Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  Dozens of curious students came to the meeting at the university, and the lecture hall rang with loud arguments and intense discussions. Through the din, a few radical students were elected to be officers. The Szilards stayed in the background, except when Leo handed around samples of his orange tract, then formally asked the association officers to take charge of distributing it in and outside the school. Volunteers came forward, although few who read the tract understood it, and Leo’s ideas on taxation were never debated by the association. Indeed, the association never met again: Its first general meeting—scheduled for the huge glass-domed inside courtyard of the university—was canceled following Hungary’s political upheavals.

  Outside Hungary the politics of dissent and disillusionment took new turns. Early in January 1919, German independents and other radicals took to the streets in the “Spartacist revolt.” By the nineteenth, German voters passed a measure that sent some four hundred delegates to frame a new constitution for the Reich, in the city of Weimar. In Russia, Red and White armies clashed in civil war. Szilard tried to focus his mind on his studies, but the turmoil around him in Budapest—and alarming news from other capitals—prevented his doing so. He managed to write examinations in physics in January 1919, earning a 6, and in February in electrotechnics, earning only a 3; both exams for courses taken while he was in the army.

  Count Károlyi’s postwar Hungarian government was faltering despite its promise of sweeping reforms. A liberal politician from an ancient noble family, Károlyi had disbanded his estate and distributed forty thousand acres to the peasants in order to set an example for the country. But no other nobles followed his bold move, and class inequity continued. Hungary’s minorities also refused to cooperate with Károlyi, and he was demoted to provisional president. Then Hungary’s victors in the war assigned two thirds of the country’s territory to its neighbors. Faced with an invasion from Rumania and forced to choose between the conservatives and the Communists, Károlyi reluctantly invited the Communists under Béla Kun to form a government for national defense with the Social Democrats.

  Kun had first adopted Bolshevism as a prisoner of war in Russia, and after the 1917 Revolution he was sent home to Budapest as a propagandist. At thirty-two, Kun projected the image of youthful energy as he strode around the halls of the neo-Gothic Parliament building. Once his “dictatorship of the proletariat,” called the Hungarian Soviet Republic, took power in March 1919, he nationalized banks, large businesses, and the nobles’ estates. His Red Army ruthlessly suppressed political opponents, then invaded Slovakia to reclaim territory lost in the postwar settlement.

  In Budapest, Kun applied agitprop techniques he had seen in Russia: opening propaganda centers, decorating trucks with slogans, forming people’s theaters and arts workshops. Parades and demonstrations wound through the streets. Statues and buildings at intersections were draped with red banners. His administration’s high point came on May Day, when a massive people’s procession flowed through workers’ and commercial districts for hours. Day-care centers were created for workers’ children, who were taken, free of charge for the first time, to play in the vast park on Margaret Island. Kun delivered fiery speeches for hours, engaging Hungary’s liberal intellectuals in his great cause.

  Socialists and liberal students demonstrated for his programs before the Parliament building and marched through the city’s streets waving red banners and shouting slogans. It was a springtime of anticipation—and anxiety. Even Bela and Leo were so caught up in the excitement that they borrowed a truck, draped it with banners for their Hungarian Association of Socialist Students, and drove around Budapest.

  Although Szilard feared the emotional power that the marches and demonstrations generated and found most socialist rhetoric tedious, he was intrigued by the idea that intellectuals could rule his homeland, and through the Galilei Circle he was acquainted with a few of the incoming ministers. Moreover, Kun and many leaders in his government were Jewish, and Szilard could appreciate the intellectual tradition that they brought to everyday politics. Still, if infatuated by the Kun government, Leo apparently played no active role beyond supporting it in debates with other students, for he recoiled at the brutality Kun’s Red Terror imposed in the name of “the people,” and he distrusted the simplicity of their economic reforms. Life was much more complicated, and uncertain, Szilard believed; and economics should be, too.

  Living where he did, among nobles and Jews alike, Szilard also sensed quickly the conservative and anti-Semitic backlash that Kun’s ideas and methods inspired. And, as Szilard followed politics closely, he saw the folly of Kun’s military conquest. Once the Red Army invaded Slovakia, it sparked a counterrevolution. Czech and Rumanian foes threw their support behind Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, an admiral and former commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet. A government formed around Horthy in the southern city of Szeged, and sympathetic Rumanian troops were soon marching toward Budapest.

