Friday, May 27, 2022

 

Politically Unreliable

Noel M. Swerdlow, "Otto E. Neugebauer (26 May 1899-19 February 1990)," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137.1 (March, 1993) 138-165 (at 144-145):
The year 1933 began with the Mathematisches Institut straitened by the depression, but as yet unharmed by outside interference. On 30 January Hitler became chancellor, and the change was rapid and catastrophic, for almost immediately brown shirts and swastikas appeared among the students and Privatdozenten. Then on 7 April the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, which included university faculty, authorized the dismissal of civil servants of non-Aryan descent or of uncertain loyalty. During the following week Neugebauer was involved in discussions between Courant and Max Born and James Franck of the physics faculty about some act of protest. Franck, who held a Nobel Prize, thought it would have some effect to resign, and on 16 April did so, for which forty-two members of Göttingen's faculty issued a statement condemning him for giving the foreign press material for anti-German propaganda. Then on Thursday 26 April a local newspaper carried the notice that six professors, including Born, Courant, and Noether, were to be placed on leave. Courant designated Neugebauer acting director of the Institut, but students were by then agitating to stop the lectures of Edmund Landau and Paul Bernays and attacking Neugebauer as politisch unzuverlässig, "politically unreliable" (his political views were always very liberal). That weekend he was required to sign an oath of loyalty to the new government, and when he refused was promptly suspended as untragbar and denied access to the Institut building.
I see history repeating itself.

Related post: The "No Platform" Movement.



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