II
SEPTEMBER 1969. DANIEL found himself in Kiel, Germany. He had decided on a coastal town, with the romantic idea that life would be sweeter next to the sea, and a major in agronomy, since the world’s people needed to be fed.
Kiel is the capital of Schleswig-Holstein, a state situated so far north within Germany that for much of its history it was part of Denmark, and it still bears the scars of the last Ice Age: it is a moraine-covered region along the Baltic Sea, itself a vast glacial lake that freezes readily in the winter. Since Otto von Bismarck’s time, Kiel has also been the headquarters for Germany’s navy. It was a beautiful Hanseatic city destroyed by Allied bombs, then destroyed again by the uniform, “modern” architectural style of postwar reconstruction.
In Germany as elsewhere, the upper echelons of the navy were a reactionary bunch. The few people who hoisted a white flag as the Allies approached Kiel were shot by their neighbors. After the war, a good number of Nazis lived out their days in the countryside of Schleswig-Holstein, often occupying high-level administrative or political positions. Daniel knew about all this from his reading, but he would soon experience it more directly: on a local fish farm where he worked one summer, his boss told him casually that he was taking the afternoon off to go celebrate the Führer’s birthday with some friends. A quarter century after the war, the agronomy department at the University of Kiel was still packed to the gills with old Nazis. The young students suffered from harassment, and the atmosphere was awful. Daniel learned that this port city was also home to an internationally renowned oceanographic institute, which was recruiting an army of young professors with more liberal ideas and offering courses in ocean science. As unlikely as it seems, after growing up in landlocked Switzerland without any special interest in marine environments, Daniel became a student oceanographer. In a way, those old Nazi agronomy professors gave marine ecology one of its most emblematic figures of the twentieth century. Things could have easily turned out differently: Daniel the agronomist, Daniel the doctor, Daniel the jurist, the linguist, the orchestra conductor—the possibilities are dizzying.
Germany isn’t a particularly maritime country, but its oceanographers have long been among the very best: the first measurement of water salinity was taken in the Bay of Kiel in 1697 by Samuel Reyher, then a professor at the young Christian-Albrecht University. The term “plankton” was invented in 1887 by another professor, Victor Hensen, who sailed from Kiel to the North Atlantic and demonstrated that cold waters are more productive and richer in fish than tropical ones. In the 1960s, a geography professor named Günter Dietrich rebuilt Kiel’s oceanographic institute (IfM*) so energetically that he died of a heart attack in 1972. In particular, Dietrich’s team put a training program together (today we would call it a master’s degree) that allowed students to do a few weeks of research in each department of the institute, which was resolutely interdisciplinary: physical oceanography, marine chemistry, planktology, fisheries biology, marine zoology, and marine microbiology all figured on the syllabus. Daniel received one of the best educations in the world in this branch of science. Twenty years later, I also went to Kiel, the way some people go to Mecca—I had dreamed of becoming an oceanographer since my earliest childhood. I walked into the IfM library and kissed the ground; there, in the gray light of the Baltic winter, were thousands of volumes dedicated to the study of the oceans. Ecstatic, I inhaled the contents of my lecture classes, gorged myself on journals and books in four languages (including the fearsome Allgemeine Meereskunde*), and muddled my way through the lab work, still lacking in practical experience. After fifteen years spent surviving the hostile and anxiety-provoking French education system, I began a second life in which work and study were no longer punishments to be borne.
But in the 1970s, Kiel wasn’t just a university town. It was also a hotbed of industrial activity that revolved around huge shipyards, which employed over twenty thousand people. This “city within a city” was the center of intense labor negotiations and protests in reaction to restructuring, buy-ups, and waves of layoffs that have continued uninterrupted to this day. The shipyard has also accumulated its share of political and financial scandals, including the secret sale of military submarines to South Africa during apartheid in the 1980s and arms contracts with Saudi Arabia. Between these episodes, however, the site prospered, and a whole generation of immigrant workers, mostly recruited in Turkey, settled near the docks. Daniel put down anchor in that same working-class neighborhood—university housing was rare and mostly controlled by student unions who were better known for their fencing contests than their social policies.
