From internment in Trial Bay to exile in Berkeley: the German physicist Peter Pringsheim and his connection with Australia

Abstract

Peter Pringsheim, best known as professor of physics at the University of Berlin, has an unusual connection with Australia. His attendance at the 1914 conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was held in Melbourne, coincided with the outbreak of World War 1, and he was interned as an enemy alien at the Trial Bay Internment Camp in New South Wales from October 1914 until July 1919. However, with the support of key Australian and New Zealand scientists, Pringsheim used his time at Trial Bay to write a scientific paper on fluorescence and phosphorescence which established him as a world authority on this branch of atomic physics. On his return to Berlin, he was promoted to professor and it seemed that nothing could now stand in the way of his career. In a grim twist of fate, however, political developments in Germany in the 1930s then forced him into exile in Belgium and the United States.