“You only studied math because you’re in love with Leo,” Leona (Lola) Steiner, her friend from the Fasor, teased Alice.
“That’s true . . . probably,” she admitted. But in Berlin, Leo seemed more distant to Alice than if she had stayed in Budapest. He always seemed to be rushing somewhere, to a class or seminar, walking about and talking quickly or thinking in a pensive trance. She was surprised at how Leo seemed to take on the pace and the energy of the city itself—its brusque and edgy style, its frantic tempo, and its halting, cloudy moods. His mind, Alice surmised, raced so frantically that his body was merely keeping up. On a few evenings, Alice did manage to meet Leo and Bela in the salon of their apartment, and once or twice Alice and Leo walked in the Tiergarten. They also strolled Berlin’s wide and busy boulevards in the Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf neighborhoods around where they lived but rarely stopped for a meal in the bustling restaurants, rarely took a moment to sit and sip tea or cocoa in a sidewalk café. Leo seemed so restless, so reserved, that when they did chat, the encounter was more instructional than intimate.
“You must read Buddenbrooks!” Leo insisted during one walk. “That’s how you can understand the Germans. And you must read Babbitt. That’s how you can understand the Americans.” Alice nodded, and Leo talked on as arm in arm they wove through the strollers on the sidewalk.
“The greatest book ever written is War and Peace,” Leo declared. “You must read it.”
“But I like Dostoyevski better,” Alice insisted. “The Idiot is so exciting, so passionate.”
“When you are older, you will like Tolstoy better,” Leo declared, ending the conversation.
Leo once teased Alice about her interest in math as a way to test her feelings about him. He teased her for studying something she clearly couldn’t put to use and seemed to confirm by this query that she liked him. But while this discovery made him uncomfortable, Alice’s company also gave Leo a chance to seem important. One spring day in 1922, as they stood chatting in the main entry hall at the University of Berlin, the huge door to Unter den Linden swung open, and in walked Einstein.
“Would you like to meet Professor Einstein?” Szilard asked Alice, and not waiting for her reply, took her arm and led her across the large lobby. “Say, ‘Good day,’ and shake hands,” Leo whispered.
“Professor, I would like to introduce Miss Eppinger from Budapest.”
“Good day,” Einstein said.
“Good day,” Alice replied, and shook hands. Nothing more was said, but from this encounter Leo grinned with pride.2
Alice Eppinger also saw Leo through their friend John von Neumann, a student in one of her math classes. She knew von Neumann from Budapest and found him jolly company, if a bit absentminded, as when he rushed up to Alice at the university one afternoon to ask her for “five pfennig for the streetcar.”
“I don’t have five pfennig, Jancsi,” she said. “But here’s a mark.”
Von Neumann studied the coin a moment and frowned. “No. No,” he said. “I only need five pfennig,” and walked away, unable to see that he could change the coin.3
When Alice, von Neumann, Szilard, and his new Hungarian friend Eugene Wigner met around the university and conversation drifted to their lives and families in Budapest, Szilard fell silent. He claimed no interest in the past, his or theirs, and dismissed their conversation as sentimental small talk. Life for Szilard was too serious, too puzzling, too grim—even among friends. His jokes had a serious point or ironic twist as well, and the only times he laughed out loud were at the movies, where he enjoyed Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick comedies.
After a year of studying mathematics in Berlin, Alice Eppinger returned to Budapest, feeling more distant from Szilard than ever. Still, despite his few hasty replies, she wrote him often. In one letter, Alice compared their love to a delicate thread, and to her delight Leo answered that this thread could be woven into a net that could not be unbound. “I have made a braid of the string that will never break,” she wrote back. But nothing more direct than this was ever said of their friendship.
Fearing the Fascist regime of Admiral Horthy that had scared him from the country in 1919, Szilard was reluctant to return to Budapest and stayed away until 1923. On his first return home, he called on Alice and her family at their villa across the way from his own, and he invited her for a walk in the handsome park on Margaret Island. On this walk they paused during their brisk hiking, sat on the lawn, held hands briefly, and even kissed and cuddled. But back on the Fasor that evening, when Szilard’s sister, Rose, and his mother asked about the outing with Alice, Leo seemed evasive and troubled.
Szilard’s second return to Budapest, in August 1924, was no easier for the young couple, and after calling on Alice, his relatives noticed that he was uneasy and distracted.4 Dutifully, Szilard called on Alice whenever he came home, and each time he was well received by her parents. Both families expected that the two would marry eventually, but nothing was ever said openly. When Alice mentioned that she wanted to have children, Leo ignored her remark. The two took long walks in City Park and along bustling Andrássy Avenue, near their families’ homes, and on that broad boulevard one sunny afternoon Leo finally spoke about their affair.
“Listen,” he announced as they strode along. “I want to tell you a story. . . . About bees.”
“About the ‘birds and the bees?” Alice asked, half-teasing and half-intrigued.
“No, no! Just about bees,” Leo said, now speaking and walking rather stiffly. “Bees. There is a book by Maeterlinck, all about bees. It tells how a family of bees lives.” Alice was delighted to hear the word “family.”
“In each family there are three kinds of bees,” Leo continued. “A queen, workers, and drones. Imagine this is a family of bees and I am a worker.”
“A father?” Alice asked impatiently.
“No, a worker. I am a worker! Don’t you understand?”
“Well,” she said, mystified, “I suppose.”
A few blocks up the busy boulevard, he finally halted and turned to her. “Listen, Alice, I am not the marrying kind. I do not want to have children. I am a worker, not a drone.”5
Alice was confused by this declaration and heartbroken, for she sensed—correctly—that Leo had little interest in her. His distance—his personal defenses and rational domineering—had pained her for most of their relationship, and their separateness, even when “together” in Berlin, only confirmed her fear that their love could never be mutual. But in his intense honesty she found some solace, eventually recognizing that Szilard could not defy his inner convictions and could not hide his own fears and foibles. For his part, Szilard spoke about their break with no one; he soon left Budapest for the Austrian Alps, then traveled on to Italy and France. He wandered next to spend two weeks in Vienna, a city he enjoyed for its lively atmosphere and its liberal political style, and once back in Berlin, in October 1924, he kept moving, vacating his room on Leibnizstrasse for another at 11 Geisbergstrasse.6
Alice returned to Berlin in the spring of 1926 when her father tried to separate her from a poor cousin with whom she had fallen in love, but she failed to gain Leo’s attention. Leo and Alice were together that summer, when he joined a hiking excursion to the Italian Alps organized by Bela and his girlfriend (later wife) Elizabeth Fejer. Also along on the trip, as chaperon, was Mrs. Eppinger and Alice’s friend Lola Steiner. Leo enjoyed the mountains around Lake Como, the fresh air, the cool temperatures, the dramatic change in scenery from Berlin’s cloudy grime. At twenty-eight years of age, Leo appeared fit and athletic, his build solid in hiking boots, knee socks, and knickers. Yet he seemed to shun the group’s easy sociability, preferring to hike and think as if alone. At the town of Lecco on Lake Como, one photograph from this trip caught Leo sitting with his back to the others, nibbling a piece of fruit. In another picture, he is lying on his back, his left arm shading his eyes as the others around him chat and pose for the camera. Alice seems pensive, her elbow touching Leo’s bu
t her stare remote. At Leo’s right arm, Lola leans forward, laughing with the other young women.
The summer of 1927 found Leo and Lola together again, this time when he took the initiative to invite her on an alpine excursion and called on her parents to ask permission. From Budapest the couple rode a train west toward the Ötztal Alps on the Austrian-Italian border. Lola later recalled:
At a small station we were supposed to change trains. But we missed the connection and had to stay there overnight. Two separate rooms would have cost much more [than one], and we conferred about that. I had to be very parsimonious at that time because my father’s business prospects were poor. . . . I felt that I must decide for thriftiness and chose the common room. . . . [But] aside from some smooches, nothing happened, and this strange situation continued for the rest of our summer.7
By then Alice realized that Leo had forgotten their relationship entirely and suggested to Bela that Leo should marry Lola. Alice soon married Theodor Danos, a Budapest businessman.
