Alfred Wegener Read online

  I thank the State Department of the United States and the governments of Greenland and Denmark for arranging permission for me to conduct research on the Greenland ice cap. While I was in Greenland, Gösta Lindgren, managing director of the Black Angel Mine (Marmorilik), made resources available to me without which I could not have succeeded. I thank Raymond Bruun of Boliden S/A and Hans Jürgen Hansen of Greenex for their help, which included helicopter travel to and from Marmorilik, far beyond the endpoint of civil aviation. I thank Capt. Fleming, the Dark Angel Mine environmental officer, for pulling me off the beach at Kamarajuk in the midst of a fierce downslope windstorm. Bjørn Thomassen, of the Geological Survey of Greenland and Denmark, helped me to choose a route up the Kamarajuk Glacier and gave me good advice concerning the history of Wegener’s expedition as well. I received similar good advice from Jan Lorentz and from Finn Pedersen, the director of the Uummannaq Museum.

  I am forever indebted to Henry Frankel, philosopher, historian, and friend, whose conversation, advice, and encouragement often kept me going when I thought I would never finish this book. His four-volume history of the continental drift controversy is as close to the “last word” on the subject as anyone ever gets. I see our work as complementary, and I am especially grateful to him for his detailed comments on my manuscript, which improved it greatly, especially in the later chapters.

  My home institution, the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington, supported my research for many years. The National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities also supported my work in 1983, 1989, and 1999. I thank them all, as well as my colleagues and friends in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. Particular thanks to Prof. Jody Bourgeois at the University of Washington, a good historian of the earth sciences and a great geologist, for her friendship and advice. I would like to thank Kelly Vomacka for helping me to proof and prepare the manuscript in its final stages. I very much appreciate the guidance, support, wisdom, and, above all, patience of Robert J. Brugger, my editor at Johns Hopkins University Press. Thanks are also due to Jeremy Horsefield for his excellent copy editing, to Kim Johnson for her expert management of the production of the book, to Glen Burris for the beautiful design, and not least to Alexa Selph, who prepared the index.

  My daughter Annie Greene also deserves my thanks for her good humor concerning a project that spans most of her life.

  My deepest thanks go to my wife, Jo Leffingwell, to whom this book is dedicated, for her unconditional support and her belief that I would someday finish this book. I could not have done it without her. Thanks, Jo.

  ALFRED WEGENER

  1

  The Boy

  BERLIN AND BRANDENBURG, 1880–1899

  The Berlin of to-day has about it no suggestion of a former period. The site it stands on has traditions and a history, but the city itself has no traditions and no history. It is a new city; the newest I have ever seen.… The main mass of the city looks as if it had been built last week. The rest of it has a just perceptibly graver tone, and looks as if it might be six or even eight months old.

  MARK TWAIN, “The German Chicago” (1897)

  It is no little thing to get to Rheinsberg from Berlin. The railroad runs past it at a distance of six miles, and only the adroit combining of stagecoach and hired cart leads one ultimately to the long-sought goal. This may explain why a place whose natural beauties are not to be scorned, and which is of great historical importance, remains almost unvisited.

  THEODOR FONTANE, Graffschaft Rüppin (1862)

  Toward the end of October the weather in Brandenburg (North Prussia) turns windy and cool. The late-summer lull that can bring both early morning fog and hot, still afternoons gives way—sometimes quite suddenly—to fresh breezes from the west. This heralds the seasonal inland march of the Atlantic Westerlies across the Prussian plain, and this flat landscape of forest, lake, and farmstead offers the wind little resistance. In Berlin, 200 kilometers (124 miles) inland from the Baltic Sea, the autumn climate is not much different from that of a coastal town like Rostock, though the imperial capital city is less cloudy. By early November the daytime highs are only around 7°C (45°F) and the nighttime lows hover near freezing. The sky is seldom completely clear, and the rain, though less frequent than it was in the late-summer months, is cold and driven by a wind with a sharp edge.

