H eisenberg completed his gymnasium studies during one of the most turbulent periods in modern German history. Defeat in the world war, collapse of the monarchy, and revolution across the Reich ripped away the fragile facade of bourgeois propriety and patriotism, throwing the entire nation into turmoil. Munich and Bavaria experienced some of the worst of it. The disillusioned 17-year-old went through his own turmoil at the turn of events. The last two gymnasium years — from his farm labor work through the political upheavals to his participation in the postwar German youth movement — were decisive for his adult political orientations. His reactions and orientations were reflections of political transformations occurring throughout the Reich and within his own family.
The seeds of transformation had sprouted before the war. With legalization after Bismarck’s demise in 1890, the political representative of the working class, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), experienced a steady increase in influence until, in the last prewar election, in 1912, it gained over a third of the seats in the Reichstag (parliament), the largest representation in that body. The Catholic-sponsored Center Party showed equally dramatic gains. Elections to the Bavarian Landtag (state parliament) had parallel results. And in both cases, but especially in Bavaria, where 75 percent of the population was Catholic, the gains occurred at the expense of the mostly Protestant National Liberal Party, to which the Heisenbergs owed closest allegiance. As the party of upper-middle-class professionals — industrialists, merchants, professors,
bureaucrats — the liberals strongly supported national unity under Prussian leadership as conducive to commercial expansion. They lobbied for the eventual institution of individual civil liberties —but not at the expense of national ideals. Bismarck, chancellor of the Reich, easily gained liberal favor; August Heisenberg, for instance, adulated “the creator of Germany” during his visit to Munich. 1 Liberals readily agreed to Bismarck s suppression of the Social Democratic Party in protection of their own interests; August, as expected, actively supported antiproletarian political pressure groups on behalf of gymnasium teachers and university professors.
The National Liberal Party achieved perhaps its greatest prewar influence in Bavaria, the only state to force a king from his throne during the liberal revolt of 1848. Liberal Party pressure — including that of onetime party deputy Nikolaus Wecklein —had helped induce the fiercely independent Bavarians to submit to Prussian leadership in joining Bismarck’s Reich. As Bavarian monarchs succumbed to insanity, liberals grasped control of the ministerial oligarchy that ruled the Bavarian state from Munich.
By 1912, liberal predominance in Bavaria had itself succumbed to the rising Center Party. In that year voters reduced liberal representation in the Landtag to that achieved by the socialists and gave the Center Party control of the government and of the ministerial apparatus, with nearly triple the Landtag seats accorded either socialists or liberals. 2 While both socialists and liberals longed to gain or regain control of the government and to press for constitutional reforms, liberal professionals, such as the Heisenbergs, feared the dilution of their recently achieved social status and cultural prestige should socialist “proletarianization” ever occur.
All such tensions and differences were put aside as Germany went to war in 1914. But as the war dragged on and the body count of workersoldiers mounted, German socialists came to believe that they had been duped by imperialistic capitalists. Annual Reichstag votes for war financing precipitated a split on the left. A radical minority, the Independent Socialists (USPD), opposed war credits and broke with the Social Democrats (SPD) in 1917. Leaders of both parties remained loyal to the constitution, but the USPD harbored a revolutionary wing, the Spartacus League. Encouraged by the surprising success of their Russian counterparts, the Spartacists agitated for a German Bolshevik revolution: the establishment of a workers’ and soldiers’ council— soviet in Russian, Rat (plural Rate) in German — to implement revo
lutionary working-class demands. They achieved their greatest success in Munich.
In Bavaria, the worsening food and fuel crisis, combined with the authoritarian rule of Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff over nearly every aspect of Bavarian life, awakened antiwar and anti-Prussian sentiments. By the terrible “turnip winter” of 1917-1918, Bavarian socialists could count on liberal support — including the support of the Heisenberg family, whose two sons were now engaged in farm labor and military service and undergoing heavy indoctrination for a now unpopular war.
