Geoscience Reference
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human nature had wanted to show all that it could of the most sublime and
the most savage.” The catastrophe awakened what Lombroso termed “all
the primitive and atavistic sentiments,” religious and otherwise.
28
The
Archiv
für Kriminologie
published a similar report on the san Francisco earthquake
of 1906: “the
bête humaine
naturally held its orgies and there were plenty of
looting mobs [
Schlachthyänen
]. On the other hand there were also traces of
homo nobilis,
and not just isolated cases, which should please the humanist.
. . . it almost makes one think of an unconscious imitation, of a 'psychic in-
fection' by example, which suddenly made heroes of average men . . . since
indeed even in the worst something human slumbers.”
29
After 1918, criminologists were not satisfied with a simple analogy be-
tween the social effects of earthquakes and of wars; instead, they probed
possible interconnections between war, revolution, and the social effects of
“atmospheric and telluric disturbances.” Thus, what observers described as
widespread hysteria following the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 was attributed
in part to the lingering effect of a world war that acted like a petri dish for
mass panic.
30
similarly, the 1928 earthquake in the Crimea was found to
awaken “the whole already extinguished image of the war neurosis (at the
moment of the catastrophe the image of the battle appeared; the sound
of heavily loaded automobiles called for two series of associations—con-
nected to the war and to the earthquake in the Crimea).”
31
in 1920, follow-
ing Germany's November Revolution, Hans von Hentig published
On the
Relatedness of Cosmic, Biological, and Social Crises.
32
Hentig was interested
in what happens when “an atmospheric or telluric infection [
Schädlichkeit
]
reaches the light and porous substrate of moral feeling.” Hentig concluded
that modern states must recall what the ancients well knew: that even the
slightest earth tremors could open the door to revolution. The authorities
of ancient Athens would never have permitted crowds to gather on the
day after a widely felt tremor—as occurred in Munich on the afternoon of
7 November 1918, when socialists staged a peaceful coup against the Ba-
varian monarchy. For information on the tremor of 6 November, Hentig
was indebted to the Bavarian macroseismic service, founded in 1905. What
clinched his argument, he believed, was that “one of the most excitable
and most eloquent heroes” of the November Revolution—the anarchist and
writer Erich Mühsam—was “by nature highly sensitive to earthquakes.” He
had in hand a letter from Mühsam, which he had received from the direc-
tor of the Munich observatory. Though written over three years before the
revolution, it was evidence of Mühsam's “earthquake-sensitivity”—a trait
Hentig linked, predictably, to his Jewish origin:
