Now, alone in Graz, he had time for reflection. His professorship was in personam, meaning that he was exempt from all the administrative tasks that would normally come with such a professorship. He need not take a turn as a dean or department chair, or take any role at all in university governance, including searching for new professors, overseeing promotions, approving and modifying degree programs, or serving on any of the astonishingly numerous committees that universities generate everywhere and in all periods of time.
Wegener had thought he would not begin his lectures until the fall, but shortly after he arrived at the Physical Institute, Hans Benndorf (1870–1953) approached him with a request that he begin lectures immediately in meteorology, as there was a pressing need, and Ficker had been gone almost a year. Benndorf was an experimental physicist and an expert on atmospheric electricity. He had been very anxious to bring Wegener to Graz, because the layering of the atmosphere, auroras, and the formation of precipitation in cold clouds—all of which Wegener had worked on—were all phenomena that involved electricity, interpreted not just as the accumulation of charge as in clouds and water droplets, or diurnal variations in the electrical state of the atmosphere, but also as ionization in the upper atmosphere. While Wegener’s approach was thermodynamic and mechanical (his work on turbulence), as well as optical and acoustical, these were a wonderful complement to Benndorf’s work on the electromagnetic states and behaviors of the atmosphere.
Wegener agreed to start teaching at once, and he began a course entitled “Introduction to Meteorology,” which he had just given at Hamburg in the summer semester of 1923; thus, most of the lectures were “ready to go.”2 The lecture hall for meteorology was situated in the Physical Institute, and as Benndorf was the institute director (and the dean), they saw each other daily. Benndorf made a point to find Wegener after his lectures, and they typically talked for a half an hour. Wegener’s introspective and potentially solitary character was obvious to everyone who knew him, and Benndorf was determined to draw him out. Their conversation was not small talk or hallway gossip; it was physics.3
Benndorf was ten years Wegener’s senior and one of the Exnerei, the students of Franz Serafin Exner (1849–1926), and thus part of the dynastic tradition of the Exner family in Austrian intellectual life. Exner was a physicist and, until 1925, rector of the University of Vienna (he was also Felix Exner’s uncle). In the 1920s and 1930s his students held most of the chairs of physics in Austrian universities. These included, in addition to Benndorf, Viktor Hess (1883–1964), Benndorf’s closest colleague at Graz and the discoverer of cosmic rays (for which he would later win the Nobel Prize), and Marian Smoluchowski (1872–1917), famous for his work on Brownian motion. Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), just then achieving world fame as a pioneer in quantum physics, had begun his career as Exner’s laboratory assistant.4
In replacing Ficker, Benndorf had been keen to find someone as broadly interested and confident in meteorology, and Wegener provided that and more. While Ficker was an excellent meteorologist, Wegener was truly both a meteorologist and a geophysicist and therefore a welcome complement to the physics faculty in Graz. In addition to Benndorf and Hess, this group included Michael Radakovic (1866–1934), a theoretical physicist known for his work on ballistics, and Karl Hillebrand (1861–1934), an observational astronomer.
Benndorf got Wegener to begin attending the Institutstee (institute tea), an afternoon tradition at Graz where the physics faculty and the graduate students (and even some undergraduates) would meet for tea (and tobacco) and present their work to one another, especially important for sharing problems “in real time,” which advanced the work of everyone involved and gave the students a sense of how science progressed. It was also a social occasion, but work and relaxation mixed well at Graz.
