Max Weber Studies

[MWS 20.2 (2020) 281-286] ISSN 1470-8078 doi: 10.15543/maxweberstudies.20.2.281© Max Weber Studies 2020, Global Policy Institute, University House, Coventry University London, 109 Middlesex Street, London E1 7JF. Time and Mortality Sam Whimster1 Max Weber Studies had no specific plans to mark the centenary of the great man’s demise. The journal did organize two centenary conferences , one on Confucianism and Daoism and a second on Hinduism and Buddhism. The rationale and motivation were fairly obvious for these celebrations, since India and China, and Asia more generally, has experienced a balancing up with the West. Coming world powers, a hundred years later, get to interrogate the milestone publications on civilizations and religions. With the 2020 pandemic many planned conferences were cancelled, so that did leave an obvious gap, which the journal is now dutifully acknowledging with its tributes. Weber’s death was something of an accidental death. Else Jaffé and Alfred Weber thought Marianne and the doctor were far too complacent about Max’s condition and with proper treatment he should have survived. Opinion is split whether a late ripple of the ‘spanish’ flu carried him away. Some years back I asked Professor John Oxford, doctor and influenza expert, what his view was—having sent him Marianne’s account of Weber’s last days. He said the 1918–19 influenza led in the final stages to pneumonia, with the inference that it would not be possible to discriminate. The historian Joachim Radkau dug out the autopsy report, significant in itself since it was presumably thought uncommon to die of pneumonia in the summer of 1920. Weber had an enlarged spleen and his stomach lining had half self-digested. We are quite well informed of Weber’s attitude to his own death. He was trained to be an officer in a mass conscription army, one of the bloodiest and insensitive of all armies, Prussia’s. As an adolescent he visited the once blood-soaked battlefield of Trautenau, sixteen years after the great slaughter of the Prussian-Austrian war, a war 1. Sam Whimster is the Editor of Max Weber Studies. 282 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2020. completely unjustified except to the ogre Bismarck. The young officer in his many army manoeuvres training would know full well what modern riflery and artillery were capable of. Soon after the Great War started, Max was vaingloriously boasting to his lady friend Frieda Gross, wife of the pacifist Dr Otto Gross, that he should be leading his company into battle. This was piece of romanticism that is hard to square with the trainloads of wounded arriving in a back siding of Heidelberg railway station for treatment in the Heidelberg-district lazarettes commanded by Reserve Captain Max Weber. Weber’s attitude to death was fatalistic, though faced with mortality in the form of a heart spasm in April 1920, he agreed with Else Jaffé’s suggestion: ‘It was if a cold hand had touched you’. In the summer semester he sprang back with enormous activity with two new lecture courses on Socialism, attracting 600 students, and General Theory of the State and Politics, attracting 400 students; in addition a seminar for postgraduates. The galley sheets for Economy and Society were corrected and demanded much time and concentration , and he also corrected the first volume of the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion. His sister Lily, the youngest of the siblings , had committed suicide in April 1920 in troubling circumstances, and he was planning to bring the orphaned children to Munich that autumn in the small house he was renting in Seestraße, hard by the Englischer Garten. While working hard he did not self-isolate. Else Jaffé, moving house in Munich, camped overnight with her maid in Seestrasse and Weber accepted dinner invitations, himself inviting Else and her mother, the baroness, to an Italian restaurant. Marianne returned to Munich after a lecture tour and visiting the Bielefeld relatives at the end of May. A couple of days later Weber took to his bed with fever and what was diagnosed as bronchitis. He died at a high point of achievement and ambition and we are left to wonder...