Science in Context (2022), 35, 336–350

doi:10.1017/S0269889724000061

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Modernism, modernity, and politics in the general

history of science: Implications of Herbert Mehrtens‘
work, from “Vienna 1900” to the Nazi era, and beyond
Mitchell G. Ash
Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria
Email: [email protected]

Argument
Herbert Mehrtens‘ work and the implications of the historical ideas he advanced went beyond the
history of any single discipline. The article therefore addresses three broad issues: (1) Mehrtens‘
reconceptualization of mathematical modernism, in his field-changing book Moderne—Sprache—
Mathematik (1990) and other works, as an epistemic and cultural phenomenon in a way that could
potentially reach across and also beyond the sciences and also link scientific and cultural modernisms;
(2) the extension of his work to the history of modernity itself via the concept of “technocratic
modernism”; (3) his seminal contributions to the historiography of the sciences and technology during the
National Socialist period, focusing on his critique of claims that mathematics, the natural sciences and
technology were morally or politically “neutral” during or after the Nazi era, and on his counter-claim that
mathematicians and other scientists had in fact mobilized themselves and their knowledge in support of
Nazism’s central political projects. Taken as a guide for understanding science-politics relations in general,
Mehrtens‘ work was and remains a counterweight to the political abstinence adopted by many who have
followed the “cultural turn” in history of science and technology. In the broadest sense, the article is a plea
for the culturally relevant and politically engaged historiography of the sciences and humanities that
Mehrtens himself pursued.

Keywords: Herbert Mehrtens; cultural and scientific modernism; symbol systems; technological modernity; Nazi-era science;
science-politics relations

Introduction
The primary focus of Herbert Mehrtens’ research lay in the history of mathematics, where his
work has had considerable, indeed field-changing impact. However, Mehrtens’ interests and the
reach of his historical conceptualizations were not limited to the history of any single discipline,
and some historians of science have tried to take his ideas even further than he did. In what
follows, I propose to bring out and briefly elaborate some of these broader implications of Herbert
Mehrtens’ work, focusing in particular on three issues: (1) the potential of his work on modernism
in mathematics for a general history of modernism in the sciences and for linking scientific with
cultural modernisms; (2) the related potential of his work on the history of technical modernity
and technocratic modernism; and (3) the implications of his seminal contributions to critical
historiography of the sciences and technology during the Nazi era for a broader understanding of
topics (1) and (2), as well as the political history of the sciences in general.
Although the three issues just named would seem to be disparate topics, and have often been
treated separately from one another, I will suggest here that they are interrelated to a greater extent
than has often been supposed, and that Mehrtens’s work helped make it possible to conceptualize
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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 Science in Context 337

such interrelations. Specifically, I will note, first, as Mehrtens did, that modernism in the sciences
has many faces, including but not limited to the liberation of self-referential symbol systems from
the tyranny of representationalism in mathematics and theoretical physics. Second, again
following Mehrtens and developing some of his contributions further, I will show in section
(3) that although modernistic approaches in mathematics and physics were attacked in the Nazi
era for ideological reasons, approaches based on technological or technocratic modernism were
presented willingly by their advocates as resources for Nazism’s central political projects. In the
conclusion, I will briefly discuss more general implications of Mehrtens‘ concept of “self-
mobilization” for a political history of science.
Some of the examples chosen to illuminate or elaborate the points made in this discussion come
from my own work, for reasons that I hope to make clear in each case. The following study is thus
presented both as a substantive contribution to the historiography of science and as a testimonial
to a friend from whom I have learned much.

Part 1: The multiplicity of modernism and modernity1

Surely it is clear that, while modernism as a multifaceted cultural phonomenon is an important
aspect of the history of modernity, the two histories cannot and should not be equated.
Nonetheless, the two histories are intimately related, and both are also multiple, albeit in different
respects.
The thesis of “multiple modernities,” advanced by political theorist Shmuel Eisenstadt and also
in different forms by postcolonial theorists, is surely well known to readers of this journal.
Eisenstadt opposed the Euro-American focus of the modernization theory that had been
dominant in the social sciences since the 1970s by refering to versions of modernization that had
succeeded outside Europe or the United States, notably in Japan (Eisenstadt 2000). In contrast, the
aim of postcolonial theorists was and remains to de-center Eurocentric views of modernity itself—
to “provincialize Europe,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty famously put it (Chakrabarty 2000; see also
Gankar 2001). The fundamental contributions of both approaches to establishing the need for
globalized perspectives on the history of knowledge, cultures and societies in the broadest sense
are undeniable. However, talk of multiple modernities in that realm tends to reify both “Europe”
or “the West” and “the East” as its “other,” putting varieties of competing viewpoints into
conceptual boxes in ways that do not reflect the actual plurality of modernities within the
supposed Euro-American “center” (Culp 2020; on multiple “formations of modernity” see Hall
1997a).2 Precisely this emphasis on plurality has also been characteristic of recent theoretical and
cultural historical studies of modernism in European settings, to which I now turn.
Cultural modernism has long been considered to be the exclusive property of literary studies,
art history, or the history of architecture. An important exception to this relatively narrow
perspective is the inclusion of Freudian psychoanalysis in most accounts of modernism, especially
those that focus on the remarkable outburst of creativity called “Vienna 1900” (Schorske 1980;
Beller 2001; for challenges to Schorske, see below). While scholars have noted that the period
around 1900 saw modernist initiatives in multiple fields other than those just named, including
mathematics and the natural and medical sciences, little systematic work has been done to bring
these into contact with modernism as it is conventionally studied. What, if anything, did these
efforts to create and advance “modern” versions of mathematics, physics, biology or psychology
have to do with one another, or with cultural modernism as it is commonly understood?
1
Portions of this section have been reworked by permission from an earlier publication by the author (Ash 2018). Unless
otherwise noted, all English translations from German texts are my own.
2
Of course, one might also argue that “the West” reified itself in order to assert the superiority of a supposedly single version
of “civilization” over all others. The classic statement of this view is Hall (1997b); a popularized reassertion of “Western”
superiorty is Ferguson (2011).

