Emil Artin and Helmut Hasse. The correspondence 1923--1958. Translated from the German by Franz Lemmermeyer (Q371436): Difference between revisions

The book under review is essentially a translation of the 2008 German language edition (Zbl 1161.01002). Perhaps, the title ``Emil Artin's Mathematical Letters to Helmut Hasse'' would more precisely describe the content. It appears that Hasse preserved Artin's letters, but unfortunately did not make copies of his own (as did, for example, Courant and van der Waerden). The letters, presented for the first time in English, are very important, for they document the birth of class field theory, including the emergence of Emil Artin's reciprocity law, through the correspondence of two of its main contributors. A great feature of the book is the deep, detailed, masterful commentaries written by Günther Frei, Franz Lemmermeyer, and Peter J. Roquette. However, an old Russian proverb warns, ``A spoon of tar can spoil a barrel of honey'', and the authors added a spoonful of tar to their commentary. The book contains the following anonymous remark downgraded to a footnote (p.~15): \begin{itemize}\item[] One of the referees of the German edition [FR] observed that Günther Frei described Hasse as a man of integrity while Hasse, without doubt, had played some role in the Third Reich.\end{itemize} One is left with the impression that this serious criticism came to the editors from an anonymous referee. In fact, the opposite is true. This remark about Frei and Roquette failing to address Hasse's collaboration with the Nazi regime came from the German Professor of History of Mathematics at Hamburg University Karin Reich. Moreover, it was a part of Reich's review published in the Zentralblatt für Mathematik (Zbl 1161.01002). In view of this review, one expects that in this new 2014 edition Frei, Lemmermeyer, and Roquette address Hasse's application for membership in the Nazi Party and his appeal to Hitler himself, his strong support for Hitler, his service as a Korvettenkapitän in the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine (The Supreme Command of the War Navy), instances of Hasse's racism and anti-Semitism, etc. Nothing at all of the kind is mentioned in the book. Moreover, Frei bunches Hasse with van der Waerden and Emmy Noether thus insinuating their equal moral standing (p.~30): \begin{itemize}\item[] This virtue of never talking negatively or disparagingly about someone, which connects Emmy Noether with van der Waerden and Hasse, has to be rated very highly in particular because it is so rare. It is therefore astonishing that both Hasse and van der Waerden have again and again become a target of, it seems, ideologically motivated articles. Among the insinuations were claims that they had tolerated or even approved of the excesses and persecutions of these [sic] times. To this end, sometimes letters and other documents were quoted. But it is not sufficient to take something out of its context in order to confirm a preconceived opinion. It would be necessary to look at these documents in a wider context and to develop the ability to interpret them correctly in consideration of the circumstances of these [sic] times.\end{itemize} We have to be grateful to Prof.\ Frei for such an open display of his ``ideological motives'' and ``preconceived opinions.'' As to accusing unidentified others of his personal indiscretions, it is an old device based on the premise that offense is the best defense. We can forgive Frei for dismissing many ``letters and other documents'' that stubbornly refute Frei's thesis, even though such a dismissal violates all standards of acceptable historical scholarship. But dragging down Frei's own beloved teacher Bartel L. van der Waerden and universally beloved Emmy Noether to Hasse's Nazi collaborator level is not done, as the Dutch say in such cases. There is no moral equivalence between Hasse -- and van der Waerden with Noether. Frei apparently thinks that the best defense of Hasse accused of anti-Semitism is to flash a positive quote from a Jew. And so he does precisely that, in the quote that refers to a very short early pre-Nazi time when Hasse and Fraenkel were both at Marburg (p.~29): \begin{itemize}\item[] Abraham Adolf Fraenkel, who like Hasse received his Ph.D. in Marburg under the supervision of Hensel, who was Hasse's colleague in Kiel, and who later was rector of the Hebraic University in Jerusalem, writes in his book [Fra67, p.~153]: Personally, my experiences with Hasse were positive throughout, and I always found him to have a flawless character.\end{itemize} This ``persönlich'' in Frei's quote, by all logic of style begs ``aber'' (``however'') in the next sentence. And so this reviewer orders Fraenkel's memoirs [Fra67] to check this conjecture, and voilà: ``aber'' does open the very next sentence, and the paragraph ends in Fraenkel's ``dismay''~(!) over Hasse's Nazi period conduct: \begin{itemize}\item[] However, some years later, after he [Hasse] had become a professor at Göttingen, a crisis shook his life: one of his opponents found out that he had a Jewish [great-] great-grandfather. Although the German racial laws only reached as far as the grandparents and besides, in his appearance and bearing he made a completely ``Aryan'' impression, he felt he was in an unbearable situation. He appealed to Hitler, who named him an honorary full Aryan along with some other outstanding, not purely Aryan scholars. Then, he joined the National Socialist Party, but after the war did not crave an alibi, in contrast to the majority of opportunistic careerists. In June 1946, when I met the most important British mathematician, G.H. Hardy and to my dismay heard these details about Hasse, Hardy was busy writing a letter to the British occupation authorities in Göttingen, demanding that he be restored to his position in view of his scholarly importance, after he had been dismissed from the University due to his party membership.\end{itemize} Frei repeatedly uses terms ``these times'', ``very difficult time'', ``this time'', ``this period'' (pp.~30--31). One may get an impression that he is writing about the time of the Black Plague, or the Great Depression. Using at least once ``Nazi Germany'' or ``The Third Reich'' would have been in order. So, why do the editors go to such a great extent in creating a myth? Is it because for them -- and, sadly, for many mathematicians around the world -- Mathematik über alles, and all moral concerns are negligible? Or is it because there was a severe shortage of heroic mathematicians in Nazi Germany? If they wanted a genuine hero, they could have written for instance about Erich Hecke. There is an eternal dispute whether mathematics is discovered or invented. There is no dispute -- history ought not to be invented. The editors ``point out that this is not meant as a comprehensive biography, neither of Artin nor of Hasse. This is a project of the future.'' It is hoped that the authors of this future Professor Hasse's biography will enumerate, quote completely, and address the magnum opus of documents and eyewitness testimonies, from Hasse's anti-semitic remarks during his talk at the 1936 Oslo International Congress of Mathematicians and up to Hasse's 1960s racist remarks made in the United States. The English language in the book is generally excellent, with a number of exceptions. For example, ``he had went'' (p.~28), ``Will you already be back until then?'' (p.~187), ``Yesterday I talked to Mr.~Meins and was enjoyed to hear \dots'' (p.~449). In closing, the book under review presents a valuable commentary on valuable mathematical letters, and brief, but heavily misleading information on one of the two main personages in the book, Helmut Hasse. The editors failed to address criticism by Karin Reich, published in Zentralblatt für Mathematik, and downgraded this important criticism to an anonymous footnote.