Berlin

Another eminent Berlin physician, Robert Koch, pioneered in the germ theory of disease. He owed his appointment to the medical faculty at Berlin’s renowned Charité Hospital to such breakthroughs in bacteriology as the isolation of the anthrax bacillus and his development of a technique for staining bacteria with aniline dyes. In 1882, shortly after taking up his professorship at Berlin, he discovered the tubercle bacillus, thereby dealing a major blow against the greatest killer disease of the nineteenth century. He also isolated the waterborne bacillus responsible for cholera. Intriguingly, Koch’s greatest rival, the Bavarian scientist Max Pettenkoffer, did not accept the validity of this discovery, and in a rash effort to discredit it swallowed a sample of cholera-infected water from Koch’s lab. Pettenkoffer’s attempt to prove the superiority of Bavarian over Prussian science almost killed him. Koch then confirmed Berlin’s leadership in epidemiological research by founding the city’s renowned Institute for Infectious Diseases. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1905 and, like Virchow before him, was made an honorary citizen of the imperial capital.

Koch’s most influential student was Paul Ehrlich, who in 1896 was appointed director of Berlin’s new Institute for Serum Investigation. His use of synthetic dyes produced by German industry to analyze tissues was a classic example of the growing and very fruitful collaboration between Germany’s industrial and academic communities. Even more important, his discovery in 1909 of salvarsan, an ar-sphenamine, offered a better treatment for syphilis, that scourge of European cities, including Berlin. For his pioneering work in immunology he too was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Like its faculty of medicine, Berlin University’s physics department was a hothouse of pathbreaking research and a veritable factory of Nobel Prizes. It was here, at the dawn of what Arnold Sommerfeld called “the golden age of German physics,” that Newton’s world was overturned through the development of quantum theory, thermodynamics, and, after Einstein arrived in 1914, the general theory of relativity. Aside from Einstein, Berlin’s recipients of the Nobel Prize for physics included Max Planck, Max Laue, and Walther Nernst. These pioneering scientists, together with their colleagues in medicine and the other natural sciences, confirmed the ascendancy of the empirical sciences over the humanistic disciplines in Berlin.

Most of the professors at Berlin were content enough to make their mark through their scientific work, but a few strayed into the political arena and challenged the policies of the imperial authorities. Virchow was a case in point. As a founder of the Progressive Party and a member of the Reichstag, he had embraced Bismarck’s anti-Catholicism and push for national unity under Prussian control. Yet he also demanded greater rights for parliament and protested against the Iron Chancellor’s dictatorial tendencies. So persistent was he in this course that Bismarck challenged him to a duel. (Fortunately for the pathologist, who could not demand scalpels as the weapon of choice, the contest never came off.)

The great historian Theodor Mommsen, who taught at Berlin from 1858 until his death in 1903, was world famous for his magisterial history of ancient Rome. In his portrait of the Caesars he had applauded the use of force to spread the power of the empire, and in the 1870s he gave his blessing to Germany’s resort to the sword in its push for national unity. But he began to worry about the Reich’s political course under Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, protesting the regime’s exploitation of anti-Semitism and the citizens’ tendency to cringe before military authority. When told that he should stick to writing history rather than trying to make it, he replied that as a “political animal” he would never abandon his rights.

These academic critics of the kaiser, however, did not set the political tone at Berlin University. On the whole, the professors at that institution were more than happy to endorse Wilhelm’s absolutist claims. The university’s rector, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, could brag with considerable legitimacy that his faculty was “His Majesty’s Intellectual Regiment of the Guards.”