July 8, 2025

James Hawes on His Book About Germany

"Prussia conquered Germany. And once it had conquered Germany it then imposed the Prussian view of history onto Germany." - James Hawes.

"When we think about Germany, and it's sometimes very hard for Germans to imagine, they shake their heads in surprise when I say you do realize that when Cologne was 1200 years old Berlin was still just a Slavic fishing village. And it wasn't even German, let alone the capital. 

And this is probably the most important thing in the book. This underlying difference between the West and the East is because everything east of the Elbe is essentially colonized. It was colonized by the Germans at exactly the same time the English were colonizing Ireland. 

It's caused by the climate change because around the turn of the millennium this thing called the medieval warm period starts in which the temperatures are even higher than now, today. Suddenly you can grow wheat in southern Sweden. You can grow wine in the midlands of England. And this suddenly meant that areas like Ireland in the West and present day Poland in the East were much more desirable farmland. The population of civilized Europe, say Italy, France, Germany, Western Germany, were massively expanding because there was more and more food. And so people were looking for new land. 

And it's in the 12th century AD that the Teutonic Knights, backed by the Catholic Church, take the northern branch of the Second Crusade, and they go east across the Elbe, and in a process of maybe 200 years, takeover everything which we then recognize as East Germany. But that leaves a fundamental difference." - James Hawes.

Related: 

The New Prussian Soldier After The Victories of Napoleon.

Otto von Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor.

Rachel Chrastil - Bismarck's War.



An excerpt from, "The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes" reviewed by Ivo Dawnay, The Oldie:

Like so much else of Europe’s history, this hard-wired duality is traced back to the Romans. Tired of marauding barbarian attacks into Gaul across the Rhine, Emperor Augustus mustered the largest army Rome had ever assembled to drive the border east, stopping in AD 9 on the banks of the Elbe, later heading south to build another border along the western banks of the Danube.

Thereafter this became the defining fault line of German life – the west civilised by Roman culture and institutions, the east a dark no-man’s land of authoritarianism and instability. Fast-forward to the eighth century and it is the Franks, led by Charlemagne, who hold the fort of civilisation, in alliance with the Pope in Constantinople, creating the Holy Roman Empire and transmitting the cultural legacy of the classical era to the Middle Ages.

But Wagnerian storm clouds are gathering. A century later the Teutonic Knights emerged east of christianised Poland. Warlike, pagan heirs to the old, un-Romanised barbarians and financed by traders in the Hansa towns along the Baltic sea, these Easterlings (from which, curiously, the pound sterling derives) came to form Prussia – at first, wholly unconnected with Germans in the west.

Hawes’s history goes on to reveal that the central fact of the next millennium of German history is an endless struggle for hegemony between the quietly industrious and developing west and the atavistic and endlessly aggressive forces of Prussia and its allies east of the Elbe. It was Bismarck, the quintessential bossy Prussian Junker, who created the modern state. Through his North German Confederation, he bullied the French into the war of 1870, and the western Länder into what was essentially a Prussian empire. Thus were the seeds of the two world wars sown.

Video Title: Interview Prof. James Hawes (English). Source: ceberlin. Date Published: May 16, 2024. Description:

James Hawes grew up in Gloucestershire, Edinburgh and Shropshire. He took a First in German at Hertford College, Oxford, then did a postgrad theatre studies in Cardiff, Wales. Having failed as an actor, he worked as an English teacher in Spain. In 1985-6 he was in charge of CADW excavations at the now-UNESCO World Heritage site of Blaenavon Ironworks. He took a PhD on Nietzsche and German literature 1900-1914 at University College, London 1987-90, then lectured in German at Maynooth University (Ollscoil Mhá Nuad) in Ireland between 1989 and 1991 before doing so at Sheffield University and Swansea University.

July 7, 2025

Faith No More - Woodpecker from Mars

Some songs you discover too late in life. Some at just the right time.

 
 

July 5, 2025

Weizsäcker

 



Wikipedia:

Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (28 June 1912 – 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, under Werner Heisenberg's leadership. There is ongoing debate as to whether or not he and the other members of the team actively and willingly pursued the development of a nuclear bomb for Germany during this time.

. . .After nuclear fission became known in early 1939 through the work of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, Weizsäcker (and by his own estimate, 200 other physicists) quickly recognised that nuclear weapons could potentially be built. He discussed the upsetting implications in February 1939 with philosopher friend Georg Max Friedrich Valentin Picht (1913–1982).

