Although Szilard needed to find work, he was loath to seek a full-time job, fearing that it might imperil his cherished independence. In May 1923, he registered at the Technical Institute, where he had begun engineering studies three years before, perhaps seeking a place to conduct experiments,8 and began to monitor theoretical physics research at the KWI. At the same time, he sought collaborations with researchers at the KWI for Fiber Chemistry, for which Mark arranged to pay Szilard a modest fee as a scientific consultant. This arrangement suited Szilard well, giving him the freedom to be in two places at the same time—or in none.
Szilard’s personal ties to the KWI grew in several ways. Von Laue followed Mark’s experiments on X-ray diffraction carefully because they related to his own work on the structure of crystals. Einstein visited the labs frequently, following Mark’s study of the Compton effect. Unexpectedly, as people dropped in, discussions began about different problems in contemporary physics. Szilard’s friend Eugene Wigner, a doctoral candidate at the Technical Institute, performed his thesis experiments in Dahlem and was on hand for informal chats. Satyendranath N. Bose, an Indian physicist working closely with Einstein, met and talked often with Szilard about relativity and quantum physics. But in this brilliant company Szilard often became so enchanted with the implications of the dialogue that he shut his eyes in thought—a habit some mistook for boredom or fatigue.
Cadging meals and crashing conversations, Szilard lived as an intellectual vagabond. He owned almost nothing: one or two suits, shoes that he wore until they frayed and fell apart, a few dozen favorite books, and an untidy array of papers and periodicals strewn around his rented room. In this way, Szilard was free to be himself: a mind and spirit constantly on the move. In April 1924, after living with Bela for a year, Szilard left 211 Kaiser-Allée for a room at 104 Leibnizstrasse, near Kurfürstendamm. Six months later, he moved to 11 Geisbergstrasse, a modern five-story apartment building a few blocks south of Wittenberg-Platz and the busy cafés and stores of Tauenzienstrasse. There he rented a room from the Philipsborn family and began a sensitive and abiding friendship with their daughter, Gerda. After four months with the Philipsborns, Szilard moved on to 32 Barbarossa-Platz, a modern apartment over a corner store and within a few blocks of Einstein’s apartment, and by the following summer Szilard had moved again, this time to 58 Pariserstrasse.9 Then, in October 1927, Szilard moved to 95 Prinz-Regentenstrasse, to a room in the Philipsborns’ new apartment. This stylish art nouveau building, near Prager Platz, finally became a home, of sorts, for Szilard; he lived with the family for the next five years and moved with them around the corner, in 1932, to an elegant, balconied building at 58 Motzstrasse, by the picturesque Victoria Louise Park.
Szilard’s appointment in 1925 as von Laue’s assistant was his first paid academic position. Although part-time, this post was prestigious because von Laue, a Nobel laureate in 1914, picked only one assistant at a time. With Mark, Szilard published two papers on the anomalous scattering of X-rays in crystals and on the polarization of X-rays by reflection on crystals.10 But beyond this, the patent applications for an electromagnetic pump that he invented with Einstein, and expansions of his thesis, Szilard wrote very little throughout the 1920s.
A world of rented rooms and borrowed laboratories gave Szilard the sense of independence he had craved since childhood and with it his childish sense of freedom. Now in his late twenties, he could act impulsively for no apparent reason but to assert his will. When his sister, Rose, visited Berlin and telephoned from her hotel, she offered to walk the few blocks to his apartment, but Leo insisted they meet at her room.
“Leo, just tell me which street you will take and we can meet in between,” she said.
“No,” he answered. “I don’t know which street I will choose until I choose it! I will meet you at your room.”11
Szilard was footloose in Berlin; he scurried around the city, taking in lectures and scientific meetings as if they were light entertainments. If any money accumulated, he quickly spent it on train tickets, sometimes leaving Berlin in mid-semester for jaunts to Paris, Vienna, Zurich, or Danzig (now Gdánsk) in search of fresh ideas. He once took Wigner to Hamburg to hear physicist Werner Heisenberg speak and after the lecture quizzed him about his work in quantum mechanics.12 And when Mark became assistant research director at an I. G. Farben chemical plant at Ludwigshafen, near Heidelberg, Szilard sought him out and brainstormed around the laboratory for two days.
