The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (14 page)

Ding spent the better
part of a decade in a passionate attempt to establish his paternity and claim his natural father’s name as his own. The story of his origins was bitter and tawdry. His mother, Else Braun, a secretary in a Dessau clothing factory, had had an eight-year love affair with Schuler, resulting in three sons, of whom Erwin was the youngest. During this long relationship, the charming baron constantly promised Else that it was only a matter of time before he would get his divorce and make their liaison legal. He did obtain a divorce, finally, in 1915. But this only led to a final disgrace for poor Else, because instead of marrying her, Schuler took vows with another woman—a local girl long in the tooth but with a nice dowry, the daughter of a rich coal merchant. At this point, Else, lacking other options, put her youngest boy up for adoption. “He’s good child with the best characteristics—attentive, sharp, and extremely intelligent, a lively, healthy little fellow who has already survived measles and whooping cough,” she wrote a prospective family in Berlin.
Schuler, she told
a friend, had promised to pay 1,200 Reichsmarks (roughly $6,000 in 2013 money) to anyone who would take Erwin off her hands. He lived for a while in the Petersohn family, then in a second household. A short time later, when Erwin was barely four years old, his mother died. After the funeral, the boy was packed off to live with yet another family, that of the Leipzig salesman Heinrich Ding and his wife.

The Dings adopted Erwin
and seem to have treated him well enough, securing him a place in a prestigious Leipzig gymnasium—the German high school for profession-bound children. But they also clashed with Erwin, especially when the elder Ding objected to the teenager’s fascination with the Nazi movement. When Heinrich Ding passed away in 1932, Erwin, over the objections of his adoptive mother, immediately joined the
Sturmabteilung
, the storm troopers, and became Nazi party member no. 1,318,211.
That year he also
graduated with honors in history and foreign languages (French and English), with notes of praise for his skills in swimming and skiing. After a strife-filled year, his adoptive mother kicked him out of the house; their final quarrel concerned his share of the father’s inheritance. Ding served a year in the military and then began studying medicine. Under circumstances that are unknown, he met Himmler, who singled him out for advancement. Himmler approved of this bright, malleable young man with no ties to family, church, or antiquated moral codes that would interfere with his placement in the new native aristocracy. And now Ding’s future was in the hands of the SS.

Erwin Ding, 23 years old
, baby faced and five feet eight inches, with short brown wavy hair, smiles from his 1935 SS personnel file—alert and handsome, in a boyish way, though with eyes a little close together, and an expression that suggests cunning and trouble. In his résumé he writes cheerfully of his future career and the bright prospects of Nazi Germany. But how he hated his name! It was the ridicule-inspiring detritus of an unhappy childhood that he wanted to bury under a glorious career in the service of the master race. In the process of filling out the tiresome questionnaires required of all SS men, Ding launched a legal appeal to change his name to Erwin Schuler. He provided two reasons. In the first place, Ding wrote, he needed to clarify that Schuler was his father in order to show his Aryan genetic background; proof of good blood was far more significant than any lingering bitterness Erwin might have carried for this man who so cruelly used his mother.
The Schuler family
, according to the numerous genealogical charts Ding filled out for the SS, had an illustrious German ancestry traceable at least to the 16th century.
*

The reason closest to his heart for the change, however, was that he was sick of people making fun of him. “
From my earliest school days
, the name
Ding
has provided my schoolmates and enemies an excuse for ridicule and teasing wordplay,” he wrote in an early entreaty. “It’s always been, here comes ‘
Ding an Sich,’
[“the thing in itself”—a reference to Kant’s philosophy] or ‘There goes Mr. Ding-Dong’ ‘the Washlady’s Ding,’ and things of this nature.” The name Ding, which means “thing” in German, was an albatross that the ambitious young man could never seem to shake. He obsessed over it nearly to the end of his very busy, criminal existence.

Erwin Ding, 1935. (Bundesarchiv.)

For Ludwik Fleck, 1935 was also an important year. The great hero of Polish independence, Marshal Piłsuldski, died, and the sea of black armbands worn by Piłsudski loyalists in Lwów did nothing to keep politicians of a more anti-Semitic stamp from grabbing the reins of state. “
Poland was literally sick
with this problem,” Ludwik Hirszfeld later wrote, adding, “When I think back about the German atrocities, Polish anti-Semitism seems mild to me. Nationalism was young and, seeking to discharge itself emotionally, fell upon the Jews as the nearest suitable object.”

Fleck’s main source of income, his private laboratory, was relatively unaffected by the political climate, since doctors, whether Aryan or Jewish, still needed diagnostic help, and his work was held in high regard. The publication of
The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
was a happy achievement, though the book received relatively little attention.
Fleck’s friend Chwistek
, in a newspaper review, praised it as a landmark in philosophy. A few German reviewers, perhaps oblivious to the writer’s ethnic origins, speculated about how Fleck’s evident scientific relativism fit into the Nazi worldview, which also divided science into different categories—Aryan and non-Aryan.
In Lwów, Fleck was
asked to give lectures by various learned and medical societies. In 1936, he was elected chairman of the Lwów chapter of the 400-member Jewish Medical Society, and on April 21 he gave a speech at an auditorium on Mariacki Square, the central plaza of Lwów. A year later, he presented an update on new developments in infectious disease at the same locale. Fleck’s lectures were advertised in the popular Jewish daily
Chwila
(Moment), published in Polish in morning and evening editions.