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 338 Mitchell G. Ash

In a programmatic paper (Mehrtens 1984), and especially in his field-changing book,

Moderne—Sprache—Mathematik (Mehrtens 1990), Herbert Mehrtens sought to reconceptualize
modernism as an epistemic and cultural phenomenon in a way that could potentially encompass
the full range of modernisms within and beyond the sciences, and perhaps even extend to a history
of modernity itself. Focussing on the so-called “foundational crisis” in arithmetics and set theory,
and following, in spirit, the introduction of non-Euclidian geometry in the mid-nineteenth
century, Mehrtens characterized the modernist perspective represented by David Hilbert and
others as the emancipation of symbol systems from the tyranny of representationalism.3 In
Hilbert’s version, logical coherence—and not correspondence to anything in the actual world—
became the primary, indeed the only truth criterion for mathematical theories. Hilbert’s strong
stand elicited considerable opposition, ranging from advocates of retaining some sort of empirical
reference as a criterion of truth in mathematics to the intuitionism of L. E. J. Brouwer and others.
It is important to state clearly that Mehrtens did not posit a binary opposition between
“modern” and “anti-modern” positions. As he wrote in a subsequent article, the opposition to
Hilbert’s position by intuitionists such as Brouwer or philosophers of mathematics such as Gottlob
Frege is best described as counter-modern rather than anti-modern: “The counter-modernist
attitude arises with modernism. It is part of modernity, of the modern world. That is why I chose
the term counter-modernism instead of anti-modernism. It is the counterpart to modernism,
insisting on the question whether there is not some natural substance to the truth and meaning of
mathematics” (Mehrtens 1996a, 522). Thus, Mehrtens argued that both Hilbert’s position and its
intuitionist alternatives represented complementary aspects of the modernization of mathematical
thinking during the foundational crisis of the 1920s.
I took up Mehrtens’ conceptions in a paper published in German two decades ago, in which
I attempted to show that the term “modern” carried rather different meanings in different scientific
disciplines (Ash 2000). Whereas in physics, for example, the apellation “modern” generally signified
theory-driven, mathematically expressed abstraction from the world of experiment, and was thus
closely related to the parallel emphasis on the free play of abstraction central to modernist
mathematics, the modernity claimed for Gestalt psychology lay in its founders’ radical claim about
the holistic character of conscious experience itself. Their emphasis on the claim that Gestalt
phenomena were immediately experienced, not “built up” or constructed from punctiform
sensations, appeared most particularly to place Gestalt theory in the vicinity of Brouwer’s
intuitionism. This perspective opposed the “impressionism” that was regarded as central to
modernism in visual art and literature. At the same time, the Gestalt theorists strongly opposed
anti-modern holisms and showed that the perception of immediately perceived wholes or
structural relations and the relationships among them could be demonstrated by experiment. If we
add to these approaches the propagation of “modern” biology as the replacement of traditional
classifying morphology by experimentation on living organisms (Nyhart 2009), or the effort to
establish a scientific philosophy on the basis of a philosophical analysis of language in the work of
the Vienna circle and its allies (Stadler 2001), the variety of scientific modernisms becomes yet
greater.
More recently, historians of science have broadened the debate still further and taken
additional steps toward addressing the multiple linkages between the sciences, including medical
science, and cultural modernism. These efforts have been particularly fruitful in the discussions of
the phenomenon known as “Vienna 1900” (for more detailed discussion see Ash 2018). In her
studies of medicine, culture and politics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vienna, for
example, Tatjana Buklijas (2012) shows how artists like Gustav Klimt took inspiration from nature
and transformed natural motifs into abstract decorative forms. In one instance, the right corner of
Klimt’s famous painting Danaë, depicting the mythical moment when Zeus, in the shape of golden

3
For more detailed discussion see the papers by Jeremy Gray (2023) and David Rowe (2023) in this issue. See also
Siegmund-Schultze (2022).