“He was full of interesting results on the new quantum mechanics of Heisenberg and the wave mechanics of Schrödinger,” Mark recalled later. “Our laboratory was part of a large industrial combine, and Leo was interested in low-boiling, nontoxic liquids that could be used in his refrigerators. He was equally sharp and knowledgeable in talking with the engineers in the plant as he was in talking with the scientists in the laboratory.” From his conversations, Mark concluded, Szilard was “the early founder of nonequilibrium thermodynamics” through practical application of the statistics he had devised in his doctoral thesis.
Szilard thought constantly about the science that abounded in his narrow world, and with no quarters in which to entertain, he spent hours in cafés, drinking tea or coffee, eating sweet pastries, and talking. A favorite haunt, the Romanisches Café, was a meeting place for artists and intellectuals. The location itself was exciting: The café’s awning faced the back towers of the neo-Romanesque Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, looming on an island in the traffic where Kurfürstendamm and Tauenzienstrasse collide. Seated in the open or under the broad awning, Szilard and his friends could look up at the church spires and back to the café’s own Romanesque towers; they could glance through the whirling traffic to the brightly decorated pavilions at the zoo; and they could peer along the crowded sidewalks of the two bustling thoroughfares.
This was hardly the cozy, sedate world of Budapest street life, where horse-drawn trams and wagons had gone clopping by the shaded coffeehouses. This was Berlin, a harsh playground for commerce and industry, a hectic intersection of shattered lives and swelling ambitions. Inside the Romanisches Café the small, round tables were clustered under brightly decorated Romanesque arches that echoed conversations and the clatter of cups and spoons. People hopped and shouted among the tables, came and went at all hours, sat by day and slumped by night in a swirl of talk and expectation. At the time, this bustling café was called “the place where everybody is somebody.”13 And for Szilard, whose rented rooms were just a few blocks away, it was the hub for his own frantic and fragmented life.
With his friend Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian physicist then studying electron beams at the Technical Institute, Szilard spent hours sitting in cafés and walking the streets, wondering aloud about new discoveries and experiments. Many of their daydreams are today’s technology, and Gabor remembered one chat when Szilard suggested making a musical instrument that resembles today’s devices for reproducing visible speech.14
“You know,” Szilard told Gabor over a café table in 1927, now that it is possible to make electron lenses, “why do you not make a microscope with electrons?” At smaller and smaller wavelengths, you would achieve much more detailed resolution than is possible with microscopes using light. Gabor and Szilard pondered his idea for a few minutes, then agreed it would serve no useful purpose. After all, you could not put living matter into the kind of vacuum tube needed to control electron beams. Besides, they concluded, so much power would be focused in the electron beam that it would incinerate any sample.
But as Gabor later realized, with that idle suggestion Szilard had grasped the possibility of an electron microscope at least a year before anyone else. And of the incinerated sample, Gabor later wrote, “Who would have dared to believe that the cinder would preserve not only the structure of microscopic bodies but even the shapes of organic molecules?” Gabor would be remembered years later as the inventor of holography, for which he received the 1971 Nobel Prize in physics.15
Szilard himself filed a patent appl
ication for a simple variation on the electron microscope in July 1931, the same year that Ernst Ruska operated his first crude device. But, typically, Szilard failed to follow through this idea beyond the thought and the patent sketch, demonstrating his need to stay free from the drudgery of scientific invention—the calculations and drafting that must succeed creative impulses if ideas are to be converted into practical things.16 Perhaps in Szilard’s case this is just as well, considering some of the practical things he thought of making: He once proposed to Gabor connecting the bloodstreams of an old dog with young ones to produce a giant breed that would live forever.17
Solving personal problems also appealed to Szilard, provided they were someone else’s. The Budapest artist Roland Detre, a close friend of Rose Szilard’s, moved to Berlin in 1926 and often sought Leo’s advice. But affairs became touchy when Detre and Rose, who was still living in Budapest, decided to marry. The Szilards despaired that their daughter should marry a starving artist and wrote to Leo for help. If at all possible, they said, try to dissuade him from marrying Rose. Szilard invited Detre to dinner and began their conversation by mentioning the letter from his parents. But poverty should be no reason to avoid marriage, Szilard said. Matrimony should be avoided on principle.
