Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
or Ruthenian, because of the low seismicity of Galicia and Bukovina). In
1901 Belar requested that the portion of the annual chronicle concerning
Dalmatia also be printed in Croatian. According to his own reports to the
commission, 382 of his observers wrote in Croatian, only twenty-six in Ger-
man, and fifteen in Italian.
63
The commission responded that it would be
impossible to translate this section of the chronicle: to do so would draw
analogous demands from the other nationalities, and the cost of satisfying
them all would be prohibitive. The commission recommended that Belar
have the chronicle printed instead in a local newspaper.
64
A month later
Belar complained to the commission that his efforts to recruit observers
by means of articles in Croatian and Italian newspapers had so far been
fruitless.
65
The fate of the imperial earthquake Commission would play out, like
imperial politics overall, as a struggle to strike a balance between centraliza-
tion and decentralization.
66
seismology demanded centralization in order
to synthesize data on midsize earthquakes, to respond concertedly to seis-
mic disasters, and to facilitate communication among the new generation of
seismic observatories. Yet earthquakes also required study region by region,
by scientists fluent in the local language, versed in local history, and familiar
to the local community of observers. After 1904, vienna's Central Institute
for Meteorology and Geophysics provided the necessary degree of central
organization, while managing to preserve the lively intercourse between
provincial scientists and the interested public. Its success can be measured,
for instance, by the over two thousand reports collected in the course of
two large swarms in Bohemia in 1900 and 1903.
67
Indeed, in the Habsburg
world, “local knowledge” was often produced as “imperial science.” Re-
search conducted in the service of nationalism—even the “national schools
of thought” celebrated by post-Habsburg historians—was often sponsored
by the Habsburg state and articulated, in German, by Habsburg-loyal schol-
ars as contributions to the ideology of unity in diversity.
68
Conclusion
For Albin Belar, the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918 meant the loss
of his
Erdbebenwarte,
the perch from which, for twenty years, he had re-
ported on each spasm of the planet. The new Yugoslav government, sus-
pecting him of German nationalism, seized the contents of his observatory,
dispossessed him of his apartment, and sent most of his instruments to Bel-
grade. While his children emigrated to the United states, Belar moved what
