Earlier this week, when I was browsing through old issues of Physics Today, I came across a geographical term that I hadn't seen or thought about for years: West Germany. The words reminded me that for most of my life, Germany was divided into two parts by a frontier established by the victorious Allies at the end of World War II. The words also evoked memories of some of my favorite cultural icons of West Germany: the experimental rock band Can, the film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the novelist Heinrich Böll.
The article that triggered the reminiscences was Edgar Lüscher's "Physics in West Germany," which appeared in the magazine's August 1966 issue. Lüscher was well qualified to survey West German physics. At the time he wrote the article, he was a physics professor at Munich's Institute of Technology (now the Technical University of Munich). His previous positions at the University of Illinois and in his native Switzerland had given him the critical perspective of an outsider.
Although the article is somewhat dry in tone, it does provide a comprehensive and interesting overview. Among the topics Lüscher covered were how physics was taught in high schools and universities, physicists' salaries, the Max Planck Institutes, and the hierarchical structure of the country's scientific culture.
Germany's divided status was symbolized by the different uniforms that track-and-field athletes wore in international competitions: all white with a red chest stripe for West Germany; dark blue top and white shorts for East Germany. The photo shows Ulrike Meyfarth, who won the women's high jump at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
I can only speculate why the editors of Physics Today solicited an article about West German physics when they did. Germany's Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) could be one reason. From 1950 through 1960, the country's gross national product grew at an average annual rate of 6%. Economic activity was so vigorous that the country ran out of workers and had to establish a guest worker program. By 1966, when Lüscher wrote his article, 1.3 million foreign workers were living in Germany. Was Germany also experiencing a Physikswunder? My predecessors on the magazine might well have asked themselves that question.
Another cause for Physics Today's interest in West Germany might have been the award of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics to Rudolf Mössbauer. Born in 1929 in Munich, Mössbauer studied physics at Munich's Institute of Technology. In 1958, while working on his PhD, he discovered that gamma rays could be resonantly emitted and absorbed by atomic nuclei bound in a solid.
The extreme narrowness of the resonance meant that re-absorption could fail to occur if either the emitter or absorber suffers a tiny perturbation that shifts the resonance. In 1959, just one year after Mössbauer had discovered the effect, Robert Pound and his graduate student Glen Rebka used it to confirm the gravitational redshift predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Mössbauer's Nobel was the first awarded to a West German physicist for work done in West Germany.
The opening page of Lüscher's article
Lüscher didn't mention Mössbauer in his article, but in a section entitled "Present and future problems," he implicitly included him—because among the problems Lüscher listed was the brain drain of physicists to the US. Mössbauer spent the years 1960–62 at Caltech, but he was lured back to the Technical University of Munich. He and Lüscher surely knew each other.
I don't know whether Germany still suffers a brain drain, but I suspect not. At least half a dozen of the country's Max Planck Institutes that conduct research in physics and its related sciences are led by non-Germans. Impressively, the four directors of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching are from four different countries: Japan, Russia, South Africa, and the UK.
And according to the most recent survey I could find, papers written by physicists based in Germany are, in total, are cited more often than papers written by physicists in any other country save the US.