  In the capital that summer of 1919, Szilard sensed Kun’s imminent defeat and, fearing the repression that might follow, decided to leave Hungary for engineering studies in Germany. During the first week in July, Szilard took more examinations at the Technical University, seeking to complete his degree quickly. His mechanics and mechanical drawing exams went surprisingly well; in each he earned a 5 in theory and a 6 in practice. At the same time, he applied through family friends in Berlin to the Technische Hochschule (Technical Institute), and through acquaintances in the Kun government he sought to obtain a passport and a visa.

  On July 24, as Rumanian troops began their offensive against Budapest, Szilard went to the Reform church in his neighborhood and applied to change his religion from “Israelite” to “Calvinist.”34 Because he had no emotional attachment to Judaism, Szilard could easily take an action then popular among Jews, who feared anti-Semitic repression once Kun’s government fell. Szilard’s mother found this conversion painful despite her own lack of interest in practicing Judaism and her infatuation with the life and teachings of Jesus.

  Kun’s Red Army and thousands of civilian volunteers streamed out of Budapest on streetcars, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons to defend the city. Ill equipped and poorly trained, they quickly fell to the invading Rumanian army. As the Rumanians marched into the capital on August 1, Kun fled to Vienna, and his Soviet Republic collapsed.

  In September 1919, Leo and Bela Szilard returned to register at their engineering school, now renamed the Budapest Technical University, but on the main building’s front steps they were stopped by more than a dozen students.

  “You can’t study here,” one shouted. “You’re Jews.”

  Leo protested, trying to reason with the group. “We’re Calvinists, not Jews, and have the papers to prove it,” he said. But that only angered the students more, and they rushed at the two brothers, kicking them as they crawled and tumbled down the broad marble steps.

  At home in the villa, Tekla Szilard was pained by her sons’ blood and bruises for being Jews but also by their religious conversion. Yet reluctantly she, too, converted. “Only later did I come to understand that my loyalty to my ancestors had been overcome by my concern for the wellbeing of my children.”35

  When Szilard reapplied in September for an exit visa to study abroad, the Horthy regime refused, citing his activities with socialist students during the Kun regime. Szilard did not know it at the time, but Horthy’s detectives had already investigated student activists, and an August report listed eighty-four “Communist students at the Technical University,” the “most aggressive and dangerous ones” marked by blue crosses. The five names marked were: György HALASZ, Vilmo ROSENBERG, György SZAMUELY, Bela SZILARD, and Leo SZILARD. On August 22, Budapest’s public prosecutor issued an order to begin an investigation of the students on the list.36 Later that fall, Leo suspected he was being followed, and Bela was warned that a detective had called on his employer. Leo was understandably anxious and again organized an armed watch at the villa.

  In
November, Szilard returned to the Technical University and from a sympathetic professor obtained an exit certificate that listed the courses he had taken and the grades he had earned. Then, pleading to trusted friends with connections in the Horthy government and offering bribes, Szilard reapplied for a passport. His answer from the passport office came five weeks later, on December 18. He could travel to Berlin. But he had to act swiftly: The permit to leave Hungary was valid only between December 25 and January 5. And he had to travel indirectly via Passau, a German city on the Austrian border, to avoid a Czechoslovakian boycott against Horthy’s government.

  To complete his travel pass, Szilard sat for a picture that captured a quizzical, apprehensive young man, his face half in shadow, eyes peering over his left shoulder. Looking at the passport and its scrawled entries, Szilard must have been both elated and sad; elated that he could escape the persecution he had suffered for months and could study engineering in Berlin but sad that he must now leave his family for the second time in less than two years. Szilard’s mother assured him—and herself—that study in Berlin was the safest path open to him. Knowing that the state police had her sons under surveillance, she urged Bela to follow in Leo’s footsteps, and he, too, applied to the Technical Institute in Berlin.