Daniel went back and forth between these two worlds, from working-class tenements to the beautiful neighborhood that hosted the historic university buildings near the parliament of Schleswig-Holstein. He was also a social animal who knew how to make friends and form strong intellectual relationships, even in Northern Germany, a place hardly known for human warmth. Cornelia Nauen, who met Daniel on the second day of classes in autumn of 1969, tells me about this character trait as well as many other important details of his scientific career. Cornelia, then a dark-haired young woman of nineteen, had fled the Ruhr (“a concrete desert”) and a stiflingly conservative home. Daniel’s seriousness and maturity impressed her, and he appreciated her in turn for her absolute loyalty, rigor, and industrious good humor. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship during which they would share a scientific and political mission. Cornelia also studied at IfM, before doing her thesis on coastal ecological processes in the Baltic Sea. After that came six years of working for the FAO * in Rome on international marine biodiversity management and the fight against pollution. The FAO jubilantly handed out tenure to most of her male colleagues and “forgot” all about Cornelia, despite her creativity and effectiveness. In 1985, that venerable organization lost a high-powered scientist when Cornelia left to join the European Commission in Brussels, where she spent the next two decades developing partnerships with the Global South—concerning fisheries, of course. Since 2010, Cornelia has been the president of Mundus maris, an NGO that fights to protect the oceans and the people who depend on them using all of the scientific and artistic means at its disposal. Even after several hours of interviews, I wouldn’t learn much more about her—a kind woman who obviously enjoys talking about the oceans, Daniel, and current events, she carefully avoids mentioning herself or her political engagements, however fascinating.
Indeed, during their time at the institute, Daniel, Cornelia, and several other students shared more than a passion for marine environments: they were also active in the Marxistische Studentenbund Spartakus, an organization close to the German Communist Party (DKP). This movement, following in the footsteps of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, was the result of the student protests of the early 1970s. In Kiel, the Communist Revolution was no recent phenomenon. In fact, in October 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s navy had its very own “Mutiny on the Potemkin.” The German sailors refused to go to sea for a final face-off with the British Royal Navy. Workers in the naval yards rallied to their cause and the insurrection spread from there, sweeping across Germany like wildfire, forcing the abdication of the Kaiser and leading to the foundation of the First Weimar Republic, as well as the proclamation of a “Free Socialist Republic” by Karl Liebknecht. In Kiel, traces of this historic battle are more than discreet, almost hidden. In the 1990s, I heard about the great communist revolt of 1918 for the first time when a whole cache of hundred-year-old weapons and tracts was discovered, entirely by accident, in a tower during renovations at Kiel city hall. Daniel distributed modern versions of these documents down near the shipyard, and Marxist dialectics taught him how to conceptualize and defend his convictions with strength and perseverance, both orally and in writing. For Daniel, who has never been to a psychologist, “Marxism is also the negation of inner life; everything is dominated by exterior forces. It pushed me to ignore my own feelings and drown myself in work—that’s always been my solution.” For many of the leftist students in Kiel, the big question was whether or not to get involved with the RAF.* Unlike the Maoists (whose work Daniel had already seen in Paris), the Spartakists kept their distance, which turned out to be the right decision: the RAF’s highly publicized career began with harmless pranks and ended in a bloodbath that led to a strong right-wing backlash in West Germany. Daniel set himself apart forever from “those idiots who plant bombs.”
For the professors at the oceanographic institute, though, Daniel, Cornelia, and their friends were redder than red, and they teased their students by asking why they didn’t simply head east, to live in the earthly paradise that had become the German Democratic Republic. Their professors still respected them, however—these politically active students were also the best in their class, the most brilliant, and the hardest workers. Daniel could often be seen wandering the halls of the institute, having long discussions with his classmates and professors about their coursework and current events. But what did he learn about the ocean during those years? Mainly that it is a giant physical, chemical, and biological machine of infinite complexity, whose many parts form a larger whole, a single dynamic system. In this way, the seasons, the winds, and the currents determine the growth of plankton, who then feed the fish, who then feed birds and marine mammals, and often humans as well. For more than a century, however, fisheries biology has developed somewhat apart from other branches of oceanography.* The reason for this difference is that there are very strong economic interests tied up in fisheries that make this area of study more “serious” and better funded than other marine disciplines, which in comparison, tend to look like nothing more than pastimes for humble naturalists.
