Nationalism and Politicization of World War I-era European Scientists

Abstract:

This thesis analyzes the ideologies of elite German natural scientists as the scientists approached and engaged in World War I. German science represented the pinnacle of scientific achievement in the early twentieth century, and the scientists themselves had embraced a fervent and widely-recognized internationalism. In voluntarily joining the German war effort, elite scientists consciously sacrificed their scientific institutions and research, as well as their international connections and prospects of advancing their internationalist agendas. Their actions both helped destroy German scientific institutions and launched the new form of “chemical warfare.” These transformations may be understood through the ideologies of a “scientized” or “scientistic” nationalism developed and held within the community of elite German scientists—that is, the scientists as a distinct group. I argue that the scientists saw values of efficiency imbued in nature but guided with the standards of the nation; tended to “biologize” the nation and solidify the nation in a science that emphasized foreign threats and minimized Germany’s risks from the synthesis and use of poison gases; and envisioned themselves as essential instruments of the nation capable of imposing their ethic upon the German military. The development and collapse of these ideological positions before and immediately after World War I foreshadow scientists’ later ethical stances toward Nazism and nuclear weapons.