As most chemists know, organic chemistry had its beginnings in the early part of the 19th century. Less well known perhaps is that the 19th century was the age of German Romanticism. What a contrast there appears to be between a rational science and Romanticism, which disdained the rational. And yet chemists synthesized a vast array of dyes that artists could use to expand their palettes. Ever more, however, synthesizing organic compounds was itself a creative act, making something that was previously unknown.

Even before mauve and azo dyes were synthesized in the middle years of the 19th century, people were fascinated by color. Goethe, the quintessential German romantic, developed a theory of color vision that was dynamic and holistic rather than mechanistic. Karl Marx was fixated on yellow gold, not only because it was used as money but also because of its purity, inertness, and relative scarcity. Friedlieb Runge synthesized the first dye in 1833 and wrote much on color in the succeeding decades. By first impregnating certain chemicals onto pieces of paper and then dripping solutions of other chemicals onto the paper, Runge was able to create beautiful patterns of lines and colors by a combination of chemical reactions and diffusion. It wouldn’t be stretching credulity to call these unearthly patterns the first non-representational, that is, modern, art. The front cover of the book shows one of these unusual designs.

The first dyes were created from chemicals found in coal tar—beauty from filth. The first chemical industries synthesized these dyes on a large scale to satisfy the public’s desire for color in their lives. In time these companies employed tens of thousands of people, who were often abused by their employers, to manufacture a large array of synthetic products including plastics, fluorescent dyes, explosives, and poison gas. Fritz Haber, the great Nobel Prize-winning chemist, discovered a method to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, which in turn was used to make beneficial fertilizer and the more dubious explosives. Haber was also instrumental in enabling Germany to use poison gas during World War I.

The German chemical industry formed a strong bond with the Nazi party during the 1930s and was instrumental in Germany’s being able to sustain World War II for as long as it did. For all its radicalism, the Nazis preferred art that was conservative, monumental, realistic—and dull. IG Farben (farbe is the German word for color) built the Buna synthetic rubber plant within the confines of Auschwitz death camp where the inmates worked and died under the most horrific conditions. Primo Levi, the great Italian writer and chemist, was an inmate at Buna and has described conditions there. The Nazis, who were averse to waste, used the burnt corpses of their victims as fertilizer. By the early 1950s the German chemical industry, which had worked closely with the Nazis, were back in business, often with new names. These companies acted as if they had not behaved in a morally reprehensible manner during the war.

I enjoyed reading this well-written, yet very challenging, book and learned a great deal in the process. I do not believe, however, that the average reader of the Journal of Chemical Education will profit from reading it. Although it deals significantly with chemists, chemicals, and the chemical industry in the last two centuries, the book was not written by a chemist and was not written with chemists in mind. In how many chemistry books will one find poetry, for example? Even though political aesthetics, which is concerned with the intersection between politics and beauty, is well known in the humanities, it is not a subject with which most chemists have any familiarity, or likely any interest. Nonetheless, if you would like to look at chemistry and the chemical industry, especially in Germany, in a broader content, I suggest that you first check the book out of a library. If you like the book, you may then wish to purchase it.