“I have decided never to marry,” Szilard declared, “because I am convinced that marriage becomes a liability for someone who is dedicated to the creative life.” But Detre protested that he loved Rose and wanted her as his wife. The two men argued into the night, until, exasperated, Szilard finally stared at Detre and said, “If you are so determined to live with Rose, why don’t you bring her out here? You could live with her without getting married.”
“But don’t you think that this would make your parents feel even worse?” Detre asked.
“What do you care about my parents?” Szilard said, trying to conclude the discussion. Detre did care about the Szilards and soon returned to Budapest determined to marry Rose. The wedding was a cheerful celebration, attended by their friends. The Szilards refused an invitation but appeared at the last minute, reluctantly accepting that their daughter would marry a poor artist.18
When Roland and Rose Detre moved to Berlin and rented a garret room near the Romanisches Café, they met Leo often for coffee or a snack. All three loved to talk—and to argue. Rose considered herself “very religious” but without a formal religion. “Oh, yes,” she would say, “I believe in everything.” Detre shared Szilard’s fascination with Spinoza and used his writings to devise a new religion of his own. In a Chinese restaurant one night, Szilard and Detre discussed his new theology throughout the meal and later talked on over cups and cups of tea. Szilard strained to find a rational way to refute Detre’s system. Detre was delighted when Leo, acting miffed, admitted, “It would be possible.”19
In his hours of thinking and talking—questioning and quibbling at studio parties, arguing in cafés and classrooms—the spare and ad hoc life that Szilard led enabled his mind to range wildly across the scientific disciplines. Political and social forces were driving and changing the Berlin society he enjoyed, and while studying the newspapers and listening to the cafés’ clientele, Szilard almost daily pondered Germany’s fate. By the mid-1920s Szilard believed that the Weimar Republic, Germany’s postwar government, was doomed to fail. Lacking procedures that might nurture and elevate new leaders, the overly complicated Weimar constitution could only grind itself down in a friction of disorder; in effect, an entropy of governance.
But Szilard still believed that democracy in Germany might survive for “one or two generations,” and he devised a rational scheme to help postpone the republic’s collapse and, perhaps, to prepare for transition to some healthier form of government.20 Drawing on the example of the Youth Movement (Jungendbewegung) that had flourished in Germany before the world war, Szilard called his organization the Bund, to his mind a closely bound alliance of like-minded young people. When Szilard brainstormed with Polanyi about the Bund, he praised The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution by H. G. Wells and thought that the first twenty pages of this book, which was published in 1928, posed succinctly the problems that the world faced.21
Polanyi arranged for Szilard to meet Otto Mandl, a wealthy timber merchant from Vienna then living in London, and during the Easter break in 1929, Szilard made his first journey to England. Mandl had discovered and enjoyed the writings of Wells, and moved by their visionary genius, he had arranged to publish them in Germany. Also, Mandl had married pianist Lili Kraus, who was born in Budapest and studied in Vienna, so Szilard found much to chat about when he called at the couple’s home. During his London sojourn, Szilard ate with the Mandls almost every day, and a highlight of the visit was a dinner in late March attended by Wells. Writing Polanyi on April 1, Szilard reported that Mrs. Mandl and the children “are very nice each one for himself and compose a family altogether pleasant to look at.” Szilard’s English is stilted and affected, his spelling has German lapses, but through it all burst new enthusiasms for the ideas that might drive his own concepts for political reform. Mandl liked Szilard’s notion of the Bund, but two other candidates Szilard tried to meet, biologist Julian Huxley and biochemist John B. Haldane, were abroad during the Easter holiday.22
Back in Berlin that spring, Szilard taught but one course, “New Ideas in Theoretical Physics,” leaving him free to think about the Bund, and the idea sustained his attention much longer than the inventions proposed in physics. “What we want are boys and girls who have the scientific mind and a religious spirit,” he wrote in detailed plans for the Bund.23 He thought about the Bund throughout the summer of 1929 and continued to scribble notes and pose ideas that fall, when he also helped teach a course on “Problems of Atomic Physics and Chemistry.” This course brought him to the KWI at least once a week, and at the Physics Institute downtown he joined his friend John von Neumann in teaching “New Questions of Theoretical Physics.”24
