineering.

  While Kurt and Alfred had never been very far or very long apart either physically or in spirit, the summer brought them closer than ever. They were both scientists now in fact as well as aspiration, both drawn to physical activity and exertion. They loved this sort of life—outdoors, trekking, climbing. For Alfred especially, the thought of an immediate return to the university was not pleasant; he had been in school almost year-round in every year of his life from the time he was five.

  At some point in the summer, early or late, Alfred made the decision to complete his year of compulsory military service, starting in September—that is, immediately on his return to Berlin. Certainly he would never be in better shape for the rigors of basic training. He would be in Berlin again, of course, but living in officer-cadet billets with his regiment as he trained, and not at home. Certainly there would be no trouble obtaining uniforms—not with Uncle Paul’s uniform factory in Wittstock. Moreover, Europe was at peace and had been at peace now for thirty years. For Alfred military service was only another discipline to master, another credential, another set of skills and regulations: in short, another inevitability of Prussian life. It would certainly be less dangerous than what they had spent the past few months doing—though, for that same reason of course, much less fun, but at least it would break the routine of schooling.

  Grenadier Guards

  In September 1901 Alfred Wegener reported for duty to the headquarters of the Queen Elisabeth Grenadier Guards, in Westend—at that time a pleasant suburb of Berlin near the end of Unter den Linden, and close by the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, where Kurt was almost finished with his degree. Given a choice, he would doubtless have been in Bavaria, training with an Alpine regiment, but such latitude of choice was not in the German scheme of things. One registered for service where one lived, because in future wars victory would depend on rapid mass mobilization, which in turn depended on having the ready reserves assemble close to their residences. The young Herr Wegener lived in Berlin; therefore, he would belong to a Berlin regiment. Alfred was enrolled in Company No. 4 of Queen Elisabeth Grenadier Guards Regiment No. 3, with the expectation that he would, upon completion of his training, become a reserve lieutenant of infantry in the Xth Guard Reserve Corps.

  A generation before, to be a “Guards Officer” would have carried considerable social cachet and have been a good acquirement for an ambitious young man desiring good connections and rapid promotion in the civil service, but as the army reorganized in the face of universal conscription in an expanded and unified Germany, “The Guards” came to include all the military units of the German Second Army, regular and reserve, stationed in and around Berlin—all generically designated as the “Guard Corps” without reference to any particular regimental traditions.

  It so happened, however, that Alfred’s particular regiment was still mostly an elite unit, as was its “brother” regiment, the Kaiser Alexander Grenadier Guards, stationed at Potsdam. Both regiments had members of the royal family as honorary officers, even though the regiments’ missions no longer entailed protecting the persons of the royal family (the original rationale for designation as “guards”). Since they were the infantry units closest to the capital city, they were regularly called upon to march in an endless succession of parades celebrating national holidays—the number of which had been continually increased in recent years in order to cement the sense of a unified and patriotic nation.

  Alfred, like Kurt before him, was exercising his right, as a member of the educated upper middle class, to avoid conscription into the army for a period of two years, by volunteering instead for one year. Such men were referred to approvingly as Einjährig-Freiwilligen (one-year volunteers). They began their training under the command of noncommissioned drill instructors and learned the immemorial lessons of barracks life, with everything at double time. They went through physical training and learned “spit and polish,” marching, field exercises and infantry tactics, marching, weapons training, military etiquette, marching, military topography and map reading, logistics and mobilization drill, and marching.

  Kurt (left) and Alfred Wegener in their Grenadier Guards dress uniforms; photograph taken at the Wegener family home in Berlin in 1902. Author’s photograph from the original in the Wegener-Gedankstätte, Zechlinerhütte. Photo courtesy of the Heimatmuseum, Neuruppin.

  Officer cadets of infantry units were (and are today) trained first as if they were enlisted or conscript infantry soldiers, and only thereafter trained as officers, which meant learning all the menial and minor duties of enlisted men, but above all how to march as members of the rank and file of the national army. The kind of marching Alfred learned in the barracks yard (close-order drill) was no longer of any practical significance in actual combat, but endurance marching along highways, carrying full field pack and weapons over long distances, was a crucial element in German military strategy and tactics.

  The German forces, like those of France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, had swollen to such immense size that a vast amount of military planning went purely into the logistical nightmare of getting the bulk of the army to the front line or frontier in time to make any difference in the outcome of a war. At regular intervals in the training, therefore, especially in the summer months, the cadets were turned out on short notice for forced marches, along highways in company with their cavalry and field artillery units, but also cross-country. Some of these marches lasted twelve hours or longer, and the troops moved as rapidly as the officers could manage it, and often far into the night. The cadets also joined in large-scale, coordinated maneuvers designed to test the readiness of Guard Corps units for full mobilization, practicing rapid movement from dispersed encampments toward a single location, as if massing for a real assault.