Wegener was immediately popular with both the faculty and the students. He had always been solicitous of students and had a modest and informal manner. Benndorf was delighted to find that he also had a wonderful sense of humor and in fact was rather mischievous and fond of a good joke. He was popular with students not least because of his reputation and prowess as a polar explorer and as an Alpine climber, hiker, and excellent skier. Graz, close up against the mountains, attracted many students who came for these outdoor amenities, and they were excited to find a professor who was a robust outdoorsman and shared their enthusiasms as well as their professional interests.5
At these Institutsteen Benndorf had many opportunities to observe Wegener’s manner of thinking, and he remarked that
he reached his conclusions principally by instinctive, inner intuition and never, or very rarely, through a formal deduction from a formula, although he was certainly able to do that as well with great ease. I was often amazed at the reliability of his judgment, especially when he considered physical questions that lay far outside his particular area of expertise. He used to say, after a rather long pause lost in thought, “Yes, I think that’s the case” [Ja, ich glaube, die Sache ist so], and most of the time it was so, even though it often took us many days afterward to find the evidence for it. He had an instinct for the truth that was rarely off the mark.6
By the time Wegener gave his inaugural lecture, on 10 May 1924, he was already integrated into the scientific community at Graz and a regular participant in the work of the Physical Institute. His interactions were mostly with other physicists and the geographers; things were so configured at Graz that meteorology, geography, and physics were in one part of the university and geology in quite another. Nevertheless, Wegener took the opportunity to try to draw in both of these audiences with a lecture entitled “The Theory of Continental Displacement, and Its Significance for the Exact and Systematic Geo-sciences.”7 This was presumably the same lecture that he had given under nearly the same title (in Danish) in Copenhagen the previous spring. It was a reprise of his premise that a complete theory of Earth required evidence from geology, paleontology, and biology on the one hand (systematic sciences) and from geophysics and geodesy on the other (exact sciences)—and that compartmentalization in science stood in the way of comprehensive understanding.8
While he was now a member of the Graz scientific community, he still had no permanent residence. Alfred and Else had agreed that during his initial term in Graz he would use his spare time to look for a place for them to live and would canvass the residential neighborhoods near the university. He looked without success, and he wrote to her that between all the talks and lectures he had to give, there was too little time. Since we know he was someone who could become so absorbed in his work that he would forget to eat to the point where he became ill, it is perhaps not surprising that he did not regularly jump up from his writing desk, put on his coat and hat, and begin chasing down real estate leads. He told Else that he would have to try again in the early fall.9
Summer 1924
In late June Alfred traveled home to Hamburg, carrying the suitcase and briefcase that had contained his worldly goods for the past two and half months. He and Else had decided to begin the summer vacation in Zechlinerhütte. Hilde was now almost ten; Käte, five; and Lotte, four. The younger girls barely knew their aunt Tony, nor had they any memory of Alfred’s childhood home. It is a common and a sweet thing to want to take your children back to your own childhood, and that was Alfred’s mission in this summer before their move to Austria.
On the train trip to Zechlinerhütte (in 1924 easily accessible by rail, in contrast to the 1890s) Alfred and Else discussed their future. She remembers that he was emphatic that he could no longer live in rented rooms and that he wanted her to come to Graz with the children and help find them a home. Whether or not they were able to sell the Hamburg house, they should pack up everything, have it shipped south, and hope for the best. After the move from Marburg to Hamburg, Wegener had never gone back, and he felt that way about Hamburg now; he wanted a fresh start.
They decided to take another sailing trip, of the kind they had taken Alfred’s mother on in 1919, shor
tly before her death. They had no large sailboat now with a cabin, nor any money to rent one, and when they arrived at Zechlinerhütte, while the children played in the yard and orchard and ran about in the huge, open loft upstairs, Alfred and Else set about to patch and paint the open boat he and Kurt had rowed and sailed in as children.
There would be no hotel and restaurant stops on this trip; it was an expedition and a camping trip, with tent, blankets, and an alcohol stove that they had to unpack and set up each evening on the shore. It was crowded, with three adults (Aunt Tony came along), three children, and a good deal of gear in a very small boat. It was difficult to find a quiet place to camp, as many of the holiday boaters had brought along their gramophones and played music far into the night. That was a minor inconvenience; Alfred was in a good humor and had the children help him each night around a fire, composing doggerel about their adventures during the day, poems of the kind his father had composed for the entertainment of his own children under the same circumstances nearly forty years before. Alfred knew the waters well, where the pretty places were, as well as the quiet ones, and they found the trip as refreshing as always.10
They stayed on a while at die Hütte and returned to Hamburg in early September. In their absence it had still not been possible to sell the house, even though they had lowered the asking price significantly. While the hyperinflation was over and Germany had revalued the mark, it was difficult to sell and move because of the confusion over whether outstanding mortgages should be calculated in the old currency or the new. This problem was being resolved in the fall of 1924 just as they were trying to sell the house in the Violastraße, but no one knew the outcome as yet.