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 Science in Context 339

rain, surreptitiously impregnated the princess of Argos, is scattered with the shapes of a blastocyst.
This early embryonic structure, first described in humans in 1895, was still a novelty at that time.
Klimt may have learned of it by attending Emil Zuckerkandl’s anatomical lectures for artists in the
summer of 1903 (see the works cited in Buklijas 2012, 232). Here, innovations in medical science
and in the arts appear to have gone hand in hand. Comparable interactions in modern architecture
and psychiatry have been documented in the case of the mental asylum “Am Steinhof,” founded in
1907 and designed in part by Otto Wagner, whose chapel building ornaments the ensemble to this
day (Topp 2004; Blackshaw and Wieber 2012; Ledebur 2016).
Another well-researched example of science and Vienna modernism is the transformation of
biology into an experimental science at the privately funded “Vivarium” laboratory (Hofer 2002;
Logan 2013; Taschwer et al. 2016; Müller 2017). The work of “Vivarium” researcher Eugen
Steinach on surgically induced sexual transformations in animals (Walch 2016), and of Paul
Kammerer on the (supposed) inheritance of acquired characteristics in amphibians, attracted
considerable media attention—much of it scandalous (Taschwer 2019). The central idea behind
that work—the malleability of living things—meshed well with the culture of creation central to
modernism.
In Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism and Private Life, Deborah Coen
challenges Carl Schorske’s classical interpretation of fin-de-siècle Vienna directly (Coen 2007; for
critical discussion of Coen’s thesis, see Hofer and Stöltzner 2012).4 Vienna modernism, in her
view, was not only a descent into the irrational following the crisis of liberalism, as Schorkse
claimed. Rather, the probabilistic worldview characteristic of modern physics in Austria was itself
an expression of the liberal culture propagated and transmitted by several generations of a single
family—the Exners. In characterising the work of Franz Serafin Exner, professor of physics and
physical chemistry at the University of Vienna from 1891 to 1920, Coen does not cite Mehrtens,
but draws in part upon work by historian and philosopher of science Michael Stöltzner on what he
calls “Vienna indeterminism” (Stöltzner 1999, 2002). These and other studies show that natural
scientists clearly deserve to be included—not only as a sideshow to—but rather as integral
participants in “Vienna 1900”.
In my own contribution to this discussion (Ash 2018) I presented two related theses. The first
was that there are certain affinities, and in some cases actual linkages, between the breakthrough to
modern ways of thinking in the natural sciences and mathematics and the radical changes in the
arts which occurred at the same time. The second was that modernism, and hence cultural
modernity, was nonetheless fundamentally plural in these fields, and not the “totalizing project”
that postmodernist thinkers tendentiously claimed it to be in order to advance their own
pluralizing position (for an earlier statement of the latter claim see Ash 1999a).
With regard to the first thesis, I suggested, generalizing again from Herbert Mehrtens’ work in
mathematics, that modernism as an intellectual style in many sciences, as in the arts, involved a
break with supposedly pictorial representation of nature and a turn toward giving free play to
abstraction and theoretical imagination, which I described as an emancipation of self-referential
symbol systems. A well-known example of this particular version of modernism in theoretical
physics and its comparability with modernism in mathematics was articulated by Ludwig
Boltzmann.5 Boltzmann consistently advocated the independent status of mathematical models in
physics, asserting that their importance went far beyond the mere summation of measurement
data. He acknowledged that the “need to save labor” was an important reason for their use, as
Ernst Mach had contended in his essay on the “economical” nature of physical theory (Boltzmann
1905 [1892], 1).6 But the real purpose of mathematical models, in his view, was “the need to make
the results of calculation observable [anschaulich]” (Boltzmann 1905 [1892], 2). In using this term

4
The following paragraph has been adapted from Ash 2018, 25–26, by permission. See note 1.
5
The following paragraphs have been shortened and reworked from Ash 2018, 31–32 by permission; see footnote 1.
6
Cf. Mach 1986 [1910]. On the transition to statistical reasoning in mechanics see Stöltzner (1999).

