A MAN IN RAGS stands waist deep in water, squinting intensely into the ocean. In one hand, he holds a piece of rope which, spread into an arc on the surface of the water, helps calm the wavelets, allowing his experienced eye to pick out the ocean’s minuscule inhabitants. With his other hand, he skillfully collects tiny fish larvae only a few millimeters long with a spoon. They are not all desirable—most will be left in little piles along the pebble beach. Only those of the milkfish (Chanos chanos) will be carefully collected and stored. At the end of his workday, the man will sell them to an aquaculture business that raises the fish in pools. The adult milkfish will later end their days in one of the myriad kitchens of Southeast Asia, on the grill or in a soup.
It is June of 1975, on the north coast of Java, near Tegal, about 190 miles east of Jakarta. Daniel has just arrived from Germany as an employee of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ )to help develop Indonesia’s fisheries. Seeing the man collecting fish larvae, Daniel called out to him, “How much do you make in a day?” The man named a sum equal to a few tenths of a dollar. “That’s not very much,” Daniel said. “Yes,” the fisherman answered, “especially because I have to give half of it to the owner of the rope.”
Daniel would never forget this archetype of the “small-scale fisherman.” The encounter led him to question the relevance of his development mission in Indonesia. “We were there to establish a flotilla of trawlers,” he recalls. Those bottom-scraping ships were already at work in the Gulf of Thailand and in Malaysia, cleaning out areas where fish had remained relatively abundant into the 1950s. The profits enriched a handful of fishing bosses while legions of villagers in the coastal areas got by on their leftovers. The GTZ’s approach was actually counterproductive, but Daniel decided not to bring it up with them—and for good reason. After finishing his master’s thesis, brilliantly defended in Kiel in February 1974, he had been lucky to get this job. The GTZ had smelled a potential leftist troublemaker, and Herr Hempel had had to throw the full weight of his influence behind Daniel’s application to ensure that his protégé landed his first contract. Daniel did not have that kind of luck with his application at ORSTOM, the French development agency, at the end of 1974. The job, focusing on tilapia fisheries in Ivory Coast, was a perfect match for him given his experience in Ghana, but they turned him down. Two decades later, he learned from Jacques Daget, the eminent ichthyologist who was in charge of the selection committee at the time, that he had been their first choice among the thirty applicants. But a call from the Ministry of the Interior changed their minds—no draft dodgers were allowed in the French overseas civil service, and in the end, ORSTOM recruited a more docile biologist who would, in fact, not make a single wave during his entire career.
In Germany, the GTZ initially told Daniel that he would be working on a collaborative research project in East Africa. He spent several months in Bad Honnef, near Bonn, where a personal tutor from Zanzibar drowned him in Swahili while he learned about the rights and duties of a German development expert. His curriculum also included several weeks of training at the venerable Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, where he brushed up on fish classification. The course content proved to be extremely vast: planet Earth is home to several tens of thousands of species, most of which live in the coastal waters of tropical countries. Daniel was excited—a large project was taking shape in Tanzania—but after several long months of waiting, everything went sideways and he ended up being sent to Indonesia, where his Swahili would be of little use. In accordance with GTZ policy, he was assigned an Indonesian partner. Purwito Martosubroto was exactly Daniel’s age and had just finished his own master’s degree at the University of Miami in Florida. He was also paid about a tenth as much as his European colleague. Purwito was too good a man to let this detail bother him, though, and a tragicomic experience soon turned the two of them into fast friends.
During their first field mission in June of 1975, their driver was going a little too fast down a muddy dirt road. “I saw it coming and rolled myself into a ball,” Daniel remembers. Their Jeep smashed into a tree—the driver’s face was badly mangled and Daniel was “covered in cuts.” Purwito, only slightly hurt, flagged down a taxi to take the driver to the hospital. Daniel waited on the side of the road, dazed. The big container filled with fish and formalin that they had been transporting had spilled all over him, and he was soaked in the smelly, corrosive liquid. A pretty young woman emerged from a nearby house to give him a glass of milk and a towel; he thanked her and did his best to wipe the stuff off. Another beautiful woman appeared and asked sweetly if he was all right, then another, then another. Daniel finally realized that he was sitting on the doorstep of a country brothel when a truck driver emerged, still zipping up his pants. The madam came out of her room to ask Daniel, still dazed and bleeding, if he would like to come sit in the shade for a while. When Purwito came back to get him, he made Daniel promise never to reveal the exact location of their accident to his wife.
