When discharged soldiers started to return from the front in December 1918, they found a very different world from the one they had left behind. This is true not only at the social, political, and economic level, both at home and abroad, but also concerning the more ethereal world of scientific ideas and scientific activity. Especially striking, of course, were the completely new horizons opened by the recent, path-breaking achievements in GTR, in which the leading Göttingen mathematicians had been so intensely involved.