In 1932, Szilard’s impetus to study biology may have come from the essay “Light and Life,” published that year by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. This bold paper urged applying the “complementarity” principle from quantum mechanics to biology. Just as physics had abandoned conventional physical concepts and created new techniques from quantum mechanics to better explain the atom, Bohr reasoned, so might biology be understood in the same seemingly irrational but ultimately useful way.13 A very remote but possible link between Bohr and Szilard may have come through physicist Max Delbrück, who returned to Berlin in the fall of 1932 from a year of study with Bohr in Copenhagen.14
Unlike most of his prominent colleagues in physics—among them Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and Victor Weisskopf—Szilard had never visited or studied at Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen during the 1920s; but he greatly admired Bohr’s work and his courage when confronting new ideas.15 Bohr’s ideas about biology gave Szilard a chance to be inquisitive, perhaps even heretically different. Whatever Szilard’s route to biology, once he thought about it, he became intrigued by an analogy with modern physics. For just as physics had broken from analysis to theory in the last few decades, Szilard suspected biology might be ripe to make the same break, and he wanted to share this adventure.
Space travel was one of the many intellectual fancies that Szilard would set aside, and biology was one that he would eventually rediscover. But the idea that came to haunt Szilard to the end of his life also dawned on him in 1932: his fear of nuclear war. Like the idea of space travel, this danger came to him through Mandl from H. G. Wells. In 1914, Wells published The World Set Free, and when Szilard read the novel, in 1932, he saw science and politics in a new and frightful alliance. Mankind’s fate may not necessarily be improved by research, he realized, but in science fiction, at least, it could worsen in catastrophic ways.16 Wells’s novel predicted— correctly—that artificial radioactivity would be discovered in 1933. In the novel, Szilard recalled later, Wells
then proceeds to describe the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, and the development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria. . . . He places this war in the year 1956, and in this war the major cities of the world are all destroyed by atomic bombs. . . .
Although Szilard regarded the book as fiction at the time, it jarred his thinking about war and peace and science, then and for years to come.17 Indeed, while Szilard was speculating about biology, teaching theoretical physics with Schrodinger, and talking about nuclear research with Meitner, he was suffering such profound doubts about his own future that he questioned even continuing as a scientist. From his sublet room on Motzstrasse, Szilard wrote one of his most conflicted and self-revealing letters to his friend Eugene Wigner.
October 9, 1932
Care of Philipsborn
Berlin W 30
Motzstrasse 58
Tel: Barbarossa 0225
Dear Wigwam,
Here is the promised letter:
1. When the knowledge that right now we have more noble causes than to do science, when this knowledge has entered our blood, then I am afraid this knowledge cannot be distilled out of it. It is bad fortune when knowledge enters blood so easily.
Thus, once one is devoted to some work that so far has not yet been done and for which, therefore, there are no instituions yet, there is no justification for a complaint that such institutions do not yet exist.
So what can one do? Well, if one does not succeed in becoming financially independent, thereby getting into a situation that makes one a free man, then one must try to get a job that leaves one enough time and permits a sufficient amount of attention for the things that one considers more important. A professorship in India for experimental physics would be a good solution, because there it would not be necessary to prepare oneself for the scientific topics before the beginning of every semester and one would have thus practically one’s energy freely available.
Whether one can get such a job, or a similar one with respect to peace and leisure, in a capital or on the East Coast of the US between Washington and Boston is known only to the rather imperfect gods. I have written to India.
2. Up to the time when such a “position” would offer itself, I could not, without having a bad conscience, devote myself to science.
This is the way I relate to scientific interests. Of course, physics interests me still one full magnitude more than refrigerators. It seems clear that anything having a structure that can capture one’s interest could do so; and that if one can do something well, one does it gladly. But is this a passion that would move mountains?
More precisely, if the zero point is represented by [their colleague Rudolph] Ladenburg’s interest for physics, and if the boiling point [of 100 degrees centigrade] is represented by my own interest in physics at the time I was eighteen years old, then my temperature is now thirty degrees.
If I decide now for physics, so then I will try to go after nuclear physics in some experimental institute with occasional excursions into the theories. I have never been for pure theoretical physics, probably because of lack of confidence in my abilities in mathematics, or should I better say disabilities? Also, it is an intolerable situation, as Einstein says, to have to rely on laying golden eggs.
I will write you soon, whenever I have a concrete problem. Please give my regards to Mr. and Mrs. Ladenburg as well as to Mr. and Mrs. [John von] Neumann.18
Yours
[Szilard]
Here Szilard struggled with a problem he did not resolve until the final days of his life: finding—or creating—an “institution” as free and noble as his own imagination. He admits failure with the hoped-for financial success of the electromagnetic pump, and he all but dismisses a conventional teaching or research “position,” although life anywhere between Washington and Boston held some appeal. Reluctantly, he favors experimenting in nuclear physics but seems to fear the possibility of failure.
