he year 1933 was undoubtedly one of the most portentous in the history of the 20th century. Adolf Hitler acceded to chancellorship of Germany, and the
increasingly draconian racial laws that began to be enacted led to the enforced emigration of virtually all of the German intelligentsia of Jewish ancestry, many of whom were scientists. The story of their departure is chronicled in this book and the fate of some 111 individuals is traced, many of them in considerable detail. One of the first to decamp was the eminent
physicist Albert Einstein. However, like so many others, Einstein found it difficult to make the final break from his homeland. After a three-month stint in California, US, at Caltech, starting in December 1932, he still hankered after Europe, considering himself ‘a European by instinct and by inclination.’ Because a return to Germany would have been too risky, he settled instead for a brief spell in Belgium. In the end, he bowed to the inevitable and accepted a full professorship from the newly established Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, US, in October 1933. Princeton became his intellectual home for the rest of his life. He never returned to Germany. Some of the émigrés were not Jewish but decided to leave Germany for other reasons. A case in point is that of physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In his lifestyle Schrödinger was even more peripatetic than Einstein and he had stints in England, Spain, and the US. In 1936, he made what he later described as the ‘unprecedented stupidity’ of taking up
a professorship in his native Austria at the University of Graz. This was a hotbed of Nazism at the time and Schrödinger, who had the greatest disdain for Nazis, felt obliged to pen a letter praising them for the annexation of his country into Greater Germany in 1938. This attempt at appeasing the Nazis did not work and Schrödinger was sacked a few months later. He eventually ended up at the new Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland, and worked there from 1940 until his retirement in 1956. That the émigrés were a remarkable group of people is testified to by the fact that over 30 of them went on to win the Nobel prize in their discipline, and many took senior positions in academia and industry. This book offers a truly fascinating account of the lives of the many scientists displaced from Central Europe in the 1930s.
Dennis Rouvray is a freelance author and consultant based in Surrey, UK
The quantum exodus
Author Gordon Fraser
Publisher Oxford University Press Year 2012 Pages 267 Price £25 ISBN 978-0-19-959215-9