Bavarian socialists also experienced a split in 1917, but it was one of personality more than politics. The founder of the Bavarian USPD was the very un-Bavarian Prussian, Kurt Eisner, a Jewish writer and intellectual who had gone to Bavaria in self-imposed exile from Berlin. Eisner’s Bavarian EISPD quickly gained support from the war-weary man in the street. During a nationwide strike in January 1918 for food and peace, several thousand workers demonstrated in Munich under Eisner, the first such political defiance in Bavaria since 1848. The demonstration provoked brutal suppression by the Bavarian army and landed Eisner in jail until October 1918.
October was chaotic. The German army was in hopeless retreat, Ludendorff had lost his command, Austria had collapsed, and the Entente threatened to push north into Bavaria. August Heisenberg’s border-guard company headed south to meet the threat.
The Bavarian Landtag finally promulgated democratic reforms on November 2, 1918, but events had already overtaken it. That night, when a ship was ordered to sail into a hopeless battle against the Entente fleet, the sailors mutinied at the north German harbor at Kiel, took over the city, and established a sailors’ and soldiers’ council, igniting revolution throughout Germany.
In Munich, socialists of both stripes called for a peace demonstration on November 7 on the Theresienwiese, the site of the Oktoberfest. During the rally, attended by 50,000 citizens of all classes and stations, Eisner seized the podium, proclaimed a socialist republic, and called for the abdication of the king and the establishment of a workers’ and soldiers’ council. The next day armed soldiers and civilians seized the army barracks, train station, newspaper offices, and Landtag building. King Ludwig III, informed of his overthrow as he strolled in his garden, quietly gathered his family, placed them in his new Mercedes, and drove into the countryside, vacating the Wittelsbach throne forever.
One day later, during a similar demonstration for peace at the Berlin Reichstag building on November 9, Social Democrat Philip Scheidemann declared a republic just ahead of what he thought would be a similar Spartacus proclamation planned for later that day. He assuaged middle-class and industrial anxieties by professing that much of the old bureaucracy would be maintained and that every attempt of more radical socialists to gain political control would be suppressed with any means necessary. The German social democracy would be neither revolutionary nor socialist, but parliamentary, bourgeois, and liberal. It would look for support to the army and to the upper middle class, not to the revolutionary councils or their representatives.
Eisner offered the same promise for the Bavarian “soviet republic,” despite its name, which at first enjoyed wide support among the populace, including the support of Social Democrats, former Liberal Party members, and the newly influential Bavarian Peasants Party. Eisner did not tamper with the social and political structure of Bavaria, nor did he institute proletarian rule or try to socialize industry. Although more far-reaching in its goals than the SPD, Eisner’s party sought little more than the introduction of the constitutional reforms already contemplated before and during the war. 3 But the new regime proved pitifully unequal to its task, completely unable to control the forces it had unleashed. The party recruited its lower officials from among Schwabing coffeehouse radicals, men long on theories and short on practical sense. As the economy declined, Eisner and his regime lost favor with their supporters. Radicals on the left and the right prepared to seize control.
New parties sprang up to replace the old imperial formations. Bavarian liberals, such as the Heisenberg family, gravitated toward either the SPD or the Bavarian faction of the new German Democratic Party (DDP), which entered into a national and local alliance with the SPD. Bavarian Center Party members joined the more conservative, Churchsupported, and now, in ostensible reaction to Eisner, more overtly anti-Semitic Bavarian Peoples Party (BVP). In the first postwar elections, held in January 1919, universal suffrage became a reality in Bavaria, with women voting for the first time. The results were staggering for Eisner’s party. The USPD received only 2.5 percent of the votes. The BVP achieved a plurality, with the SPD and the DDP close behind. 4
As prime minister of Bavaria, Eisner had presided over a socialist government (both SPD and USPD) that relied on the Bavarian army for military support. The war-weary army, independent of the Reich during
peacetime, had rallied to Eisner’s revolution in the early days. But the support quickly evaporated when —under restrictions imposed by the victorious Entente and in line with his own antimilitaristic sentiments — Eisner forbade the formation of a peacetime army. A failed Spartacist putsch in Berlin and a failed left-wing Munich coup attempt in December 1918 convinced right-wing extremists of the need for a counterrevolutionary militia. Secret protofascist societies, such as the Thule Society, organized private armies to protect against Bolshevism. One aristocratic Thule Society member, Anton Graf von Arco-Valley, apparently eager to demonstrate his anti-Semitic fervor to his comrades (because of a Jewish ancestor), gunned down the Jewish Eisner in the street on February 21, 1919. Ironically, his victim had been on his way to the Landtag to submit his resignation after losing the election and the support of the middle class.