  When this autumn wind sweeps into Berlin, it travels from west to east down the second-broadest avenue in Europe, tugging at the miles of carefully ordered shade trees that give the avenue its name: Unter den Linden. It strips their leaves and swirls them past the neoclassical facades of ministries and palaces, and past the pediments and porticoes of the Prussian State Library, the Royal Opera, the Friedrich-Wilhelms University, and the Arsenal, finally releasing them into the old Lustgarten, the great parade ground fronting the Imperial Palace on the Museum Insel (museum island).

  The Museum Insel in the River Spree is the heart of Old Berlin and the site of the medieval towns of Berlin and Cölln, founded in the thirteenth century. By the fifteenth century, they had merged (without growing significantly), and the construction of a castle had elevated the town to the “Seat of the Electors of Brandenburg”—the Hohenzollern—a family then just beginning its long climb up the ladder of imperial fortune. Only during the reign of Friedrich I (r. 1688–1713) did the island’s aspect change dramatically. Friedrich strove to realize his dream of an “Athens on the Spree” by spending extravagantly on public buildings. From his time on, vigorous architectural campaigns by Friedrich after Friedrich and Wilhelm after Wilhelm steadily transformed the center of Berlin from an undistinguished North European trading town into an Italianate Renaissance and neoclassical metropolis. Among these architectural adventures, that of the Imperial Palace was the greatest and most protracted. An enormous residence with (eventually) almost 1,200 rooms, it was continuously under construction from the seventeenth until the twentieth century.1 Around it, the remains of medieval Berlin gave way in the nineteenth century to great temples of classical and modern secular culture—the Old Museum (1823–1830), the New Museum (1843–1859), the National Gallery (1867–1876), and the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (1897–1904). This industrious acquisition of an artistic and architectural heritage was accompanied on the Museum Island by massive construction in the service of somewhat more typical princely and royal preoccupations: the monumental, high-Renaissance Berlin Cathedral (1894–1905)2 and the baroque Royal Stables (1896–1901).

  It was in this cold, windy, gritty, imperial construction zone that Alfred Lothar Wegener was born on Monday, 1 November 1880. Alfred was the fifth and youngest child of Richard Wegener (1843–1917) and Anna Schwarz (1847–1919). His birthplace was a converted Austrian embassy at 57 Friedrichsgracht, a scant few blocks from the Imperial Palace, and facing the Spree Canal on the southeastern side of the island. This ample and gracious structure was home to the Schindlersches Waisenhaus, a privately endowed orphanage for sons of clergy, teachers, civil servants, landowners, and merchants; the Wegeners had taken over its direction and management in 1873, a few years after their marriage. With its airy, high-ceilinged rooms—the great ballroom in the rear of the building had converted handily to a gym full of gymnastic equipment—the spacious interior of the building was more than adequate to house the Wegener family, the thirty or so orphans in their charge, the two young men (Adjunkten) assisting Richard Wegener in the teaching and daily supervision of the orphans, and the resident domestics under the direction of Anna Wegener. Its faintly neoclassical exterior, with four Corinthian pilasters set into the facade, makes common cause with its Palladian neighbor to the north, and together they stand in serene contrast to the surrounding redbrick apartment buildings, which manage only to look sooty and compressed.3

  The Schindler Orphanage was all but indistinguishable from a small, upper-class boarding school. Perhaps befitting its location in “Athens on the Spree,” it was much more an Athenian than a Spartan
institution, and thus quite unlike the parsimonious, for-profit boarding schools that George Orwell denounced in his memoir “Such, Such Were the Joys,” with their cold rooms, bad food, bullying, and humiliation carefully graded to the class position of the parents. At the Schindler Orphanage there were ample food and heat: the orphans were, after all, upper-class sons of professional and well-to-do landed families, and the mission of the institution was to see that these boys should not lose their hereditary educational and social advantages by a mischance of fate. The orphanage was meant to be a nurturing milieu for boys without parents, a place for the building of their character. The English word “character” is, as often and rightly noted, a weak translation for the German Bildung. The latter was a cultural ideal on the order of Athenian paideia: a carefully harmonized scheme of personal development seeking to couple good breeding with moral probity, physical prowess, classical education, and high culture.

