Abstract
This chapter serves as a summary of the entire ca. 500-page book. It brings me to a conclusion that one’s response to living under tyranny without willingly supporting it can only be to leave, to engage in resistance, or to compromise.
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Notes
- 1.
This epigraph comes from “Старательский Вальсок” (“Conformists’ Little Waltz”), 1963, a song by the great Russian poet, song writer-performer, and dissident Alexander Galich, translated from the Russian by Ilya Hoffmann, Natalia V. Kuznetsova, and Alexander Soifer for this book.
- 2.
Max Planck’s admonition to Werner Heisenberg [Hei2].
- 3.
New York University Archives, Courant Papers.
- 4.
Nachlass von Erich Hecke, Universität Hamburg.
- 5.
ETH, Hs 652: 12153. Undated letter, written between August 21 and August 27, 1945.
- 6.
While himself remaining in Germany, in 1935 Carathéodory sent his daughter Despina, a Munich law student, to Athens, likely to protect her from the oppressive conditions of Nazi Germany [Geo, pp. 305–306].
- 7.
I was an undergraduate student when Mathematics Professor Abram Khaimovich Livshitz invited me to see his performance at the Moscow State University’s (MGU) student theater Nash Dom (Our Home). This theater-studio was founded by Mark Rozovsky in 1958 when he was still a student of journalism. The theater was closed down by the Soviet totalitarian authorities on December 23, 1969, a few months after my visit. By the spring 1969 all previous plays were banned, leaving measly scenes collected under the title “Take Old Staff and Show.” The scene I describe was originally written by Novosibirsk student theater’s authors Evgeny Vishnevsky and Vadim Sukhoverkhov.
- 8.
Van der Waerden, letter to van der Corput; July 31, 1945; ETH, Hs 652: 12160.
- 9.
[Mil], pp. 69–70.
- 10.
Our annual meeting devoted to the art and culture of the Fang people of West Equatorial Africa, extensively studied by Fernandez, and to other topics of mutual interest, such as a role of a scientist in tyranny.
- 11.
Bartel’s son, Hans van der Waerden contributes his view [WaH1]: Let us turn to the underlying general question, whether it was right or wrong for my father to stay in Germany after 1933, and even more so after 1940. I am glad to hear you pronounce your personal opinion on the subject (a moderate and carefully deliberated opinion indeed). Allow me to add some of my personal reflection too.
Judging the behavior, decision, “Life choices” of other people can only be done by applying general principles, which must ne true not only in one place, but in every place on earth at any time. How, which could have been the general principle stating as a moral imperative for my father to leave Germany after 1933? Could it be this: “When the government of a country is turned into cruel and criminal tyranny, all intellectuals serving that government are obligated to emigrate, otherwise they become guilty of ‘contributing’ (as you put it) to the dictatorship”? Is this really a general principle, applied all over the world and at any epoch? I only heard it being pronounced for Germany, and only after 1945 in retrospection, and even that not to everybody, and not applied to everybody. I never heard the principle being applied to the USSR under Stalin (whose dictatorship was as horrible as Hitler’s, if comparing the devil to satana is possible at all). Under Stalin, some intellectuals emigrated (as a personal choice) or were forced to do so. But never has anybody been blamed for not emigrating and so “contributing” to the Staling tyranny.
Allow me to add yet another, even more general consideration. In a wider sense, every intellectual in a public position “contributes” to the government he is working for. If this government—even without mutating into open tyranny—commits criminal actis on a larger scale, the intellectual gets involved and makes himself responsible, unless he “acts bravely” by openly protesting (or emigrating, if protesting seems too dangerous). This applies, for instance, to the actual U.S. government.
In 2010, Hans van der Waerden returns to this topic [WaH2]: “As a crude approximation, your three-cross-road theory may be of some use; it is inadequate when it comes to really understand day-to-day life in a totalitarian system. Because there is a fourth way, chosen by many who wished to preserve both life and soul. It says: “Stay in the country, avoid great gestures of opposition, but quietly and persistently show by small signs that you disagree, and so give hope and comfort to others.” Under a perfectly organized surveillance system as Stalin established in the USSR, this sideway too apparently was barred; in Hitler’s Germany, however, thousands of anti-fascists have followed it, thus surviving and uniting in an invisible network of free thinking and breathing.
References
Georgiadou, M., Constantin Carathéodory: Mathematics and Politics in Turbulent Times, Springer, Berlin, 2004.
Heisenberg, W., Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, Harper & Row, New York, 1971.
Mehrtens, H., Irresponsible purity: the political and moral structure of mathematical sciences in the National Socialist state, Science, Technology and National Socialism, by Renneberg, M. and Walker, M. (ed’s), Cambridge University Press, 1994, 324–338 and 411–413.
Miłosz, C., The Captive Mind, Octagon, New York, 1981.
Reid, C., Hilbert, Springer, New York, 1970.
Soifer, A., In Search of Van der Waerden, Leipzig and Amsterdam, 1931–1951. Part III: Amsterdam, 1946–1951, Geombinatorics XIV(3), 2005, 124–161.
Waerden, B. L. van der, Science Awakening, P. Noordhoff, Groningen, 1954. Expanded edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1961.
Waerden, Hans van der, letter to A. Soifer, June 20, 2004.
Waerden, Hans van der, letter to A. Soifer, September 10, 2010.
Waerden, Theo van der, letter to A. Soifer, June 25, 2004.
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Soifer, A. (2015). The Drama of Van der Waerden. In: The Scholar and the State: In Search of Van der Waerden. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0712-8_41
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