Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  29

  MANHATTAN TRANSFER

  On 11 May 1960, at six-thirty in the evening, Richard Klement got down as usual from the bus which brought him home from work at the Mercedes-Benz factory in the Suarez suburb of Buenos Aires. A moment later he was seized by three men and in less than a minute forced into a waiting car, which took him to a rented house in another suburb. Asked who he was, he replied instantly, ‘Ich bin Adolf Eichmann,’ adding, ‘I know I am in the hands of the Israelis.’ The Israeli Secret Service had had ‘Klement’ under surveillance for some time, the culmination of a determined effort on the part of the new nation that the crimes of World War II would not be forgotten or forgiven. After his capture, Eichmann was kept secretly in Buenos Aires for nine days until he could be secretly flown to Jerusalem on an El Al airliner. On 23 May, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced to cheers in the Jerusalem parliament that Eichmann had arrived on Israeli sod that morning. Eleven months later, Eichman was brought to trial in the District Court of Jerusalem, accused on fifteen counts that, ‘together with others,’ he had committed crimes against the Jewish people, and against humanity.1

  Among the scores of people covering the trial was Hannah Arendt, who was there on behalf of the New Yorker magazine and whose articles, published later as a book, caused a storm of controversy.2 The offence arose from the subtitle of her account, ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil,’ a phrase that became famous. Her central argument was that although Eichmann had done monstrous things, or been present when monstrous things had been done to the Jews, he was not himself a monster in the accepted sense of the word. She maintained that no court in Israel – nor any court – had ever had to deal with someone like Eichmann. His was a crime that was on no statute book. In particular, Arendt was fascinated by Eichmann’s conscience. It wasn’t true to say that he didn’t have one: handed a copy of Lolita to read in his cell during the trial, he handed it back unfinished. ‘Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch,’ he told his guard; ‘Quite an unwholesome book.’3 But Arendt reported that throughout the trial, although Eichmann calmly admitted what he had done, and although he knew somewhere inside him that what had been done had been wrong, he did not feel guilty. He said he had moved in a world where no one questioned the final solution, where no one had ever condemned him. He had obeyed orders; that was all there was to it. ‘The postwar notion of open disobedience was a fairy tale: “Under the circumstances such behaviour was impossible. Nobody acted that way.” It was “unthinkable.” ‘4 Some atrocities he helped to commit were done to advance his career.

  Arendt caused offence on two grounds. 5 She highlighted that many Jews had gone to their deaths without rebellion, not willingly exactly but in acquiescence; and many of her critics felt that in denying that Eichmann was a monster, she was diminishing and demeaning the significance of the Holocaust. This second criticism was far from the truth. If anything, Arendt’s picture of Eichmann, consoling himself with clichés, querying why the trial was being prolonged – because the Israelis already had enough evidence to hang him several times over – only made what Eichmann had done more horrendous. But she wrote as she found, reporting that he went to the gallows with great dignity, after drinking half a bottle of red wine (leaving the other half) and refusing the help of a Protestant minister. Even there, however, he was still mouthing platitudes. The ‘grotesque silliness’ of his last words, Arendt said, proved more than ever the ‘word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.’6

  Despite the immediate response to Arendt’s report, her book is now a classic.7 At this distance her analysis, correct in an important way, is easier to accept. One aspect of Arendt’s report went unremarked, however, though it was not insignificant. It was written in English, for the New Yorker. Like many intellectual emigrés, Arendt had not returned to Germany after the war, at least not to live. The mass emigration of intellectual talent in the 1930s, the bulk of which entered the United States, infused and transformed all aspects of American life in the postwar world, and had become very clear by the early 1960s, when Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared. It coloured everything from music to mathematics, and from chemistry to choreography, but it was all-important in three areas: psychoanalysis, physics, and art.

  After some early hesitation, America proved a more hospitable host to psychoanalytic ideas than, say, Britain, France, or Italy. Psychoanalytic institutes were founded in the 1930s in New York, Boston, and Chicago. At that time American psychiatry was less organically oriented than its European counterparts, and Americans were traditionally more indulgent toward their children, as referred to earlier. This made them more open to ideas linking childhood experience and adult character.

  Assistance to refugee analysts was organised very early in the United States, and although numbers were not large in real terms (about 190, according to one estimate), the people helped were extremely influential. Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse have already been mentioned, but other well known analyst-emigrés included Franz Alexander, Helene Deutsch, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel, Otto Fenichel, Theodor Reik, and Hanns Sachs, one of the ‘Seven Rings,’ early colleagues of Freud pledged to develop and defend psychoanalysis, and given a ring by him to symbolise that dedication.8 The reception of psychoanalysis was further aided by the psychiatric problems that came to light in America in World War II. According to official figures, in the period 1942–5 some 1,850,000 men were rejected for military service for psychiatric reasons, 38 percent of all rejections. As of 31 December 1946, 54 percent of all patients in veterans’ hospitals were being treated for neuropsychiatrie disorders.