Purwito quickly guessed the political convictions of his unusual European colleague and did his best to ensure that Daniel’s leftist sentiments remained hidden. In 1970s Indonesia, being a communist or even a trade unionist meant death. Beginning in 1965, Suharto, a genocidal dictator, had organized an incredibly violent crackdown that caused the death or disappearance of one million people in just a few months. “My girlfriend told me that there were a lot of bodies floating in Jakarta Bay—people stopped eating the fish,” Daniel says. Ten years later, suspicion, public denunciations, and corruption still dominated Indonesian society. “Any undertaking was an infernal triangle consisting of a military officer, a straw man, and a Chinese businessman,” comments Daniel. He lived in fear for the first time—it didn’t take much to be denounced, tortured, assassinated, or deported to a prison camp on Buru in the Maluku Islands, over a thousand miles from Jakarta.
Though it wasn’t easy, I managed to contact Purwito Martosubroto, who is now retired and living in Jakarta. During our phone conversation, politely and in a very calm voice, he confirms that during Daniel’s stay, Suharto’s martial law applied to everyone, including foreign diplomats.
On Cendana Street in Jakarta, Daniel lodged among Indonesia’s elite: during his first year there, Suharto was one of his closest neighbors. Daniel lived with a grande dame of the former ruling class, by then an impoverished lady who discreetly received visitors from her past life and spent her time reminiscing about the old days. Daniel found this atmosphere oppressive and soon moved to Semarang—a calmer and more tolerant city—with Elizabeth Kambey, his Indonesian girlfriend, where they avoided gossip by pretending to be a married couple. The house next door was under construction at the time and a few indigent laborers scratched at the dirt with dull tools. On his way out the door one day, Daniel forgot himself and started whistling “The Internationale.”* One of the workers stood straight up as though struck by lightning. Brandishing his shovel and crossing it with a stick he had grabbed from his neighbor, he cried, “Bagus!”† with a toothless smile. Then, in the same moment, he went right back to work in the trench. The poor wretch never looked Daniel in the face again.
Our apprentice researcher also spent six weeks at sea aboard the Mutiara 4, a 115-register-ton‡ research trawler, slowly crossing the Java Sea and South China Sea toward Singapore. Eighty one-hour-long tows* were carried out at regular intervals and the contents of the net dumped out on deck. “A typical tow would yield two hundred kilograms (440 pounds) of fish, and there were 150 different species, of which only 80 were known!” recounts Daniel. Biological diversity is at its height in the tropics. Daniel had read as much in Kiel and Frankfurt, but he had to see it to believe it. In the nineteenth century, that same incredible diversity had attracted Alfred Russel Wallace, co-inventor of the theory of evolution, to the region, where he eked out a living gathering bird and insect specimens for wealthy British collectors.
Over the years, Daniel has told the story of his expedition on that trawler in the Java Sea over and over again to anyone who will listen. It was the experience that launched his career in the tropics—a total shock, a wake-up call. As Cornelia Nauen puts it: “From there, he would have to reinvent fisheries biology.”
Why? As we’ve noted, the management of fish stocks had, at this point, only been theorized by Northern researchers, and only for the cold waters of the North Atlantic. The number of fish species under consideration was limited, often to fifteen or so, making it possible to study each species in detail. More specifically, in order to manage a fishery, one must know the age of the fish, as well as their size and mass as a function of age. After that, in order to determine how much a fishery should catch, one must identify the natural mortality rate (that is, mortality caused by things other than fishing). For each species, this means years—decades, even—of work collecting samples at sea and analyzing them in a laboratory. To determine the age of fish caught, scientists since the beginning of the twentieth century had been relying on the work of Johannes Reibisch, yet another inventive scientist based at the University of Kiel.