Whenever talk turned to politics around the café tables, Szilard expounded his own analysis of postwar economic developments, seeking a balance between laissez-faire capitalism and the socialist elitism that he thought necessary to reform the world. The life-styles predominating in “civilized countries” were closely associated with the ruling economic system, Szilard argued, and were largely determined by underlying economic principles. He complained that there was no sense of community purpose to bind the needs and aspirations of the German nation. And he concluded that some form of parliamentary democracy must be maintained to support laissez-faire capitalism.
From all this brainstorming, Szilard easily became gloomy about the survival of German democracy; he had noted a serious danger sign in February 1929 when he read about a conference in Paris on the rescheduling of Germany’s postwar reparations payments. Representing Germany was the flamboyant Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, president of the German Reichsbank, who declared that Germany would not resume payments until she recovered her former colonies. Szilard concluded that “if Hjalmar Schacht believed he could get away with this, things must be rather bad.” The practical step Szilard took after reading about that was to transfer his money to a bank in Geneva.25
That move would save his personal finances, at least temporarily. But how, Szilard wondered, might he save Germany? Europe? The world? The Bund remained his answer. Szilard envisioned as the ultimate result of the Society of Friends of the Bund a utopia brought about in a society guided by an intellectual elite. “If we possessed a magical spell with which to recognize the ‘best’ individuals of the rising generation at an early age . . .” he wrote, “then we would be able to train them to independent thinking, and through education in close association we could create a spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion which would renew itself on its own.”26 His Bund would engage its members in a “life of service,” but unlike a religious order, “the ruling opinion” would not “be retained for a very long time.” Nor would this institution resemble “scientific academies,” because th
ey usually replenish themselves by “inside elections” that “preserve the ruling opinion” by selecting candidates for their “political” views.
What Szilard sought instead was a way for the Bund to constantly generate fresh ideas, then assume “a more direct influence on public affairs as part of the political system” either with or in place of government and Parliament.27 The trick in all this Platonic speculation, he warned, is that the Bund’s members “must not of course be entitled to a higher standard of living nor to personal glory.”
Szilard’s three-step proposal began with “the best” boys and girls being recruited from the top form of secondary schools at ages eighteen or nineteen to become “junior” Bund members. To spot the “best” candidate, he suggested looking for students who are considered “personalities” by their peers.28 (In their independence and personality, these ideal candidates were remarkably like Szilard himself.) Juniors and seniors could interact in “club rooms” at centers for discussing “public affairs,” with reading and lecture rooms also on site. But the juniors should also keep in touch with friends from the general population. Szilard hoped that in the club rooms young people “will learn to think for themselves and do so in areas where for most people passions and emotions prevent clear thinking.”
In a group version of Szilard’s own “active passivity,” the Bund’s juniors should meet the “finest representatives” of contemporary political movements but “should not be allowed to join . . . any political party or philosophical movement before they have reached the age of 30 years.”
;29 As a second step, juniors would study at only a few universities in order to keep in close contact through seminars and workshops. Step three, an “Order of the Bund,” Szilard hoped would allow dedicated members to indulge in “a life of sacrifice and service.” The order’s members must hand over all money they earn “above the base minimum necessary for their existence.” And for about one-third of them “celibacy may perhaps be prescribed.”30
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