  Still fearing the police and not knowing how “official” his travel papers actually were, Szilard counted the days until Christmas, the first date he could leave. Into a large suitcase he stuffed more than a dozen books, some clothes, and a few papers. His father handed him a wad of 100-pound sterling notes, then most of the family’s savings, which Leo hid under the innersole of a thick-soled pair of shoes that he tucked among the books. At the Vidor Villa he bade his parents and sister farewell and with Bela’s help hauled the bulky suitcase to the streetcar stop at the corner. The state police might be watching Budapest’s long-distance train stations, Szilard thought, so he rode the streetcar through Pest to the Danube embankment. At a wooden kiosk by the shore, Szilard bought a one-way ticket for a daily excursion cruiser to Vienna. He hugged Bela, dragged his suitcase over the metal rungs of the gangplank, and was soon standing by the railing, waving good-bye.

  The excursion boat was not crowded that Christmas Day, but on shore the holiday season was in full swing. As the steamer chugged into the center of the Danube, Szilard could see Christmas lights strung from the lampposts along the embankment. Against the strong current the steamer pushed under the ornate Chain Bridge and slid past Margaret Island—in Szilard’s youth, a green and generous playground, now a dark and leafless shore. On up the river, Christmas greens and colored lights hung about the landings. Although Szilard and his family were now nominal Christians, the holiday itself meant nothing to them, and they never considered exchanging gifts.

  The country Szilard left behind that chilly day further depressed him, he later recalled. He thought of the sorry history he had just survived— war, revolution, counterrevolution, and economic depression. And as Szilard sat in the steamboat’s warm cabin, brooding about his past and future fears, he caught the eye of an old farmer seated on the opposite bench. The farmer seemed dressed for the fields nearby but was actually a Hungarian émigré on a return visit after living in Canada for forty years. The old man smiled and, seeing that Szilard seemed sad, asked him why.

  “I am leaving my country, perhaps for good,” Szilard answered.

  The old man grinned. “Be glad!” the farmer said in a jovial voice. “As long as you live you’ll remember this as the happiest day of your life!”37

  CHAPTER 4

  Scholar and Scientist

  1920–1922

  Pushing into the Danube’s surging current, the excursion steamer from Budapest passed below the hillside city of Bratislava, cleared customs at the Czechoslovak-Austrian frontier, and chugged by Vienna’s low wharves and looming warehouses. On board and happily free of Hungary, Leo Szilard still faced problems during his escape, but arrest was not one of them. He had to drag his book-filled suitcase to a streetcar, ride to the center of the city, find an affordable room, and make visa arrangements for the rest of his journey to Berlin.

  Szilard’s personal sense of relief and exhilaration drew on the city’s flippant spirit. “I was greatly impressed by the attitude of the Viennese,” he remembered later, “who in spite of starvation and misery were able to maintain their poise and were as courteous as they have always been, to each other as well as to strangers.”1 Szilard was also impressed by Vienna’s political climate, now a socialist city in contrast to the reactionary regime he had just fled. Happily he ran his errands, first securing a student visa to enter Germany, then buying a ticket for the circuitous rail route spelled out on his Hungarian passport. On New Year’s Eve, with visa and ticket in hand, Szilard lugged his case to the train station to continue his journey.

  Szilard may have enjoyed the train ride along the Danube, through snow-bright fields, but after he crossed the German border at Passau, on New Year’s Day, the bitter-cold weather and a miners’ strike soon turned his trip into a gruesome ordeal. Coal shortages halted his train unexpectedly, for hours or days, each time quenching the steam heat. A trip that should have taken all day stretched to nearly a week as Szilard huddled in his frigid passenger compartment, living on whatever snacks he could buy when his train stopped in a town.

  Cold and exhausted, Szilard finally arrived in Berlin on January 6, 1920, to find a city and its people drained by the war and appearing as desperate as he felt.2 Hunger marked the faces in the crowds that shuffled through the snow. Szilard himself found food expensive, restaurants crowded, and wondered how long his 100-pound notes might last. But in the bustle Szilard also discovered a new spirit, energy, and speed that Budapest never had. Berlin’s traffic seemed to roar and swoosh around the circles and along the broad boulevards. The city had more bright lights, more noise and music, more beggars, more sleek buses, more style and schmaltz to assault his attentive mind. If Budapest was sedate, bending under its aristocratic past, then, to Szilard, Berlin seemed sassy, thrusting itself on his senses and sensitivities. Here was a new world where past and future collided.