For his part, Leo had no interest in marrying anyone. He was courteous to the women he encountered around the university, although sometimes brusque with those he met socially. The only exception was the tall, darkeyed, dark-haired Gerda Philipsborn, a good-natured woman with a lively sense of humor who remained a mystery to all Szilard’s friends, even Bela. When the three met for lunch in a restaurant on Kurfürstendamm, Gerda told Bela she planned to move to India, to see how she might help the poor. Leo had met her in the fall of 1924, when he sublet a room in her mother’s apartment on Geisbergstrasse.8
There are no other records of their relationship until February 1929, when Gerda wrote on Leo’s behalf to Albert Einstein, from a Brixton Hill hotel in south London, about English patent negotiations for the electromagnetic pump that he and Szilard had designed.9 She and Leo apparently returned to the city a year later (or perhaps Miss Philipsborn had moved to London in 1929 and Leo had visited her). In a letter to Einstein that Szilard wrote from Gerda’s Queens Gardens address in the Bayswater section of London in March 1930, he described efforts to promote to English academics his idea for a “Bund” of young intellectuals—a group entirely separate and different from the pro-Nazi Bund.10 Szilard wrote again from that address in April, and back in Berlin, when the Philipsborns moved to Prinz-Regentenstrasse, still in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood, Szilard moved with them.11
Acting as Szilard’s secretary, Gerda Philipsborn wrote to Einstein from Berlin in October 1931. She reported that Szilard wanted to turn his US visitor’s visa into one for permanent immigration, and she asked for a recommendation note to the American consul. This Einstein provided, and when Szilard landed in New York in December 1931, he gave Gerda Philipsborn’s name and address as his European residence. She, in turn, reported his move to the Berlin police for him.12 By October 1932, Szilard was living with the Philipsborns at a new apartment on Motzstrasse.13 But then, Miss Philipsborn left for Palestine, by December had landed in Bombay, and the next month began work at Jamia Millia Islamia (National Islamic University) near Delhi, where she taught until her death from cancer in 1943. Szilard moved to the Harnack House, the faculty club for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the western suburb of Dahlem. A few months later, Szilard’s friend Eugene Wigner would note “how easily he parted from Miss Philipsborn. . . “14 From London, in 1934, Szilard sent her a ten-pound money order; at about that time, he was also considering teaching physics in India but soon dropped the idea.
The woman Szilard would eventually marry, in a private ceremony in 1951, he first met more than two decades earlier. It was 1929 when he encountered a shy and charming Viennese woman named Gertrud (Trude) Weiss. Their relationship, once begun, continued to swing like the repelling and attracting poles of two dangling magnets, not only during their long courtship but also well after their marriage.
Born in 1909, Trude grew up as a daughter of a successful and widely respected physician. A talented math and physics student, she enrolled in these subjects at the University of Vienna in 1928 but a few weeks into the first semester dropped her studies. A family friend, psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs, asked Trude if she would consider working as a governess in Switzerland. His offer intrigued her, and she moved to Vevey, a town on the north shore of Lake Leman, between Lausanne and Montreux. Trude’s employers, Kenneth and Annie Winifred Macpherson, were caring for the eight-year-old daughter of their friend the American poet Hilda Doolittle, who wrote under the name “H.D.” Trude enjoyed teaching the young girl, named Perdita, and in off hours took language courses at the University of Lausanne.15
Mrs. Macpherson, an English author who used the pen name “Bryher,” decided in the summer of 1929 to move to Berlin and found a magazine on modern film. Trude agreed to come along as her part-time secretary and translator and in Berlin helped produce Close Up, a distinguished and authoritative English-language quarterly. Trude and Bryher also began work on a book of German lessons for English speakers, The Lighthearted Student.16 (“Hundreds of people have learned to understand German talkies with its engaging help!” one ad boasted.)
In Berlin that fall, Trude met Leo Szilard through their mutual friends Karl and Michael Polanyi and decided to enroll in university science courses. She also called on her mother’s brother, Paul Schrecker, a renowned Leibniz scholar whose wife, Claire Bauroff, was an avant-garde dancer. Trude agreed to translate a German manuscript into English for Szilard, perhaps his proposal for the Bund, and when she had finished, she asked Aunt Claire for advice.