Reibisch cut up and examined fish otoliths under a microscope, an extremely meticulous technique. Otoliths are calcium carbonate structures, like tiny teeth, that float freely in the inner ear of vertebrates—yes, you and I have otoliths in our vestibular systems too. Their position and movements are determined by gravity and they stimulate little hairs that line the inner ear, allowing us to keep our balance. If they don’t work properly, we end up with a terrible feeling of seasickness called positional vertigo. I’ve had it—it’s awful. Otoliths, which can be more than one inch long in certain fish, have a great aesthetic beauty, and for researchers they contain some fascinating information. In fact, once otoliths have been delicately sliced up and placed under a microscope, they reveal annual growth rings, like those of a tree. By carefully studying these cross-sections, researchers can determine the age of the fish they came from. Moreover, each species has distinctly shaped otoliths, forming a whole gallery of artistic creations. Even if these structures are all that remain of a bird’s or a marine mammal’s dinner, some quick forensic analysis can reveal the kind of fish they ate. I used this very technique to complete my thesis on cormorants. I examined tens of thousands of the tiny structures—I especially like the otolith of the cod for its rough, shell-like surface, and that of the sea bass, which has a unique protrusion that looks like the prow of a ship.
It is the Danes who have become the top otolith-slicing specialists in fisheries biology. They have made it into a real industry, aiming to control the global market for their particular skill. In the mid-twentieth century, this goal seemed attainable: development programs usually tried to copy-paste Western methods onto tropical ecosystems. However, as Daniel quickly realized looking at the hundreds of different kinds of fish hauled out of the water by his trawler in the Java Sea, patiently studying the growth of each species and then calculating how many the fisheries should catch would be impossible. In fact, the otoliths found in tropical fish do not have annual growth rings—and even if they did, the Northern European process is so time-consuming that the new trawlers financed by the Asian Development Bank would surely catch all the fish before scientists had time to learn their secrets.
Daniel began looking for a solution, but he wouldn’t find it right away—he was frustrated, and his job proved more frustrating still. He had to tolerate a bad-tempered project manager—a shifty man who was a little too keen on the bottle. Daniel’s scientific writings from his years in Indonesia are modest, initially limited to a few reports, then a single publication in 1980. It was not until twenty years later that Pauly and Martosubroto, still close friends, set things to rights by publishing an enormous tome on the fish of western Indonesia.
In the meantime, Daniel’s contract went unrenewed, and the GTZ recruited a replacement behind his back. “Daniel returned to Kiel very suddenly,” Hempel recalls. Exiled from Indonesia, Daniel suffered from more than unemployment—he and his girlfriend, Elizabeth, broke up for good when he left Jakarta. Back in Germany, Hempel received him coldly. The master was deeply dissatisfied with the work his protégé had done for the GTZ. Daniel explained the situation with his German project manager, and Hempel “took a detour” through Jakarta during his next globetrotting adventure to check his student’s story. The project manager arrived drunk for their meeting in Hempel’s hotel lobby. On his return to Kiel, the Herr Professor reassured Daniel and offered him a part-time position as a research assistant* so that he could start his doctoral thesis in January of 1977.
The length of a doctoral program in the sciences varies greatly according to the candidate and the country. Some go on for a decade or are never finished, but most are completed in three to four years. Daniel wrapped his thesis up in two and a half years, doing most of his research in 1977 and 1978.
When it came to directing theses, Hempel took a perfectly binary approach. Either the candidate was independent and creative, and Hempel offered only discreet and non-invasive support. Or they struggled and he chose a topic for them, drawing on the institute’s seemingly infinite collection of jars brought back from past oceanographic expeditions. The victim would then spend several years with his or her nose stuck to an ocular lens, churning out a descriptive monograph on the state of plankton or fish larvae in some obscure part of the Atlantic.
