6533b85bfe1ef96bd12ba8f6

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Mathematical Publishing in the Third Reich: Springer-Verlag and the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung

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Stiss. He was known to take interest in DMV affairs and they believed his views coincided with those current at the DMV board, in other words, with their own. Stiss had been a pupil of Ludwig Bieberbach (1886-1982), who in the Third Reich propagated an anti-Semitic, racial theory of Deutsche Mathematik and led a group of National Socialist mathematicians strongly opposed to the DMV. The DMV board hoped that Stiss might be able to reconcile his former teacher with the DMV, or at least safeguard it and its politics against the threat of political attack from Bieberbach's faction. In addition, Stiss had recently become a member o f the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) and was thought to have good relations to the Ministry of Education and Research, which, accordingly, approved Sfiss's election in October 1937. Stiss grew to be one of the most influential representatives of the German mathematical community in the Third Reich, and collaborated closely with Nazi authorities particularly in the Ministry of Education and Research. In the course of this collaboration the DMV's professional policy became closely entangled with issues that stood at the very core of the Nazi state, notably its anti-Semitism and its antiinternationalism. The Ministry of Education and Research was dedicated to transmitting these values to the sphere of the sciences. The collaboration of the DMV board and especially of Siiss in this program, which in its consequences lay beyond their control, was a precondition of their influence and successful professional policies during the war [10]. During his DMV presidency, which lasted until 1945, Stiss was repeatedly at odds with Springer-Verlag. Springer was amongst the leading scientific publishers in Germany, and their mathematics branch enjoyed a worldwide reputation. After World War I Springer had enrolled outstanding mathematicians to launch a first-class publication program in mathematics. Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Richard Courant stood for the G6ttingen influence in this enterprise. Springer's yellow books were soon known in the most remote places and often alluded to as the yellow plague, which no mathematician could escape. The many instances of conflict between Stiss, as the representative of the DMV, and Ferdinand Springer and his main mathematical adviser Friedrich Karl Schmidt (1901-1977), can serve well to illustrate how the independence of scientific publishing was shaken under National Socialism.