Abstract
This chapter discusses the reasons why a book-length biography of Van der Waerden, and portrayal of his friendship with Heisenberg were important. It also describes ways in which my historical scholarly writing differs from tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
February 6, 1996 post on E-Holocaus Discussion Group. Sepinwall is a Professor at the Holocaust Education Resource Center, College of Saint Elizabeth.
- 2.
June 1, 2004 e-mail to Alexander Soifer [Bru8].
- 3.
Curiously, during the decades of our correspondence, N.G. de Bruijn did not follow his own advice to preserve details of his life, or even to disclose what his initials “N.G.” stood for. In the end, I convinced him to write his autobiography, which has appeared in my book [Soi9].
- 4.
This most fitting here sentence comes from the title of the 1981 documentary by the Dutch film director Philo Bregstein about the murder of the great poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini; the original Dutch title is Wie de Waarheid Zegt Moet Dood.
- 5.
My research on Van der Waerden’s turbulent years 1931–1951 was largely finished and my three essays waiting in Geombinatorics’ queue when in 2004 I received from a German colleague a long Centenary article with the title nearly identical to the first installment [Soi4] of my triptych: “Van der Waerdens Leipziger Jahre 1931–1945” by the then Leipzig University Professor of History of Mathematics Rüdiger Thiele (Mitteilungen der DMV 12-1/2004, 8–20). It turned out that the title was about the only thing in common between our works. It would require a long article for me to correct Thiele’s errors and challenge his prejudices. For example, Thiele alleges “It is natural that in particular Jewish emigrants have attacked van der Waerden for his stay in Nazi Germany.” It appeared as if Thiele blames the Jews for their “attacks” on Van der Waerden. Everyone—and particularly a German historian—should have exercised better judgment and respect for the Jews who were harassed, thrown from their jobs, forced into exile, sent to death camps, killed, and driven to commit suicide. Moreover, there was no truth to Thiele’s allegation: Van der Waerden’s critics Otto E. Neugebauer and Oswald Veblen, for example, were not Jewish. Thiele quoted Veblen writing in December 1933 about “signs of growing anti-Semitism,” as if establishing moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the United States. Yes, there was anti-Semitism in America, as in all countries where Jews lived—but the Nazis gave a particularly bad name to anti-Semitism. There is no moral equivalence, Professor Thiele: the difference between American and German anti-Semitism is 6,000,000 dead bodies! Thiele promotes a pre-ordained advocacy at the expense of an impartial analysis of even his Leipzig University’s archival documents made available to both of us. As a result, in my opinion Prof. Thiele’s article contributed little to history in general, and to our understanding of Van der Waerden in particular. In 2009 this article appeared in the form of a small book in German, “Van der Waerden in Leipzig.”
- 6.
An anonymous referee complained, “Considering history as a form of art is quite unusual and might differ from what other publications in history would do.” Exactly right: I do not write “usual” books—there are plenty of them collecting dust on the shelves of libraries.
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Soifer, A. (2015). Why Van der Waerden and Why Me?. In: The Scholar and the State: In Search of Van der Waerden. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0712-8_2
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