Science – with physics center-stage – and politics are two discrete but strongly intertwined parts of society. The book discusses the complex relationship between politics, especially the sharp political caesuras in 20th century German history, on the one hand and the manifold continuities in physics of the same period on the other hand. A first set of articles frames the organizational systems and performative structures of funding and supporting research as part of the political subsystem of society. A second set of comparative articles tackles regions and countries which are usually not in the focus of historians of science: the Ukraine, Japan, and China.

The volume results from the research program on the history of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft from 1920 to 1970 and seeks to place the history of the DFG into international contexts.