  The other two most influential emigré psychoanalysts in America after World War II were Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim. Erikson was Freud’s last pupil in Vienna. Despite his Danish name, he was a north German, who arrived in America in 1938 when he was barely twenty-one and worked in a mental hospital in Boston. Trained as a lay therapist (America was also less bothered by the absence of medical degrees for psychoanalysts than Europe was), Erikson gradually developed his theory, in Childhood and Society (1950), that adolescents go through an ‘identity crisis’ and that how they deal with this is what matters, determining their adult character, rather than any Freudian experience in childhood.9 Erikson’s idea proved extremely popular in the 1950s and 1960s, with the advent of the first really affluent adolescent ‘other-directed’ generation. So too did his idea that whereas hysteria may have been the central neurosis in Freud’s Vienna, in postwar America it was narcissism, by which he meant a profound concern with one’s own psychological development, especially in a world where religion was, for many people, effectively dead.10 Bruno Bettelheim was another lay analyst, who began life as an aesthetician and arrived in America from Vienna, via a concentration camp. The account he derived from those experiences, Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations, was so vivid that General Eisenhower made it required reading for members of the military government in Europe.11 After the war, Bettelheim became well known for his technique for helping autistic children, described in his book The Empty Fortress.12 The two works were related because Bettelheim had seen people reduced to an ‘autistic’ state in the camps, and felt that children could therefore be helped by treatment that, in effect, sought to reverse the experience.13 Bettelheim claimed up to 80 percent success with his method, though doubt was cast on his methods later in the century.14

  In America, psychoanalysis became a much more optimistic set of doctrines than it had been in Europe. It embodied the view that there were moves individuals could make to help themselves, to rectify what was wrong with their psychological station in life. This was very different from the European view, that sociological class had as much to do with one’s position in society, and that individuals were less able to change their situation without more widespread societal change.

  Two matters divided physicists in the wake of World War II. There was first the development of the hydrogen bomb. The Manhattan Project had been a collaborative
venture, with scientists from Britain, Denmark, Italy, and elsewhere joining the Americans. But it was undoubtedly led by Americans, and almost entirely paid for by them. Given that, and the fact that Germany was occupied and Britain, France, Austria, and Italy were wrecked by six years of war, fought on their soil, it was no surprise that the United States should assume the lead in this branch of research. Göttingen was denuded; Copenhagen had been forced to give up its place as a centre for international scholars; and in Cambridge, England, the Cavendish population had been dispersed and was changing emphasis toward molecular biology, a very fruitful manoeuvre. In the years after the war, four nuclear scientists who migrated to America were awarded the Nobel Prize, adding immeasurably to the prestige of American science: Felix Bloch in 1952, Emilio Segrè in 1959, and Maria Mayer and Eugene Wigner in 1963. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 established its own prize, quickly renamed after its first winner, Enrico Fermi, and that too was won by five emigrés before 1963: Fermi, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller. Alongside three native American winners – Ernest Lawrence, Glenn Seaborg, and Robert Oppenheimer – these prizewinners emphasised the progress in physics in the United States.

  Many of these men (and a few women) were prominent in the ‘movement of atomic scientists,’ whose aim was to shape public thinking about the atomic age, and which issued its own Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for discussion of these issues. The Bulletin had a celebrated logo, a clock set at a few minutes to midnight, the hands being moved forward and back, according to how near the editors thought the world was to apocalypse. Scientists such as Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Bethe left the Manhattan Project after the war, preferring not to work on arms during peacetime. Edward Teller, however, had been interested in a hydrogen bomb ever since Fermi had posed a question over lunch in 1942: Once an atomic bomb was developed, could the explosion be used to initiate something similar to the thermonuclear reactions going on inside the sun? The news, in September 1949, that Russia had successfully exploded an atomic bomb caused a lot of soul-searching among certain physicists. The Atomic Energy Commission decided to ask its advisory committee, chaired by Oppenheimer, for an opinion. That committee unanimously decided that the United States should not take the initiative, but feelings ran high, summed up best by Fermi, whose view had changed over time. He thought that the new bomb should be outlawed before it was born – and yet he conceded, in the Cold War atmosphere then prevailing, that no such agreement would be possible; ‘Failing that, one should with considerable regret go ahead.15 The agonising continued, but in January 1950 Klaus Fuchs in England confessed that while working at Los Alamos he had passed information to Communist agents. Four days after the confession, President Truman took the decision away from the scientists and gave the go-ahead for an American H-bomb project.