Fleck’s book was not, ostensibly, aimed at a Jewish audience, though it must have struck a chord among scientifically trained Jews who had learned, through nationalistic exclusion, that the scientific community to which they belonged was just as subject as any other field to cultural tendencies. Fleck’s marginality—his enforced independence—clearly liberated his thought. He was a practicing scientist virtually outside the academic stream, a Jew in Catholic Poland, an intellectual on the edge, in some sense, of the enlightened world. All of this may have made it easier to view the structures of the scientific establishment with a critical eye. Fleck was not shy about exposing the pathetic sham of “Jewish versus Aryan” science, but this was not the main thrust of his work. He was looking at something deeper, something constant in the complexion of human behavior.

Science, Fleck wrote, was increasingly dependent on specific techniques, methods of investigation, and instruments. There was no such thing as “pure” scientific truth, because scientists relied utterly, in their inquisitive work, on tools that were artifacts of scientific culture. Specialists no longer believed they were looking into the heart of things; they no longer pretended that any
Ding an sich
, or essence of things, was within their grasp. “When they penetrate ever deeper into objects they find themselves more distant from the ‘things’ and closer to the ‘methods,’” wrote Fleck. “
The deeper in the woods
, the fewer the trees and the more numerous the woodcutters.”
No matter how science
was practiced, he held, the procedures and concepts behind the work were shared collectively. In modern parlance, Fleck might have said that “thinking outside the box” was a rare phenomenon. In a democratic system, the scientific elite catered not only to each other but also to the interested public, which provided research money and prestige and, perhaps most importantly, validated the collective’s work by spreading versions of its successful research findings.
Thought collectives consisted of
inner, “esoteric circles” of specialists, and what Fleck called “exoteric circles,” that is, nonspecialist but interested parties. In fields other than science, the thought collectives were more elitist, keeping their distance from the outer circles through secretiveness and dogmatism. One example, in his view, was the religious organization—Fleck had observed both Jewish and Catholic forms—and another, on a lighter note, the fashion industry, with its arbitrary yet airtight requirements:

The special mood of the thought
collective of fashion is constituted by a readiness immediately to notice that which is fashionable and to consider it of absolute importance, by a feeling of solidarity with other members of the collective, and by an unbounded confidence in the members of the esoteric circle. The most dedicated followers of fashion are found far out in the exoteric circle. They have no immediate contact with the powerful dictators forming the esoteric circle. Specialized “creations” reach them only through what might be called the official channels of intracollective communication, depersonalized and thus all the more compulsive. . . . [T]hey are simply told “
ce qu’il vous faut pour cet hiver
” [Here’s what you must wear] or “
à Paris la femme porte
”. . . . It is coercion of the strongest kind, because it appears in the guise of a self-evident necessity and is thus not even recognized as a coercive force. And woe to the true believer who does not or cannot conform.

Dogmatism was also, of course, the characteristic of scientific thought collectives in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. For progress to take place, Fleck believed, the “esoteric circle” needed to interact with the outer circles.
Democracy, he said
, leads to the development of new ideas and to progress, while isolated elites were characterized by “conservatism and rigidity.” Fleck was not a relativist about the democratic requirements of science. Stalinist and Nazi thought styles could not replace a practice that demanded free thought, even if scientific thought was not quite as unencumbered as people assumed.

Although it could rarely offer definitive answers to anything, Fleck wrote, science had to do its best to inform the public—even people with arcane specialties relied on popular versions of science to express their knowledge. To give a sense of how this worked, he provided a hypothetical case in which he was asked to examine a throat swab from a child who might be suffering from diphtheria. After conducting an examination, Fleck tells the family doctor, “The microscopic specimen shows numerous small rods whose shapes and positions correspond to those of diphtheria bacilli. Cultures grown from them produced typical ‘Löffler bacilli.’”
*
If Fleck were communicating his findings to a fellow microbiologist, he would give a much more detailed, nuanced descriptive passage that concluded, “In view of the origin of the examined material, and the morphological and culture characteristics of the bacilli, the diagnosis of Löffler bacilli seems sufficiently well established.”
The parent, meanwhile, would simply
be told, “‘Your child has diphtheria.”

The fact that the bacteria were found in the throat of a young patient with symptoms of diphtheria was crucial to the diagnosis. You had to know what you were looking for when you looked into a microscope, and your scientific acculturation inevitably shaped what you saw. If Fleck had been ignorant of the surface that had been swabbed, it would have been impossible—in 1935, anyway—for him to hazard more than a guess at the identity of these germs, whose forms and shapes were highly variable. Every expert understood this. If Fleck said as much to the family doctor, however, the latter might accuse him of cutting corners, or stating the obvious. As a member of a wider thought collective that also included, broadly, the family doctor and the patient, the scientist had to communicate on different levels to bring about a successful treatment.

Every communication and, indeed
, all nomenclature tends to make any item of knowledge more exoteric and popular
. Otherwise each word would require a footnote. . . . Each word of the footnote would need in turn a second word pyramid. If continued, this would produce a structure that could be presented only in multidimensional space. Such exhaustive expert knowledge completely lacks clarity and is unsuitable in any practical case. . . .
Certainty
,
simplicity, vividness originate in popular knowledge
.

Yet the push for clarity had its costs. To get consistent results, scientists needed bacteria to be fixed and stable species. To achieve this uniformity, Fleck noted, they usually injected animals or culture plates with bacteria that had been growing in a given medium for 24 hours or less.
This was more likely
to provide “fixed” species, but it also meant ignoring any secondary changes that would typically occur in the bacterial cultures after they had sat an additional day or so in the petri dish.