German Abroad: The History and Historicity of an Academic Language, East and West

Over the past few centuries, several languages — French, German, Russian, Latin, English — have served as international scientific languages. This has not been a product of the linguistic properties of these specific languages, but rather a matter of persuading non-native speakers to adopt them to communicate with colleagues abroad. German’s position as an international language of science is usually explored within the context of the German-speaking countries (most often only within the boundaries of the region which became theKaiserreich in the 1870s), but the phenomenon cannot be explained without looking at those who used the language outside of Germany, and especially outside of German-speaking nations. This lecture describes the use of German as a scientific language by non-native speakers from the 18^th century to the 20^th century, using examples based in three cities: St. Petersburg, Prague, and Princeton. The choice of a scientific language is always simultaneously a question of both the speaker and the intended audience.

Michael D. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University in the United States. He specializes in the history of science — especially the physical sciences — in Russia/Soviet Union, Europe, and North America, in the modern period. Since 2004 he has published five books on diverse topics: the Russian chemist Dmitrij Mendelejew, the early history of nuclear weapons, the concept of “Pseudoscience”, and finally (in 2015), a history of scientific languages from antiquity to the present (Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English). This year he is a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Moderation: Dr. Michael Prinz