Abstract
In 1933 the year of Hitler’s coming to power in Germany there were periods, when life in Vienna was almost intolerable. The newspapers published extras around the clock and vendors ran shouting through the streets offering the latest editions. Groups of young people, many wearing swastikas, marched along the sidewalks singing Nazi songs. Now and then, members of one of the rival paramilitary groups paraded through the wider avenues. I found it almost impossible to concentrate and rushed out hourly to buy the latest extra. On one of these days, I met Dr. and Mrs. Schlick in a street car. “It is impossible to concentrate,” the professor said, “I read extras from morning to night.”
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Notes
Nationalistic students tried to discredit Schlick even because of his given name, Moritz, which many Austrians (perhaps because of its alliteration with Moses) regarded as Jewish even though the name clearly derived from the Latin Mauritius. Moreover, Schlick was named after a close relative of his mother, the once famous Ernst Moritz Arndt, one of the greatest heroes of Germany in the Napoleonic period. His books and poems inspired the liberation of the country from French occupation. In his writings, Arndt developed ideas about German national aims which some National Socialist theoreticians, knowingly or unknowingly, paralleled. To the end of his long life in 1861, he was called ‘the most German of all Germans’ (der teutscheste alter Teutschen, teutsch being a chauvinist version of deutsch, related to teutonic).
Because of his activity as rector, the cardinal appeared to Schlick as a permanent 198 pillar against Nazism. But those who hoped that he would stand up to the Nazis after Hitler’s occupation of Austria were disappointed.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Menger, K. (1994). Moritz Schlick’s Final Years. In: Golland, L., McGuinness, B., Sklar, A. (eds) Reminiscences of the Vienna Circle and the Mathematical Colloquium. Vienna Circle Collection, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1102-7_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1102-7_16
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