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 340 Mitchell G. Ash

(and, elsewhere in the same text, the related term “sensorization” [Versinnlichung]), Boltzmann
clearly meant something quite different from Mach’s “sense impressions.” He meant to give
priority to theory, not observation, and to argue that the former guided the latter, not the other
way around.
For Boltzmann, the labor involved in creating mathematical models in physics was not the
convenient summary of sense impressions, as Mach would have it, but the development of
“mental images” (Gedankenbilder). Indeed, Boltzmann argued that broad collections of facts
(umfassende Tatsachengebiete) could never be described directly, but could only be depicted by
such Gedankenbilder—that is, by systems of mathematical equations (Boltzmann 1905 [1897],
142). Though he spoke of images, representation and Versinnlichung, Boltzmann plainly did not
mean any analogy to photographic imagery (in contrast, see Mach 1910 [1897], discussed in Part 2
below). Rather, for him, theories are symbol systems that stand on their own and are testable only
as wholes; they are images of nature only in a very abstract sense. Although Boltzmann
emphasized, as Einstein later did, that such symbol systems are not entirely self-referential, but
rather subject to experimental testing, his emphasis on the independence of mathematical theory
and on abstract theoretical rather than photographic pictures of nature has come to be regarded as
central to the modern standpoint in physics.
Modernism in the sciences has been articulated in multiple ways, not all of which can be linked
so directly to Herbert Mehrtens’ work as that of Boltzmann’s theoretical physics. As suggested
above, biological modernists’ emphasis on the plasticity of behavior and the malleability of living
systems may have more to do with the technological than with the formalistic strains of
modernism. Nonetheless, it should be clear that the implications of Mehrtens’ study of modernism
in mathematics need not be limited to that discipline. This is even more true of Mehrtens’ work
after 1990, to which I now turn.

Part 2: Technological modernism and technocratic modernity

Alongside the style of modernistic thinking based on the emancipation of symbol systems from
the demands of representationism and its countermodernistic pendant, there also existed multiple
versions of what Mehrtens called “technocratic modernism.” This intellectual style presupposed a
concept of knowledge based on what can be done with nature and the human-built world as well
as human behavior. It was exemplified most clearly in the case of eugenics as a form of biological
politics (for eugenics in Vienna see Baader et al. 2007), and in the re-conceptualisation of social
science that took society itself as an object that could and should be acted upon by science-based
policy, later termed social engineering (Brückweh et al., 2012). Quite similar styles of thinking
were also evident in the work of Jacques Loeb on the mechanics of photosynthesis (Pauly 1987), in
the efforts to establish the malleability of living things in the “Vivarium” laboratory mentioned
above, and in the re-conceptualisation of substances in human bodies (such as hormones,
vitamins and enzymes) as effective causal agents (Wirkstoffe) that could be synthesised artificially
in the laboratory (Stoff 2014).7
In a sense, technological modernity created the infrastructure that made cultural modernism
possible. Cultural historians and historians of science have long noted that the common context
for the breakthroughs to modern styles of thought in both the sciences and the arts at the turn of
the century is the technological transformation of the lived world resulting from the so-called
second industrial revolution (for recent discussions see Bud et al. 2018). Central to that
transformation were, inter alia: the radical reorganization of urban infrastructure and planning,
which began with the construction of Vienna’s Ringstrasse and the straightening of the Danube
(Békési 2021; see also Klemun 2021), and continued through Hausmann’s Paris and many other
7
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno elaborated aspects of this conception of modernity under the rubric “instrumental
reason” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969), cited by Mehrtens (1990).

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 Science in Context 341

projects; the shift from gas to electric lighting, which ultimately overcame the difference between
day and night (see among many others Schivelbusch 1995), and the invention of the horse-drawn,
then electrical streetcar and the construction of urban transportation systems that collapsed the
boundary between city and countryside (Oldenziel 2018). All of these developments marked the
emergence of the city as an artificial universe of sound and light, seemingly emancipated from any
direct dependence on nature and its rhythms—a nature that was itself being transformed by the
encroachment of the city. Already here, in these transformations of the lived world, we can see
how difficult it is to separate the emancipation of self-referential symbol systems from
technological modernity. Indeed, it could be (and has been) said that the metropolis itself was
beginning to become a set of large technical systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (Hughes 1987). For an example of how this process played out over time, we can
compare the diagrams for the first networks of dynamos, created to provide electric power to
portions of a city, with those produced decades later for entire cites and regions (Hughes 1993, 3,
8–9, 10–13). A further step along this path is the interlinkage of electrical and transportation
systems, for example in the London Underground and the New York City subway.
That the technological transformations that enabled the rise of modern urbanity also informed
scientific research practices is well known (for a recent study of this process in Berlin see Wise
2018). First telegraphy and then telephony transformed scientific communication, eventually
becoming topics for scientific and technical research themselves. Subsequently, the invention of
the phonograph expanded the range of the sensory experience of sounds in ways comparable with
the revolutionary impact of the telescope on astronomy, or the microscope in the biological
disciplines (Kursell 2016).
A well-studied example of this technological dimension of scientific practice is Ernst Mach’s
work with Peter Salcher on photographs of projectile motion, first published in 1887 (Hoffmann
2001).8 The avowed aim of this study, according to Mach, was to “make the process perceivable”—
in this case to capture photographically the pressure waves caused by the movement of an object
through air at high speed (Mach 1910 [1897], 357). Mach later defined the aim of the recording
apparatus in general as the “thickening of immediate perception” (Verdichtung der Anschauung)
(Hoffmann 1997, 45; see also Stiegler 1998). Thus, for Mach, the term “sense impressions”
included extensions of ordinary sensation by means of technology; the apparent difference
between how things appeared to the unaided senses and these technologically produced images
was, in Mach’s view, merely quantitative, despite the extraordinary difficulties he encountered
when he attempted to create such images.
Herbert Mehrtens addressed these technological dimensions of modernity briefly in
Moderne—Sprache—Mathematik (Mehrtens 1990, Chap. 7) and in a paper presented at the
1990 congress of German sociologists, the theme of which was “The Modernization of Modern
Societies” (Mehrtens 1991). There he argued that “modernity in science unfolds in a new
conjunction between formal symbolic constructions, that is mathematics in the widest sense, and
the creation of physical structures and processes, that is technology in the widest sense” (Ibid.,
605). One link between the programs of modernist mathematics and technological modernism
was the fact that technical planning presupposed mastery of formal reasoning. Taken together,
mathematial formalism and technological concepts constituted what Mehrtens termed “the
domination ideal of modernity” (Beherrschungsprogramm der Moderne).
In keeping with the professorship in the history department of the Technical University in
Braunschweig, with emphasis in history of science and technology, to which he was appointed in
1992, Mehrtens’ subsequent publications focused increasingly on the technological and technocratic
aspects of modernity. In a brief essay for an exhibition catalogue entitled “Technology and Industry
under the Sign of the Modernities,” for example, Mehrtens distinguished between three
“modernities,” the first of which began with the printing press and the second with the
8
This paragraph has been reworked from Ash 2018, 30, by permission. See note 1.

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 342 Mitchell G. Ash

mechanization of industrial production (Mehrtens 2002a). The third modernity, which began in
the late nineteenth century, is generally seen as a cultural phenomenon, as in “Vienna 1900.”
Mehrtens, however, asserted, anticipating the historical research just outlined, that “the third
modernity grew with and out of the age of industry” (Ibid., 32), noting that cultural modernism,
the science-based industries, the beginnings of assembly line production and so-called “scientific
management” all emerged at roughly the same time.
For Mehrtens, in this new situation “to be more productive is no longer the result of
inventing and employing new machinery, but becomes a question of human organisation,
including that of the self, and of technical things, including their codes and accounting techniques
(Berechnungsverfahren), in space and time” (Ibid.). Just as in sewing machines the individual parts
are produced in a standardized manner and then assembled, so was human labor also to be
standardized and reorganized. In the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his disciples Frank B.
and Lillian Gilbreth, “the rationalizers generally rationalized themselves” (Ibid., 33). In the same
paper, Mehrtens made the connection to cultural and scientific modernism by noting that, around
1900, rationality itself lost a central support: the belief in the recognizability of the world in real
space and time. Seen in this context, “the rationality movement” in industry “can be interpreted as
an attempt to bring the world under control again through calculation” (Ibid.).
From the late 1990s onward, Mehrtens elaborated his analysis of Taylorism in further detail. In
a paper entitled “Labor and Time, Bodies and Clocks” (Mehrtens 2002b), for example, he cited the
stopwatch employed by Taylor to measure and then to standardize units of manual labor as a
literal embodiment of instrumental reason. He also emphasized, however, that Taylor combined
multiple measurements to achieve his aim, and that it was the systematic combination of these
measurements, as well as the organization of cooperation between the laborers whose
performance was being measured and their managers, that justified Taylor’s calling his program
“scientific management,” despite its lack of any theoretical foundation. Mehrtens further noted
that Taylor’s follower Gilbreth used a carefully designed series of photographic images that were
similar to the motion photography of physiologist Etienne Jules Marey in Paris, who is known
today as the founder of labor science in Europe, to provide visual as well as quantitative support in
the search for efficient movements in laborers (Ibid., 131; see also Brain 2007).
What, if anything, do the multiple modernisms in the sciences and the cultural fields sketched
in Part 1 above have to do with technocratic modernity? One answer, advanced at the beginning of
this section, is that the technological transformations of the urban world made cultural modernity
possible. Another, more substantive answer might take note of modern experimental biologists’
emphasis on the mechanics of plant growth or the malleability of organic forms, mentioned
earlier, as manifestations of an integration of technical and natural scientific thinking. Closer to,
but not identical with Taylorism was the early behaviorists’ proposal to redirect psychology from
the classification of elementary and higher mental processes to the prediction and control of
behavior based on animal models. Still more telling is the case of eugenics, the institutionalization
of which began around 1900. Though the field was initially presented as a new science, eugenics
was in fact a technocratic social policy program that could not yet apply basic knowledge of
human genetics, which did not yet exist at the time, but enabled research in that field by claiming
that it was necessary in order to carry out eugenical selection correctly (see, e.g., Schmuhl 2005).
The prominence of such technocratically oriented research programs refutes the long-held view
that the cultural modernists formulated resistance to or fundamental critiques of technology-
centered modernity. Such claims were (and still are) based on the naive, perhaps wishful
assumption that modernism in the arts was inevitably politically progressive, while anti-
modernism was linked with conservative or reactionary politics. As Detlev Peukert (1992) already
argued in his study of the Weimar Republic, such simplistic dualisms projected the political
struggles of the 1960s backward into the Weimar period and failed to capture the multivalent
linkages of culture and politics that actually existed at that time. Subsequent research by Anne
Harrington (1996) and myself (Ash 1991, 1995) on left- and right-wing constructions of holistic

