Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.4.
Grubenhund
caricature (1911). Arthur Schütz,
Der Grubenhund: Experimente
mit der Wahrheit
(Munich: r. Fischer, 1996), 106
tion was once again an earthquake and the prank it inspired. Over lunch the
day after the tremor, a group of engineers fell into conversation about “the
unprecedented idiocy [
Schmockerei
] of the newspaper earthquake reports
in general and those of the
Neue Freie Presse
in particular.” Suddenly seized
by “a wild desire,” an engineer by the name of Arthur Schütz left the table;
when he returned he read his friends the earthquake report of one “herr Dr.
Ing. erich r. v. Winkler, Assistant at the Central Laboratory of the Ostrau-
Karwin coal mines.” this individual had supposedly observed the earth-
quake's effects on a train's compressor—in excruciating detail and in the
name of the “ceaseless efforts of our mining authorities for the protection of
the lives of the miners.” What would live in infamy, though, was the follow-
ing sentence: “A wholly inexplicable occurrence is, however, that already
half an hour before the start of the quake, my mining-dog [
Grubenhund
],
asleep in my laboratory, gave conspicuous signs of the greatest disquiet.”
It helps to know that, to a mining engineer, a
Grubenhund
is a cart for car-
rying coal (see figure 3.4). the letter reduced Schütz's friends to hysterics,
but they refused to believe that a newspaper would print it. Schütz bet that
the content of the report was irrelevant; only the tone mattered. Indeed, the
letter appeared the following morning in the
Neue Freie Presse.
Kraus was
naturally the prime suspect.
the incident gave birth to a new sociological concept. Schütz defined a
Grubenhund
as a false report that sneaks by editors but can be clearly recog-
nized by readers. thanks to his many imitators, the term came to be used more
broadly to identify a tactic against the obfuscating jargon of technical experts.
Schütz himself later cast his prank as an apolitical act of enlightenment:
