252
12 Coda
dynamics remain unmentioned. The quote above is, of course, knocking on
an open door.
12.1 After the Great War
For Kapteyn, the consequences of World War I were not limited to giving up his
annual visits to the United States, California and Mount Wilson. International
and national developments concerning the role of Germany after the war
turned out to be a divisive issue, from which Kapteyn could not escape. The
League of Nations was founded as a direct result of the Peace of Versailles,
but Germany was not initially admitted as a member. This refusal to strive for
reconciliation was not limited to politics; it played an increasingly important
role in international science in general and astronomy in particular.
In October 1918, the British Society of London organized a meeting with
exclusively representatives of the victorious countries (UK, USA, Italy, France,
Belgium, Serbia and Brazil) on the creation of an over-arching organization
of national scientific academies. Its report was published in an astronomical
journal [106]. Kapteyn will certainly have read this. The tenor was that ‘unlike
after the end of earlier wars, personal relations between scientists of the allied
countries and the central empires will be impossible for a long time to come’.
The text of the report leaves no room for doubt:
If today the delegates of the scientific academies of the allied nations and of the
United States of America find it impossible to take up personal relations again,
even in the matter of science, with the scientists of the central nations, inasmuch
as these will not be admitted again into the union of civilized nations, they do
this with full consciousness of their responsibility, [...]
[...] the central powers have infringed the laws of civilization, disdaining all
conventions and unchaining in the human soul the worst passions engendered
by the ferocity of the struggle. War is inevitably full of cruelties [...]. These are
not the acts we refer to, it is the organized horrors, encouraged and conceived
from the beginning, with the sole aim of terrorizing inoffensive populations.
The destruction of numberless homes, the violence and massacres on land and
on sea, the torpedoing of hospital ships, the insults and tortures inflicted on
prisoners of war, will leave in the history of the guilty nations a stain which the
mere reparation of material damages will not be able to wash away. In order to
restore confidence, without which all fruitful collaboration will be impossible,
the central empires will have to repudiate the political methods the practice of
which has engendered the atrocities which have roused the indignation of the
civilized world.
12 Coda
dynamics remain unmentioned. The quote above is, of course, knocking on
an open door.
12.1 After the Great War
For Kapteyn, the consequences of World War I were not limited to giving up his
annual visits to the United States, California and Mount Wilson. International
and national developments concerning the role of Germany after the war
turned out to be a divisive issue, from which Kapteyn could not escape. The
League of Nations was founded as a direct result of the Peace of Versailles,
but Germany was not initially admitted as a member. This refusal to strive for
reconciliation was not limited to politics; it played an increasingly important
role in international science in general and astronomy in particular.
In October 1918, the British Society of London organized a meeting with
exclusively representatives of the victorious countries (UK, USA, Italy, France,
Belgium, Serbia and Brazil) on the creation of an over-arching organization
of national scientific academies. Its report was published in an astronomical
journal [106]. Kapteyn will certainly have read this. The tenor was that ‘unlike
after the end of earlier wars, personal relations between scientists of the allied
countries and the central empires will be impossible for a long time to come’.
The text of the report leaves no room for doubt:
If today the delegates of the scientific academies of the allied nations and of the
United States of America find it impossible to take up personal relations again,
even in the matter of science, with the scientists of the central nations, inasmuch
as these will not be admitted again into the union of civilized nations, they do
this with full consciousness of their responsibility, [...]
[...] the central powers have infringed the laws of civilization, disdaining all
conventions and unchaining in the human soul the worst passions engendered
by the ferocity of the struggle. War is inevitably full of cruelties [...]. These are
not the acts we refer to, it is the organized horrors, encouraged and conceived
from the beginning, with the sole aim of terrorizing inoffensive populations.
The destruction of numberless homes, the violence and massacres on land and
on sea, the torpedoing of hospital ships, the insults and tortures inflicted on
prisoners of war, will leave in the history of the guilty nations a stain which the
mere reparation of material damages will not be able to wash away. In order to
restore confidence, without which all fruitful collaboration will be impossible,
the central empires will have to repudiate the political methods the practice of
which has engendered the atrocities which have roused the indignation of the
civilized world.