Max Planck’s Remorse

I read this book, the latest on the sociopolitical life of Max Planck, by the American physicist Brandon Brown, to be related to (Planck and) the Holocaust, although the Holocaust receives in this book only one mention (25) and a cursory one at that. I had expected a replacement for The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science of John L. Heilbron (1986), ¹ a book that makes no mention of the Holocaust at all, or any other Nazi atrocity for that matter ² . The unspoken agenda of both biographical books on Planck is to absolve him for having stayed in his post when the Nazis came to power. This effort is doomed to failure as defensiveness in the name of great people merely insults their memory. My reading of Brown’s book is not unique. A review of it by David Mills (2016) says,

this book is also an examination of evil and the many ways that people reacted to it. Some embraced . . . madness for personal but temporary gain while others paid the ultimate price in opposing it. Still others, like Planck, fell somewhere between these two points.

The explanatory part of the book is too thin. Thus, Brown explains Planck’s reactionary political views as fitting “very much a nineteenth-century Prussian gentleman walking into a wholly new twentieth century” (p. xiii), although he repeatedly presents Planck as unusual. He explains Planck’s fervent patriotism as due to his having lost a brother in war. This is not satisfactory as mourning need not lead to patriotism, much less to the kind that Planck displayed, particularly as it was not exactly of the typical 19th-century Prussian sort, as Brown notices elsewhere in the book. For a last example, let me note that Brown explains Planck’s support for promising young people like Einstein and Lise Meitner as due to the difficulty he had in advancing his own career in academe. This explanation too is not satisfactory (all too often, old people justify their harshness in the same way). Also, it is false: Planck’s academic career was felicitous from the start. As Brown narrates, he was associate professor before he was 30, full professor when he was slightly over 30, a leading physicist before he was 40, and a leading public figure when he faced the Nazi accession. The discrimination that Meitner suffered as a woman is unbelievable today. Planck did all he could to help her. (David Hilbert’s support for Emmy Noether at about the same time was similar.)

The narrative part of the book concerns events in 1944 and 1945 (with a brief coda for Planck’s decline in his last 2 years after the war and a six-page scientific appendix). It therefore narrates the whole dramatic story in flashbacks, in a manner that is hard for me to grasp. Its style is not of a biography but of a semi-documentary novel. To comply with the requirement of a biography, though, Brown provides the reader with Planck’s home address, adding (6),

At this address, Max enjoyed his ideal study and library, a chamber for intensive mornings of thinking and writing. He established a focused routine of study, writing, and correspondence in the mornings, with walks and music in the afternoons, and time for family in the evenings. Though projecting an austere public presence, sometimes interpreted as aloof or arrogant, Planck could also be very playful within the walls of his villa on Wangenheimstrasse, enjoying card games and even horseplay on the lawn, well into his advanced years.

It is not clear why Brown refers here to our hero first as Max and then as Planck. For the sake of scholarship, however, he adds references. I did not check them. ³ Sadly, to make a long story short, in 1943, Planck’s lovely home was bombed (9), and he and his wife left Berlin and moved to a small village nearby. No address is given this time. In that village, Brown continues (on the same page),

Max felt his age . . . And although he missed seeing Wilhelm Furtwangler conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, he learned to enjoy the same concerts via radio.

Again a note supports this information. It refers to Astrid von Puffendorf’s book that is on Irwin Planck, son of Max, whom the Nazis executed after the failed attempt at assassination of the Führer. Still, I wonder. Brown’s book narrates in detail what Planck was doing in Nazi Germany: he was desperately and hopelessly trying to tame the beast. What was Wilhelm Furtwängler doing there? Could he not follow Arturo Toscanini and go into exile?

This question is wrong: it rests on excessive expectation (although thousands of non-Jews did leave Germany then). Brown does not discuss what is reasonable to have expected from a public person like Planck; had he done that, his book would have been shorter, clearer, and more effective. In such discussions, it is advisable to ignore cases like that of Herbert von Karajan, the famous Austrian conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, for it is embarrassingly pathetic: late in life, in a TV program about him, he pretended to have opposed the Nazi regime. (His first wife was “quarter-Jewish” and that did cause him some trouble.) The next morning, I remember, the daily press ridiculed him. ⁴ My model for the not too pleasant yet still quite appropriate is composer and music educator Karl Orff. He was no hero: he refused to try to help a friend captured as a member of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi underground group. After the war, he apologized publicly.

