Essay Review: Zinner,Copernicus,and the Nazis: Entstehung und Ausbreitung der copernicanischen Lehre

The word ‘Lehre’ can also mean ‘model’, ‘teaching’ or ‘doctrine’ but it appears that the word ‘theory’ is most in keeping with the content of the book.

In 1931, Zinner published an article entitled: “Why the astronomy of the Germans?”, in Himmelswelt, xli (1931), 249–53 (in German).

von Ranke Leopold wrote: “To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants to show only what really happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist]).” Quoted and translated in: Meyerhoff Hans , The philosophy of history in our time: An anthology (New York, 1959), 13.

Schmeidler (1920–) was promoted at Munich on 18 December 1941 with a thesis entitled “Zur statistischen Verwertung von Sternzahlen und mittleren Parallaxen”; thus, he was in a particularly good position to shed light on the circumstances surrounding the publication of Entstehung (for brief biography, see Litten Freddy , Astronomie in Bayern 1914–1945 (Stuttgart, 1992), 231, 251).

Geuter Ulfried , The professionalization of psychology in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 1992; first publ. 1984), 280–1.

Proctor Robert , Racial hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass, 1988); Friedländer Saul , Nazi Germany and the Jews, i: The years of persecution, 1933–39 (New York, 1977), 193–4.

Others included Fritz Kubach, of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Munich), Karl Zeller (Stuttgart), Hans Schmauch (Marienburg), Bruno Thüring (Vienna, but also associated with the Bamberg Observatory in the early 1930s), August Faust (Breslau/now Wroclaw) and Eugen Brachvogel (Frauenburg/now Frombork).

In 1944, vol. i of the Gesamtausgabe appeared with the manuscript of De revolutionibus, edited by Kubach Fritz .

In analysing Paul of Middleburg's Secundum compendium correctionis calendarii (1516), Zinner explains that Copernicus and Johann Stöffler were counted as “German astronomers” ahead of the “foreign representatives” to the calendar commission: “This representation under the Germans testifies as much to their German nationality as to their German writings and letters and their concerns about Prussia as their Fatherland” (p. 173).

In footnote 22, p. 503, Zinner ‘swamps’ the spelling of Copernicus's name in a torrent of historical detail: “How was his name written? The name of his relatives was written Coppernic, Koppernieck, Koppernik, Koppernigk and thus does one encounter his name in the documents of Ermland and in the communications of his friends. He himself wrote Copernic, Coppernig, Coppernik and finally, especially Copernicus…. In Prussia, the German form of the name was still customary until around 1800; thus Christopher Hanow wrote Kopernik in 1749 and Johann Bernoulli wrote Copernik in 1779. Close to the learned form Copernicus, the following crop up: 1776 Kopernikus, 1800 Kopernicus, 1843 Copernikus, 1881 Coppernicus and 1887 Koppernikus. Since 21 October 1941, the style ‘Coppernicus’ has been prescribed (vorgeschrieben). Already in the nineteenth century, the French wrote Copernic and the Poles wrote Kopernik in 1802.” Throughout his text Zinner uses the “prescribed” spelling “Coppernicus” but the editors have decided to use the “learned” spelling in the title to the edition here under review. On the matter of establishing proper ancestry, see Friedländer , Nazi Germany and the Jews (ref. 6), 192–210.

One of these forced labourers was the distinguished Lvov microbiologist and sociologist of knowledge, Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), arguably the foundational thinker in what would later be known as “Science Studies” and a seminal influence on Thomas Kuhn. Fleck's Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (Basel, 1935) clearly went against Zinner's epistemological inclinations; hence, the two Origins never met. Fleck was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. (See Genesis and development of a scientific fact, ed. by Trenn Thaddeus J. and Merton Robert K. , transl. by Bradley Fred and Trenn Thaddeus J. , foreword by Kuhn Thomas S. (Chicago and London, 1979).) The Proceedings of the Erlangen Physical-Medical Society, the series in which Zinner's Entstehung appeared, was a respected academic publication that antedated Nazi rule. The nominal occasion for Entstehung's publication was the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen and the 400th anniversary of the publication of De revolutionibus. Zinner's Geschichte und Bibliographie der Astronomischen Literatur in Deutschland zur Zeit der Renaissance (Leipzig, 1941) was produced on low-quality wartime paper.

Litten , Astronomie in Bayern (ref. 4), 26n; see also Dobrzycki Jerzy , Review of Ernst Zinner, Regiomontanus: His life and work in Journal for the history of astronomy, xxiii (1992), 306.

Litten , Astronomie in Bayern (ref. 4), 207.

National Archives Record Group 242, Berlin Document Center Miscellaneous Collections. Special thanks to Robert Proctor for directing my search to microfilm copies of the Berlin records (on deposit since 1994 at the U.S. National Archives, Bethesda, MD) and to James Kelling, Archives Specialist, who generously conducted a search of the records and provided copies of all relevant materials.

Ringer Fritz K. , The decline of the German mandarins: The German academic community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, 1969); Stern Frank , The whitewashing of the yellow badge: Antisemitism and philosemitism in postwar Germany, transl. by Templer William (Oxford and New York, 1992), 164ff.

Stern , Whitewashing, 176.

Ibid., 176.

Ibid., 175: Office of U.S. Military Government, Bavaria, Trend, no. 30 (17 Jan. 1947).

Feyerabend Paul , Killing time: The autobiography of Paul Feyerabend (Chicago and London, 1994), 43–45.

See Friedländer , Nazi Germany and the Jews (ref. 10), 55: Party member 3-125-894.

