Gustav Magnus und die Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin – ein ambivalentes Verhältnis?

“Gustav Magnus and the Physical Society of Berlin—An Ambivalent Relationship?” by Wolfgang Schreier (German language).—Wolfgang Schreier examines Gustav Magnus’s ambivalent relationship to the Physical Society of Berlin, founded in 1845, which emerged from the milieu of his colloquium, established in 1843, while also pressing beyond its limits. The essay begins with a revealing episode at the society’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration in 1896, where Gustav Wiedemann and Adolph Paalzow offered opposing interpretations of the “Magnus school”: Was Magnus not a founder of a school precisely because he did not bind his students to his own research topics, or did this freedom itself create a particularly fertile scientific school? Schreier places this question within the tensions of generational conflict, bourgeois associational culture, democratic claims to public access, and the differentiation of physics in the nineteenth century. The Physical Society appears as an open institution, not restricted to academics, whose founders—Gustav Karsten, Wilhelm Beetz, Karl Hermann Knoblauch, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Wilhelm Heinrich Heintz, and Ernst Wilhelm Brücke—aimed more strongly at independence, public engagement, and new fields of inquiry than did the more exclusive Magnus colloquium. This becomes especially clear in the 1848 address to the Berlin Academy of Sciences, initiated by the society, which called for public sessions, as well as in its early lectures on electrical engineering, technology, medical physics, and physical physiology. Magnus recognized and indirectly fostered this development through his colloquium, laboratory, and scientific openness; at the same time, he remained reserved toward far-reaching theoretical generalizations, a broad expansion of applied subjects, and the new associational form. The essay thus arrives at a nuanced conclusion: Magnus helped prepare the way for the Physical Society of Berlin, and with it for a new kind of scientific institution, without being able—or willing—to identify himself with it.