Chaos reigned in Munich. A gunfight erupted in the Landtag, killing two deputies. Street fighting broke out all over the city, while Werner and other liberal students, now contemptuous of Eisner, burst into jubilant celebration at the news of his demise. The SPD, backed by the DDP, peasants, and the USPD, soon gained control of the government and assumed command on March 18. The government was headed by Johannes Hoffmann, minister for education and culture under Eisner. As one of his first acts, Hoffmann abolished the nobility and its privileges, which alienated gymnasium pupils and the middle- and upper-class majority. Gustav Wyneken, a well-known reform educator, scolded the elite pupils and their teachers in schoolmasterly fashion for their cultural snobbery and resistance to social change. They used their new freedom of opinion, he wrote, “in order impudently, spitefully, and scornfully to turn against the revolution and its leading men . . . and to form something like a silent conspiracy of resistance against the new order of things.” 5 Wyneken’s chiding only instilled deeper resentment in the students.
The “silent conspiracy” grew louder as events grew even more chaotic. When Hoffmann, no Bismarckian diplomat, attempted to integrate the now rabidly federalist province into the SPD-controlled Weimar Republic that had replaced the German Reich, right-wing extremists gained new support from the Catholic hierarchy and its party, the BVP. At the same time, communist victories in Hungary and Austria further radicalized Bavarian leftists, instilling even greater fear and resentment in the right.
Like Eisner, Hoffmann proved unequal to his task. On April 7 a self-styled Revolutionary Central Council composed of radical USPD
members seized control in Munich and proclaimed a new soviet republic to rule Bavaria. The new regime of “coffeehouse anarchists,” led by the expressionist poet Ernst Toller, vainly attempted to socialize Bavaria’s press and educational system.
A regime newspaper proclamation to gymnasium pupils on April 12 drove them directly into the hands of the increasingly violent opposition: “Pupils! You have experienced the political and economic collapse of Germany; now you will experience the last and greatest collapse, that of her culture.” Genteel Kultur had been used too long by the upper classes to separate themselves from the uneducated masses. “The collapse of our culture has now become an historical necessity,” the revolutionary council proclaimed. 6 The next day the city was in revolt.
On orders from Berlin, Hoffmann and his officials fled to Bamberg in friendly northern Bavaria. On Palm Sunday, April 13, his Munich followers unleashed a coup d’etat, bringing down the Toller regime. But after a bloody street battle at the main train station and a one-day rule of the Munich garrison, Bolshevik forces gained the upper hand, declared Toller’s “pseudosoviet republic” at an end, and proclaimed a genuine soviet republic. Lenin telegraphed congratulations from Moscow. August Heisenberg and his family now turned to the SPD as the only hope for protection against Bolshevism and for preservation of national unity.
Like its immediate predecessors, the soviet regime faced a failing economy, a hostile populace, and a severe coal shortage, exacerbated by a brutal cold wave. On April 1 half a meter of snow had lain on the ground. The soviet regime’s survival owed solely to the presence of its “red army,” inherited from Toller, and to false rumors that red armies from soviet republics in Hungary and Austria were marching up the Danube. The Munich forces, without uniforms but well equipped with weaponry from the demobilized Bavarian army, were also well paid, receiving the highest army wages in Germany — in advance. Munich had little trouble raising a rag-tag army of 10,000 to 20,000 men, mostly unemployed workers, front veterans, and former Russian prisoners of war.
Supporting this expensive army proved impossible. Munich’s tottering economy collapsed and remained in chaos after a near-total general strike by most of the Munich population during Easter Week, April 14-22. The plight of the people, including the Heisenbergs on Hohenzollernstrasse, grew ever more desperate: Hoffmann’s forces had set up a total blockade of the city. In this they had the cooperation of the Bavarian peasants, who, though their party had once allied with the
Independent Socialists, violently opposed the soviet rebellion. The peasants prevented food and fuel from entering the city. Rejecting the regime’s paper money, they refused to sell their produce.
