Hofmann Versus the Antisemites

All this occurred just before antisemitism began to flourish as a distinct movement in Germany. Its outbreak in Berlin in 1879 caught Hofmann in its wake, for in the following year he was elected rector of the university.

The birth of modern German antisemitism in that year began with the agitation of journalist Wilhelm Marr and preacher Adolf Stöcker, but what made the movement especially powerful was the academic respectability given it by the famous historian Heinrich von Treitschke, one of the most popular and respected professors at the University of Berlin. While distancing himself from rabid and racist agitators such as Marr, Treitschke considered the Jews "an element of national disintegration" and called on them to assimilate fully to their fatherland as the price of emancipation.^[64]

The liberals were not silent in the face of these developments. A "declaration of notables" condemning the attacks was issued by 73 prominent Berliners, among them 17 of Treitschke's faculty

colleagues—including fellow historian Theodor Mommsen, biologist Rudolf Virchow (both founding members of the Progressive Party), and Rector August Wilhem Hofmann. But the movement caught fire among the students. In Leipzig in October 1880, Bernhard Förster began to circulate an academic petition with radical demands for restrictions of the rights of Jews. Within eighteen months, 255,000 German students, about one-fourth of all matriculants, signed.^[65]

At the same time in Berlin, an eloquent and popular law student named Erich yon Schramm began to organize a "German Students' Union" (Verein deutscher Studenten), whose main purpose was to be antisemitic agitation. Fortunately, he needed official approval for registration of the society, either by the university or by the police, so that Hofmann had the power to prevent the group from forming at the university. Throughout the 1880-1881 academic year, he rejected three successive drafts of the proposed bylaws, disguising his fundamental opposition in legal technicalities and in the neutral argument that "political" organizations, of whatever orientation, are inappropriate in the academy and would lead only to discord among the students. Most of Hofmann's colleagues supported this reasoning. Finally Schramm gave up and registered the Union with the police. However, after a final revision of statutes in 1881, the university officials were forced to admit the Union as a registered student society.

The German Student's Union, born in Berlin, spread quickly to other universities, even before its official certification. In Leipzig, Halle, Göttingen, Kiel, and Greifswald, many hundreds of students joined.^[66] Hofmann was sorely troubled by these events; it is said that early in 1881 he contemplated resigning his office.^[67] For its part, the Union never forgave Hofmann for his interference and boycotted every Hofmannfest in Berlin, even his funeral in 1892.^[68]

No doubt Hofmann was delighted that the antisemites stayed away from the various appreciations given him in his last years. Despite the hard feelings and jealousies engendered by Hofmann's crowning himself "king" of chemistry and creating a sort of chemical court around himself, few chemists have been so well and so vocally feted during their lifetimes. His scientific productivity was little diminished even into his old age, and he was honored by most scientific societies around the world. Even his death was fortunate in a sense, for his health continued to be nearly perfect until a sudden stroke or heart attack killed him at the age of seventy-four. The flowers sent from around the world filled his home to overflowing. The funeral was attended by 1500 mourners.^[69]

Kolbe's mature years were very different in tone. His friends began to slowly disassociate themselves from the "thunderer of Waisenhaus-

strasse," as Lothar Meyer called him.^[70] Jacob Volhard was caught in the middle. Kolbe regarded his former student as a good friend and loyal comrade in arms, with whom he could be completely open and trusting—after all, Volhard had shared the Russians' censure for his nationalistic piece on Lavoisier in 1870.^[71] But Kolbe had forgotten, or perhaps was unaware, that Volhard was the son of an extremely liberal and idealistic attorney, that he had an internationalist outlook similar to that of Hofmann, and that both he and his parents had long been intimate friends with the Hofmanns and with the Kekulés (as well as with the Liebigs) from their hometown relationships in Darmstadt.^[72] By the mid-1870s, Volhard was also remonstrating with Kolbe and sometimes not altogether gently, despite his feelings of respect and friendship.

