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The Nazis deprived themselves of all this when they fired Physicist Born for something called "Jewish physics." Franck quit, and others scattered. Gottingen did not remotely recover until after World War II, when it took in a wave of avid students in tattered Wehrmacht uniforms —"the best generation we ever had." recalls one veteran professor. It also welcomed a new source of research renown: the independent Max Planck Institute for Physics, named for the late pioneer of the quantum theory, and headed by Physicist Heisenberg, discoverer of the "uncertainty principle."* Though Heisenberg moved his staff to Munich in 1958, Göttingen remains headquarters of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science—a chain of Planck research institutes all over West Germany.
Fraternity Foolery. Göttingen's students are today sometimes less satisfying than the Wehrmacht veterans. One-third of the men belong to Korporationen (fraternities), and despite vigorous faculty disapproval, they have an irrepressible yen for Germany's most adolescent atavism —dueling. Göttingen is also a notable Arbeitsuniversität (grind school), meaning that its relatively unprosperous students work extra-hard and pile up Teutonic tensions. Yet all is not blades and blood; the duelers are equally enamored of progressive jazz, hikes on picturesque "Stallion Hill," and lipstickless coeds with hair the color of sunlit beer. "There are human beings among the students too," says one hopeful official.
All the fraternity foolery may look outdated when the state of Lower Saxony finishes its prodigious revamping of Gottingen. While aiming to keep enrollment steady, the planners hope to rebuild 92% of the university. On the boards are hundreds of new buildings, including a twelve-story hospital. Science and medicine will dominate, with more than ten times the space allotted to "sciences of the spirit." Theology gets short shrift, says one architect, because "they'll never discover anything world-shaking." Beams Nobel-winning Chemist Otto Hahn: "Now the university will start to grow again."
* The disturbing discovery, based on Heisenberg's work with electrons, that the very act of observing a phenomenon changes the nature of the phenomenon.