The Heisenberg family found itself again in trouble. The wartime blockade of Germany had earlier deprived the family of food; the new blockade threatened starvation again. But this time Mrs. Heisenberg managed to locate a sympathetic farmer in Garching, about 15 kilometers north of Munich on the Isar River. The farmer agreed to supply the Heisenbergs with food staples, but only if the family could run the blockade and pick up the food at the farm. Many years later, 60-yearold Werner recounted to his former youth-movement followers how he, his brother, and a friend, Kurt Pflugel, set out one night to collect their black-market provisions. 7 “Kurtei,” one of the debaters of Platonic atoms, was two years behind Werner at the Max-Gymnasium and a fellow member of the Military Preparedness Association. He and Werner had become acquainted through the tutoring Werner provided at the request of Kurtei’s father, a demobilized major in the Bavarian army and no doubt an acquaintance of Captain Heisenberg.
Warmly dressed against the bitter cold but without their uniforms, which would have raised questions, the three young, men who tempted death on that freezing all-night journey had reason to be glad of their military training. Munich at that time was encircled by a massive “white army” ordered into Bavaria by Berlin and poised to invade the city. Following the most direct route to Garching, the teenagers slipped through the red army line at one of its strongest points, the Krupp munitions works at Freimann, near the English Garden and the icy Isar River. Since numerous students left the city at that spot to join the white forces, the red guards paid particularly close attention to movement from that direction. Somehow, the three boys made it safely across both lines and reached the farm. When they tried to return, however, the white forces detained them, fearing that the boys might reveal the army positions if they were captured.
Werner and his companions managed to escape the white army, thanks to their intimate familiarity with the local terrain. Passing the Krupp works, they went past Aumeister, a beer garden in summer, and over the broad, wind- and snow-swept field near the North Cemetery and into Schwabing. They arrived home safely with knapsacks full of flour, butter, venison, and, so Werner claimed, unbroken eggs. Years later, partly in memory of the exploit, Heisenberg, director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics, erected a new building for his institute at the very spot near Aumeister (still a beer garden) where the boys had crossed the army lines that night.
The communist regime in Munich had meanwhile made itself thoroughly hated and feared by most of the population, especially the educated upper classes. The closing of the university and newspapers, the confiscation of food and weapons, and the imposition of a “military dictatorship of the proletariat” further traumatized the people, who began to speak of a “red terror” and to equate communism with thievery and disorder. 8 As Werner later put it, “Pillage and robbery, of which I myself once had direct experience, made the expression ‘Raterepublik’ appear to be a synonym for lawless conditions.” 9
The red terror reached its zenith as the white army closed in. Red guards rounded up politically suspect persons and seized hostages from among the leading bourgeois and noble families. Adolf Hitler, though no bourgeois, claimed in Mein Kampf that he was to have been interned but defended himself with a carbine. Werner’s father, like many potential hostages, went into hiding.
Meanwhile, Social Democrat Hoffmann had lost a skirmish at Dachau, just north of Munich, to red army commander Toller. Hoffmann retreated with his wounded pride to Bamberg, called on Berlin for help, and exhorted the right-wing secret societies, his staunchest supporters in Munich, to mount guerrilla attacks and to prepare for a general uprising.
The societies in their turn recruited the sympathetic gymnasium students to the cause, many of whom were already organized into paramilitary units through the Military Preparedness Association. The schools had closed for Easter recess and remained closed until early May 1919, but the pupils relayed the news from friend to friend. Kurtei’s father, Major Pflugel, enlisted the Preparedness company of the Max-Gymnasium and organized it into an assistance unit under his command. The assistance units were to act as guides for the invading troops and as an auxiliary force during and after the invasion. Among those recruited into Major Pflugel’s schoolboy unit were his son Kurt, Werner Heisenberg, their schoolmate Werner Marwede, and probably Heisenberg’s brother Erwin. All except Erwin later joined Werner’s youth-movement group.