During the Second World War, Weizsäcker joined the German nuclear weapons program, participating in efforts to construct an atomic bomb, while based at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. As early as August 1939, Albert Einstein warned U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt about this research and highlighted that "the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated."

As a protégé of Werner Heisenberg, Weizsäcker was present at a crucial meeting at the Army Ordnance headquarters in Berlin on 17 September 1939, at which the German atomic weapons program was launched. Early in the war — possibly until 1942 — he hoped a successful nuclear weapons project would earn him political influence. In July 1940 he was co-author of a report to the army on the possibility of "energy production" from refined uranium. The report also predicted the possibility of using plutonium for the same purpose including the production of a new type of explosives. During summer 1942 Weizsäcker filed a patent on a transportable "process to generate energy and neutrons by an explosion... e.g. a bomb". The patent application was found in the 1990s in Moscow.

Historians have been divided as to whether Heisenberg and his team were sincerely trying to construct a nuclear weapon, or whether their failure reflected a desire not to succeed because they did not want the Nazi regime to have such a weapon. This latter view, largely based on postwar interviews with Heisenberg and Weizsäcker, was put forward by Robert Jungk in his 1957 book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. In a 1957 interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel, Weizsäcker frankly admitted to the scientific ambitions of those years "We wanted to know if chain reactions were possible. No matter what we would end up doing with our knowledge – we wanted to know." Only by "divine grace", Weizsäcker said, were they spared the temptation to build the bomb as the German war economy was unable to mobilize the necessary resources.

Original sources about this question were not revealed until 1993, when transcripts of secretly recorded conversations among ten top German physicists, including Heisenberg and Weizsäcker, detained under Operation Epsilon at Farm Hall, near Cambridge in late 1945, were published. In the conversation after the group of detainees had listened to the BBC Radio news on dropping of the atomic bomb on 6 August 1945, Weizsäcker said: "I believe the reason we didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded!"

But the "Farm Hall Transcripts" also revealed that Weizsäcker had taken the lead in arguing for an agreement among the scientists that they would claim that they had never wanted to develop a German nuclear weapon. It was this version of events which was given to Jungk as the basis of his book. This story was untrue at least to the extent that the detainees also included scientists actively engaged in eager attempts to build a nuclear bomb, namely Kurt Diebner and Walther Gerlach. Max von Laue later called this agreement "die Lesart" (the Version). Although the memorandum which the scientists drew up was drafted by Heisenberg, von Laue wrote: "The leader in all these discussions was Weizsäcker. I did not hear any mention of any ethical point of view."

Weizsäcker himself stated that Heisenberg, Karl Wirtz and he had a private agreement to study nuclear fission to the fullest possible extent in order to "decide" themselves how to proceed with its technical application. "There was no conspiracy, not even in our small three-man-circle, with certainty not to make the bomb. Just as little, there was no passion to make the bomb..." In a recent report based on additional documents from Russian archives, historian Mark Walker concludes that "in comparison with Diebner [and] Gerlach ... Heisenberg and finally Weizsäcker did obviously not use all power they commanded to provide the National Socialists with nuclear weapons".

However, historian of science and technology Wolf Schäfer has concluded, that Weizsäcker did want to build the bomb for Hitler. In a detailed study about Weizsäcker’s contributions to both Nazi Germany and West Germany, he distinguished between the young and the older (pacifistic) Weizsäcker, that is, the person he was from 1939 to 1945, and the person he became thereafter.

The young von Weizsäcker was no clairvoyant; he expected a German victory and wanted to offer Hitler the superweapon to guarantee Germany's supremacy, not to prevent the dictator's suicide and the devastation of the country. What von Weizsäcker foresaw in 1941 was Germany's emergence as the world's first nuclear power. The highly talented Hitler would jump at this, he thought. The power of the atomic bomb would enable the dictator, who had already conquered Western Europe, to keep the "Anglo-Saxons" in check (USA), or rather bring them to their knees (Great Britain), and to colonize Russia. We can assume that the policy of peace, which the young von Weizsäcker wanted to discuss with Hitler, was the reorganization of Europe under German domination.