We have seen that Kekulé became Kolbe's favorite target for vilification. Kolbe even claimed that Volhard himself was suffering from Kekulé's machinations, since Kekulé had engineered a call for his student Theodor Zincke to Marburg—like Kekulé, an uncultured, incapable man—and Kolbe maintained that Volhard would otherwise have gotten the call. His bitterness was no doubt heightened by the fact that this had been his chair until 1865. Kekulé, he concluded with characteristic coarseness, "has succeeded in transforming the chemical chair at Marburg University into a night chair [Nachtstuhl , or chamber pot] for a large number of years."^[73] In the fall of 1882, Kolbe blasted Baeyer with the same viciousness as he had Kekulé.^[74] In a letter to Frau Baeyer, Volhard expressed sympathy:

My old friend Kolbe is behaving truly irresponsibly. A pity on the man; since he began to devote himself to insults he has produced nothing more of value. . . . Once one has delivered oneself up to vanity, one does not realize to what degree of madness this will lead him.^[75]

Obituaries provide some estimation of contemporary respect for the departed, especially if one knows how to read between the lines. Volhard wrote a long, highly laudatory biography of Hofmann, one of three book-length treatments of his life and career that were published in the first decade after his death (a fourth appeared in 1918, simultaneously Hofmann's hundredth birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft).^[76] In his description of Hofmann's battles with the antisemitic students, Volhard left no doubt regarding his own hatred for the "disgusting Jew-baiting" of the students, and his admiration for Hofmann's persistent resistance.^[77]

As for Kolbe, Volhard made an appreciative speech at the unveiling

of a plaque in his honor, but it was never published. Hofmann composed a somewhat stiff and very short obituary for the Berichte , departing notably from his customary exuberant style.^[78] It is well known that Hofmann was an enthusiastic and energetic obituarist in his old age, filling three substantial volumes of collected "Memories of Departed Friends."^[79] Kolbe was not among these friends; Kolbe's hated French rivals Dumas and Wurtz, along with three Jews (Gustav Magnus, Alphons Oppenheim, and Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy), were. In fact, there may have been an unstated message in the fact that he chose to memorialize both Wurtz, author of the line about French chemistry that caused so much pain, and Oppenheim, Wurtz' Jewish student who translated the work into German.^[80] The Wurtz biography, published in German, is by far the longest and best biography ever written of this major French chemist.

In general, Kolbe has fared very poorly regarding obituaries and biographies. The authors of the two most authoritative obituaries were at once relatives and former students of Kolbe (his son-in-law Ernst von Meyer and his nephew Hermann Ost). Significantly, a primary objective of both of these obituaries was to resurrect Kolbe's tarnished reputation and to try to place his attacks in the best possible light. With the presumed exception of the present effort, Kolbe's life and career have not been properly studied—a fact that is surely in some measure a consequence of his conduct, especially after 1870.

A principal focus of this chapter has been intolerance, antisemitism in particular. If that prejudice is a disease from which one suffers (as many, even antisemites themselves, have described it),^[81] then Kolbe can be said to have contracted a serious, even pathological, case. To what extent was he typical of his peers in the academic chemical community? Any direct answer must be carefully qualified. It is obvious that most Christians in German academia, even those who worked closely and happily with Jews, were influenced by the negative stereotypes that prevailed in Bismarckian society;^[82] however, I have found little evidence for widespread and active prejudice among the peer community described here.^[83] Hofmann stands out as a particular example of almost aggressive philosemitism, but many others in the community—Bunsen, Wöhler, Kekulé, and Volhard, for example—were invariably kind and fair-minded regarding their Jewish students and colleagues.

Many of the great names in German chemistry, including those just cited, had numerous Jewish students, assistants, and associated Privatdozenten. Bunsen recommended Victor Meyer as his successor at Heidelberg, and Kekulé did everything he could to advance the career of Wallach. It is certain that many recipients of letters from Kolbe con-

taining antisemitic slurs did not welcome them—namely, correspondents such as Volhard, Kopp, Hofmann, and Baeyer. Even noted antisemites could act kindly toward individual Jews: Oppenheim was one of Treitschke's few friends during his student days, and Treitschke loved him dearly his entire life.^[84] Even Kolbe could have kind words of respect for Ladenburg and Victor Meyer.^[85]

Were scientists in general any different from humanist scholars during this period? An unequivocal answer is not possible. Scientists are certainly full members of their wider collegial community as well as the general culture of the society of their day. As Ringer has shown, the Wilhelmian academic community, imbued with the neohumanist ethos of Kultur , had a number of characteristics that appear to us as arrogant, narrow-minded, and antimodernist. Most academic scientists during our somewhat earlier period shared many of these values, especially a sense of the ineffable qualities and inestimable importance of the neohumanist Gymnasium as a means of forming a sensitive, cultured, and broadly educated mind. Both Hofmann and Kolbe fought tenaciously—Hofmann with his accustomed tact and Kolbe with his usual abrasiveness—against the movement to weaken Gymnasium education as preparatory to university. "To have read Homer," waxed Hofmann lyrical,

. . . quickens one's life. The face of a gray-headed public servant, upon which the pencil of time has engraved the unmistakable traces of official monotony, will lighten, if perchance the full-sounding hexameter of the Iliad strikes unexpectedly upon his ear. It is as though his youth suddenly flickered up again within him. What the Bible is to the common people, such is in many respects Homer to the educated.^[86]

Clearly, in many respects scientists shared the humanists' value system. Nor do I mean to set up chemists as paragons of virtue and tolerance during this period of increasing illiberalism. Kolbe is a particularly virulent counterexample on the side of the chemists, and the historian Mommsen's staunch progressivism was a counterweight to colleague Treitschke's bigotry.

