German Physical Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The German Physical Society, known in German as the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft or DPG, holds a distinction that no other organisation of physicists on earth can claim: it is the oldest of its kind in the world. Its origins trace back to a regular gathering of scholars in a Berlin urban palace called the Magnus-Haus, completed in 1760 and named after the natural scientist Gustav Magnus. Those meetings eventually gave rise to the Physical Society of Berlin, formally founded in 1845. What began in one building in one city has grown into an organisation with a 2025 membership of more than 50,000 physicists worldwide. But the DPG's story is not simply one of steady growth. It is a story of journals that reshaped how science moved across borders, of a Nobel laureate who tried and failed to seize control of German physics, and of leaders who pushed back against a state determined to make science serve ideology.

• 2. A Journal That Moved Physics

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  By 1919, the DPG's own publication, the Verhandlungen, had grown too large to manage effectively. The society's chairman at the time, Arnold Sommerfeld, convened a committee to solve the problem. Its members included Albert Einstein, Eugen Goldstein, Fritz Haber, E. Jahnke, Karl Scheel, and Wilhelm Westphal. Their recommendation was to create an entirely new journal, one built for speed: original research by established scientists, published without peer review. That journal, the Zeitschrift fur Physik, began publication the following year, in 1920. Springer-Verlag published it as a four-part journal from 1920 through 1997 under the auspices of the DPG. During the golden years of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, it was widely regarded as one of the most prestigious physics journals in existence. It served as the vehicle for the young generation of quantum physicists who were pushing science into territory it had never entered before. In 1975, Zeitschrift fur Physik merged with Physics of Condensed Matter, and it eventually continued under a new name as the European Physical Journal.

• 3. Resistance Under the Nazi Regime

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  On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power. Barely two months later, on the 7th of April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, stripping Jewish civil servants and regime opponents of their positions. Within physics, the impact was severe: 25 percent of physicists holding academic posts in the period 1932-1933 were lost under these policies. Johannes Stark, born in 1874 and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919, became a driving force of the movement known as Deutsche Physik. Acting under the Fuhrerprinzip, Stark sought to become what observers called the dictator of physics, aiming to bring German scientific societies under National Socialist control. Max von Laue, serving as DPG chairman, gave the opening address at the 1933 physics convention in Wurzburg and invoked the persecution of Galileo to draw a parallel with the attacks on Einstein's theory of relativity, which Deutsche Physik's proponents dismissed as Jewish physics. When Stark ran for president of the DPG against Karl Mey, the industrial physicist and head of Osram, Stark received only two votes. In retaliation, he cancelled the DPG's use of its rooms in the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, deleted travel expenses for its personnel to attend DPG meetings, and barred PTR staff from lecturing at DPG events. At the end of 1938, under pressure, the DPG called on its Jewish members to withdraw their membership, an action initiated by Herbert Stuart and Wilhelm Orthmann. Carl Ramsauer, who served as DPG president from 1940 to 1945, and his deputy Wolfgang Finkelnburg tried to steer an independent course. Early in 1942, on Felix Klein's initiative and with the support of Ludwig Prandtl, Ramsauer submitted a petition to Reich Minister Bernhard Rust at the Reichserziehungsministerium. The petition documented what Ramsauer described as the atrocious state of physics instruction in Germany and attributed it directly to the politicisation of education.

• 4. Reconstruction and Reunification

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  After World War II ended, Max von Laue moved to rebuild the DPG in 1946, but the Allied Control Council's restrictions on cross-zone organisations meant he could only reconstitute it within the British Zone at first. Separate versions of the DPG were later re-established in the American and French sectors. These separate bodies were not united until 1950, a year after the Federal Republic of Germany was formally established on the 23rd of May 1949. The society remained divided across the Iron Curtain for decades. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the DPG fully reunified across Germany, absorbing the Physical Society of East Germany in 1990. From that moment, the DPG took over operation of the Magnus-Haus in Berlin, the same palace where the society's story had begun over a century earlier. Today the Magnus-Haus serves as a venue for lectures and meetings on both physics and socio-political issues, and it houses the DPG's historical archive.

• 5. Awards, Youth, and Public Reach

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  The DPG's highest honour for theoretical physics is the Max Planck Medal, first awarded in 1929. Its equivalent for experimental physics is the Stern-Gerlach Medal, first awarded in 1933. The organisation also administers prizes designed specifically to draw in the next generation, including the Gustav Hertz Prize for Young Physicists. Some awards are given in partnership with foreign institutions, such as the Max Born Medal and Prize and the Otto Hahn Prize. For science journalists and communicators, the Medal for Natural Science Journalism recognises those who have made exceptional contributions to explaining scientific facts to the general public. Since 2000, the DPG-Abiturpreis has been awarded annually to high school graduates across Germany who have shown outstanding performance in physics; winners receive a certificate and a one-year free membership in the society. Since 2002, the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division has recognised original contributions that apply physical methods to understanding socio-economic problems. The DPG also supports Jugend forscht, the national research contest for young scientists. On the public side, the Highlights of Physics festival, organised jointly with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, draws around 30,000 visitors each year and stands as the largest event of its kind in Germany.

• 6. Where the DPG Gathers

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  The DPG office is located in the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, a physics conference centre in the town of Bad Honnef, near the university and federal city of Bonn, and is headed by Chief Executive Bernhard Nunner. Students, working scientists, and Nobel Prize winners have all passed through Bad Honnef to share ideas and attend advanced training courses. The DPG's conference calendar is substantial: the DPG-Spring-Meetings are held annually at venues across Germany, while the DPG-Fall-Meetings focus on a single research topic each year. The German Conference of Women in Physics has been held annually since 1997, with DPG support continuing through 2019. The Young DPG working group, known as jDPG, runs a nationwide network for physics students through workshops and networking meetings. In partnership with the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy, the DPG hosts the annual BCGS Weekend Seminar, a retreat combining physics lectures, excursions, and social events to connect students with leaders in the field. Every year the DPG also publishes the Verhandlungen der DPG, listing the abstracts of around 8,000 papers from its conference programme. The organisation's membership reached a peak of 63,012 in 2014, a figure that offers a sense of the scale at which the DPG has been operating in recent decades.