ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Cosmic Physics to the Bioclimatological Lebensraum: Engineering a ‘Supplementary Meteorology’ in Germany and Austria 1934-1944

• In Event: The Authoritarian Anthropocene: Twentieth-Century Party States and the Mobilization of Earth and Climate Knowledge

English Abstract

In 1934, in the same year that the Austrian dictator Engelbert Dollfuss had abolished the Austrian parliament and one year after Adolf Hitler’s national socialists came to power, a new supplementary meteorological journal appeared, the Bioklimatische Beiblätter.

Established by the Austrian Wilhelm Schmidt and the German Franz Linke, this journal created a forum for the new organic science of the relationship between, climate, weather and the body. It followed an earlier model of German-Austrian supplementary meteorology, Ludwig Weickmann and Victor Conrad’s 1931 journal Ergebnisse der Kosmischen Physik, which focused on the new mathematical physics of the Earth System as a scaling up of regular synoptic meteorology. However, the Beiblätter was a German-language journal scaling down and focused on the local microclimate and the organic.

Bioclimatology had historical roots in the European (often Alpine) spas of the 1920s, where physicians and climatologists began to develop a science of healthy and unhealthy atmospheres, but in the 1930s it became a more contested science which both saw cooperation and competition between a nationalized and racialized medicine and an atmospheric physics aimed at understanding the global earth system.

To what extent was the bioclimatological journal a product of the new political circumstances? In my presentation I will examine the development of atmospheric physics and bioclimatology in the German-speaking world under the new European order of autocratic regimes. I will also consider especially ‘global’ meteorologists, unified under one Reichswetteramt since 1934 worked towards and against their anti-cosmopolitan totalitarian systems.

Author

• Robert-Jan Wille, Utrecht University