Eduard Study (1862-1930) - ein mathematischer Mephistopheles im geometrischen Gärtchen

Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit Eduard Study (1862-1930), einem der deutschen Geometer um die Jahrhundertwende, der seine Zeit zum Einen durch seine Kontakte zu Klein, Hilbert, Engel, Lie, Gordan, Halphen, Zeuthen, Einstein, Hausdorff und Weyl geprägt hat, zum Anderen in ihr aber auch für seine beißenden und stilistisch ausgefeilten Kritiken ebenso berühmt wie berüchtigt war. Da sich Study mit einer Vielzahl mathematischer Themen beschäftigt hat, führen wir zunächst in die von ihm bearbeiteten Gebiete der Geometrie des 19. Jahrhunderts ein (analytische und synthetische Geometrie im Sinne von Monge, Poncelet, Plücker und Reye, Invariantentheorie Clebsch-Gordan'scher Prägung, abzählende Geometrie von Chasles und Halphen, die Werke Lie's und Grassmann’s, Liniengeometrie sowie Axiomatik und Grundlagenkrise). In seiner darauf folgenden Biographie finden sich als zentrale Stellen seine Habilitation bei Klein über die Chasles’sche Vermutung, sein Streit mit Zeuthen darüber als eine der Debatten der Mathematischen Annalen (aus der er historisch zwar nicht, mathematisch aber tatsächlich als Gewinner hätte herausgehen müssen, wie wir an der Lösung des Problems durch van der Waerden sehen werden) und seine Auseinandersetzungen als etablierter Bonner Professor mit Engel über Lie, Weyl über Invariantentheorie, zahlreichen philosophischen Richtungen über das Raumproblem, Pasch’s Axiomatik, Hilbert’s Formalismus sowie Brouwer’s und Weyl’s Intuitionismus.

Transatlantic negotiations on "hell"?: W. E. B. Du Bois's visit to fascist Germany and Theodor W. Adorno's exile in the land of the culture industry

In 1936, the African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois visited Nazi Germany for a period of five months. Two years later, the eleven-year-long American exile of the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno began. From the latter’s perspective, the United States was the “home” of the Culture Industry. One intuitively assumes that these sojourns abroad must have amounted to “hell on earth” for both the civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois and the subtle intellectual Adorno. But was this really the case? Or did they perhaps arrive at totally different conclusions? This thesis deals with these questions and attempts to make sense of the experiences of both men. By way of a systematic and comparative analysis of published texts, hitherto unpublished documents and secondary literature, this dissertation first contextualizes Du Bois’s and Adorno’s transatlantic negotiations and then depicts them. The panoply of topics with which both men concerned themselves was diverse. In Du Bois’s case it encompassed Europe, science and technology, Wagner operas, the Olympics, industrial education, race relations, National Socialism and the German Africanist Diedrich Westermann. The opinion pieces which Du Bois wrote for the newspaper “Pittsburgh Courier” during his stay in Germany serve as a major source for this thesis. In his writings on America, Adorno concentrated on what he regarded as the universally victorious Enlightenment and the predominance of mass culture. This investigation also sheds light on the correspondences between the philosopher and Max Horkheimer, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Oskar and Maria Wiesengrund. In these autobiographical texts, Adorno’s thoughts revolve around such diverse topics as the American landscape, his fears as German, Jew and Left-Hegelian as well as the loneliness of the refugee. This dissertation has to refute the intuitive assumption that Du Bois’s and Adorno’s experiences abroad were horrible events for them. Both men judged the foreign countries in which they were staying in an extremely differentiated and subtle manner. Du Bois, for example, was not racially discriminated against in Germany. He was also delighted by the country’s rich cultural offerings. Adorno, for his part, praised the U.S.’s humanity of everyday life and democratic spirit. In short: Although both men partly did have to deal with utterly negative experiences, the metaphor of “hell on earth” is simply untenable as an overall conclusion.