Gustav Magnus und sein Haus: Im Auftrag der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (review)

Since World War II, experimental physics has entered public consciousness as a large, expensive, technical enterprise. Yet at some point between the cabinets of the eighteenth century and the industries of the twentieth, the laboratory of physics had its start. One place where that occurred was in Berlin, in 1842, at the address Kupfergraben 7, an elegant, two-story house with a slate mansard roof that overlooked an island in the Spree River and gardens beyond. The story of this rococo building and its owner is the subject of the collection of essays under review.

In commissioning this volume on its 150th anniversary, the German Physical Society has made a deliberate nod to history. During the cold war, this scientific organization found itself split in two: one part stayed in the East, another moved to the West. That distinction vanished in the wake of German reunification, at least for the organization. With help from the Siemens Corporation, the German Physical Society returned to its roots. It repossessed and refurbished its original home, the Magnus House. Eager to be rid of what had become an eyesore after four decades of Communist neglect, the Berlin Senate supported the takeover. If this was not exactly a changing of the guard, one could call it a changing of the ghosts.

But ghosts haunt even in a Festschrift. We discover that the Magnus House served as an institute of Nazi ideology and as an NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) detention center, that the popular ascription of the building’s design to Knobelsdorff is in error, and that Lagrange was thoroughly miserable as a tenant. Gustav Magnus does not come off much better. In the first sentence of the book, editor Dieter Hoffmann feels compelled to inform us that Magnus was a Jew, although this plight, or honor, apparently made no difference to either his science or his career. Magnus does seem to have been a horribly jealous person, though, refusing his colleagues access to his collection of instruments and only grudgingly recognizing his students as independent scientists. All this is told without the least irony.

Magnus worked in a variety of scientific fields throughout his life, his best achievements being his investigation of specific heats, his measurement of dissolved blood gases, and his analysis of the aerodynamics of spinning bodies. He also contributed to the development of Prussian technology beyond his own work, serving as a judge at industrial exhibitions and as an adviser in the fields of agricultural chemistry, mining, weights and measures, and technical education. This aspect of his career is mentioned in passing.

More attention is devoted to Magnus’s role as teacher. Perhaps this focus is justified. Most historians remember him for having trained an entire generation of Berlin scientists in the art of physical experiment. The best pieces in the volume cover this part of his life, though they might have made more reference to relevant literature, for example, Wolfgang Schreier and Martin Franke’s history of the Physical Society (in yet another Festschrift commemorating the 150th anniversary of the organization).

The essays draw attention to a figure often overlooked. Their quality, however, is uneven at best. Their failure to treat technology is especially regrettable, as it is the thread that runs through most of Magnus’s scientific research. Readers of this journal, therefore, will probably find the book disappointing and may want to refer to traditional accounts by August Wilhem von Hofmann and Hermann von Helmholtz.