  The German army, like everything else in Germany in 1900, came equipped not just with traditions, regulations, and procedures but with a philosophy. The philosophy of the hour was laid out in a book by Baron Colmar von der Goltz (1843–1916) and entitled Volk in Waffen (The nation in arms). First published in 1883, it was a tremendous popular success and very influential at home and abroad, with translations into French, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Turkish. By 1901, when it became assigned reading for Alfred during his military service, it was already in its fifth edition. It is a fascinating book. Its sober preparations for mass mobilization and rapid deployment by rail, for heavy artillery bombardment followed by human-wave assaults, and for bunker and trench warfare, as well as its expectation of huge casualties and the need for a ready reserve as large as the standing army, all belie popular accounts of the First World War as some new form of warfare that caught unsuspecting nations by surprise. In Germany they had been planning it for forty years, and other European nations had read of these plans and followed suit on their own
. Period photographs, even from wars that few outside Germany have ever heard of, such as the German-Danish War of 1864, show that the “unparalleled ferocity” of the First World War, with its moonscapes of total destruction, was already visible a half century earlier.33 These landscapes were the battlefields of the future in von der Goltz’s book. Even an army passing through a district on its way to the front must lay waste to the countryside: “the crowded roads, the deterioration of the roads in bad weather, the confusion and friction between columns on the march, the picture of desolation which is spread when hundreds of thousands, like a swarm of locusts, pass over a district. The atmosphere is full of dust, smoke, and smells of burning. Those in the lead may find it bearable. If, however, the passage of troops extends over two, three, or four consecutive days, the hindmost must march through a mere wilderness.”34

  The whole point of von der Goltz’s book was that true military preparedness consists in expectation more of failure than success: one must expect almost everything to go wrong from the start. “The commander-in-chief most undoubtedly will, in spite of the changing fortunes of war, always keep the main object in view, but the means by which he hopes to attain it can never be sketched out with any certainty long beforehand.… No plan of operations can with any safety include more than the first collision with the enemy’s main force.”35 Given the scope and scale of planned hostilities, no other outcome was at all likely. Therefore, officers must be trained to expect adverse developments, to maintain in adversity disciplined self-control and a fierce resolve to win, and then to transmit this fitness and courage to the troops under their command. Moreover, because of the expectation of heavy casualties, “it will thus be unavoidable that many companies of the line will be in the hands of reserve officers immediately after the first few battles.… In the course of a great war … eventual success depends on the capacity of this class, for only good leaders produce good soldiers.”36

  The core of Alfred Wegener’s officer training, then, was first to teach him to live and work and fight as an enlisted man and to understand how war looks and feels to the men who do most of the dirty work and the dying. The next stage was not to instill in him initiative and flexibility in making battlefield decisions, but rather to teach him how to maintain discipline and order among his men in great adversity. The fundamental idea and aim to achieve this was Kameradshaft—a sense of mutual trust and fellowship. The infantry company should be like a family, with common aims and interests. It was with this expectation and for this reason that officers were rarely transferred: once Alfred was commissioned as a reserve officer, he would continue to command many of the same men over the period of his active service in the reserves—the next fifteen years (until age thirty-six).37 When in the field, he was told, he should often visit the men in their quarters; he should be in charge of their clothing, food, and drink; see to their equipment; inquire after their health; and work to bolster their morale.

  The explicit philosophical basis of this approach to military discipline was none other than Charles Darwin—and not the Darwin of The Origin of Species, with its struggle for survival, its “nature red in tooth and claw,” but the Darwin of The Descent of Man, with its attempt to explain the value of altruism, fellow feeling, and mutual dependence for the evolutionary success of the human species. General von der Goltz was quite explicit about this fellow feeling as the basis of the discipline that can win wars:

  The best explanation of discipline and its marvelous power is found in the saying of Darwin, contained in his Descent of Man: “The superiority which disciplined soldiers show over undisciplined masses is primarily the consequence of the confidence which each has in his comrades.” This absolute confidence is, beyond all doubt, the prime means by which discipline works, and it most appropriately explains what we really understand under this trite word.… Every man in the ranks knows from experience that his officer does not, under any circumstances, leave the company to which he belongs.… Thence springs that confidence of which Darwin speaks, and in which the great judge of human nature finds the superiority of disciplined armies.… This inward force, exercised by a feeling of relationship, will endure, when order produced by law fails.38

  This may well have been Wegener’s introduction to Darwin, at least in a formal setting. This may seem odd, for Darwinism spread rapidly in Germany after the translation of The Origin of Species in 1860, and evolutionary thought, especially progressive evolution, was a mainstay of German philosophical thought throughout the nineteenth century. However, Darwinism was not taught in Prussian secondary schools in the 1890s for a variety of reasons. Foremost among these was the impossibility of treating the theory at all without a frank discussion of sex, and sex was not discussed in Prussian schools.

