Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

I find this blog post somewhat ironic. The author starts the post by saying that the trigger for the post was Marx's 200th birthday.

Britain might have declined slightly, but Marx's home country, Germany, has comparatively fallen from the top of the world, intellectually. It's still a heavy hitter, but if you compare it to pre-WW1/pre-WW2 Germany, it's just a ghost.

Why?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_von_Liebig

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Rontgen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Geiger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bethe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Born

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_List

etc, ad infinitum.

Germany is a special case. Nazism literally wiped the entire German intelligentsia, both physically (killing Jews and leftists, removing freedom of research, and eventually turning the country in a bombed-out wasteland that instigated the emigration of anyone with the opportunity to do so) and culturally (as it tainted anything that could have even remotely contributed to the rise of Nazism). The newer generations were suddenly rudderless and self-loathing. You could make a similar argument with Russia before and after Stalinism, or Italy before and after Fascism. Totalitarism destroys culture.

I don't particularly agree on the article's premise, but I don't think bringing Germany in the picture helps the debate.

Many on that list are Jewish so that could be a reason.

But not the majority (I've actually counted and it's 4/16) and definitely not the majority from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_scientists

Also, I forgot to include philosophers... a very scary concept, considering the caliber of German philosophers (Kant, Nietzsche, etc.).

This misses the point a bit. Intellectuals are not a commodity. How do you weigh one Fermi or Einstein against 3 other scientists?

You're assuming that the native Germans were somehow second rate scientists. Re-check my list :)

Germany not only destroyed its Jewish population willingly, therefore losing some of Germany's best minds but also destroyed its own research facilities, economy and even a good chunk of its native German scientists by shipping them off to war or having them bombed back at home.

Folly of the greatest magnitude, any way you look at it.

I don't see where I made that assumption.

Kick out a few key faculty members and the rest of the good ones will follow, Jew or not, because they are good and have the choice to leave. You don't need all your faculty to be Jewish in order to lose all your good ones by kicking out a single Jewish faculty member.

If you lose 4/16 of your academics but all 4 of those were the Giants, then you haven't decimated your department, but you have lost what made it good in the first place.

Even before the war reached the borders, German mathematics was decimated. Sometimes by numbers, but always by the numbers that mattered. Because anyone good knew someone effected, and everyone good had the option to leave.

There is even a quote on Hilbert's page:

About a year later, Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked whether "the Mathematical Institute really suffered so much because of the departure of the Jews". Hilbert replied, "Suffered? It doesn't exist any longer, does it!"

Not sure that fully explains it, but its a sad and tragic loss nevertheless.

Yup. America's intellectual prominence owes a lot to the Jews (and others) who flead Germanic countries during ww2. Goedel, Einstein, Von Neumann, Fermi, Bethe. And countless others who refused to stay silent as their best colleagues disappeared. America feasted on the output of those people and their intellectual progeny. Meanwhile, the great German faculty were (in some cases literally) decimated.

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