Returning from die Hütte, Wegener found a stack of letters from Koch in Copenhagen, about their work in Greenland. It had taken Koch nine years to complete the cartographic results from the Danmark Expedition of 1906–1908; Wegener had been waiting patiently for the results, hoping that they could support his claims for the drift of Greenland. We have already seen that these results came in for much opposition and dispute in the Berlin symposium on Wegener’s work in 1921.11
None of the scientific results of their 1912–1913 traverse of the Greenland ice cap had appeared by 1924, and it was already eleven years since their return. Both Wegener and Koch had made preliminary and informal publication of some of the results, Koch on the glaciology and Wegener on the meteorology. Koch had, of course, written his popular account and published it before the war, and Else Wegener’s translation had appeared in 1919. During the war, nothing could happen on the actual Greenland results; Wegener was a German military officer, and Koch the head of the Danish Air Force. It was impossible that they should regularly communicate, let alone collaborate.
Wegener very much wanted the scientific work to come out. It was meager in terms of their hopes and plans, but it now seemed more substantial than it had in 1913. Though he could work on it only sporadically during his time in Hamburg, he eventually completed the laborious calculations to reduce the barometric altitude measurements of the ice cap traverse and his meteorological observations for the overwintering.12 He had sent these to Koch in the spring of 1924, imagining that Koch would have been, in the interim, working up the glaciology. Koch was able to proof Wegener’s introductory remarks and to send news of their old expedition companions, including Achton Friis and Fritz Johansen (1882–1957), the expedition’s zoologist, but that was all.
It soon became evident that Koch had nothing complete from the 1912–1913 expedition; he had only his rough notes and various initial drafts. He had nothing for the glaciology at all, none of the work on the structure and layering of the ice or of their measurements of fracture and flow, or work on the engrossing question of the “blue bands” within the ice layers and their meaning. He had done a draft of the topography of Dronning Louise Land, but not of the numerical data, either of the temperature measurements in the boreholes which had taken them all winter to perform or of the excavations of the snow and firn layers in the middle of the ice cap during the 1913 traverse. The one thing he had completed was the reduction of the measurements of the astronomical position finding of their locations going across the ice (the geodesy), which he had attacked first as the essential foundation for all the other calculations.
The first hint of this came in two letters from Koch in July and August 1924, thanking Wegener for the complete manuscript of his “meteorological observations during the traverse” and offering to find an independent publisher for it in Copenhagen, if Wegener could provide a typescript. This was odd; all of this work was supposed to come out, as did the results of every Danish expedition, in Meddelelser om Grønland. Then Koch thanked Wegener for an invitation to come to Graz and confer in the fall, but he demurred. Another letter followed, with chatty material about expedition plans of former comrades, including their plans to go to West Greenland, and a request for Wegener to find (for them) a copy of Erich von Drygalski’s expedition reports from 1891–1893 for the west central Greenland coast.13
Wegener soon learned that Koch was unable (increasingly) to work concentratedly on anything that involved mental effort and especially calculation. He would sit at his desk and begin to work, then become dizzy, and, with increasing frequency, would actually faint. No psychological diagnosis is required here; this form of “syncope” (fainting) is a diagnostic marker, especially in a man of his age and with his physical history, for a condition called “aortic stenosis” and its associated pathology “congestive heart failure.” Sitting posture, combined with the mental energy required for the calculations and the restriction of blood flow through the aorta, would reduce the blood flow to Koch’s brain and cause him to faint. No doubt he had tried many times to complete the work, but each time he did, it brought on this condition, certainly a negative reinforcement.