  If the orphanage was a physically comfortable and culturally elite institution governed by lofty philosophical ideals, it was also, and on the emotional side inescapably, a civic institution for little boys without parents. It was a distinctly curious fate for Alfred Wegener and his brothers and sisters to have been born and raised within its walls. Alfred’s two eldest siblings, his sister Tony (b. 1873) and brother Willi (b. 1874), appeared in the world soon after their parents arrived to direct the orphanage. They were followed within a few years and in rapid succession by Kurt in 1878, Käte in 1879, and Alfred himself in 1880.

  The implications of these unusual domestic arrangements for Alfred Wegener’s life and for the lives of the other Wegener children, who shared their parents’ attentions day and night with thirty or so supplementary siblings, are manifold and intriguing. When Willi, Kurt, and Alfred were in their primary school years, their lives were to be strictly segregated from those of the orphans. They did not attend class with them, study with them, or eat with them, and the Wegener family apartment was in a wing of the building opposite to that containing the dormitory and schoolrooms. Kurt and Alfred, however, sought the orphans out as playmates. Whenever they were free from adult supervision, they spent time with the orphans in the playfield behind the orphanage and exercised with them in the gym.4 We are told that Alfred, while still of preschool age, took as his model one of the older orphans, an expert gymnast, and trailed him about the gym doggedly trying to follow his lead in the exercises.5 One says “after school,” but in an orphanage, as in any boarding school devoted to molding the whole child, there was no “after school,” only a brief cessation of formal instruction; set routines continued throughout the twenty-four-hour day. It is worthy of note that gymnastic exercise, weightlifting, and sports were not only promoted by the government but also controlled, required, and regulated as meticulously as the rest of the curriculum and treated with (almost) the seriousness of Latin and Greek.

  The regulation of the life of schoolchildren and belief in the power and benefit of ordered routine probably reached some sort of historical maximum in Berlin during Alfred Wegener’s boyhood. Driven by a serious attempt to scientize and rationalize civil existence, it also aimed to orchestrate, integrate, and harmonize the interior life of these future subjects and citizens to match the external order as much as possible. Prussia was a Kantian state, and this was in many ways a Kantian orphanage (even with a strong fondness for Schiller on the part of Richard Wegener). The day, the week, the year were partitioned by subject and level, with rising and retiring times as faithful as the motions of the planets; sport and play, music and art, languages and mathematics, religion and history, geography and literature each had their apportioned hours and graded tasks.

  The orphans, after completing their primary schooling within the walls of the Schindler Orphanage, went on to the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, one of Berlin’s oldest (1574) and most prestigious secondary schools.6 That is, those capable of meeting its standards did so. Those who had fared somewhat less well in primary school went on to a Realgymnasium, a six-year course with less emphasis on classics, and those with no discernible academic ability were apprenticed out to craftsmen and left the orphanage altogether.7 This partitioning by academic performance gave an initial presumption to class privilege but then demanded talent and performance in return; it reveals the perilous and difficult character of the Prussian meritocracy: it was hard to rise in it, and all too easy to fall. The hard-working and capable boys who went on to the Grauen Kloster followed the harrowing and minutely supervised nine-year classical curriculum that assured entrée into the university and eventually the upper ranks of the civil service. The Grauen Kloster proudly counted Prince Otto von Bismarck among its graduates (class of 1832), and in 1880 Bismarck was still chancellor and at the height of his power and prestige.

  The intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the Wegener family circle was extremely literary and dominated by Richard Wegener’s interests in classical and modern drama, poetry, and philosophical theology. He inclined positively toward natural history and physical science, though he insisted that the sciences keep to their proper sphere. He was passionately devoted to languages, with a special fondness for Greek and Hebrew. The details of these interests might not occupy us so much if this were a British or an American or a French family of the same period and social class. But in Germany such preoccupations meant more because the educated bourgeoisie that prized them was, practically speaking, politically disenfranchised. The abundant energy of this vast army of urban professionals, which in other industrial nations was absorbed by party politics, social reform, and sectarian religious disputation, in Germany flowed profusely into the enjoyment and elaboration of high culture and civilization—in a word, into Kultur.