Knowing Daniel, Hempel offered only a few general suggestions at the beginning of his PhD program, which Daniel resolutely ignored. After his Indonesian experience, he knew that he had to find a viable technical solution to the problem of managing tropical fisheries, and nothing less would do.
To accomplish this mission, he dove into the universe of Ludwig von Bertalanffy. This Hungarian theoretician was born at the beginning of the twentieth century into the Viennese bourgeoisie, surrounded by a star-studded family of churchmen, artists, intellectuals, and senior imperial officials. Initially educated by private tutors like all the sons of his social class, he went on to the universities of Innsbruck and Vienna to pursue a career in biology and philosophy. Going against the positivist approach* so in vogue at the time, he considered the universe to be a living system that exists independently of human societies.
During a long career in Europe, then in North America, with the support of his wife and close collaborator (who was, however, never listed as a coauthor on any of his work), he developed general systems theory,† which we now consider to be one of the most important conceptual leaps of the last century. Von Bertalanffy worked his whole life to bring the natural and social sciences together, but in the 1930s he also created, almost as an afterthought, an equation that describes the growth of living organisms. He defined growth over time as the result of a conflict between all the biological processes that allow an organism to live and grow, such as the synthesis of its molecules, cells, and tissues, and the degradation of these same molecules, cells, and tissues. If the balance is negative, death will win out. If it is positive, the creature will be able to accumulate energy, grow, and reproduce. Von Bertalanffy’s differential equation, almost as elegant as the one for special relativity, effectively describes the growth of many creatures, including fish. The British duo Raymond Beverton and Sidney Holt, giants in the field of fisheries biology, were not wrong to place von Bertalanffy’s equation at the center of their seminal work, published in 1957, which laid down the foundations of the discipline. Analyzing the growth rate of fish is, in effect, an essential step for anyone who wants to manage a fishery. Small fish grow into big fish . . . and if they are caught before that point, then the fishery is not being managed rationally.
During his studies in Kiel, Daniel eagerly devoured Beverton and Holt’s book, where he encountered von Bertalanffy’s work for the first time. However, it “ran off his back like water off a duck.” When he returned from Indonesia, though, he rediscovered the Viennese scientist, this time in the original German, in von Bertalanffy’s 1951 book Theoretische Biologie.1 Obsessed by the idea of being able to calculate the growth rate for the thousands of tropical fish he had encountered, Daniel realized that he would have to come up with a general model for the growth of all fish, without waiting for studious measurements based on cross-sectioned otoliths. To achieve this, he threw himself into a giant data-collection campaign, looking for all the information ever published on the size of fish as a function of their age, which allows the estimation of their growth rates. The word did not exist yet, but today we would call it a meta-analysis based on a review of published data whose goal was to determine some overarching principles of how the living world functions. Daniel took his inspiration from the Russian scientist Georgii Winberg, but his research project seemed totally eccentric compared to what his classmates were doing. In fact, the other students generally focused their doctoral research on a single species in one specific area and devoted much of their time to collecting and analyzing samples. Students love going on scientific expeditions aboard oceanographic research vessels, if possible in the more exotic regions of the globe—finally, a little adventure after all those years of hitting the books under the gray skies of Schleswig-Holstein.
Daniel, who had already roasted under the tropical sun, chose another battlefield: the library of the oceanographic institute. There was no internet and no databases—the information Daniel sought was scattered among the thousands of volumes stored in that venerable institution. The young researcher, who was “less a collector than an accumulator,” spent most of 1977 and 1978 in the library. He consulted some works on site, but also borrowed boatloads of them—usually a dozen a day. The benevolent librarian, Frau Wollweber, tired of checking out all those books, eventually gave him carte blanche. After that, Daniel gathered his data as he pleased, creating one index card per fish species encountered in his reading. In the end, his collection contained 515 species from 978 different populations. Gathering such a dataset in the field would have taken several lifetimes, and Daniel, impressed by the results, never wasted time on fieldwork again, insisting, “It just doesn’t go fast enough.”
