Pauling speaking in Mainz, Germany, July 1983.
Since we’re in an announcing mood, it gives us great pleasure to pass along word of another new Pauling resource recently made available online by the Special Collections & Archives Research Center: a German-language edition of Robert Paradowski’s Pauling Chronology.
Robert Paradowski’s chronology of the life and work of Linus Pauling, which we’ve written about in the past, is surely one of the most useful accounts of Pauling’s story available anywhere and almost certainly the best general overview that one can find online. Paradowski is Pauling’s official biographer. He knew Pauling well and compiled a significant corpus of one-on-one interviews that surely contain a great deal of unique information. Those of us who spend time in the Pauling orbit have long anticipated the release of the Paradowski biography, rumored to be a three-volume work, but it has yet to see the light of day.
So until the publication of his epic, Pauling watchers with an interest in Paradowski’s work have to content themselves with the Chronology, which was first published in print in 1991 and later released online by Oregon State University in 2009. Since then, we have done what we can to increase the accessibility of the text to larger audiences, beginning with a Spanish translation released in 2010. The new German edition is likewise meant to act in this spirit of increased access to a valuable resource. Future translations are anticipated as skill sets within the department avail themselves.
Pauling was comfortable with language. His written English was impeccable – peppered throughout the Pauling Papers, one finds numerous examples of his correcting the grammar or style of other authors – and he was comfortable delivering lectures in essentially all of the romance languages. German, however, was Pauling’s strongest second language.
Carl Pauling, 1915.
Pauling came from German stock on his father’s side. His grandfather Charles Henry Pauling, whom everyone called Carl, was born in the U.S. to recent German immigrants, and he eventually married a German woman named Adelheit Blanken. In 1882 Carl and Adelheit moved to Oswego, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, and stayed there for the remainder of their lives. Linus, who was born in 1901, spent a significant amount of time in his grandparents’ home, especially after his family had settled for good in Portland in 1909. As Thomas Hager notes in his Pauling biography, Force of Nature, daily life in the grandparents’ home was imbued with the culture of the old country.
…the woodstove was always warm and the smell of rich German cakes filled the air. A sod cellar was packed with home-canned fruits and crocks of sauerkraut and pickles….Carl and Adelheit were devout Lutherans. Because there was no church in Oswego, every month they would invite a minister from across the river to hold services in their house. Linus sometimes sat among the small group of worshipers in the front parlor, listening to the service and hymns sung in German.
This early exposure to German spoken in the home gave Linus a leg up in his later studies of the language, which included two years of undergraduate class work at Oregon Agricultural College and, later, his passing of a compulsory exam during his doctoral studies at Caltech.
This study was of extreme use in that facility with German was crucial for a scientist in the early twentieth century. Much of the more important work in the physical sciences was being published in German-language journals and many of the leading minds were based at German universities.
An academic procession at the University of Munich, 1927. Note the arrow pointing to Arnold Sommerfeld. Photo likely taken by Linus Pauling.
Pauling gained first hand knowledge of these facts during his crucially important Guggenheim trip in 1926-1927. Based mostly in Germany, Pauling made contacts with a number of German scientists including Arnold Sommerfeld, an early mentor of great consequence. Sommerfeld’s lectures made a deep impression on Pauling and it was not long before Pauling was taking notes, writing papers and giving talks in German. This capacity only sharpened over the course of his European stay and served Pauling exceedingly well for the remainder of his life.
The German translation of Paradowski’s Pauling Chronology is available at http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/diechronologie/page1.html
