Author: Moritz von Brescius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108427324
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
A path-breaking study of national, imperial and indigenous interests at stake in a controversial German expedition to British India.
Author: Charlie Hall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351122533
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
At the end of the Second World War, Germany lay at the mercy of its occupiers, all of whom launched programmes of scientific and technological exploitation. Each occupying nation sought to bolster their own armouries and industries with the spoils of war, and Britain was no exception. Shrouded in secrecy yet directed at the top levels of government and driven by ingenuity from across the civil service and armed forces, Britain made exploitation a key priority. By examining factories and laboratories, confiscating prototypes and blueprints, and interrogating and even recruiting German experts, Britain sought to utilise the innovations of the last war to prepare for the next. This ground-breaking book tells the full story of British exploitation for the first time, sheds new light on the legacies of the Second World War, and contributes to histories of intelligence, science, warfare and power in the midst of the twentieth century.
Author: J. L. Heilbron
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674238044
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
In this moving and eloquent portrait, John Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. With great understanding, he shows how Max Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich. In an afterword written for this edition, Heilbron weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an “ark” to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism.
Author: Mark Walker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1489960740
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
In this book, Mark Walker - a historical scholar of Nazi science - brings to light the overwhelming impact of Hitler's regime on science and, ultimately, on the pursuit of the German atomic bomb. Walker meticulously draws on hundreds of original documents to examine the role of German scientists in the rise and fall of the Third Reich. He investigates whether most German scientists during Hitler's regime enthusiastically embraced the tenets of National Socialism or cooperated in a Faustian pact for financial support, which contributed to National Socialism's running rampant and culminated in the rape of Europe and the genocide of millions of Jews. This work unravels the myths and controversies surrounding Hitler's atomic bomb project. It provides a look at what surprisingly turned out to be an Achilles' heel for Hitler - the misuse of science and scientists in the service of the Third Reich.
Author: Louis De Vries
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : German language
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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Book Description
Author: Douglas M. O'Reagan
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421439840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Intriguing, real-life espionage stories bring to life a comparative history of the Allies' efforts to seize, control, and exploit German science and technology after the Second World War. During the Second World War, German science and technology posed a terrifying threat to the Allied nations. These advanced weapons, which included rockets, V-2 missiles, tanks, submarines, and jet airplanes, gave troubling credence to Nazi propaganda about forthcoming "wonder-weapons" that would turn the war decisively in favor of the Axis. After the war ended, the Allied powers raced to seize "intellectual reparations" from almost every field of industrial technology and academic science in occupied Germany. It was likely the largest-scale technology transfer in history. In Taking Nazi Technology, Douglas M. O'Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land—including that of other Allied nations. Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed—and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself.
Author: Andre Wakefield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226870227
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Probing the relationship between German political economy and everyday fiscal administration, The Disordered Police State focuses on the cameral sciences—a peculiarly German body of knowledge designed to train state officials—and in so doing offers a new vision of science and practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. Andre Wakefield shows that the cameral sciences were at once natural, technological, and economic disciplines, but, more important, they also were strategic sciences, designed to procure patronage for their authors and good publicity for the German principalities in which they lived and worked. Cameralism, then, was the public face of the prince's most secret affairs; as such, it was an essentially dishonest enterprise. In an entertaining series of case studies on mining, textiles, forestry, and universities, Wakefield portrays cameralists in their own gritty terms. The result is a revolutionary new understanding about how the sciences created and maintained an image of the well-ordered police state in early modern Germany. In raising doubts about the status of these German sciences of the state, Wakefield ultimately questions many of our accepted narratives about science, culture, and society in early modern Europe.
Author: Vishwa Adluri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199931356
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as their example, Adluri and Bagchee develop a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities. The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth. Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.
Author: Kurt Mendelssohn
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
At the end of the 19th century, under the benevolent patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany became home to new scientific and technological ideas. In German universities, innovators like Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Walther Nernst revolutionized physics and chemistry with their theories of relativity, of the atomic structure and of the quanta. Walther Nernst, a founder of physical chemistry, received the Nobel prize in 1920 for his formulation of the third law of thermodynamics. He died in 1941 in Germany, disillusioned by Hitler’s destruction of German academic life. This biography of Walther Nernst, the author’s mentor, also provides an overview of German science and technology, from its stellar rise to its rapid fall when the Nazis came to power and the vast majority of German scientists went into exile to Britain (like the author), to the United States or elsewhere to continue the tradition and spirit of the scientific revolutions started in Germany’s institutions of higher learning. “A masterly description of the spectacular rise of German science and industry at the turn of the century and of life in Germany in the pre-1933 era.” — The Times (London) “Mendelssohn’s... fascinating book... is a study of the rise and fall of German science as well as a life of Walther Nernst... as he shows, the ‘mad fanaticism’ of the Nazis blinded them, and blinded them completely, to the enormous scientific potential they had inherited in the laboratories of Weimar Germany.” — Roger Williams, Encounter
Author: Anne Harrington
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218080
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.