  The civilizing mission willed by Richard Wegener and men like him had almost nothing to do with the preoccupations of the aristocratic Junker landowners who held the real power in the German state. On the contrary, the Kulturträger—the bearers of the culture—saw themselves as members of a cooperative enterprise with world-historical implications. The details of this alliance between intense self-cultivation on the one hand and selfless solidarity with all mankind on the other were elaborated in a broad spectrum of speculative metaphysical schemes that functioned almost as political parties of the spirit; these had readerships and followings to an extent unimaginable today, in the English-speaking world at least. Since we know something about the philosophical allegiances of the Wegeners, it is worth peering into the systems of thought prevailing in their home at the time of Alfred’s birth.

  Alfred Wegener’s Family Background

  We are born not into our own lives but into the lives of others. We are not even ourselves in any meaningful sense for quite some time. What sort of beings we become even in our childhoods is a combination of what we brought with us into the world—our temperaments, talents, and quirks—and the emotional, physical, and mental structures that were there (or not there) when we arrived on the scene. To understand who Alfred Wegener became in later life, we must look into the character of those into whose lives he was born, above all to that of his parents: the lessons they taught, the things they believed, what they wished for their children, and what they wished from them. It may well be that “the boy is the father of the man.” Still, “the father of the boy” is, much more prosaically, the boy’s father. One of the most personal and pragmatic rationales for historical study is to understand how generation-long offsets in attitude and allegiance govern the world. Even in a culture of novelty such as we inhabit, our social and cultural ideals are profoundly shaped by what our parents believed when we were children. This commonplace gains depth if we consider that much of what our parents believed and taught us at that time about a “good life,” a “good person,” and a “good world” was inculcated in them during their childhoods, by our grandparents—meaning that we are walking around with views of the world shaped by events (sometimes quite transient, local events) fifty or sixty years before we were born.

  Rich
ard Wegener, who rigorously supervised the upbringing of his children, was a stereotypic embodiment of the cultural and social aspirations of his region, class, and time. Born in 1843, he was ninth of the eleven children of Friedrich Wilhelm Wegener, a hard-working and eventually prosperous owner of a military uniform factory in Wittstock, in the northwest corner of Brandenburg, about 90 kilometers (56 miles) from Berlin. It was only in Richard Wegener’s generation that this family acquired wealth and ambition sufficient to overcome the parochial inertia that had held it in rural Brandenburg for 300 years.8 Richard’s brother Otto took one path into the Prussian future, that of rural landed wealth and political power, by becoming the manager of a great estate in West Prussia. Richard took the other: urban education and civil service. Richard realized his father’s frustrated ambition to study theology and become an evangelical clergyman. After his seminary study and ordination in 1868, he spent a year as an assistant pastor to a parish in Kolmar, in Posen—the Prussian province centered on the historic Polish city of Poznán. Carefully saving his annual salary and his Christmas bonus, he returned to Wittstock and asked twenty-one-year-old Anna Schwarz to marry him. Anna, Alfred’s mother-to-be, was herself an orphan, born in the tiny hamlet of Zechlinerhütte and raised by relatives in nearby Wittstock; she and Richard had met as students.9

  Anna consented, and for the next five years Richard supported himself and his wife on the salary of an assistant pastor, though his plans and interests were already pulling him far beyond the traditional Wegener orbit both geographically and intellectually. He was drawn to the emerging metropolis of Berlin and, within its cosmos, to three great cultural preoccupations of nineteenth-century Germany: classical philology, philosophy, and poetry. Richard studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and earned a PhD from the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin in 1873, with a thesis entitled Begriff und Beweis der Existenz Gottes bei Spinoza (The concept of God and proofs of his existence according to Spinoza).10