“How much should I charge Dr. Szilard for this translation?” Trude asked. “A hundred marks? Fifty?”
“What does it matter?” her aunt answered. “He’ll pay you, but what will you do next? Buy a dress. Wear it once. Hang it in your closet and forget it.” She paused, staring at Trude knowingly. “But if you charge him nothing, he will be in your debt forever.” Trude charged him nothing.17
In November 1929, Trude enrolled in the university to study physics and biology for the winter semester and completed her courses the following March. Szilard was teaching “New Questions of Theoretical Physics” that fall, and Trude, who had enrolled for six other courses, sat in on his presentation one Friday afternoon. She attended for a few weeks and apparently asked enough questions to engage his interest. Two friends from that time, physicist Victor Weisskopf and chemist Hermann Mark, recall that Szilard brought Trude to their parties, sometimes called her kedves, Hungarian for “dear,” and engaged her in deep conversations about film— then the most radical of the arts.
Szilard often became interested in the lives of people he met, if only as a way to dispense helpful advice, and during one conversation he asked Trude what she planned to do when her courses ended.
“I can’t decide between physics and medicine,” she admitted.
“You are too dumb to go into physics,” Szilard said. “Go home to Vienna and study medicine.”18 This she did, and during her stay at the University of Vienna, Trude twice made—and broke—engagements with young men. When she graduated, in 1936, she was still infatuated with Szilard.
Szilard’s impulsive personal advice, a “service” he provided to family and friends throughout his life, was not always followed. But it was usually appreciated and recognized by many as the most intimate response he could make to those he met. Like many shy and private people, Szilard sheltered his own emotions by focusing on details in the lives of others. He was uneasy with intimacy, yet by the gift of his advice Szilard was able to be both clever and personal without actually becoming close. Typically, he addressed the women he knew by their first names and the men by their last names, striking a familiar, avuncular tone with his female friends, a formal tone with the men.
Szilard’s closest friend for much of his adult life was Eugene Wigner, the son of a Budapest tannery manager. As a teenager, Wigner had studied at the Lutheran Gymnasium, a few doors down the Fasor from Szilard’s family villa, but the two did not meet until both were at the Technische Hochschule (Tec
hnical Institute) in Berlin, where Wigner enrolled in 1921. Wigner’s father wanted his son to learn chemical engineering, to prepare for work at the tannery, but once in Berlin, Wigner’s studies led him to the “borderlines of knowledge” and such disciplines as physics, statistics, and mathematics.19
Although both young men studied at the institute, and Wigner remembers that they first met in a physical chemistry class there “during a brief flirtation of Szilard with this subject,” the two really became acquainted during Einstein’s seminar on statistical mechanics.20 The two also attended Max von Laue’s Thursday physics colloquium. At first, Wigner “did not understand a word, but somehow it had a fascination for me, and soon enough I understood.” (In 1963 he won the Nobel Prize in physics.) From the start, Wigner and Szilard found affinity in their love of physics and their reserved manners. Both enjoyed walking and talking in the Tiergarten, from the Technical Institute at the west corner to the Brandenburg Gate and university district at the east end, through broad allées and winding paths, around lakes and streams; Szilard at a quick shuffle, Wigner at a lope. Almost all their thoughts spun around theoretical physics, and if the conversation touched on their common Hungarian roots and homes, Szilard was quick to change the subject.21 “He seldom spoke about his parents,” recalled Wigner, “but when he did, his affection for his mother rarely failed to come through.”22
On their many walks Szilard and Wigner also talked about German politics and the fate of the depressed economy. Szilard read the Berlin newspapers every day and enjoyed following the many parties’ intrigues. He worried about how the new constitution, devised at Weimar in 1919, would survive economic and political pressures, especially the humiliation and drain of postwar reparations to the Allies. How, he asked Wigner, could this new Weimar Republic make its constitution work? It all seemed too complicated—even for Szilard’s inventive mind—with its strong president responsible to all the people, a chancellor responsible to the Reichstag (Parliament), a proportional-representation scheme to protect minority parties in elections, and only limited autonomy for the once-mighty German states. How would it work? What would keep it all together?
Genius in the Shadows Page 12