FISHING: THE FIRST traces of this human activity date from tens of thousands of years ago. Today, fishing directly or indirectly employs 300 million people around the world and feeds 500 million people in developing countries, where it is often a major source of food. If we define it as gathering aquatic organisms in the most general sense, the earliest evidence of fishing in France can be found on the walls of Cosquer Cave (eighteen thousand years BP), near Cassis, in the form of drawings of harpooned monk seals. When it comes to harvesting ocean fish, some cod fisheries off the coast of Newfoundland are so consequential that they have actually changed the course of human history. For instance, they fed slaves in the Caribbean for centuries, creating a Creole culinary tradition based on a source of fish several thousands of miles away.1
Despite their paramount importance for entire civilizations in Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Europe, fish populations only recently became the subject of rigorous scientific study. In Northern Europe, the Norwegians were the first to begin to worry about large-scale fluctuations in cod stocks along their coast. Still the poor relative of the other Scandinavian countries, Norway was not yet one of the world’s leading petroleum producers. The residents of its Lofoten Islands depended heavily on marine resources, and the government (under Swedish rule at the time) commissioned the first scientific studies of cod in the 1850s. Early progress was slow. It was not until the early twentieth century that Johan Hjort, director of the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, understood that the fluctuations were determined by the rate of survival of cod larvae. Some years, many larvae survive: this leads to a “strong cohort.” Other years, environmental conditions create a hecatomb: this is called a “weak cohort.” Small fish become big fish, and strong cohorts lead to good fishing years while weak cohorts create scarcity for the Lofoten fishers.
Birth, growth, reproduction, and death (natural or caused by fishing): these are the fundamental processes based on which scientists attempt to calculate how many individuals can be harvested without causing the collapse of an entire fish population, the same way you prune a bonsai without killing it. The best biomathematicians went to work on the problem and developed increasingly complex statistical models that would be steadily improved by long-bearded European men, mainly during the first half of the twentieth century. The second half of the century was then devoted to studying different variations and perfecting existing models. Daniel began his career, therefore, in a field that already had a strong formal basis, on a stage dominated by some very impressive founding fathers.
The concept of overfishing was first defined in 1931 by a British scientist named Edward Russell, but in the 1970s, the world’s fisheries were still in a state of euphoria, the catch having more than tripled since 1950 and coming ever closer to the symbolic record of 100 million metric tons* per year. At the time, each wild fish population was managed like a marine monoculture: the rules for herring were different from the ones for sprat, and neither had anything to do with cod. Daniel absorbed these doctrines—built around the study of some two dozen North Atlantic commercial species—without question. Two decades later, I did the same, though unlike Daniel, I developed a fascination for plankton, then marine birds—a specialization judged to be much less profitable. Fisheries biology: that was the place to find work as a marine ecologist.
And at the oceanographic institute in Kiel, fisheries biology was a big deal, overseen by a major authority figure—Gotthilf Hempel.* This formidable professor is the most influential German oceanographer of the twentieth century. He began his career far from the water, however, with a thesis on the physiology of grasshoppers at Heidelberg University in 1952. He was given a position in that still-lovely city, which had escaped the bombs, but his chronic asthma pushed him toward the coastal regions of Northern Germany. He moved there for good in 1967 after several years of traveling around the world for UNESCO, during which he built an impressive network of influential friends in tropical countries. What followed was an exceptional career during which he directed no fewer than six different research organizations, founded the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, and worked to get a 387-foot icebreaker, the Polarstern, built with the staunch support of his friend, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Hempel also published a colossal number of books and scientific reviews and supervised more than sixty-six doctorates, easily making and destroying scientific careers along the way. Today, the word on the street is that if he dies in time, the next German icebreaker will be called the Gotthilf Hempel.
I attended several of Professor Hempel’s classes in the 1990s, and see him again in January of 2016 for an interview in Kiel. We agree to meet at the oceanographic institute, now called GEOMAR. Hempel is nearly eighty-seven years old, and his white hair and beard give him an unearthly look. He pulls up in a shiny black Volkswagen Golf, accompanied by Cornelia Nauen, who has come up from Düsseldorf for the occasion. I have reserved a quiet meeting room near the roof terrace, but Hempel has his own agenda: he wants to sit in the library and has a little less than two hours for me. He strolls off decisively in that direction. We find ourselves in a noisy and crowded setting where coffee is reverently served to the master and his guests. Quite a few acquaintances stop by, surprised to see us sitting at a table with a few books and two microphones. As a student, I would have fainted at the idea of speaking to Hempel, but I enjoy this interview. He is not an easy subject, too used to captaining his own ship. Still, I’m not interested in the official story, and I have come armed with a list of specific questions. Hempel finally gives in with good grace but finds my method much too disorganized; luckily, this test won’t be graded. His mind, and his words, are razor-sharp as he paints me a picture of the young Pauly. “Daniel was formidably intelligent and he liked controversy; even when he knew he wasn’t completely right, he drowned the other camp with his arguments. He was sometimes aggressive during those debates, but never mean. We were on opposite sides, politically speaking, and we often disagreed, but I respected him and the esteem was mutual.”