  The essence of the hydrogen bomb was that when an atomic bomb exploded in association with deuterium, or tritium, it would produce temperatures never seen on earth, which would fuse two deuterium nuclei together and simultaneously release binding energy in vast amounts. Early calculations had shown that such a device could produce an explosion equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT and cause damage across 3,000 square miles. (For comparison, the amount of explosives used in World War II was about 3 million tons.)16 The world’s first thermonuclear device – a hydrogen bomb – was tested on 1 November 1952, on the small Pacific island of Elugelab. Observers forty miles away saw millions of gallons of seawater turned to steam, appearing as a giant bubble, and the fireball expanded to three miles across. When the explosion was over, the entire island of Elugelab had disappeared, vaporised. The bomb had delivered the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT, one thousand times more violent than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Edward Teller sent a telegram to a colleague, using code: ‘It’s a boy.’ His metaphor was not lacking in unconscious irony. The Soviet Union exploded its own device nine months later.17

  But after World War II ended, most physicists were anxious to get back to ‘normal’ work. Quite what normal work was now was settled at two big physics conferences, one at Shelter Island, off the coast of Long Island, near New York, in June 1947, and the other at Rochester, upstate New York, in 1956.

  The high point of the Shelter Island conference was a report by Willis Lamb that presented evidence of small variations in the energy of hydrogen atoms that should not exist if Paul Dirac’s equations linking relativity and quantum mechanics were absolutely correct. This ‘Lamb shift’ produced a revised mathematical account, quantum electro-dynamics (QED), which scientists congratulate themselves on as being the ‘most accurate theory in physics.18 In the same year as the conference, mathematically and physically trained cosmologists and astronomers began studying cosmic rays arriving on Earth from the universe and discovered new subatomic particles that did not behave exactly as predicted – for example, they did not decay into other particles as fast as they should have done. This anomaly gave rise to the next phase of particle physics, which has dominated the last half of the century, an amalgam of physics, maths, chemistry, astronomy, and – strange as it may seem – history. Its two achievements are an understanding of how the universe formed, how and in which order the elements came into being; and a systematic classification of particles even more basic than electrons, protons, and neutrons.

  The study of elementary particles quickly leads back in time, to the very beginning of the universe. The ‘Big Bang’ theory of the origin of the universe began in the 1920s, with the work of Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble. Following the Shelter Island conference, in 1948, two Austrian emigrés in Britain, Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold, together with Fred Hoyle, a professor at Cambridge, advanced a rival ‘steady state’ theory, which envisaged matter being quietly formed throughout the universe, in localised ‘energetic events.’ This was never taken seriously by more than a few scientists, especially as in the same year George Gamow, a Russian who had defected to the United States in the 1930s, presented new calculations showing how nuclear interactions taking place in the early moments of the fireball that created the expanding universe could have converted hydrogen into helium, explaining the proportions of these elements in very old stars. Gamow also said that there should be evidence of the initial explosion in the form of background radiation, at a low level of intensity, to be picked up wherever one looked for it in the universe.19

  Gamow’s theories, especially his chapter on ‘The Private Life of Stars,’ helped initiate a massive interest among physicists in ‘nucleosynthesis,’ the ways in which the heavier elements are built up from hydrogen, the lightest element, and the role played by the various forms of elementary particles. This is where the study of cosmic rays came in. Almost none of the new particles discovered since World War II exists naturally on earth, and they could only be studied by accelerating naturally occurring particles to make them collide with others, in particle accelerators and cyclotrons. These were very large, very expensive pieces of equipment, and this too was one reason why ‘Big Science’ flourished most in America – not only was it ahead intellectually, but America more than elsewhere had the appetite and the wherewithal to fund such ambition. Hundreds of particles were discovered in the decade Following the Shelter Island conference, but three stand out. The particles that did not behave as they should have done under the earlier theories were christened ‘strange’ by Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech in 1953 (the first example of a fashion for whimsical names for entities in physics).20 It was various aspects of strangeness that came under scrutiny at the second physics conference in Rochester in 1956. These notions of strangeness were brought together by Gell-Mann in 1961 into a classification scheme for particles, reminiscent of the periodic table, and which he called, maintaining the whimsy, ‘The Eight-Fold Way.’ The Eight-Fold Way was based on mathematics rather than observation, and in 1962 mathematics led Gell-Mann (and almost simultaneously, George Zweig) to introduce the concept of the ‘quark,’ a particle more elementary still than electrons, and fro
m which all known matter is made. (Zweig called them ‘aces’ but ‘quark’ stuck. Their existence was not confirmed experimentally until 1977.) Quarks came in six varieties, and were given entirely arbitrary names such as ‘up,’ ‘down,’ or ‘charmed.’21 They had electrical charges that were fractions – plus or minus one-third or two-thirds of the charge on an electron – and it was this fragmentary charge that was so significant, further reducing the budding blocks of nature. We now know that all matter is made up of two kinds of particle: ‘baryons’ – protons and neutrons, fairly heavy particles, which are divisible into quarks; and ‘leptons,’ the other basic family, much lighter, consisting of electrons, muons, the tun particle and neutrinos, which are not broken down into quarks.22 A proton, for example, is comprised of two up quarks and one down quark, whereas a neutron is made up of two down quarks and one up. Ad this may be confusing to nonphysicists, but keep in mind that the elementary particles that exist naturally on Earth are exactly as they were in 1932: the electron, the proton, and the neutron. All the rest are found only either in cosmic rays arriving from space or in the artificial circumstances of particle accelerators.23