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away and all are equal, equal in their degree of helplessness and of misery.”
suess stressed that social elites were as vulnerable as anyone else to both
the physical and psychological effects of earthquakes. “The dreadfulness
of the phenomenon lies in the suddenness of its occurrence and in that even
the educated person is likely to see in it something entirely unintelligible,
something entirely incomprehensible. Thus our response to the event must
be: sympathy for the victims and the conscientious advancement of our
studies.” Unlike Kant in 1755, suess portrayed the scientific and humanitar-
ian perspectives on the earthquake as compatible, even interdependent. The
scientist needed to know how earthquakes “usually present themselves to
the observer,” while the work of reconstruction required scientific knowl-
edge of the distribution of seismic risk throughout the monarchy.
The Living Earth
If you want to discover the world, you need to pierce the eggshell.
38
—eduard suess, 1888
In the tradition of seneca, suess set earthquakes in the context of “the all.”
The loss of solid foundations could seem uncanny, even unnatural. By
bringing the earth as a whole into focus, as suess did with his contraction
theory, geologists could instead show earthquakes to be a natural part of the
planet's life cycle. suess set out to readjust humanity's sense of scale, both
spatial and temporal, by showing earthquakes to be the result of tectonic
shifts over the course of geohistory. shortly after an 1898 earthquake in
Croatia, Rudolf Hoernes wrote in the
Neue Freie Presse
that suess's plan-
etary perspective “may comfort us when we recognize the essence of the
uncanny [
unheimlich
] seismic forces that are active on the Adriatic coast.”
39
The Ljubljana seismologist Albin Belar offered a similar image in the same
newspaper in the wake of the Messina earthquake of 1908: “The earth lives
and quakes—and a standstill means planetary death. We will no longer
shudder in fear at the word earthquake when we consider that it is merely
a balancing out of forces and tensions, similarly as in a thunderstorm.”
40
Indeed, suess's view of earthquakes as symptoms of planetary evolution was
widely echoed into the early twentieth century. As a writer in the
Edinburgh
Review
put it in 1905, “earthquakes are a sign of planetary vitality”; neither
“effete globes like the moon” nor “inchoate worlds, such as Jupiter or sat-
urn” could be expected to suffer seismic waves, being too inelastic in the
first case and too “pasty” in the second. “Our globe is, by its elasticity, kept