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 Science in Context 343

science in this period, and earlier work by Jeffrey Herf (1985) on what he termed the “reactionary
modernism” advocated by philosophers of technology and thinkers like Oswald Spengler, have
confirmed this multivalence in detail. More recent work on holism in Weimar-era biology does
not explicitly address political issues, but abundantly confirms the multivalence of holistic
thinking in this field (see, e.g., Brandt 2022). In contrast, Birgit Nemec (2020) shows that
opposition between modernist and traditionally conservative strategies for visualising the human
body in anatomy textbooks remained in place in “Red Vienna.”
The varieties of modernism, as well as the politically multivalent constructions of holism in the
sciences, provided a large, complex pool of concepts and practices, from which scientists selected
as they positioned themselves in the Nazi era (for selective uses of Gestalt psychology in the Nazi
period, see Ash 2016b). In contrast to such twistings and turnings, Joseph Goebbels had no
problem with technological modernity. In a speech at the opening of the Berlin Auto Show on
February 17, 1939, he proclaimed that “We have never opposed technology” but wish only to
impart to it a “German spirit,” discipline it and put it into service for the German Volk (cited in
Herf 1985, 196). This brings me to the third section of this essay.

Part 3: “Irresponsible purity” and “self-mobilization”: Implications of Mehrtens’

critical work on the sciences in Nazi Germany
To scholars working on the history of science in Germany, Herbert Mehrtens is known as co-
editor, with Stefan Richter, of a wide-ranging essay collection that pioneered German-speaking
historians of science’s investigations of mathematics, the natural sciences and technology in the
Nazi period (Mehrtens and Richter 1980; Mehrtens 1980). In his work on Ludwig Bieberbach and
so-called “German mathematics” (Mehrtens 1987), he showed, as other scholars had done for so-
called “German physics,” that oft-cited ideological attacks on modernistic mathematics and
physics in the Nazi era were not ordered from above, but were in fact efforts by scientists who had
long opposed these trends to defeat them by political means. Mehrtens’ most provocative
contribution to this critical scholarship was his paper “Irresponsible Purity,” published in German
in 1990 and in English in 1996 (Mehrtens 1996b [1990]). Here and elsewhere, Mehrtens effectively
countered apologists’ claims that scientists had retreated to their workbenches or studies and
produced only non- or apolitical “basic” science in the Nazi era, and labeled active collaboration
with the regime “pseudoscience.” His counter-argument was that so-called “basic” theoretical
work and applied mathematics of high quality were both needed and actually employed to support
Nazism’s central political projects, in particular weapons development in the German war effort
(Mehrtens 1986, 1996c; cf. Epple 2002). Mehrtens thus posed fundamental challenges to
exculpatory claims, originating in the immediate postwar period, that mathematics, or the natural
sciences in general, could possibly have been morally or politically “neutral” during the Nazi era.9
In his keynote address to the 1992 conference of the German Society for History of Medicine,
Science and Technology, which brought together then-current scholarship on the history of these
fields during National Socialism, Mehrtens (1994) took this argument further and spoke of
“Collaborative Relations” (Kollaborationsverhältnisse). As the talk’s full title—in translation
“natural and technical sciences in the National Socialist state and their historiography”—makes
clear, the address was not limited to mathematics. Most significant for understanding the broader
implications of this lecture are the sections that discuss “the collaboration of the elites” and what
Mehrtens, following historian of technology Karl-Heinz Ludwig (1974), called the “self-
mobilization” of scientists and engineers under Nazism.
As Mehrtens pointed out, after the largely silent acceptance of the Nazis’ dismissal of scholars
and scientists of so-called “non-Aryan” descent, which he called the “fundamental compromise,”
9
Mark Walker (2023) and Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze (2023) discuss Mehrtens’ contributions on these topics in more
detail in their contributions to this issue.