Quoted in Sheehan Thomas , “A normal Nazi”, The New York review of books, 14 Jan. 1993, xl:30. The question of humanistic scholars' arrangements and encounters with the Nazi regime is still a source of considerable anxiety and has yet to receive a thorough, general treatment. Sheehan's review considers Heidegger's relationship to the Nazis with particular attention to a book that included a collection of Heidegger's Nazi speeches and a series of essays, including one by Jacques Derrida, assessing their moral and political import for his philosophy ( Wolin Richard (ed.), The Heidegger controversy (New York, 1990)). After four months on the market, Wolin's book was withdrawn by Columbia University Press because of a legal suit by Derrida concerning the rights to reproduce one of his previously published essays (it was subsequently reissued, without Derrida's contribution, by M.I.T. Press).

For this episode, see Young-Bruehl Elisabeth , Hannah Arendt: For love of the world (New Haven, 1982), 443; Sheehan , op. cit. (ref. 21), 30.

On the occasion of Zinner's 65th birthday, the historian of astronomy Willy Hartner briefly characterized Zinner's main publications, including Entstehung, but, in so doing, took no notice of Zinner's nationalistic rhetoric (“Ernst Zinner [zum 65. Geburtstag]”, Nachrichtenblatt der Deutschen Vereinigung für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik, 1951, 10–11). However, the possibility of a ‘revision’ must also take into account a larger historical context: It was a common postwar view in Germany that the suffering of the prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union was the moral equivalent of the suffering of the Jews in the German concentration camps. This view encouraged a selective memory of German responsibility which permitted widespread rationalization and denial (see Moeller Robert G. , “War stories: The search for a usable past in the Federal Republic of Germany”, American historical review, ci (1996), 1008–48.)

Zinner E. , Astronomie: Geschichte ihrer Probleme (Freiburg and Munich, 1951). Frank Stern quotes what he aptly calls the “trenchant” observations of the historian Walter Jens in his study of the University of Tübingen, a view with more than local import: “Of all the grandiose and dreadful, the moving and frightening documents in the Tübingen University archives, the protocols from the era after 1945 are the most eerie and weird: It was just as though nothing had happened! As if there had been no Stalingrad, no Auschwitz, no program of eugenic sterilizations, no legitimating and ennobling stamp of scholarly approval for antisemitism” ( Stern , op. cit. (ref. 15), 159; Jens Walter , Eine deutsche Universität: 500 Jahre Tübinger Gelehrtenrepublik (Munich, 1981), 342f).

Already in 1931, Zinner heralded the nationalist theme in two curious graphs alleging the (logarithmically) improving quality of German estimations of solar and stellar longitude between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries — as opposed to a comparable decline in Greek values between the first century B.C. and the eleventh century A.D. (GS, 596). In 1931, Zinner expressed the hope of founding an institute for the investigation of national culture curves (see Litten , Astronomie in Bayern (ref, 4), 22; also Dobrzycki , op. cit. (ref. 12), 306).

Steinschneider Moritz (1816–1907): “Copernicus nach dem Urtheile des David Gans, eines jüdischen Astronomen, der mit Tycho Brahe in Verbindung stand” (Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, xvi (1871), 252–3).

“Auch dürfte die Mitteilung des Rabbi David Gans, das er um 1600 bei Brahe zu Benatek einen Zeitmesser von wunderbarem neuem Bau zum Beobachten der Mittagsdurchgänge der Sterne gesehen habe, in diesem Zusammenhange von Wert sein” (GS, 427).

Ibid., 117: ben Aia Abraham , Avenare Abraham , ben Esra Abraham , pp. 77, 81; ben Hiyya Abraham (Judaeus), p. 433; and ben Gerson Levi , p. 117 — all buried in a long list of names. On p. 80, Levi is described as “a member of the Paris scientific circle of the second half of the fourteenth century” and on p. 122, there is a reference to his ownership of a Jacob's Staff.

And, indeed, Zinner's relationship to Jewish colleagues before and after 1945. For this review, I have been unable to consult Zinner's personal correspondence at the Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, University of Frankfurt.

This, at least, is what the CSU-San Diego librarian Louis Kinney reports (Catalogue of the rare astronomical books in the San Diego State University Library (Seattle, Washington, 1988), 7). However, I have found none of Zinner's personal correspondence pertaining to the transaction in the archives of the Zinner Collection.

Of these, the 212 pre-1800 printed books are described in Kinney's Catalogue. The original Collection consisted of 4,192 items but Zinner later added “13 filing cases” of monographs, pamphlets, reprints and photostats of manuscripts (see Friends of the Library newsletter, April 1981).

Price Derek to Harrington Awona ; quoted in “Library Staff News, San Diego State College”, September 1969, p. 3. The original letter is not on file.

Czartoryski Pawel , “The library of Copernicus”, Studia Copernicana, xvi: Science and history: Studies in honor of Edward Rosen (Wroclaw, 1978), 355–96.

Isis, xxxvi (1946), 261–6, p. 262. I have checked all the other reviews cited in Rosen's annotated Copernicus bibliography — all published during the war (Three Copernican treatises, 3rd rev. edn (New York, 1971), 268). With the exception of Rosen's review, the others are extremely brief, uncritical and synoptic. Nobis and Schmeidler do not refer to any of these reviews. At CSU-San Diego, neither Zinner's personal copy of Entstehung nor the issue of Isis containing Rosen's review is annotated, although the presence of Rosen's review in the Collection means that Zinner had read it.