Wilhelm Furtwängler was much more valiant than Orff. He did his best to protect Jewish members of his orchestra. And already on November 25, 1934, he wrote a letter in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, describing the Führer as an “enemy of the human race.” Why do commentators find it nevertheless hard to show indulgence to him? Under Nazi rule, he was busy inviting to Berlin Yehudi Menuhin, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Schnabel, and Bronislaw Huberman, the legendary founder of the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra for German Jewish refugees with the help of Toscanini. Huberman declined publicly; he “stressed his personal friendship for Herr Furtwängler, but regrets that he must renounce Germany as she is now,” reports The Times (September 14, 1933). In March 7, 1936, after the passing of the Nuremberg race laws, Huberman wrote to The Manchester Guardian: “Before the whole world I accuse you, German intellectuals, you non-Nazis, as those truly guilty of all these Nazi crimes, all this lamentable breakdown of a great people.” I think Huberman had too high expectations from German non-Nazi intellectuals. Martin Buber understood their weakness better. Early in the day, they could bring down the system, he observed, but they had no wish to do so; very soon they realized their error, he added, but by then, the opportunity was gone. When Huberman wrote about them in the British press in 1936, it was too late. I do not know if Buber’s assessment was right. Quite possibly, modern German intellectuals were just unable to influence politics.

The speed with which the opportunity to overthrow the regime disappeared (if it ever existed) is easy to explain: the Nazi authorities moved fast, taking everyone by surprise, simply because they had no restraint, whereas their severest critics did not see that they were plain mobsters. Still, why did the German intellectuals hesitate rather than judge the Nazis the national disaster that they were? This is the question that both biographers of Planck faced; they seem to have made great effort to answer it for Planck. A better answer rests on the philosophy that was popular in Germany since its foundation, when Max Planck was a young adolescent, as Uriel Tal (1975) has presented it.

According to Tal, the Second Reich contributed to the rise of the Third Reich as it legitimized the readiness of its natural scientists to combine their rationalist, universalist attitude toward nature with an irrationalist, particularist politics. One of the most important expressions of this was the doctrine of Germany as the chosen people that Fichte and Hegel advocated early in the 19th century. One of the least important yet most indicative expressions of this, Tal observed, is the suggestion, made by German scientists of Christian extraction to their colleagues of Jewish extraction, to get baptized in the name of national uniformity. (The suggestion gained force from religious discrimination. ⁵ ) The demand for uniformity is ubiquitous; its endorsement by the scientific community is deadly everywhere; in Germany, it was particularly so. A unique feature of the Holocaust was not so much barbarism by itself but the mix of barbarism with high culture and civilization.

Still, at best, Tal’s suggestion points at the idea that might have paved the way to the endorsement of Nazi ideology by the German scientific world: it does not tally with the Nazi idea of “Jewish science.” Also, even those who objected to that idea were still able to sympathize with the Nazi regime to different degrees, beginning with Planck’s toleration of it at least in its early days and ending with the assiduous cooperation with it by leading physicists Werner Heisenberg and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker.

They not only cooperated actively with the regime, but they also never apologized. The nearest they came to this is the famous letter from Heisenberg to Robert Jungk (author of Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, 1956) on November 17, 1956. ⁶ The major point of this letter is a defense of his friend Weizsäcker against the claim that he had been a fan of the Führer. This denial has meanwhile been refuted, ⁷ and this of course prevented both friends from coming clean. Nevertheless, in that letter Heisenberg says, “any . . . decent human being” had to have “loathed Hitler’s personality and the crimes committed by his movement.” He mentions there—as elsewhere—that the conflict of interest that a scientist may have is between serving science and humanity and serving king and country. He adds to this the following amazing observation.

Actually, I suppose that a similar dilemma must have existed for the physicists active on the allies’ side as well, for once they were signed on during the war, they also were signed on for Stalin’s victory and Russia’s foray into Europe. Overall, the German physicists acted in this dilemma as conservators of a sort of that which was worthy and in need of conserving, and to wait out the end of the catastrophe if one was lucky enough to still be around.

Sadly, this very serious accusation (of the anti-Nazi scientists as having the same moral standing as the Nazi ones) has thus far not met with the scornful public rebuttal that it requires. What Heisenberg saw as a dilemma is an ancient one: between acting dutifully and obediently (Antigone). Many war criminals pleaded having obeyed orders. The Nuremberg trials rejected this excuse. Clearly, the rejection cannot hold universally. Yoram Dinstein (1965) has noted that the rejection holds with no qualification only in cases that involve violations of international law and this is now generally recognized. Still, Heisenberg calling this “the dreadful dilemma” is right ⁸ (perhaps the title of the book on Planck by John L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man, alludes to this). Heisenberg concludes his letter to Jungk with the complaint that he (Jungk) had shown “complete misunderstanding of a totalitarian dictatorship.” He never spoke of his own understanding of it. Again, he never apologized. He thus justified the last word of Einstein who refused to return to Germany not because of the conduct of his peers during the Nazi regime—he said he could not judge that—but because after the war they did not apologize or try to make amends.

Did Planck have to apologize, and, if so, did he? For better or worse, this question seems to me to be the core of this book. Planck’s initial attitude was the idea that as Germany had been humiliated at Versailles, it was incumbent on German public figures to avoid disturbing their politicians in their exalted effort to help Germany return to its (alleged) past glory. Clearly, although Planck always disliked the Nazis, at first he was indulgent to them as he hoped that they were returning pride to Germany, and sooner or later he realized that he was in terrible error. Brown, it seems to me, finds it necessary to judge Planck, and he wishes to do so as leniently as he can, by taking account of the situation and the norms accepted at the time—hence the question, how extensive was the opposition to the Nazi tyranny? When the Führer freely divulged his own barbarism on the radio on the morning after the Night of the Long Knives (July 2, 1934), many Germans were shocked. Before and after this, some anti-Nazi demonstrations surfaced, and some opposition groups went underground. Quite a few German public figures went into exile. Some members of the German armed forces committed suicide when forced to join the barbarism. Hardly any individual known as opposed to the regime could move about freely. Perhaps there were only two of those in the whole of the German Empire, Ernst Niekisch (who reorganized the German armed forces after they were disbanded in accord with the Versailles treaties) and Max Planck (who held significant positions of power within the scientific community). In particular, most non-Jewish academics were docile and cooperated—actively or at least passively.

There is a general unease about this: how should we face it and its atrocities? As the last witnesses to it—perpetrators, victims, opponents, and bystanders—are taking leave, it is becoming increasingly clear that we have to take a stand about it: we cannot consider it a colossal tsunami, nor even a raid of the Huns, as it happened to a most cultured and civilized nation. Efforts to understand it by studying the Nazi leaders take us nowhere as they were thugs. They can fascinate, but little interesting can be said about them. ⁹ Much was said of the common people who supported the regime; they pleaded ignorance and were disbelieved. This led to a blind alley. Until very recently, German and Austrian people found it difficult to talk about the regime, let alone its atrocities. And so now is the turn of the intellectuals, the public elite, to undergo scrutiny: people like Furtwängler and Planck. Hence this book.

Did they know of the Holocaust? Presumably, says Brown, sooner or later, Planck did learn about it; by then, it was much too late: “we have done the most horrible things; terrible things must happen to us,” he said then, as Lise Meitner reports (26). Earlier, he was much too naive, as Einstein said. Brown considers this evidence that he knew. He also seems to consider this Planck’s confession of guilt. Yet Planck lived sufficiently long after the war was over, and he had ample opportunity to speak of the Holocaust. He did not.

It is this, the end of the story, that is puzzling. The beginning is clear enough. Many European intellectuals who were not sufficiently democratic—not sufficiently averse to tyranny, to put it bluntly—had expressed the terribly naive, not to say downright stupid, wish to meet with tyrants to influence, convince, teach, or enlighten them. Of these, only one is known to have been granted this wish: antidemocrat Max Planck. Early in the day (in 1933), he requested an audience with the Führer and had his wish granted. He advised the Führer to stop the persecution of Jewish scientists so as to allow German research to flourish. This caused the Führer to lose his temper. How stupid was the hope to tame the beast Planck learned at once in a shock from which he never recovered. How different was his view from that of Einstein, who left Germany abruptly early in 1933, before Planck managed to fire him in accord with instructions. Friends offered Einstein financial support; he declined: as he explained in his reply to Planck’s letter (April 6), he was not in urgent need of money as he had taken precautions earlier against exactly this eventuality. In that letter, he also expressed his view that the Nazi regime was already engaged in a “war of annihilation against my defenseless Jewish brothers.” Of course, this is not to compare or to contrast the cases of Einstein and Planck: it is to contrast the realism of the assessment of the one with the naïveté of the other.

Soon after the War, Victor Gollancz organized a campaign to persuade the British Government to allow British people to send food parcels to Germany. In 1947, Yehudi Menuhin went to Berlin to perform under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of conciliation. In 1947, the Royal Society granted Planck the Copley Medal. In 1951, Martin Buber received the Goethe award of the University of Hamburg despite great pressure to refuse. Einstein stood out—because after the defeat, his German peers did not ask for forgiveness or try to make amends. Does this include Planck? It seems so. Neither Heilbron nor Brown answered this question. The last chapter of the story (chapter 16) tells of the interrogation of Planck after the war; it is utterly uninformative. The coda reports on his last years. It is a most unpleasant circumlocution. It seems, Brown says, Planck had a task to fill to his last day, and public apology would have made it difficult to do what he could. This is the subtitle of the book: Driven by Vision, Broken by War. And the subtitle, it seems, is good to the last drop. This seems true; it is shameful all the same. As Planck was extremely honest and straightforward, he deserves a robust biography, shame and all.