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 344 Mitchell G. Ash

German academics collaborated quite actively with the National Socialist regime in multiple ways,
especially after the Nazis themselves moved toward cautious collaboration with bourgeois elites
after the “revolutionary” phase at the beginning of the regime. As a result of this policy shift,
university faculties and disciplinary societies remained in place after they had been politically and
“racially” purged, thus offering institutional avenues for collaboration (for confirmation of this
claim see, inter alia, Hoffmann and Walker 2012). After the Four Year Plan shifted economic
planning toward preparation for war in 1936, and again after the war began, new institutional
structures were put in place and Nazi actors, such as Rudolph Menzel, head of the German
Research council from 1938, and Carl Krauch of IG Farben, built their own research empires
(Flachowsky 2008). To these should be added Hermann Göring, head of the Four Year Plan and
also of the Luftwaffe. As a result of all this, Mehrtens argued, science and science policy took on a
“more technicist direction” (Mehrtens 1994, 24).
That this shift did not occur without difficulties was shown in a recent PhD dissertation, by
Robert Frühstückl (2018a), on applied mathamatics in Vienna during the Nazi era, which was
inspired in part by Mehrtens‘ ideas. In the debate on “pure” versus “applied” mathematics that
began around 1900, he writes, mathematicians at the University of Vienna positioned themselves
clearly in favor of “pure” science, though one of them voiced regret that the decision to allow
technical institutions to award doctoral degrees obviated the need to integrate technical
mathematics into university departments (von Escherich 1905, cited in Frühstückl 2018a, 73). The
appointment of applied mathematician and Nazi party member Hans Huber to succeed the
number theorist Philipp Fürtwängler at the University of Vienna, following the annexation of
Austria in 1938, changed the direction of the department (ibid., 131; see also Frühstückl 2018b).
The 1941 appointment of Wolfgang Gröbner, a specialist in applied geometry, was apparently
intended to continue this trend, but Gröbner was ordered to Braunschweig shortly thereafter to
assist in the establishment of an “Air Force Institute for the application of higher mathematical
methods to problems of flight technology” (Frühstückl 2018b, Section 5.2.1). There he
encountered first-hand a dilemma that had been noted by others since the late 1930s: university-
trained mathematicians working in applied settings were required to jettison the purely theoretical
orientation they had learned and to focus on solving practical problems such as calculating flight
paths for antiaircraft shells, using methods that they had not been trained to employ. This example
suggests that integrating classical and technological modernisms was not an easy task.
With the term “self-mobilization,” Mehrtens articulated the additional thesis that the
collaboration of scientists, physicians and engineers with central political projects of the regime—
the racial “purification” of the German Volkskörper and the conquest of “living space” in
Europe—were generally not commanded from above, but rather were willingly offered by the
scientists, physicians and engineers themselves. Their total engagement in rocket science or other
projects, and even in ostensibly unpolitical projects unrelated to the war effort, such as the
compilation of mathematical handbooks, suggests in his view that those involved “used their
competence to the utmost” (Mehrtens 1994, 27; on the role of these efforts in Nazi plans to
“reorder European science,” see Siegmund-Schultze 1986).
Mehrtens’ verdict was clear: “The often-used claim that science was ‘misused,’ with its resonance
of sexual exploitation and the rape of innocent victims, is inappropriate.” Rather the opposite was
the case: “Throughout the system scientists pressed their political-technical usefulness, in their own
narrow self-interest. This collaboration took place wherever experts were needed: anthropologists,
geologists, aerodynamics experts, electrotechnologists statisticians and so on” (Mehrtens 1994, 24).
Theoretical sciences were in a more difficult position due to the ideological attacks just mentioned,
but physicists were quick to work on the possible implications of atomic fission for generating
electric power or building weapons as soon as the discovery became known.
Most important for later work was Mehrtens’ claim that “the willingness to compromise was
two-sided; on the political side as well one was often ready to reduce political claims in favor of
expert qualifications” for the task at hand (Ibid., 25). In a 1996 survey of mathematics before and

