A Brill Calendar: June 2

Few periods were as disruptive to Leyden University, ‘Praesidium Libertatis’, as the Nazi occupation from May 1940 to May ’45.

Jacob Adriaan Goedkoop (Velzen, 1921) Leyden Professor from 1958 until 1986, described this infringement on continuity for the study of physics in his history of the Foundation for the Energy Research Centre of The Netherlands; before that War one of Leyden’s regalia.

“On June 2 1945 H. A. Kramers, Leyden Professor in theoretical physics, just back in Europe since WW II was over, could lay his hands on recent instalments of the American professional journal ‘The Physical Review’. He spent the night reading them. The contents confirmed his fear that physics in The Netherlands had incurred an enormous setback […] but perhaps more ominous was that they didn’t contain anything on the subject so avidly discussed when the war started: nuclear fission. Already early in 1939 it had been proven that an enormous amount of energy would result from such a process and even in the popular press it was suggested that a ship like the ‘Queen Mary’ could circumnavigate the globe on an amount of fuel the size of a lump of sugar.” [Translation WD]

Leyden was a beehive for these debates in pre-war years when young scientists like Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and Julius Robert Oppenheimer were locals in Leyden’s ‘Inn of Physics’, with the Old Master, theaging Hendrik Lorentz, acting as the Landlord. Two months and four days after Kramers’s sleepless night, the Japanese city of Hiroshima became famous in the most terrible manner imaginable. In the resurgence of scientific work in The Netherlands – including re-establishing personal and corporate relations – publishers like Elsevier, North-Holland Publishing Company, Kluwer and Brill began to act trans-nationally as avant-garde agents of change, filling the void caused by annihilation of the German economic structure (including its activity in scholarly publishing), in an increasingly Anglophone academic climate and culture.