Ivan Supek (one of Heisenberg's students and friends) claimed that Weizsäcker was the main figure behind the famous and controversial Heisenberg–Bohr meeting in Copenhagen in September 1941. Allegedly, he tried to persuade Bohr to mediate for peace between Germany and Great Britain. According to Weizsäcker's own account, he had persuaded Heisenberg to meet Bohr in order to broker an accord of the international nuclear physicist "community" not to build the bomb. However, according to Bohr's (posthumously published) account of the events, Heisenberg enthusiastically promoted the prospect of German victory and wanted Bohr and his colleagues to assist in the German atomic program. 

Later during the war Weizsäcker worked as a professor at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. The American capture of his laboratory and papers there in December 1944 revealed to the Western Allies that the Germans had not come close to developing a nuclear weapon.

Weizsäcker was allowed to return to the part of Germany administered by the Western Allies in 1946, and became director of a department for theoretical physics in the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. In 1952, he became the first director of the IFT (Institute of Theoretical Physics) in São Paulo which would later become part of UNESP. From 1957 to 1969, Weizsäcker was professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg. In 1957 he won the Max Planck medal. In 1970 he formulated a "Weltinnenpolitik" (world internal policy). From 1970 to 1980, he was head of the Max Planck Institute for the Research of Living Conditions in the Modern World in Starnberg. He researched and published on the danger of nuclear war, what he saw as the conflict between the First World and the Third World, and the consequences of environmental degradation.

. . .In the 1970s he founded, together with the Indian philosopher Pandit Gopi Krishna, a research foundation "for western sciences and eastern wisdom". After his retirement in 1980 he became a Christian pacifist, and intensified his work on the conceptual definition of quantum physics, particularly on the Copenhagen interpretation.

His experiences in the Nazi era, and with his own behavior in that time, gave Weizsäcker an interest in questions of ethics and responsibility. In 1957, he was one of the Göttinger 18, a group of prominent German physicists who protested against the idea that the Bundeswehr (West German armed forces) should be equipped with tactical nuclear weapons. He further suggested that West Germany should declare its definitive abdication of all kinds of nuclear weapons.

Atomic Heritage Foundation:

Born into German nobility in 1912, Weizsäcker studied physics, astronomy, and math at various German institutions between 1929 and 1933, including the University of Göttingen and Leipzig University. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the latter in 1933 and became a physics professor at the university shortly thereafter. Later, he taught physics at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Physics and the University of Strasbourg from 1936-1942 and 1942-1944 respectively. During his time in academia, Weizsäcker worked alongside notable scientists such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. His early research focused on planetary formation and the energy in stars.

Weizsäcker was involved in the German nuclear weapons program as early as August 1939. Albert Einstein wrote in his famous August 2, 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “I understand that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.”

He was among the lead scientists of the Uranverein or “Uranium Club” working on the German atomic bomb project and attended the group’s first meeting in September 1939. Over the course of the war, he researched the means by which German scientists could produce fissionable uranium and plutonium isotopes and drafted two patents, found in Moscow in the 1990s, on methods to generate energy from neutrons.

Weizsäcker conducted his research at both Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Physics and the University of Strasbourg. In December 1944, after they captured his Strasbourg laboratory, American forces discovered the Germans had abandoned their atomic bomb program.

Video Title: Ideas on the Philosophy of Science - Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1987). Source: Philosophy Overdose. Date Published: September 10, 2023. Description:

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (Professor emeritus of physics and philosophy at Munich and Hamburg) explains his view of philosophy and the philosophy of science in a lecture given at Cornell University in 1987 as part of a series on the philosophical and political consequences of modern science. 

Shen Kuo

 


Wikipedia:

Shen Kuo (Chinese: 沈括; 1031–1095) was a Chinese polymath, scientist, and statesman of the Song dynasty (960–1279). Shen was a master in many fields of study including mathematics, optics, and horology. In his career as a civil servant, he became a finance minister, governmental state inspector, head official for the Bureau of Astronomy in the Song court, Assistant Minister of Imperial Hospitality, and also served as an academic chancellor. At court his political allegiance was to the Reformist faction known as the New Policies Group, headed by Chancellor Wang Anshi (1021–1085).

In his Dream Pool Essays or Dream Torrent Essays (夢溪筆談; Mengxi Bitan) of 1088, Shen was the first to describe the magnetic needle compass, which would be used for navigation (first described in Europe by Alexander Neckam in 1187).Shen discovered the concept of true north in terms of magnetic declination towards the north pole, with experimentation of suspended magnetic needles and "the improved meridian determined by Shen's [astronomical] measurement of the distance between the pole star and true north". This was the decisive step in human history to make compasses more useful for navigation, and may have been a concept unknown in Europe for another four hundred years (evidence of German sundials made circa 1450 show markings similar to Chinese geomancers' compasses in regard to declination).