“For Daniel,” Cornelia Nauen adds, “being a Black man was a daily struggle. His visit to the United States really made an impression on him, and this consciousness, along with his Marxist ideas, was very important to him. He was already very loyal back then.” In those days, Daniel was happy to talk about most things, but he remained discreet about his personal history; Hempel wouldn’t learn the details of his past until thirty years later. “The hardest thing was the way other people looked at me,” Daniel explains. “The first time I talked to Cornelia about my past, she started crying, so I didn’t push it after that.”
The rapport between Hempel and his students was very relaxed. Daniel never addressed him as “Professor Hempel,” despite the German obsession with titles, and still calls him “Herr Hempel” today. The Herr Professor also had a mischievous sense of humor and soon procured himself a Little Red Book, memorizing whole sections in secret. In the students’ office, a portrait of Chairman Mao took up a whole wall. During “strategic” discussions with his young colleagues, Hempel would seat himself beneath the portrait of the great leader and jokingly slip a few well-placed quotes into the conversation. Hempel’s act delighted Daniel and Cornelia, who weren’t fans of Maoist pomposity either.
Still penniless, Daniel worked at a nearby hospital. Though he received a scholarship from the Protestant Church* in his second year, he struggled financially during his first year in the program. He learned then that the oceanographic institute offered students one-hundred-hour contracts doing the most tedious laboratory chores. He offered his services and became assistant to one Wolf Arntz. Doctor Arntz, whom everyone calls Petz, was another child of the war, from Southern Germany. The son of a linguist, he spent his childhood wandering the banks of the Rhine, dreaming of endless oceans. At university, he initially studied English and Russian, thinking he would become an interpreter, but with mandatory military service hanging over his head, he decided to prolong his studies and go into marine biology, finally reaching the sea coast and its distant horizons.
When I meet him in Bremen in 2016, this epicurean octogenarian can look back on a long and agreeable career. Brought on as a public servant by the German agency for technical cooperation after his doctorate, he traveled the world and spent several years in Peru in the 1980s before becoming chair of marine biology at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven and participating in multiple expeditions to Antarctica. Everyone likes Petz. A bear of a man,† he enjoys making little delicacies for his friends and has even cooked on board the icebreaker Polarstern, whipping up sumptuous meals for over a hundred people. In Bremen, he takes me to one of the best restaurants in the city, situated along the Weser River, and we chat happily about a young upstart named Daniel Pauly. “For Daniel, of course, I was a horrible reactionary, but he told me that at least I wasn’t racist,” Petz explains over his second cup of coffee. “He was obviously well ahead of everyone else and couldn’t be bothered with details.”
Yet in the early 1970s, the task that Petz assigned to Daniel was an extremely meticulous one: sorting through mud. In fact, Petz was a benthologist, specializing in everything that happens on the ocean floor. Out at sea, much of his work involved hauling up big globs of sediment from the depths using an articulated mechanical digger whose jaws bite into the ground, then close around their contents; the whole thing is hauled up to the surface and emptied on board. This slimy stuff, which contains a number of tiny organisms, was then mixed with formalin and stored in jars labeled with the date and the location where it was collected. Such jars filled row upon row of shelves in the basement of the oceanographic institute, like green beans in a farmhouse pantry. Often years later, research assistants would open them to sort and identify the little creatures, whose number and diversity is an indication of the health of the marine ecosystem in question: when there are only a few worms, as is the case in certain “dead zones” in the Baltic, there is cause for legitimate concern.
When Daniel was assigned to mud sorting duty, the method used was very primitive: aliquots* were taken, then placed in petri dishes. After a quick rinse, the student would place the mixture of sediment, formalin, and preserved critters under a dissecting microscope to be identified and listed. This technique had several serious drawbacks. Students and researchers were exposed to formalin fumes, which are highly toxic. No one was worried about it at the time, but we soon learned that formalin is carcinogenic and that exposure over long periods of time can lead to potentially deadly allergic reactions. Additionally, the sediment swirling around in the mixture of water and formalin prevents the technician from seeing clearly, so sorting through the samples is terribly tedious. The whole process quickly frustrated Daniel, who began looking for a better way.