And yet, there is a certain danger in underestimating the cultural differences between academic scientists and humanists considered as groups, in the last century as in this. William Coleman has written vaguely, but I think accurately, about "a veritable culture of science" which took root in early nineteenth-century Germany, a thesis I have attempted to address more fully in the first chapter of this book.^[87] This scientific culture gathered force through the century, especially as the sciences and (until late in the century) chemistry above all looked in-

creasingly important for promoting German industrialization and political-military power. David Rowe has also argued that Ringer's conclusions from his study of the nonscience German professoriate cannot unproblematically be extended to the science community.^[88] This suggestion is reinforced by the fact that however hard it may have been for Jews to succeed in science, it was virtually impossible in fields such as literature or languages, where the first Jewish Ordinarius was not appointed until the Weimar period.

It must be noted, however, that real strains had begun to develop in Bismarckian scientific culture, and the Kolbe case illustrates some of these. In a sensitive and revealing monograph on the astrophysicist Karl Friedrich Zöllner, a colleague of Kolbe's at the University of Leipzig, Christoph Meinel has explored "the fragility of the culture of science in Imperial Germany, and its hidden antinomies."^[89] Zöllner, like Kolbe, was a vehement (and antisemitic) critic of modernity, who attacked Hofmann and other prominent liberal scientists of his day. (Hofmann himself thought the two were in league, though apparently this was not the case.)^[90] The situation thus had become sufficiently complex to frustrate any simple generalizations.

The price of prejudice, in every discipline, must not be underestimated. Even the perpetrators of prejudice were victims: one object lesson from this study, a "cautionary example" to use Volhard's phrase, is the self-inflicted demolition of Kolbe's erstwhile brilliant career. Much more destructive than the actions of a single man, though difficult to gauge, were the institutional barriers that existed until the Empire was founded, which acted to exclude a talented community of intellectuals from German universities. Institutional and legal barriers were, of course, re-erected after Hitler's accession to power in 1933; Alan Beyerchen has masterfully depicted the consequent impact on the German physics community.^[91] A final factor that is most difficult to document or study in detail is silent prejudice, since it may not even be revealed in private letters. There is no question that qualified Jews in every field continued to be discriminated against even after full emancipation. Nor was antisemitism confined to Germany; the difficulty of Charles Gerhardt to achieve career success in France was surely at least in part a function of his Jewish heritage. It is also true that antisemitism was a serious and in many cases insuperable barrier to Jewish advancement in the elite universities of the United States during this same period.

Historians sometimes forget that, however much we try to depict the apparent inevitability of later historical events from earlier contexts, factors, and trends, history is actually a contingent process, manufactured by freely acting and often unpredictable human beings.

The apparent progress that Jews made in academia during the 1870s and even in the 1880s was not foreordained to be reversed. When Friedrich III ascended the throne early in 1888, he represented the great hope of German liberals. One of his first acts was to force the resignation of the reactionary interior minister R. V. von Puttkamer. Consequently, there was real reason to believe that the elements of liberal democracy were finally in the ascendant, in the academy as elsewhere. Tragically, Friedrich was already dying when he became emperor, and he ruled only ninety-nine days; he was succeeded by Wilhelm II, a very different man from his father.

Five months after Friedrich's death, Hofmann published his collected biographies, with its liberal subtext, and dedicated the volumes to Friedrich's widow, Victoria. Victoria was the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and had studied informally with Hofmann in her youth. Upon Hofmann's death four years later, Victoria wrote a long letter of condolence to Hofmann's widow and directed that busts of two scientists be placed flanking a statue of her to be erected in the Tiergarten: Helmholtz and Hofmann.^[92] About Wilhelm, the new emperor, she is said to have commented, "Don't for a moment imagine that my son does anything from any motive but vanity."^[93] The German Reich then had begun its trajectory toward war and holocaust.