. . .Shen Kuo wrote extensively on a wide range of different subjects. His written work included two geographical atlases, a treatise on music with mathematical harmonics, governmental administration, mathematical astronomy, astronomical instruments, martial defensive tactics and fortifications, painting, tea, medicine, and much poetry. His scientific writings have been praised by sinologists such as Joseph Needham and Nathan Sivin, and he has been compared by Sivin to polymaths such as his Song dynasty Chinese contemporary Su Song, as well as to Gottfried Leibniz and Mikhail Lomonosov.

An excerpt from, "11th-century polymath was the first to recognise past climate change" By Michael Le Page, New Scientist, October 8, 2022:

An 11th-century polymath called Shen Kuo was the first to recognise that the climate has changed in the past, science communicator Simon Clark told New Scientist Live in London on 8 October.

The history of the science of weather and climate is very Eurocentric, said Clark. So, while writing his book Firmament, published earlier this year, he looked at what was happening elsewhere and came across Shen’s work.

In a 1088 work called Dream Pool Essays, Shen wrote about how a landslide exposed a cavity in a riverbank in what is now Yan’an in Shaanxi province in northern China, where conditions aren’t suitable for bamboo to grow. But in the cavity, Shen found bamboo plants that “had turned to stone”.

Puzzled by this discovery, Shen suggested that, in ancient times, the climate in the region must have been different. This is arguably the first written account of how the climate in specific places could change over time, said Clark.

An excerpt from, "Review: Recent Publications on Shen Kuo’s Mengxi bitan (Brush Talks from Dream Brook)" By Nathan Sivin, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2015:

Shen Kuo’s (1131-1195) polymathic collection of jottings is attracting more attention lately. A generation ago, the only complete translation into a modern language of was that by the Kyoto History of Science Seminar into Japanese (Umehara 1978-1981). A decade and a half later, two translations into modern Chinese with the same publisher followed it a year apart, and in the next year, a German translation of selections that included almost half of the book. Since 1997, we have had a complete scholarly translation into modern Chinese and a couple of less scholarly ones, a complete translation into English, a reprint of the best edition of the text supplemented by substantial new notes, a useful critical study of the text, a new full-length biography of Shen, and some reflective essays on him and his work. 

I will evaluate nine of these tomes, and will then raise a question that seems to me worth asking: What is the point—if any—of completely translating the many books of miscellaneous jottings like Shen's?

Video Title: Shen Kuo - The Renaissance Mind of Ancient China. Source: Dr. K. Date Published: October 25, 2024.

July 4, 2025

Who was Edward Bellamy?



Wikipedia:

Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 – May 22, 1898) was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerous "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of state ownership of the main pillars of the economy, achieved through nationalization.

Wikipedia:

Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian time travel science fiction novel by the American journalist and writer Edward Bellamy first published in 1888.

. . .The book was translated into several languages, and in short order "sold a million copies." According to historian Daniel Immerwahr, "In the 19th-century United States, only Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies in its first years" than Bellamy's book.

The novel inspired several utopian communities. In the United States alone, over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas. According to Erich Fromm, "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement."

. . .Looking Backward influenced the novel Future of a New China by Liang Qichao.

An excerpt from, "Edward Bellamy: An Introductory Bibliography" By Peggy Ann Brown, American Studies International, October 1988:

A perennial favorite on high school and college reading lists, Looking Backward has sparked modest attention during the centennial of its publication. Scholarly interest has included a handful of conferences, meeting sessions, and journal articles. And although no centennial edition of Looking Backward has been published, the University of Massachusetts Press is marking the occasion with an essay collection titled Looking Backward , 1988-1888. Essays on Edward Bellamy (1989). Bellamy has received popular recognition via crossword puzzle clues and an article in the New York Times Book Review highly critical of the novel's totalitarian tone. An episode of CBS's popular "Murder, She Wrote" paid quiet homage with a minor character identified as Ed Bellamy from Massachusetts.

While Bellamy's reputation rightly rests on Looking Backward's images and appeal, a full appreciation of his contributions as a social visionary and transformation from literary recluse to political activist requires attention to his earlier writings. This essay provides a brief introduction to Bellamy's literary and political career through works by and about the novelist.

Video Title: Who was Edward Bellamy? Source: Edward Bellamy House. Date Published: December 1, 2020.