First Year in Graz, 1924–1925
Alfred returned alone to Graz in early September 1924, with the understanding that Else and the children would come in early October and find a house as soon as possible. Then they would move in and “camp” until the furniture arrived. He did not wait in Hamburg to accompany them because he had been invited to deliver a major address at a scientific congress to be held in Innsbruck at the end of September.
Alfred was looking forward to the Innsbruck congress, and on the train south from Hamburg he was reminded of how much he loved mountainous terrain. The topography of Germany and Austria can best be understood from the standpoint of the United States if the United States were rotated 90° counterclockwise. Then the flat coastal plain of the eastern United States would be in the north and the Rocky Mountains in the south. In between would be the heavily cultivated agricultural area of the American Midwest.
As his train approached Munich, the terrain became hilly, but continuing south the landscape changed quite rapidly and remarkably, from rolling hills, to mountain foothills, and then to precipitous Alpine valleys settled as high as the topography would allow—large houses of white stucco with broad sloping roofs. Kurt Wegener once remarked that Graz was a backwater and therefore ideal for scientific work. One sensed how out of the way it was long before one arrived. On reaching Salzburg, a few hours east of Munich, the train was “cut”: the main part of the “Austria Express” headed south, and a very modest segment, the “Steiermark Express,” headed for Graz, with more and more Alpine stops along the way and then, once out of the scenic country, becoming a “flier” speeding down the last slope to the Styrian plain.
Graz is an old place with narrow streets and a distinctly southern feel, with the buildings bewilderingly clustered and the direction of the streets fairly random in their curves, following the early settlement and topography. For Wegener, after the gray of Hamburg, coming here through the Alps was a transformation—moving to a celebrated vacation spot from an industrial center on a flat coastal plain. It all put him back in the expansive mood of the summer sailing trip and away from the cares of Hamburg.
For the Innsbruck meeti
ng, Benndorf (and Ficker) had planned for Wegener to give a plenary lecture on his displacement theory and his climate work as a way to position him, as well as Graz, in the complex politics of Austrian academic life and to mark out their contrast with Vienna, where Carl Diener had just replaced Franz Exner as Rektor of the university.
Although it is rarely mentioned today, as a condition of accepting his professorship in Graz, Wegener had become an Austrian citizen in mid-1924, along with Else and the girls.14 Walking around Innsbruck with his colleagues, he was reminded again and again why he liked Austria and the “Austrian character” (österreichische Wesen).
He and Köppen had both hoped that at the end of the war—with the collapse of both empires—the German-speaking countries could be integrated, and Köppen also hoped that this would be a prelude to something like a United States of Europe. When, in Innsbruck, Wegener learned that Albert Defant (who had been second to him in the call to Graz) was the primary candidate to replace him at the German Naval Observatory, his mind turned to this issue again.
He wrote to Köppen on 14 September from Innsbruck and remarked that the Viennese culture had produced a remarkable transformation in Hungary, Romania, and Poland and could also work wonders for northern Germany, where the “embarrassing compulsion for official ceremonialism” and the general stiffness were obstructive and dispiriting. Northern Germany in general, and the observatory in particular, would benefit from “the example of a light-minded newcomer, and they will not get that without him [Defant].”15
This Innsbruck conference gives a sense of how Wegener had left behind a large, highly officious, somewhat impersonal Prussian universe and entered exactly the kind of relaxed, reduced, and intimate sphere that he wrote about to Köppen. If this informality was not the case, we should probably know nothing about Wegener’s attendance at this conference, let alone what he said. As it turns out, there was, at Graz, a young man named Anton Rella (1888–1945), a newly appointed professor of mathematics. “Tonio,” as he was known, had been Erwin Schrödinger’s best friend at the Gymnasium in Vienna, and later on he had become close friends with Milutin Milankovich. Rella wrote Milankovich an excited letter in the summer of 1924, telling him about Wegener’s impending lecture and urging him to travel with him to Innsbruck to hear it. The Graz faculty was very excited about this event, and Milankovich decided to attend. Rella had told him that “the highlight of this conference is going to be Wegener’s new theory of continental drift.”16
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