Today’s professional scholar is a simply a worker doing his work….He knows that life consists of innumerable work days and only a few holidays; he knows that in order to prove himself he’s got to come to terms with this life; he’s got to find it bearable.

Arthur Salz, Für Wissenschaft gegen die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1921).

Anytime I mistake what I do for more than it is, I reach for the Germans writing around the turn of the twentieth century. Salz, a sociologist who taught at Heidelberg until the Nazis forced him out of Germany in 1933, responds to Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf: