When We Cease to Understand the World

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of antisemitic violence.

When We Cease to Understand the World discusses a number of interrelated scientific discoveries and the scientists who made them, starting with the invention of the first synthetic pigment at the beginning of the 18th century and ending with the death of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck in the mid-2010s. However, the book focuses primarily on the scientific innovations and conflicts that occurred in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The 19th century saw the rise of modern nation-states in Europe. As territories across Europe unified and created national identities, they also sought to ensure their dominance through scientific innovation. These nation-states, particularly Germany following unification in 1866, funded scientific research that spurred industry, public health, and—critically—military technology (Von Gizycki, Rainald. “Science, State and Industry in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Minerva, vol. 14, no. 2, 1976, p. 268). European scientists during this time period frequently saw themselves as supporting their nation through their work, as in the examples of Fritz Haber and Karl Schwarzschild.

This growing nationalism and technological advances converged and exploded into conflict at the turn of the 20th century with World War I. WWI is often described as “the first modern war,” and it was a moment when many scientific technologies were deployed on the battlefield for the first time, resulting in massive casualties. This is seen in the text with the story of Fritz Haber, German nationalist and inventor of the chlorine gas deployed in the first poison-gas attack on the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium, resulting in over 1,100 deaths. WWI ended with the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, which forced Germany to pay massive reparations to the Allied nations of France and the United Kingdom and brought about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This created immense financial hardship in these countries, as seen in the case of Schrödinger, who returned to Vienna after the war and lived in destitution.

Prior to the rise of the Nazis in Germany, which was precipitated in part by the financial hardship caused by the Treaty of Versailles, many Jewish people living in Germany were secular, integrated into society, and proud Germans. This is seen in the stories of Haber and Schwarzschild, both of whom volunteered for military service during WWI, only to see their family members persecuted and murdered by the Nazis during WWII.

During WWII, advances in theoretical physics that had been made during WWI and the inter-war years were applied to the development of nuclear weapons. As referenced in the text, the findings of theoretical physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg were used by American scientist Robert Oppenheimer and his team to develop the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States.

After WWII, many Nazi scientists from Germany and Austria were brought over or escaped to the Americas, including the United States, Argentina, and Chile. In the 1960s in Chile, German immigrants, including Nazis, created Colonia Dignidad, a quasi-military compound that promoted fascist ideals. During the US-backed regime of the dictator Augusto Pinochet that began in the 1970s, dissidents were held, tortured, and killed at Colonia Dignidad (“Colonia Dignidad Remains a Dark Chapter of German Legal History.” European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights). This Germanic or Nazi connection in Chile is alluded to in the text in the final chapter, “The Night Gardener.” The narrator notes that his town in Chile was “founded by European immigrants” (184), and that, as in some other small southern cities, there are “blonde blue-eyed girls running among our decidedly homogenous mix of Spaniards and Mapuches” (184). He also describes the military garrison up the road from his village where the lieutenant—who disappeared dissidents for the Pinochet regime—worked.