  Germany’s loss of the war had also destroyed its imperial way of life. Unemployment spread rapidly after the collapse of the kaiser’s armies. Revolts in 1919 had shaken the gloom of defeat as the socialist Spartacists had marched on the capital. Hundreds died in the streets, combatants and civilians both caught in the crossfire. By 1920, Berlin was tense with social and political strife.

  The first lodging Szilard found was a room in the Bohemian neighborhood around the busy Berlin Zoo Railway Station and the cafés of Kurfürstendamm. His address at 5 Savigny Platz put him on a lively and pleasant tree-ringed square of small shops, restaurants, and cafés. Once his bulky suitcase was stowed, Szilard strode north along the western edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten, a huge park of birds and lakes and strollers. At the “Knee,” the busy intersection of Berlinerstrasse and Hardenbergstrasse, by the park’s western tip, he climbed the steps into the imposing Technische Hochschule (Technical Institute) of Berlin to register. “The number of foreign students who were admitted was limited,” and “the attitude towards foreign students was not friendly. . . .” Only by “having to bring to bear all the pressure I could through such private connections as I was able to muster in the city” was I admitted, he recalled.3

  Szilard also needed a permit to live in Berlin, and at the police station he produced documents from his Hungarian Association of Socialist Students to argue that he had been exiled by the reactionary Horthy regime, whose anti-Communist White Terror was then purging anyone involved in the previous Kun government. During his first busy days in Berlin, Szilard also called on business contacts of his father and on family friends. He even tracked down his third cousin, Paul Heller from Budapest, and through him was invited to a fancy-dress ball, given each year by the son and daughter of Dr. Felix Frankel, a prominent physician and public health official. When Szilard called at the Frankels’ large home at 82 Kurf
ürstenstrasse, near the zoo, he was ushered upstairs to a large ballroom. As a newcomer, Szilard was expected to meet the adults but then mingle with the dozens of young people as they chatted and frolicked. Instead, he took a seat in a corner of the huge room, struck a pose of aloof boredom, and sat there most of the night.4

  By the end of January, Szilard began the first of a dozen moves when he left Savigny Platz and sublet a room at 11 Lohmeyerstrasse, just off busy Berlinerstrasse, by the stately Charlottenburg Castle.5 Back in Budapest, where Bela was trying to secure his own exit visa for study in Berlin, detectives in the Budapest State Police filed a report on the “Affair of Leo Szilard and his accomplices” that concluded:

  Leo Szilard, born in Budapest, Calvinist, unmarried, twenty-three years old, student of the Technical University, did not have any assignment at the university during the Commune [Kun’s government]. He seemed to agree with the spirit of the Commune, however he did not make any propaganda or behave extraordinarily in any other way. No evidence proving his being a Communist could be obtained.

  The detectives wrote the same verdict for Bela, and five days later, Budapest’s public prosecutor declared the investigation closed, “as no evidence of their guilt could be found.”6 This, and a few bribes from Louis Szilard, cleared Bela’s exit visa to join Leo at the Technical Institute.

  Conspiracy of another sort was just beginning elsewhere that month: a plot that would eventually send Szilard fleeing Europe and lead to the horrors of World War II. In Munich, Germany, on February 24, Adolf Hitler proclaimed to a meeting of his followers twenty-five points of the National Socialist program. At the time, these “Nazis” and their manifesto were generally ridiculed, if noticed at all.

  Anticipating Bela’s arrival, Leo moved to a larger apartment in Charlottenburg on March 1, just two blocks from the Technical Institute. To reach their new apartment, the Szilards entered a door at a custodian’s booth on the street at 2 Herderstrasse, then walked through a courtyard and archway to a back garden and climbed four flights of stairs. The four rooms were home to Mrs. Else Dresel—a living room, a salon and kitchen, her bedroom, and, at the back, a small bedroom for Leo and Bela. Their window overlooked a barren weed plot and the back of an apartment on Liebnizstrasse to the west. It was much grimmer than their back-garden view in Budapest, but with housing scarce and rents rising, the Szilards were grateful for a room of their own with a window.