Among the populations included in his note cards, there were about a hundred that had been studied in sufficient detail to determine their natural mortality rates, a variable represented by the letter “M.” The all-important “M”—holy grail of fisheries biology. Indeed, in order to determine how many fish can be sustainably caught by a fishery, you have to know how many die a “natural” death. In many tropical regions, Daniel’s colleagues were starting from the assumption that all small fish grow and reproduce rapidly. They assumed, therefore, that all the populations renewed themselves yearly, and assigned “M” a very high value. Daniel didn’t believe it for a second and saw no reason to expose tropical fisheries to such discriminatory simplification. Such assumptions are particularly dangerous because if analysts assume that populations are completely renewed each year, fisheries will be encouraged to treat the ocean like an open bar.
Daniel therefore constructed a statistical model derived from von Bertalanffy’s equation that makes it possible to calculate M for any fish population based on the maximal size (or mass) and growth rate of the average individual. “I’ve never been very good at math, but I managed,” admits Daniel, who relied on his vivid imagination to come up with “a sort of pseudo-code.” Armed with a rapidly scribbled proposal, he went to see Gerd Woller of the physical oceanography department, who coded the necessary computational routines for him in FORTRAN.* The entire institute shared a single computer, which was connected to a number of terminals. The machine would allocate a fraction of a second of its calculation time to each operator, one after the other. Daniel punched in his data and a cloud of oblong dots appeared on the screen—these were the M values as a function of fish size and growth. Examining his results closely, Daniel noticed a striking pattern: the warm-water fish were clustered together on one side of the screen, the cold-water fish on the other. Not surprising, as scientists had long known that fish grow faster in warm water. Daniel added this factor to his statistical analysis and found a strong correlation between M, the maximal size/mass of fish, their growth rate, and the average temperature in their range.
Because Daniel had done such good work, Hempel tapped him to be part of the German delegation at the annual conference of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES )which, in the spring of 1978, took place in Copenhagen, four hours north of Kiel by train. It was the biggest event of the year in fisheries biology, and the idea of presenting his research to the gods and demigods of the era—including the great Ray Beverton—terrified Daniel (though, as always, he hid it well). “I expected someone to say, ‘This thing doesn’t make any sense; it’s missing this or that.’ I thought they’d tear me apart,” he admits. In the end, though, they thought his work was just fine.
Back in Kiel, Daniel completed his dataset and checked his analysis for a total of 175 species.2 The resulting scientific article became his first big hit. “People either needed the equation or the database,” he concludes. In fact, Daniel had very astutely published his entire database as a table in the article. Transparency and open access to raw data have been central features of his work ever since. The “Pauly equation,” as it would soon be called, became popular because it allowed researchers to determine M using very simple parameters, including temperature. This earned Daniel a lot of kudos, but also some ridicule. The latter camp is best represented by his American colleague Ray Hilborn, who later criticized Daniel’s method for being too low-tech and at odds with more complex, time-consuming methods commonly used in the Global North: “The Prophet Daniel is among those excluded. Some say that Daniel chose his exile, others say he was cast out. Whatever the reason, Daniel resides in the lower regions, the hot places. [He] must toil in infernal heat, deprived of holy catch-at-age data and armed only with a thermometer.” 3
The critiques were not always very sophisticated, though, and his publication soon found a privileged place in the scientific literature. Used by thousands of his colleagues, it is one of the top three most cited works by Daniel Pauly. Having made so much progress, Daniel could have done the next logical thing: write up his analysis in thesis form, bag his PhD, and then go looking for a job. For Daniel, though, his foray into the land of M was just a detour, and for his thesis, he wanted to go even further.