  In the same year that Wegener began to learn the details of Darwinian theory in a formal setting (1901), the Association of German Scientists and Physicians voted for the first time to press for a renewal of biology instruction in the schools, but even here there was no agreement that this instruction should include evolution. Indeed, the few secondary biology texts that existed (none of which were used in Prussia) excluded not only Darwinism but reproductive physiology altogether.39

  A few passing references to Darwin might not have had so powerful an effect on Alfred in some other context, but here they came mixed with a rhetoric of mission and sacrifice, of pride and strength. Moreover, for once, Alfred was presented with a unity of philosophy and task in which he was expected to be a leader, not a follower, and a father rather than a son—to his troops at least. Here were adult and concrete questions about life and death, not abstract philosophical problem sets, and he was stirred, sometime in the autumn of 1901, to a curiosity about life “in general” in a way he had not been before. It was a combination of factors: the sense of personal strength and confidence he had gained in Innsbruck, the military training itself and its weighty expectation for him to be “a man” and a leader of men in war, and just the process of maturation itself in this third year past high school; Alfred was now beginning to move away from home and family mentally and emotionally as well as physically. There was nothing abrupt in this nor any strong impulse to rebellion. He was a loving and dutiful son, though he was resolute in pursuing his inclinations.

  Not burdened by school work for the first time in his life, he could pursue a course of elective reading, and he began to read more widely in popular philosophy and evolutionary theory. Needing some structure and guidance, he took advantage of his proximity to the university to enroll in a year-long course of popular lectures in philosophy. This enrollment was both permitted and encouraged by his military superiors, who had no objection whatever to having the university’s lecture halls salted with uniformed officer cadets. In the winter term of 1901–1902 these lectures would be given by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) under the title “History of Philosophy and Its Relationship to Culture,” and in the summer of 1902, by Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) as “History of Modern Philosophy with a Consideration of Contemporary Culture.”

  Alfred was doing something new for him, but something that most people, at least those offered any choices in life at all, come to at this point in their lives. He was finding out who he was and what his place was in the world—not “place” in the sense of calling, for he knew he would be a scientist, and probably a professor, and a reserve officer. Rather, it was time for him to find out what sort of person he would be and what principles would guide him. The world he had been born into and the worldview practiced, preached, and enforced within it were still strongly present within him, but he was becoming conscious of the need to sort things out, deciding what to keep and what to discard, as well as the need to affirm something. None of this was very clearly articulated, of course, but an inarticulate striving is, initially at least, a necessity if one is to pursue questions of existence and meaning. If everything seems very clear and simple, the impulse to investigation is rarely strong enough to cause much of an awakening. So if this
first search was still vague and rudimentary, it was a search for meaning nonetheless, and Alfred brought to it both his native enthusiasm for discovery and his very considerable tenacity.

  3

  The Astronomer

  BERLIN, 1901–1904

  We are not called upon to solve the meaning of life but to find out the deed demanded of us and to work and so, by action, to master the riddle.

  J. W. HAUER

  The Generation of 1880

  One notices in photographs—Berlin street scenes, for instance—taken just after the turn of the century a change in the appearance of men, especially the younger men. Their coats are shorter and worn casually open; they are beardless, and some even completely clean-shaven. Top hats are gone, and bowlers are giving way to soft fedoras. Black is still the world’s favorite color, but one sees waistcoats in contrasting colors, and neckties are wider and softer under rolled collars, and not knotted like nooses under sharply starched wings. Seventy years earlier the romantics had shaved off their beards and loosened their ties; now they were back and youth was once again in fashion.

  From the beginning of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the First World War, European intellectuals (both literary and scientific) spoke a language exalting life, youth, vital freedom, will, energy. The philosophical vehicle for these slogans and tendencies was called “life-philosophy” (Lebensphilosophie) by advocates and opponents alike. Lebensphilosophie has endured bad press since the middle of the twentieth century, having been blamed for a range of cultural developments from the terrible to the merely disconcerting. It has been accused of inciting and strengthening war, colonialism, fascism, nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. It has been held equally responsible for irrationalism, spiritualism, the new-age movement, environmentalism, anti-intellectualism, and a general collapse of manners and mores.