Content area
Full Text
A Whisper of Espionage: Wolfgang Kohler and the Apes of Tenerife (Ley, 1990) tells the story of the author's quest for information pertaining to a first-hand report that espionage on behalf of Germany was conducted in the Canary Islands during the years of World War I and indicates that Wolfgang Kohler, while director of the German Primate Research Station on the island of Tenerife, collaborated with Ernst Groth, German Consul to Tenerife and chief of the Tenerife spy ring, in building a radio transmitter to communicate military intelligence to Germany. Teuber (1994) claimed that the book was based on rumor. The present paper (a) answers this charge by providing some primary and secondary sources of information that constitute the evidential foundation for the interpretation presented in A Whisper of Espionage and (b) corrects errors contained in Teuber's article.
Marianne Teuber's (1994) article, "The founding of the Primate Station, Tenerife, Canary Islands," provides information on the role played by her deceased father-in-law, Eugen Teuber (1889-1958), in founding the research facility where Wolfgang Kohler conducted the seminal studies contained in his classic book, The Mentality of Apes (Kohler, 1925). This detailed account of events surrounding Kohler's research adds to our understanding of this unique period in the history of modern psychology, a period during which the seeds of contemporary cognitive psychology were sown by the founders of Gestalt psychology: Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka.
Teuber's article is of special interest to me because some of her statements are directly relevant to research I reported in connection with my book, A Whisper of Espionage: Wolfgang Kohler and the Apes of Tenerife (Ley, 1990). In her discussion of "The Primate Station on Tenerife after Teuber," M. L. Teuber states:
Recently, assertions have been made that the Primate Station was used for espionage during World War I (Ley, 1990).... Rumors of espionage were current even before the war. On July 15, 1914, Kohler wrote in one of his delightful and frank letters to Hans Geitel . . "Not a Spaniard, but an Englishman has managed to spread the rumor that the apes are only a pretense for us to engage in espionage. Perhaps a Zeppelin could land here! In the meantime, nobody takes this seriously and we...