Few topics in history of science have attracted as much scholarship as the birth of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Yet despite the near-obsession with all things quantum, one of the major architects of this famous theory is largely forgotten: the brilliant German mathematical physicist Pascual Jordan (1902–1980), who in collaboration with Werner Heisenberg and Max Born, outlined the fundamentals of quantum theory. The reason Jordan is rarely remembered today is commonly attributed to his Nazi-era writings that praised Hitler’s regime; an unrepentant fascist hardly fits into the usual heroic narrative of scientific triumph.
This paper delves into the question of Jordan’s remembrance, and argues that Jordan has gone down in historical memory as a villain not, as has been thought, exclusively because of his pro-Nazi statements during the Third Reich, but in large part due to his decision to reenter politics in the late 1950s. It was only then that Jordan viciously attacked colleagues in physics who spoke out against possible West German nuclear armament, deriding them as naïve fools. Stridently supporting Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union, Jordan was elected to the West German parliament. Yet his colleagues responded by unearthing and disseminating Jordan’s writings from the Nazi period, exposing them to a new postwar audience. Without relativizing Jordan’s decisions and writings during the Third Reich, I demonstrate that actions taken long after Hitler’s death have often dictated who is collectively remembered as an “unapologetic Nazi.”
