Mit Umlaut

To the Editors:

If “excessive use of the umlaut” is “the only complaint” the reviewer has to make about John Heilbron’s biography of Max Planck [NYR, November 20, 1986], the number of his examples can be reduced to a single one. For contrary to the reviewer’s formal statement, the name of the little place on the left bank of the Elbe, somewhat to the North of Magdeburg and now in East Germany, where the physicist lived during the last two years of the war, is not Rogatz, but, indeed, “Rogätz,” with umlaut.

A faithful reader of the NYRB,

Jürgen Deininger

Universität Hamburg

Hamburg, West Germany

Rudolf Peierls replies:

I accept Professor Deininger’s correction. My information came from my atlas, but I should have realized that an English atlas is more likely to lose an umlaut than the reviewer is to invent it. My apologies to John Heilbron.