The German Genius

their brains and body and were then “ordered” by a doctor and superior officer to lose their symptoms and get well. These techniques sound bizarre now but success rates of 90 percent or above were claimed, much reducing the pension burden. 16
    T ECTONIC S HIFTS
     
    As the 1915 publication of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in English in Britain shows, intellectual life did continue during the war, and it was not always disfigured by nationalistic, or chauvinistic, emotions. Two other German ideas first saw the light of day in the 1914–18 period, both extremely influential and each having nothing to do with war.
    Alfred Wegener, born in Berlin in 1880, was a meteorologist who received his PhD from the University of Berlin. An Arctic explorer, who was wounded in World War I, he first aired his ideas about “continental drift” in 1912 at a meeting of the German Geological Association at Frankfurt, but his full theory wasn’t set down in book form, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane ( The Origin of Continents and Oceans ), until 1915. 17 His idea, that the six continents of the world had begun life as one “supercontinent,” was not wholly original—it had been aired earlier by an American, F. B. Taylor, in 1908—but Wegener collected much more impressive evidence than anyone else so that his theory, much ridiculed at first, eventually convinced most skeptics. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight one might ask why scientists had not reached Wegener’s conclusion sooner. By the end of the nineteenth century it was obvious that to make sense of the natural world, and its distribution around the globe, some sort of coherent explanation was needed. For example, there is a mountain range that runs from Norway to north Britain and should cross in Ireland with other ridges that run through north Germany and southern Britain. In fact, it looked to Wegener as though the crossover actually occurs near the coast of North America, as if the two seaboards of the North Atlantic were once contiguous. Similarly, plant and animal fossils are spread about the earth in a way that can only be explained if there were once land connections between areas that are now widely separated by vast oceans.
    Wegener’s answer was bold. The six continents as they now exist—Africa, Australia, North and South America, Eurasia and Antarctica—were once one huge continent, one enormous landmass which he called Pangaea (from the Greek, for all the earth ). The continents had arrived at their present position by “drifting,” floating like huge icebergs.
    The idea took some getting used to, but it could not go unexamined. 18 How could entire continents “float”? And on what? If the continents had moved, what enormous force had moved them? By Wegener’s time, the earth’s essential structure was known. Geologists had used analysis of earthquake waves to deduce that the earth consisted of a crust, a mantle, an outer core, and an inner one. The first basic discovery was that all the continents of the earth are made of one form of rock, granite. Around the granite continents are found a different form of rock—basalt, much denser and harder. Basalt exists in two forms, solid and molten (we know this because lava from volcanic eruptions is semi-molten basalt). This suggests that the relationship between the outer structures and the inner structures of the earth was clearly related to how the planet formed as a cooling mass of gas that became liquid, then solid.
    The huge granite blocks that form the continents are believed to be about 50 kilometers thick, but below that, for about 3,000 kilometers, the earth possesses the properties of an “elastic solid,” or semi-molten basalt. Millions of years ago, when the earth was much hotter than it is today, the basalt would have been less solid, and the overall situation of the continents would have resembled more closely an iceberg floating in the oceans. Even so, it took time for the notion of continental drift to be accepted—textbooks as late as 1939 were still treating it as “a hypothesis only.” It was not until sea-floor spreading was confirmed in 1953, and the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge identified in 1968, that Wegener was finally vindicated.
     
     
    The work that Ludwig Wittgenstein produced during the war was not a response to the fighting itself. At the same time, had Wittgenstein not been exposed to the real possibility of death, it is unlikely that he