When We Cease to Understand the World

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of death by suicide, mental health conditions, antisemitic violence, pedophilia, and sexual assault.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the use of amphetamines, specifically Pervitin, by members of the German military, known as the Wehrmacht, during World War II. When Chief of the Luftwaffe High Command Hermann Göring was captured after the war, for example, he was carrying a suitcase full of Pervitin. Then, the essay describes how many Germans took their own lives toward the end of WWII, when it was clear the Nazis were going to lose the war. While some hung themselves, shot themselves, or slit their wrists, others took rat poison or made use of cyanide capsules. During a performance of the Berlin Philharmonic for Nazi elites on April 12, 1945, where the program included Nazi favorite Götterdämmerung, the last of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide capsules to the audience. Many Nazi leaders, including Göring, Goebbels, and Hitler later died by these cyanide pills.

The chapter then discusses the route by which cyanide, known as Blausäure in German, was developed. Cyanide, or potassium cyanide, smells of almonds, although approximately 40 percent of people cannot smell it. Zyklon B, the gas used to kill Jewish people in the gas chambers, contains cyanide. Its predecessor, Zyklon A, was used as a pesticide on California oranges and was sprayed on trains carrying Mexican migrants as a “delousing” procedure. Both Zyklon A and Zyklon B leave blue pigment on the rooms they are used in because they are a byproduct of the first synthetic pigment, Prussian Blue.

Blue pigments were originally made by crushing lapis lazuli, a stone, which made it incredibly expensive. In the early 18th century, a Swiss pigmenter named Johann Jacob Disbach created Prussian Blue. He was trying to create a red that was less expensive than the ruby red made from imported, fragile cochineals from Central and South America. He poured potash over a mix of different animal parts created by his apprentice, Johann Dippel. Instead of red, he created a brilliant blue color he called Prussian Blue. His financier, Johann Frisch, marketed the Prussian Blue pigment and made a fortune, which he used to develop a silkworm plantation in Prussia. He encouraged the king of Prussia to plant mulberry trees, which silkworms feed on, all over Germany, and later the Nazis expanded the project.

The book then describes the state of chemical science at the time Prussian Blue was developed: “Chemistry had not yet branched away from alchemy, and the compounds known by a myriad of arcane names such as bismuth, vitriol, cinnabar and amalgam were a hatchery for unexpected, often happy accidents” (17). Disbach’s apprentice, Johann Dippel, was an alchemist who spent his later years trying to reanimate bodies and develop the Philosopher’s Stone from his home, Frankenstein Castle, later inspiring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He developed an insecticide used later by the German military in North Africa to poison wells.

In 1782, chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolated cyanide, originally called Prussic acid, from Prussian Blue. Scheele also developed arsenic, which was used in green pigments and possibly contributed to the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. Labatut then describes how Russian Imperial adviser Rasputin survived an assassination attempt by arsenic and how British cryptographer Alan Turing apparently took his own life by cyanide.

The chapter discusses how chemical warfare was used in World War I and how fears of it lingered in World War II. It describes in detail the first gas attack on April 22, 1915, in Ypres, Belgium, when the German army released chlorine gas on the French army, killing hundreds. Chlorine gas was developed by German chemist Fritz Haber. His wife “accused him of perverting science by devising a method for exterminating human beings on an industrial scale” (26). She later died by suicide. Haber also developed nitrogen fertilizer, which is used around the world today. One of the German soldiers who survived the attack in Ypres was a young Adolf Hitler, who was later temporarily blinded in a British mustard-gas attack. After WWI, while working as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, Haber created a pesticide that used cyanide, which he named Zyklon. During the Nazis’ rise to power, Haber was forced to leave Germany because of his Jewish ancestry, although he had converted to Christianity. He died in Basel, Switzerland, of a heart attack; the rest of his family was killed by Zyklon B in the Nazi gas chambers.

At this point, Labatut inserts a fictional letter from Haber to his wife, in which Haber confesses to feeling guilty about his development of nitrogen fertilizer because he fears it will cause plants to grow out of control and “tak[e] advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure” (33).