When Wigner received this confused and soul-searching letter, he was so pained that he wrote their mutual friend Michael Polanyi in Berlin. Independently, Polanyi had asked Einstein to recommend Szilard for a job in Princeton.19 To Polanyi, Wigner wrote:
This moment I received from Szilard a rather depressed letter. I am under the impression that it would be good to do something soon. True, one cannot come to conclusions on the basis of one letter. I also believe—and you will understand me—that he is an ass in many respects. I answered him as best I could. I have just written to him just as well as I am able. Now I do think that it would be best if he could again settle down. I thought that Einstein would bring him here [to Princeton]. Of course, that would be wonderful.
Please let me know how you feel about this plan and whether you would find it correct for me to write this to Einstein. Or else do you find a “different” way better? Please, write to me about this. The whole thing worries me very much.
Your wife [Magda] should also talk to Szilard in a “wise” way; I feel that would be helpful. He seems to be rather frustrated. Of course, it is possible that nobody could help him, but it is as possible that one could do that. . . .
There is much talk here now about [John von] Neumann and I really should stay here for good, but I am rather undecided. . . .
Many friendly greetings from E. Wigner.
P.S. . . . Please do not show this letter to Szilard.20
Something besides his professional anxieties must have agitated Szilard during the fall of 1932. Perhaps it was a breakup with Gerda Philipsborn or her departure for India. Perhaps it was the ominous political events that Szilard followed so attentively in the daily newspapers: The Nazis were then consolidating their July victory as the largest party in the German Reichstag and by January would control the government. Or perhaps it was the realization that any academic appointment or
industrial job, no matter how appealing it may at first seem, would soon lose its challenge.
In late October, just before the university’s winter semester began, Szilard tucked his few belongings into two suitcases and moved from his sublet room with the Philipsborns in the Berlin neighborhood of Wilmersdorf to the Harnack House, the faculty club for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in suburban Dahlem. Registering as Polanyi’s guest, he gave Budapest, not Wilmersdorf, as his home address and settled into the Muller Zimmer, a room for visiting scholars. He was restless and edgy: fascinated by the energies and enigmas he had discovered in America, excited by the theoretical leaps he might make in biology, intrigued by the experiments he might devise in nuclear physics. But he was also fearful that the Weimar Republic’s political and social order would soon collapse. And he suffered profound doubts about his own life as a scientist. From this time on, Szilard was ready to move, but still unable to decide just when, or where, or why.
CHAPTER 9
Refuge
1933
Leo Szilard had little to celebrate with the New Year of 1933. Anxious, lonely, and uncertain about his faltering career in physics, his only employment was to lead a weekly seminar at Berlin University and to poke around the research labs at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in suburban Dahlem. Free to wander about the gray and cloudy city and among his friends, Szilard had plenty of time to worry. Michael Polanyi sat in his small apartment when Szilard called during the first week of the New Year. Think about leaving Germany, Szilard insisted. Things will get worse under Hitler. Much worse. But Polanyi demurred. After all, Hitler headed a minority party in the Reichstag, Polanyi reasoned. How much trouble could one man create? Like many others in Berlin at that time, Szilard recalled later, Polanyi thought that the “civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening.” Szilard took the opposite view, “based on observations of rather small and insignificant things.” During his twelve years in the capital, Szilard had “noticed that the Germans always took a utilitarian point of view. They asked, ‘Well, suppose I would oppose this, what good would I do? I wouldn’t do very much good, I would just lose my influence. Then why should I oppose it?’”1
Szilard urged Polanyi to accept the professorship just offered him at Manchester University in England. But Polanyi hesitated, complaining that if he moved to a new lab now, he could not be productive for another year.
“Well,” Szilard replied sarcastically, “how long do you think you will remain productive if you stay in Berlin?”
The two old friends disagreed, but Szilard persisted, urging that if Polanyi said no to Manchester, he should at least say it was because his wife opposed the move; she, Szilard argued, could always be said to change her mind. Still Polanyi hesitated, and his stubbornness only fueled Szilard’s fears. In fact, Polanyi did follow Szilard’s advice and declined the appointment because of “rheumatism,” expecting “difficulties” with Manchester’s “humid climate.”2
Berlin’s political climate changed on January 30 when the aging and senile president, Paul von Hindenburg, then weary of the squabbling among minority political parties, yielded to pressure by the National Socialist (Nazi) party and named its leader, Adolf Hitler, chancellor of Germany. When he learned about Hitler’s appointment, Szilard returned to his cozy third-floor room at Harnack House, stuffed his belongings into two suitcases, and set them by the door so that “all I had to do was turn the key and leave when things got too bad.”3
If his friends wouldn’t listen, Szilard thought, maybe his family would, and off he went by train to Budapest, arriving at his parents’ villa on February 3. “Hitler and his Nazis are going to take over Europe,” Szilard warned his parents, his brother, Bela, and his cousins. “Get out now. Leave Europe—before it’s too late!”4
But, like Szilard’s Berlin friends, his family also hesitated. They could not understand Szilard’s constant travel, his need to board a train or ship so impulsively, his agitated fright and flight. They had homes, families, and more important, cultures. They were “Hungarian,” with roots in Buda and Pest and the remote mountain towns of their ancestors. Szilard, by contrast, seemed rootless and adrift, stirred by events of the moment or by visions of a dark future they could not see. While their sensitivities bent toward music and family and friendships, Leo’s were to news and its nuances in science and politics. He was a man of the world, and this winter meeting in Budapest convinced them that his fast and frightful world had little to do with their own.