Berlin’s socialist war minister, Gustav Noske, charged with stamping out radicalism, dispatched a massive force of regular army troops and Freikorps (free corps) units to Bavaria. Noske had organized these units, with financial backing from German industry, to accomplish his mission without having to rely on the unreliable and severely limited regular army. Because of the postwar turmoil, Noske’s free corps units came to consist mainly of adventurous, often ruthless, mercenaries — former officers (usually with royal titles), restless front veterans, and students lusting for action but too young to have fought in the war. They became
a fertile breeding ground for right-wing extremism. Many infamous Nazi careers had their start in one of these units. 10
On April 23, 1919, Noske ordered the onslaught on Bavaria to begin two days later under the command of Lieutenant General von Oven. 11 In anticipation of the attack, Werner’s unit was assigned to assist Cavalry Rifle Command 11, with 1500 men a component of Gruppe Deetjen, commanded by Colonel Deetjen. In his invasion plan, Noske ordered Deetjen and his units to penetrate Bavaria from the north and to secure the northeast sector of a circle around Munich. At Jena, Deetjen assembled the cavalry command, part of a regular army unit that had fought at the front — a move that caused riots and a general strike among the prosoviet populace.
Once assembled, the cavalry unit traveled through Bavaria by train on April 28 via Regensburg and Freising, put down minor resistance it encountered at Freising, and positioned itself in the vicinity of the Aumeister beer garden, for its final assault. Werner and his companions had first encountered the men they would now support during their midnight expedition to the Garching farm.
By April 30, the north and east sectors of the circle around Munich had been secured, precipitating the final act of red terror. When the invaders captured the main red army base at Dachau on that day, the more bloodthirsty Munich reds reacted by murdering ten of their hostages in the basement of soviet headquarters, the Luitpold-Gymnasium. Among the victims were eight aristocratic members of the Thule Society and two prisoners from Hussar Regiment 8, attached to Gruppe Deetjen. The final assault on the city had been planned for May 3, but after the killings there was no stopping the momentum of events.
University and gymnasium students slipped through the red lines that night to inform Captain Ehrhardt, commander of the Second Naval Brigade in Gruppe Deetjen (and one of the leaders of the right-wing Kapp putsch a year later), of the senseless murders. Early on the morning of May 1, as a light snow fell, the Munich underground spontaneously rose up, stormed the Residenz and the Feldherrnhalle, seized weapons from the army barracks, and captured the university and the LuitpoldGymnasium.
Hearing the clamor of battle, troops in the north broke ranks and began pushing toward their targets. Gruppe Deetjen, spearheaded by inflamed Hussars, attacked the Krupp works, where they met and overcame heavy resistance, then crossed in the snow through Aumeister to the North Cemetery. Fighting their way from house to house down Leopoldstrasse and Schleissheimerstrasse, they battled units of red
guards at the Max-Gymnasium and near the Heisenberg home on Hohenzollernstrasse, crossed the Siegestor near the university, and by nightfall had pressed all the way to the Feldherrnhalle near Odeonsplatz, just north of Marienplatz in the center of town. Student units and secret societies guided the troops through the unfamiliar streets, but Cavalry Rifle Command 11 remained as a rear guard in the vicinity of Schleissheim, just outside the city limits. As daylight faded, the forward troops of Gruppe Deetjen withdrew for the night into northern Schwabing and camped at the Max-Gymnasium. 12
General von Oven decided not to wait for the entire southern flank of the city to be surrounded and ordered a full-scale assault for the next day. At dawn on May 2, Gruppe Deetjen smashed its way out of Schwabing toward the Residenz and the inner city. Local citizens spontaneously joined the invaders in heavy street battles raging at the war ministry, the Luitpold-Gymnasium, and the train station. Kurt Pflugel carried ammunition to his father, who spent the day blasting with a machine gun near the Wittelsbach Fountain. On the evening of May 2, General von Oven established his headquarters in the city and declared the red terror at an end. But the white terror was just beginning.
It flared on May 3. Following Oven’s orders and incensed by the hostage murders, the ruthless white troops stormed for days through the city once held by the fiercely hated red guards, summarily shooting anyone who carried a weapon. 13 During the rampage, every home was subjected to a systematic search for weapons and red army members and sympathizers. Minor battles flared as residents defended their homes. Anyone captured as a red was usually shot after the sketchiest of court martials. Gymnasium units, Werner’s among them, guarded the many prisoners awaiting trial and execution.
