[Living with responsibility: Max Born and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker as philosophers with distance].

Abstract

Both Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker und Max Born belong to the most active scientists, which have raised their voice for peace in the 1950s. While Born, senior to Weizsäcker by one generation, engaged in peace movements at an early stage, which was also due to his emigration, and was a driving force for the Einstein-Russell memorandum, Weizsäcker entered the stage essentially with the Göttingen declaration but quickly dominated the discourse. The comparison of their different engagements for peace sheds new light on Weizsäcker. Unlike the German emigrant with a British passport, who was mainly influenced by EInstein and Russell as well as some socialist thoughts he had encountered at an early age, the son of a noble diplomat and the physicist, who was saved from military duties because of his work in the German wartime nuclear project, had quite a different perspective on the postwar atomic threat. The relation of Born and Weizsäcker remained marked by a certain distance even when both took up very similar roles of 'public scientists' active for peace, be it as delegates at Pugwash conferences, on the air, or as speakers in the Frankfurt Paulskirche.