The von Bertalanffy equation actually predicts that organisms like fish will eventually reach a maximal size and stop growing, which is the case for all fish, from the guppy to the whale shark. However, good old Ludwig didn’t specify the biological mechanism that underlies this phenomenon. Intense academic debates among his younger colleagues ensued—one scientist even suggested that they simply abandon von Bertalanffy’s equation altogether. After carefully reading von Bertalanffy’s texts in German, however, Daniel discovered that the master had left a clue behind: he mentions that the metabolism of living organisms is limited by “a biological surface,” but doesn’t take the time to explain which one. Daniel could see two possibilities: the intestines, which limit the absorption of the products of digestion, or the gills, which limit the supply of oxygen to the fish’s body. Having cut up quite a few fish in Ghana and Indonesia, he decided that the surface of the intestine could not be the limiting factor, and turned away from that possibility. Around the same time, a Californian physiologist with a passion for birds, none other than Jared Diamond, took this constraint more seriously and showed that it controlled the life of hummingbirds: their intestines’ capacity to digest nectar from flowers determines their energy gain and therefore their daily flight time. Pursuing his gill theory, Daniel dove back into his database and promptly showed that, in fact, the greater the surface of a fish’s gills, the stronger its growth.
Already familiar with the effects of temperature on metabolism, he also postulated that the higher the ocean’s temperature, the more oxygen the fish would need, putting more pressure on their gills. In order to explain the impact of temperature, he visualized the following phenomenon: the proteins that make up living bodies function properly because of their unique three-dimensional structures. In fact, many biochemical reactions are initiated or controlled by lock-and-key-type mechanisms, where a protein fits into a particular receptor. However, above a certain temperature, proteins collapse like an overcooked soufflé. Having lost their individual shapes and characteristics, they can no longer perform their biological functions.
The surface area of gills and the temperature of water: these are the two factors that, according to Daniel, explain fish growth and validate von Bertalanffy’s equation. Not unlike Jared Diamond in his scientific works and books for the general public, Daniel offered an extremely detailed argument to defend his thesis. He dissected von Bertalanffy’s equation, carefully analyzed its implications and the misunderstandings it had created, then wrote on for a hundred or so pages, embellishing his words with ninety-six equations edited by Dirk Reimers of the department of physical oceanography.
The subject matter is intellectually demanding and the debate could have been terribly boring, but Daniel’s style is clear, powerful, and sometimes even funny. He demonstrates an astonishing mastery over a vast theoretical and empirical body of literature with consequences that go well beyond the growth phenomenon. Daniel, who had written his master’s thesis in German, managed—not without difficulty—to get permission to write his doctoral thesis in English. It was his first big project in the language, but his style is perfectly fluid. As if by osmosis, he had absorbed all the writing techniques he needed from his extensive reading in the language. In his thesis, he blended them into a style all his own, hammering out the text on his typewriter with all ten fingers. Proud of his results and unbeatable on the subject, Daniel defended his thesis* brilliantly in May of 1979, then published a condensed version in 1981. The scientific review he chose was a low-profile one and the lack of response proved deafening. Daniel, sincerely convinced that he had made a major conceptual breakthrough, was shocked to realize that his colleagues had absolutely no interest in his theoretical work: he hadn’t sparked even the smallest controversy. Swallowing his disappointment, he refused to abandon what he already considered to be his most important scientific breakthrough.
THE YEAR 1977 was a decisive one for Daniel’s career and his intellectual growth, but it was also marked by two major events in his private life: Elizabeth Kambey, pregnant when they separated in Indonesia, gave birth to a son named Ilya, far away in Jakarta—and Sandra Wade entered his life.
I had never heard of Sandra until the spring of 2015. In order to work with Daniel and his team, I was spending four months in Vancouver with my family. The city, and the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus, had become a millionaires’ playground, and the trip, productive and pleasant as it was, weighed heavily on our finances. To make ends meet, we had switched houses with a Canadian family, lending them our little house in Montpellier while we took theirs in Vancouver. We found ourselves in a beautiful turquoise abode built a hundred years ago with the wood of a giant torn from the old-growth forest—supposedly, just one of those cedars was enough to build fifty houses. We soaked up the environmental and human history of the country. In Western Canada, though, that history is a depressing one, emblematic of the destruction of natural resources and the genocide of the First Peoples—even Vancouver Island, so lauded by the guidebooks, has lost over 90 percent of its old-growth forest.