The frenzy continued unabated until the traumatized populace was finally shocked into sense by the murders on May 7 of 21 Catholic journeymen, shot, bayonetted, and beaten to death by drunken free corps soldiers who mistook their meeting for a red conspiracy. As one writer described it: “At the municipal cemetery where dead White soldiers lay on mortuary slabs adorned with wreaths and white-blue [the Bavarian colors] garlands the remains of the massacred Catholic journeymen were dumped among the workers’ corpses on dirty ground in lean-to sheds. Crying women slithered on blood-soaked sawdust trying to identify their husbands by numbered cardboard tags tied to the corpses’ limbs.” 14
By May 8, more than a thousand had died in the white terror, including all the red leaders except Toller. Toller, arrested in a lady’s
boudoir disguised in women’s clothing, escaped summary execution only because of the sport he afforded his captors. In comparison, the white forces, by their own count, lost 58 men in the battle for Munich. 15
Werner and his unit were stationed at the headquarters of the cavalry command in the Gregoranium, a Catholic seminary on Ludwigstrasse directly across from the university. The boys, dressed in the boots and green uniforms of the Preparedness Association, carried loaded rifles while on duty. Under pressure from authorities, Heisenberg stayed with his unit for several weeks, even after the Max-Gymnasium reopened on May 9, 1919. He recalled his reading of Plato’s Timaeus early one morning while relaxing on the seminary roof where “it was nice and warm.” 16 Weather records do not report a break in the cold and snowy conditions until the end of the month. 17
The Berlin forces remained in Munich until July 1 to reestablish “quiet and order” — that is, to suppress every social democratic tendency in Hoffmann’s reinstated Social Democratic government. The legitimacy of the once-moderate regime now rested on the antidemocratic right, which made the raising of a loyal Bavarian army a top priority. Socialist war minister Noske designated as the nucleus of the new army one of the more ruthless of his free corps units, that led by Bavarian Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp. Eager to send the “Prussians” back north, and believing that Bavaria’s troubles were caused by the lack of an army to protect against Bolshevism, Bavarian officials carried on an intensive recruitment campaign for the harmless-sounding Schutzenkorps (rifle corps). Free corps students, many from Prussia, eagerly joined the Bavarian cause, while local gymnasium units remained on duty into the summer.
School and university officials aggressively recruited Munich students, who were the most sympathetic to the new counterleft militia. On the second day of the new term, the university prorector informed his students that their studies must take second place to the defense of Bavaria against Bolshevism. 18 To allay any doubts about the new unit, the prorector assured the students that “in Free Corps Epp the democratic spirit reigns in a practical sense.” Among the champions of “democracy” on Epp’s staff were Rudolf Hess, later to serve as Hitler’s deputy Fuhrer, and Ernst Rohm, soon to command Hitler’s storm troopers. Epp himself became Hitler’s Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor) for Bavaria in 1933. Anti-Semitism came to play an even more open role in German politics. 19
Erwin Heisenberg, already an army veteran, signed up for service before school reopened, took an early Abitur in April, and graduated
into Epp s Bavarian rifle corps. Werner, lately of military age and also under pressure by his superiors, would have joined along with his brother; but, the prorector notwithstanding, his studies took priority — as they always had. When Berlin needed recruits a year later to suppress another soviet uprising, this time in the Ruhr, Erwin again enlisted — and Werner again remained with his books. Of the 33 pupils in Heisenberg s ninth grade, 14 signed up for the temporary duty and were dispatched to the Ruhr in April 1920. But for Werner, military adventures had paled beside the excitement of his approaching Abitur.