While at home, Szilard telephoned his longtime friend Alice Eppinger, who had married Theodor Danos in 1927 and now mothered three lively children. Szilard seemed nervous and preoccupied when he called at her spacious apartment.
“Hitler is a crazy, stupid man,” Szilard warned her. “Everybody must flee! Under Hitler a terrible time will come!”
She heard his warnings but could give no coherent response. To Alice, the politics of Germany seemed remote. Hungary had economic troubles of its own. Changing the subject, Alice introduced her children, but Szilard, always unable to make small talk, just stared at the youngsters a long while.
“They are not very well developed,” he finally said, breaking the silence. “What do they read now?” When Alice mentioned a few children’s book titles, Szilard frowned.
“When I was six, I read Faust, in Hungarian,” he told the children.
“Nobody else has told me they are not well developed,” Alice said quietly.
As Szilard waited for Alice’s husband to return, he said little and nervously paced around the parlor. When Theodor Danos arrived, the two men shook hands, then stood in silence. Szilard could only repeat his warnings about Hitler, and gaining no response, he excused himself. This was to be the last time Alice and Leo were to meet, although they did exchange letters after World War II and Szilard sent her money after learning that the Nazis had killed Theodor and one of their daughters.5
During his three weeks in Budapest, Szilard tried to revive his friendly and familiar routine as a student—the afternoons at the New York Café arguing politics and economics, the evenings by the fireplace in the parlor at the Vidor Villa, chatting with uncles and cousins. But he was too impatient and gloomy, his friends and family seemed inattentive, and by the last week of February he boarded a train that carried him through Prague and down the Elbe River valley to Dresden and Berlin.
The letter awaiting him brought more gloom: Siemens, the international electronics company, had written rejecting his proposal for research on an absorption refrigerator.6 Harnack House seemed colder than usual to Szilard when he returned late in February. In contrast to the warm and cozy atmosphere of his family’s home, the stucco-covered exterior reflected the gray winter sky and made the huge dormitory look inhospitable and Teutonic. Inside, the dark halls to the small scholars’ bedrooms were dim in the thin winter light. In Szilard’s room, under the eaves on the third floor, frost curtained the metal casement windows, obscuring his view of Dahlem’s arching tree branches, now bare of leaves as they scratched the dark sky.7
Berlin itself must have seemed as tense and uneasy as he felt. Its population had swelled after the war, overcrowding both housing and public places. With unemployment severe, the prosperous and the poor collided on Berlin’s noisy sidewalks, and the political and class tensions made the capital seem increasingly hostile. Economic distress had quickened tensions that winter in Germany and around the world.
In the United States, the stock market crash of October 1929 had plunged the nation’s economy into a deep depression. The Democrats won a landslide election in November 1932, voting to the White House New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and returning both houses of Congress to their party for the first time since 1915. In January and February 1933, Roosevelt was assembling his new cabinet—he would be inaugurated on March 4, beginning his “Hundred Days” of reform legislation destined to expand the federal government’s role in American life.
In England, economic distre
ss fueled social unrest and new interest among intellectuals in both communism and fascism. This was the first worldwide depression, but nowhere was it more destructive than in Germany, a country still straining from the military and economic defeats of the First World War.
Szilard had been in Berlin when Hitler took power, and by the time he returned there from Budapest three weeks later, he sensed a new chill more potent than the winter’s damp and biting air. He sensed, as never before, a pervasive anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism in public speeches and newspaper editorials. To strengthen his minority government, Hitler had scheduled a Reichstag election for March 5, and for it, red, white, and black Nazi slogans and banners accented the gray city-scape. In the halls of Harnack House, Szilard heard about colleagues who were losing their teaching posts—forced out by timid academic councils that feared a rising wave of anti-Semitic policies.
Just four weeks after Hitler’s appointment, on the night of February 27, the massive neoclassical Reichstag building burst into flames. Within minutes Hitler was on the scene to declare this “crime” the work of Communists, and the next day he persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the protection of the people and the state,” suspending sections of the constitution that guaranteed individual and civil liberties.8 Again Szilard called on Polanyi to warn about trouble ahead.
“Do you really mean to say that you think that the secretary of the interior had anything to do with this?” Polanyi challenged.
“Yes,” Szilard insisted, “this is precisely what I mean.”9
The Reichstag fire allowed Hitler to feature his anti-Communist theme in the March election campaign. With his inflated promise of economic recovery, his scapegoating of other political leaders, and his party workers’ intimidation of voters, Hitler gained the Reichstag majority he craved. But their 44 percent of the vote still denied the Nazis the two-thirds majority needed to impose sweeping economic and legal reforms. So Hitler turned to other means, ordering the Communists subject to arrest and persuading Hindenburg to appoint Joseph Goebbels to a new cabinet post, Reich minister for people’s enlightenment and propaganda. And, unnoticed by all but the nearby residents in the Munich suburb of Dachau, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp on March 20.
Genius in the Shadows Page 17