Heisenberg fled hay fever to a treeless North Sea rock and found quantum mechanics
In summer 1925 a hay-fever-stricken Werner Heisenberg escaped to Heligoland, a pollen-free speck of red rock in the North Sea, and there conceived the basis of quantum theory. The same tiny island gave Germany the words of its national anthem, and Britain once swapped it for claims in Zanzibar.
Heligoland lies about 46 kilometres off the German coast and is the only German island group far from the mainland. The inhabited main island is a triangle of roughly one square kilometre with cliffs 50 metres high; its neighbour, the Düne, is sandier, lower and home to an airfield. The two were joined until a storm flood cut them apart in 1720. A free-standing sea stack, the Lange Anna, rises 47 metres off the northwest tip. Around 1,127 people lived there in 2016, many speaking Halunder, a North Frisian dialect.
Ownership passed around. Denmark held it from 1714 until the British took it in 1807 during the Napoleonic Wars, and it became a hub of anti-Napoleon intrigue through which thousands of Germans joined the King's German Legion. Britain kept it mainly to deter French naval moves but never fortified it, judging it too exposed. From 1826 it thrived as a spa, drawing German and Austrian writers who liked its liberal air; Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote the Deutschlandlied there in 1841. In 1890 the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty handed it to a newly unified Germany anxious about the approaches to the Kiel Canal.
Science found it useful. Heinrich Gätke's 1890 book on the island's astonishing parade of migrant birds shaped the study of migration, and a marine biological station opened in 1892. Heisenberg's 1925 visit came after months of frustration; neither aspirin nor cocaine had eased his hay fever, but the bare island did.
Germany turned the island into a naval fortress. Before the First World War it bristled with 364 guns, and civilians were evacuated. The Nazi era brought a submarine bunker and tunnels built partly with forced labour, including Soviet citizens. In 1947 the British Royal Navy set off a huge demolition blast, remembered as the Big Bang, which carved out a new middle level of the island. British control lasted until 1952, when West Germany took it back.
Source: Heligoland