Whenever Heisenberg looked back on this period of violent political upheaval, it always seemed to him a puzzle: “Why all this happened is no longer quite clear to me.” 20 And whenever he described his activities during the red and white terrors of 1919, they seemed little more than youthful fun when enjoyable, otherwise a crushing bore: “Well, I was, you know, a boy of 17, and I considered that a kind of adventure. It was like playing [cops and robbers], and so on. . . . I just had to write things for an officer, and sometimes I had to take the guns somewhere; this was nothing serious at all.” 21 Like many teenagers, he and his chums made the most of the opportunity: “We were freed from school, as so many times before, and we wanted to use our freedom to get to know the world from different sides.” 22
Yet the reality of that world was much less lighthearted than Werner made it seem. His future wife later supplemented her husband’s reminiscences with two more serious episodes he had recounted to her. 23 During Werner’s military duty, one of his Military Preparedness comrades accidentally shot himself while cleaning his rifle and died screaming in agony. On another occasion, his commander ordered Werner to guard a prisoner overnight — a “red” who was to be tried and executed the next day. Face to face with the enemy, probably for the first time, the teenager asked the man for his life story, which was as ordinary as the history of most other red soldiers. The majority were much more in need of the high army wages than committed to any political ideology. By morning, Werner was convinced of the man’s innocence and managed to have him released. Death, apparently, was more than a frivolous adventure to the 17-year-old.
Nor should one readily accept that Werner did not fully comprehend the stakes. The political upheavals of the period entailed more than mere shifts in political power. Matters of class, social standing, and cultural recognition were at stake for everyone, and these were of primary concern to the Heisenbergs. The plethora of political parties, each representing a specific economic or religious interest group, sug
gests the extremely close identification of class interests with political aspirations. The shifting political alliances — even among such diverse groups as peasants and professors — in concert with the shifting economic and political situation also attest to the relationship.
The Heisenberg family was part of the pattern. Before the war, the liberal, Protestant professionals in particularism Catholic Bavaria naturally supported a unified Reich and readily hoped for the expansion of middle-class rights as well as the protection of their status against the rising influence of masses of industrial workers. The collapse of the old order and the threat and eventual reality of local proletarian regimes bent on destroying the carefully crafted cultural bases of bourgeois academic status pushed the bourgeois liberal family into the seeming irony of supporting the party of lower-class workers, the Social Democrats. But the Social Democrats actually ascribed to liberal objectives and to liberal defensive measures against serious working-class challenges and eventually against any threatened change of the old social order.
If the “socialist” Weimar Republic that succeeded the Wilhelmine empire now subjected itself to mass party politics and to shifts in cultural and economic policies at the seeming whim of lower-class voting majorities, then the Weimar academic would continue to maintain the earlier fiction of an apolitical stance — even to appear fiercely oblivious to political change. Objective scholars and scientists could not be tainted by subjective, self-serving political intrigue — even as they engaged in such intrigue. Most of the established physicists of the period — Arnold Sommerfeld, Max Born, Max Planck, Max von Laue — reacted in this way. The most obvious exception, of course, was Albert Einstein, whose outspoken defense of the Weimar democracy earned him the disapproval of his colleagues.
By the middle of the war, young Werner had no doubt internalized his family’s social and class allegiances. To the end of his life he always vigorously opposed the federalist tendencies of Bavaria and other German states in favor of a centrally governed nation. By 1919 he had also committed himself to the family goal of gaining and preserving social standing through academic achievement, and he immediately identified with the upper-middle-class academic elite during the Weimar period. He, too, assumed an apolitical stance, but for different reasons. The ideological and emotional allegiances of his elders, born of their station in Wilhelmine society, lost most of their attraction for him on the collapse of Wilhelmine Germany in bitter military defeat, brutal domestic violence, and bickering political factions. The frivolity of his military
adventures seems less an indication of adolescent obliviousness than a relief from the intense adult pressures of home and school.
Faced with defeat and revolution, Werner and many other young people reacted with a bitter sense of betrayal and exploitation. The heavy-handed indoctrination they had received into German war aims and the hollow facade of bourgeois gentility now juxtaposed with armed revolution and counterrevolution on the streets of Munich rendered them angry and mistrustful. “We therefore took the right to see for ourselves,” he later wrote, “what in this world is valuable and what is worthless, and not to ask our parents and teachers about it.” 24
Werner the physicist would enter the apolitical, bourgeois world of the upper-middle-class academic, but Werner the man would perceive his place within it in terms derived from the emotional and ideological commitments espoused by what he and his friends were now calling a youth movement.
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