“Canadians are generally indifferent when it comes to the environment,” Daniel told my wife, Bénédicte, when she interviewed him for the French press. During our visit, he was more overscheduled than a politician—as usual—but accepted our invitation to dinner, adding, “I’ll bring Sandra Wade.” “Typical,” I thought to myself, “the alpha male has started a new life with some young woman. I’m curious to meet her.” Daniel arrived with terrifying punctuality accompanied by a quiet, distinguished Black woman his own age. We were all a bit shy and Daniel dominated the conversation. He made quite an impression on my adopted daughter, Ambalika, and his mustache and big glasses reminded her of her Indian father. Daniel gave her a serious look and declared, “In your career, nothing will be as important as your ability to write.” There’s nothing like an authority figure to make a mark on the teenage mind, and I am eternally grateful to Daniel for sharing that piece of wisdom. Sandra, for her part, spoke now and again in a lovely Southern accent, but remained mostly silent. Clearly, it’s best to speak with her when her talkative husband isn’t around.
I manage to do just that about a year later. Sandra has come to Europe with her sister Cheryl and we eat lunch together in Brussels on a warm Sunday in May. Her perfume reminds me of someone, but I can’t decide if it is one of my favorite aunts or the therapist who treated my dyslexia when I was eight. Sandra sits comfortably, knitting while she tells me her story with a slight drawl evocative of long, quiet evenings. But she also observes me with a piercing clear-blue gaze that brooks no argument.
Sandra was born two months before Daniel into a family from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the eldest of three sisters. They moved from place to place according to the assignments of their career soldier father, including to Darmstadt in Germany, where the family lived on the American military base from 1956 to 1960. “We traveled a lot in Europe. Our parents exposed us to as much as they could, whereas a lot of the American [military] parents did not. Planning the trip was always a part of it; we used to go to the library to look at maps,” Sandra recalls. They hit the road often and visited, among other things, Expo 58 in Brussels. “Of course, we were a curiosity—most Europeans hadn’t seen Black people before, but it didn’t bother us.” “That’s true,” Daniel adds when I talk to him about his in-laws. “They had a lot more freedom of movement in Europe than in the US. For a Black family, the United States was hostile territory—you had to plan your trip as if you were crossing the Sahara, identifying the oases in advance so that you could stop safely.”
In Darmstadt, the Wade sisters went to the US Army school and learned piano and German. Back in the United States, their parents settled in California, never returning to Arkansas. They were some of the five million black Americans who, starting in the 1940s, left the impoverished, racist South to look for “the warmth of other suns.”* Mrs. Wade was a stickler for her daughters’ education and their independence—her watchword was “Always have your fare home.” They all went to college and pursued postgraduate studies, and a new Black intelligentsia was born. For Sandra, that would mean a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Berkeley, then a master’s degree in political science from the Monterey Institute for International Studies. One of her professors insisted that she pursue her doctorate at the London School of Economics under the direction of Ralph Miliband and wrote to his British colleagues to ensure that everything would go according to plan.
Sandra moved to London in the autumn of 1970 and stayed there for two years. Her sister Cheryl joined her in 1971, then returned to Seattle to complete a PhD thesis on marmoset behavior at the University of Washington. Since his visit to California in the summer of 1969, Daniel had continued to correspond with the Wade family from time to time, and Mrs. Wade kept her daughters up to date on the wanderings of this odd bird. In the summer of 1971, he came to England for a visit. When he arrived at Piccadilly Circus, he tried to call Sandra but couldn’t get the phone in one of the famous red telephone boxes to work for him. He walked outside to ask for help—leaving his wallet inside just long enough for it to disappear, along with all of his money. Mortified, Daniel borrowed some cash from Sandra, and his hundred-hour contract with Petz Arntz later helped clear the debt.
