Originally, was published in
German, then a leading scientific language. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the journal published in both German and English. Initially, only foreign authors contributed articles in English but from the 1970s German-speaking authors increasingly wrote in English in order to reach an international audience. After the
German reunification in 1990, English became the only language of the journal. The importance of unquestionably peaked in 1905 with
Albert Einstein's
Annus Mirabilis papers. In the 1920s, the journal lost ground to the concurrent
Zeitschrift für Physik. With the 1933 emigration wave, German-language journals lost many of their best authors. During
Nazi Germany, it was considered to represent "the more conservative elements within the German physics community", alongside
Physikalische Zeitschrift. Between 1944 and 1946 publication ceased due to
World War II. Granted permission to restart by Soviet military authorities in August 1946, the journal subsequently maintained a policy until 1992 of co-editorship by one person from East Germany and one from West Germany. After German reunification, the journal was acquired by
Wiley-VCH. A relaunch of the journal with new editor and new contents was announced for 2012. As a result of the 2012 relaunch, changed scope and updated the membership of the
editorial board.
Editors The early editors-in-chief were: •
Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren (1790–1797) (as and ) •
Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert (1799–1824) (as and ) •
Johann Christian Poggendorff (1824–1876) (as ) •
Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann (1877–1899) (as ) •
Paul Karl Ludwig Drude (1900–1906) (as ) With each editor, the numbering of volumes restarted from 1 (co-existent with a continuous numbering, a perpetual source of confusion). • on
stretched exponential relaxation by
Rudolf Kohlrausch (1854), • on
stretched exponential relaxation by
Friedrich Kohlrausch (1863,1876), • on the
photoelectric effect by
Heinrich Hertz (1887), • on
blackbody radiation by
Max Planck (1901), • on
capillarity by
Albert Einstein (1901), • the
Annus Mirabilis papers by Albert Einstein on
photons and the photoelectric effect,
Brownian motion, on
mass–energy equivalence, and the
special theory of relativity (1905) • on the
heat capacities of
solids with quantized energy levels by Einstein (1907), • on molecular motion near
absolute zero by Einstein and
Otto Stern (1913), • on the
general theory of relativity by Einstein (1916) ==Abstracting and indexing==