Prepared for this moment by years of working in industry, he decided to invent an automatic sorting system, putting together a “very badly made but functional” prototype in his kitchen. Daniel’s technique uses elutriation, the separation of particles based on their density: the mud sample is placed in a funnel, the bottom of which is covered with a screen. The screen is transpierced by a pipe, up through which a continuous stream of water is run, causing the sample to bubble. The little marine organisms, less dense than the rest, float to the top and overflow out of the funnel. They then run down the outside and are gathered in a filter attached to the base. The oceanographic institute had a large workshop and a team of friendly technicians who quickly transformed Daniel’s invention into a beautiful machine that allowed samples to be separated five to ten times faster than before. “Daniel came up against a systemic problem and he found a technical solution,” says Cornelia Nauen. “Since then, he’s always taken the same approach—just with bigger and bigger problems.” Daniel agrees: “My biggest advances have been mainly methodological.” Characteristically, his German university had asked him to resolve a technical problem with his own hands rather than throwing himself headfirst into theoretical questions, as is often the case in the French system.
The mud-separating machine ran like a dream, and Daniel never completed his one-hundred-hour contract. Petz was magnanimous, and once Daniel reached his sample quota, he was allowed to seek new horizons. Hempel had kept well abreast of the affair, however, and asked Daniel to write an article describing his new machine; the student hopped to it and wrote a short paper, two pages in perfect German that would appear in an obscure review in 1973 after only a few minor corrections from his mentors. This was Daniel Pauly’s first publication—two humble pages about mud.
But this first attempt was hardly trivial, as it allowed Daniel to go beyond his lectures and other coursework and start working in the laboratories of the oceanographic institute. At the time, Petz Arntz’s and Gotthilf Hempel’s labs were located on the docks, near the fish market. In the early seventies, German fisheries were still active. From Iceland to Greenland, they caught huge quantities of rockfish and pollock, while the coastal fisheries of the North and Baltic Seas provided heaps of cod, plaice, and flounder. The docks were a lively place, and from behind their laboratory window, Petz and his students engaged in some amateur sociology. The system worked like a gold rush: the fishermen would raid the northern waters and return with their pockets full of cash. As soon as their feet touched solid ground, they would run after any woman who chanced herself on the docks, including young students, whom they’d try to trap inside telephone booths. Since that hunt wasn’t very successful, they would call a taxi and go to Hamburg, where they could really live it up. A week later, the ship’s officers would follow them with a minibus to retrieve the human wreckage, and the now-penniless sailors would have no choice but to go back to hauling nets out of the North Atlantic.
Forty-five years later on a freezing January day, when I visit the area where the fish markets used to be, the only sound is the crunch of my boots in the snow. The magnificent red brick buildings are still there alongside statues of heroic sailors, but there is not a single fishing boat moored along the docks. The depots have been transformed into facilities for a start-up that makes electronics, mainly for the oceanographic institute, which has itself tripled in size thanks to new construction. Wandering through its cavernous lobby, I catch a glimpse of some comfortable-looking offices. The institute’s annual budget of 90 million euros is also quite comfortable and funds the work of about forty professors. Of those, thirty-one are men—thirty Germans and one Pakistani, who I’m told grew up in Germany. In the twenty-first century, German marine science is still mostly a white man’s game. The research interests of the venerable institution have, on the other hand, changed a great deal since Daniel’s time here, and even since my time in the 1990s: geological and mining interests are prominent, as is the study of the ocean’s great biogeochemical cycles. The climate and its impact are, of course, taken into consideration, but ecological questions are considered marginal, especially where vertebrates such as fish are concerned. Certainly, at a time when the oceans are being emptied of their birds and fish, it seems wise to shift one’s focus to plankton and other tiny sea creatures.
* Institut für Meereskunde (Oceanographic Institute), also sometimes affectionately called Institut für Märchenkunde (Institute for the Study of Children’s Stories).
* “General oceanography”—a huge volume, well researched but heavy reading.
* Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
* Rote Armee Fraktion, the “Red Army Faction,” also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
* I use the term oceanography in the literal sense, meaning “the study of the oceans,” which includes numerous subdisciplines. I am choosing to go against the French research community in physical oceanography, which has a vexing habit of claiming the term for its own exclusive use.
* A metric ton is equal to 2,204 lb.
* Gotthilf literally means “God’s help.”
* “How a commie like Daniel managed to get a scholarship from the Church, I’ll never know,” comments Gotthilf Hempel.
† In fact, “Petz” is a familiar name for a bear in German.
* A small quantity that is taken out of the whole, of which it is supposedly representative.