After London, Sandra got a job as an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University, where she taught from 1973 to 1977 while working on a doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics on the philosophy of Malcolm X. Her research brought her back to London in the summer of 1977, then to Hamburg to visit the family of a German colleague she had met in California. There are only about sixty miles between Kiel and Hamburg, and it seemed natural that Daniel should come down for a courtesy visit. Everyone waited up for him, but he arrived hours late—he had simply lost the address. Sometime later, Sandra went to Kiel, “and the rest is history,” as the discreet British saying goes.
Sandra, for her part, tells me the following: “We decided that we were both ‘young, gifted and Black’ and we should get married. He asked me if I would, and I said, ‘Yes, surely why not.’ That’s how that happened. It was just one of those very pragmatic things.” She moved in with him in Kiel and never returned to San Francisco to finish her doctorate. Daniel had warned her that marrying him would mean eventually becoming little Ilya’s mother, since he planned to reunite with his son, to which she replied, “That’s nice.” In their wedding photos, from December 8, 1978, Sandra is wearing a chic black suit and a pearl necklace with matching earrings. Her hair is short, shorter than Daniel’s—he is bushy-haired and long-bearded, sporting a beige jacket over a dark sweater and white shirt. Sandra looks delighted and delightful behind her thick-framed glasses. Daniel doesn’t smile—he never does in photos—but instead looks tenderly at his young wife. “Winston was held up by his family in California, but he was proud of Daniel. For him, marrying one of the Wade sisters was the heist of the century,” Sandra comments.
The young couple lived at number 15 Adalbertstraße, near Kiel’s military port and not far from one of the city’s most beautiful parks, which is a great place to sit outside during the summer months. They both remember it as a happy time. Even the cold, dark, rainy winters didn’t get to Sandra, who started German classes at the university and refused to be cowed by ill-tempered shopkeepers. With a little money loaned to them by Petz Arntz, the Paulys bought a small black-and-white television, a portable model in a shiny red plastic case. The TV was their window on German society, and they studied it from their living room, watching popular shows such as the legendary drama Crime Scene.* The four episodes of the American miniseries Holocaust were shown on German television that year. “For the first time, they showed the life of a Jewish family during the war, with Nazis as supporting characters—it really shook people up,” Daniel remembers.
The atmosphere was studious, and Daniel often stayed home to work on his fish growth database and write his thesis. Sandra read his manuscript but didn’t make many corrections. “He just writes particularly well in English in scientific papers. I was surprised by that, but I think it’s because he read so many.” She did, however, come to her husband’s rescue when he lost his temper with the oceanographic institute’s computer: thousands of fish-related data points had to be typed out individually by hand in one interminable list. If there was a single mistake, he had to start over from scratch. After a series of failures, Daniel was ready to throw in the towel—it was Sandra who managed to do it without any mistakes, on only her second try.
* A well-known left-wing anthem written in 1871 by Eugène Pottier. (TN)
† “Good!”
‡ Gross register tonnage (GRT): formerly the international unit used to measure a ship’s internal volume; one register ton equals one hundred cubic feet. (TN)
* A “tow” refers to a single use of a trawl net, a process consisting of deploying the net, pulling it for an extended period, and retrieving it.
* This is how doctoral theses in Germany are usually financed. Everyone knows that PhD students are the ones who push research forward, but they are only paid to work part-time, despite the fact that they generally put in twice as many hours as their tenured colleagues.
* Positivism: a system of thought that highlights scientific analysis and hard facts and believes in the benefits of knowledge. Even today, the idea that science and technological progress serve humanity and will resolve all its problems in the end is deeply rooted in our Western societies.
† General systems theory is that all systems, be they social, biological, or psychological, are organized in a way that is independent of their nature and the spatio-temporal scale at which they occur. This theory is used in cybernetics, psychology, and linguistics, among others, and is the object of transdisciplinary studies as well.
* A programming language.
* Titled “Gill Size and Temperature as Governing Factors in Fish Growth: A Generalization of Bertalanffy’s Growth Formula.”
* Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2010). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
* The German title is Tatort.