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 Science in Context 345

during the Second World War, Mehrtens argued that to make such collaborations possible,
scientists and mathematicians were prepared to revise previously accepted views of their own
expert qualifications. As part of the effort to create a diploma curriculum in their discipline in the
early 1940s, “the mathematicians created the figure of the industrial mathematician as a new
objective for mathematical training,” in order “to show that mathematics was a practical and
useful subject” (Mehrtens 1996c, 104). Whether such collaborations were motivated by ideological
agreement and political loyalty due to German nationalism, or perhaps by a common hostility to
Bolshevism, or by opportunistic careerism, was for Mehrtens a secondary issue. Surely all of these
motives, or some combination of them, were at work. An anecdote from the period suggests that
participants in such collaborations during the Nazi era were well aware of the mutual
instrumentalization at work: When radio propaganda urged the mobilization of science in 1939
with the slogan “science in the service of the war,” scientists simply reversed the expression and
spoke (in whispers) of “war in the service of science” (Harwood 1997, 141).
The term “self-mobilisation” itself, and the thesis behind it, have since been widely accepted
and are now routinely employed in the literature. Among the many examples of the fruitfulness of
this perspective are studies of aeronautical and aircraft research by Helmuth Trischler (1992,
1996) and Ulrich Albrecht (1996). Albrecht’s study shows how far this nearly fanatical
commitment could go, extending to suicide planes made of wood designed in the last two years of
the war. Going beyond the elite, Helmut Maier (2007) shows how scientists and engineers in
armaments-related fields collaborated with middle- and upper-level management of armaments
firms and the military to dynamize armaments construction and testing. The process of “working
towards the Führer,” as many of those involved termed it, helped to enable the increasing
productivity of the German armaments industry until near the end of the war. Further examples
from Kaiser-Wilhelm institutes extend from the appropriation of botanical specimens from Soviet
laboratories (Heim 2002), to the acquisition of the brains of murdered brain-damaged children
(Schmuhl 2009), and to the 200 blood samples from Mengele’s infamous clinic in Auschwitz,
acquired in an effort to establish a science-based test for “race” (Trunk 2009). Self-motivated
engagement outside the Kaiser-Wilhelm institutes included efforts to mobilize spatial research,
cartography, and geography in support of population policy and ethnic resettlement in Nazi-
occupied territories (Svatek 2016). Contemporary historians have cited this and related literature
on the behavior of scientists under Nazism, while showing how principles of modern management
or “social engineering,” presented to the regime by experts on their own initiative, became central
to the execution of Nazism’s murderous program (Patel and Reichardt 2016). What, if anything,
all of this implies about the “modernity” of the Nazi regime itself cannot be discussed here.
Mehrtens does not appear to have addressed the decades-long debate on that question.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I return to the three issues raised in the introduction. I hope to have shown (1) that
in his work on modern mathematics Herbert Mehrtens made fundamental contributions to the
project of historicizing modernism in the sciences, the implications of which go beyond
mathematics and have proven useful in linking scientific with cultural modernisms. I also hope to
have shown (2) that Mehrtens developed a fruitful approach to historicizing technical modernism
and technocratic modernity, and (3) that his work on mathematics and science during the Nazi
era, in particular the deliberate shift to technological and technocratic modernity, has impacted
research on the relations of the sciences and politics in that period.
In my opinion, Mehrtens’ emphasis on self-motivated elite collaboration, or “self-
mobilization,” can be read as a guide for understanding science-politics relations in general,
both in Germany during the Nazi era and also in other cases. This perspective implies a more
symmetrical, interactive conception of science-politics relations than has been generally accepted

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 346 Mitchell G. Ash

until fairly recently. The claim that alliance-seeking “collaborations” were at work to make all this
happen implies that such alliances might take place in democracies as well as dictatorships.
I elaborated such an interactionist perspective more broadly in a paper published in German
twenty years ago, the title of which could be translated into English as “Science and Politics as
Resources for One Another” (Ash 2002; see also Ash 2016a). In this approach scientists are treated
not as victims of political interference, but rather as self-conscious elites who enter into various
arrangements with policymakers or political authorities in order to gain support for their research,
while also being perceived as supporting or being useful to the given regime. In this perspective
both science and politics are moving targets: regime changes that lead to changes in what counts as
politics can also lead to changes in what is regarded as science for ideological or practical reasons.
Moreover, in this approach the resource concept is not limited to finances or personnel. Since
the 1980s, science studies has shown that the concept can include far more than money, personnel
or raw materials.10 Concepts, rhetorical slogans and even theories were already being treated then
as “cognitive” (I would now say, discursive) resources. However, the list of potential resource types
is still longer: in addition to financing and personnel, work spaces, institutional networks and
collaborations, research practices and the apparatus that enables them, epistemic resources such as
images, graphics, books, patents and designs, as well as the attribution of ideological meanings and
significance to certain scientific approaches and methods can all function as resources in this
framework. Mehrtens’ “collaboration relations” fall under the heading of social relations as
resources in such situations. What is or is not a resource in such interactions cannot be decided a
priori, but is rather an empirical question.
Seen in this light, Mehrtens’ approach can be useful for developing a broader and more
complex understanding not only of modernism in mathematics and the sciences, but also of the
relations of science and politics. All this has, or could have, particular resonance today, as a
remedy for the apparent political abstinence of many in our discipline during the current “cultural
turn.”11 In the broadest sense, this paper can and should be understood as a plea for a culturally
relevant and politically engaged historiography of the sciences and humanities. That is surely what
Herbert Mehrtens also sought to achieve.

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Mitchell G. Ash is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he was Professor of
Modern History with emphasis on the History of Science from 1997 to 2016. He is also a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg
Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has published on the history
of psychology, the history of animal-human relations, the history of universities, and the relations of the sciences and politics
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Cite this article: Ash, Mitchell G. 2022. “Modernism, modernity, and politics in the general history of science: Implications of
Herbert Mehrtens‘ work, from “Vienna 1900” to the Nazi era, and beyond,” Science in Context 35 (4): 336–350. doi:10.1017/
S0269889724000061

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889724000061 Published online by Cambridge University Press