Today I am still friends with his charming nephew and niece, his favourite brother Silvio’s children. Silvio, the youngest in the family, was a doctor in Krems, where I went to see him when I returned to Austria in 1956. He must have been seriously ill already, for he died not long afterwards. One of Fränzel’s brothers, E., is still alive. He is a respected surgeon in Klagenfurt. E. once took me up the Einser (Sextener Dolomites) and, what’s more, saw me safely down again. I am afraid we have lost contact, driven apart by our different views of the world.
Shortly before I entered the University of Vienna in 1906, the only university I was ever enrolled in, the great Ludwig Boltzmann met his sad end in Duino. To this day I have not forgotten the clear, precise and yet still enthusiastic words with which Fritz Hasenöhrl described Boltzmann’s work to us. Boltzmann’s scholar and successor held his inaugural address in autumn 1907 in the primitive lecture hall of the old Türken-strasse building without any pomp or ceremony. I was deeply impressed by his introduction, and no perception in physics has ever seemed more important to me than that of Boltzmann – despite Planck and Einstein. Incidentally, Einstein’s early work (before 1905) shows how fascinated he too was by Boltzmann’s work. He was the only one who took a major step beyond it by inverting Boltzmann’s equation S = k lg W. No other human being had a greater influence on me than Fritz Hasenöhrl – except perhaps my father Rudolph, who in the course of those many years we lived together drew me into conversations concerning his many interests. But more about that later.
While still a student I made friends with Hans Thirring. This turned out to be a lasting relationship. When Hasenöhrl was killed in action in 1916, Hans Thirring became his successor; he retired at seventy, forgoing the privilege of remaining for the honorary year and leaving Boltzmann’s professorial chair to his son, Walter.
After 1911, while I was assistant to Exner, I met K. W. F. Kohlrausch, and yet another lasting friendship began. Kohlrausch had made his name by proving experimentally the existence of the so-called ‘Schweidle Fluctuations’. In the year before the outbreak of the war we worked together on the research of ‘secondary radiations’, which produced – at the smallest possible angle on small plates of varying material – a (mixed) beam of gamma rays. I learnt two things in those years: firstly that I was not suited to experimental work, and secondly that my surroundings and the people who were part of them were no longer capable of making experimental progress on a big scale. There were many reasons for this, one of them being that in charming old Vienna well-meaning blunderers were placed, often according to seniority, in key positions, thus impeding all progress. If only it had been realized that personalities with great mental capacities were needed, even if it meant bringing them in from afar! The theories of atmospheric electricity and radio activity were both originally developed in Vienna, but anyone who felt really dedicated to their work had to follow those theories wherever they had been passed on. Lise Meitner, for instance, left Vienna and went to Berlin.
But back to myself: in retrospect I am very grateful that because of my reserve officer’s training in 1910/11 I was appointed assistant to Fritz Exner and not to Hasenöhrl. It meant that I was able to experiment with K. W. F. Kohlrausch and make use of a number of beautiful instruments, take them to my room, especially the optical ones, and dabble with them to my heart’s content. Thus I could set the interferometer, admire the spectra, mix colours, etc. This was also how I discovered – through the Rayleigh equation – the deuter anomaly of my eyes. Moreover I was committed to do the long practical course, so that I learnt to appreciate the significance of measuring. I wish there were more theoretical physicists who did.
In 1918 we had a kind of revolution. The Emperor Karl abdicated and Austria became a republic. Our everyday life remained much the same. However, my life was affected by the breaking up of the Empire. I had accepted a post as a lecturer in theoretical physics in Czernowitz and had already envisaged spending all my free time acquiring a deeper knowledge of philosophy, having just discovered Schopenhauer, who introduced me to the Unified Theory of the Upanishads.
For us Viennese the war and its consequences meant that we could no longer satisfy our basic needs. Hunger was the punishment the victorious Entente had chosen in retaliation for the unlimited U-boat war of their enemies, a war so atrocious that Prince Bismarck’s heir and his followers could only outdo it in quantity, and not in quality, in the Second World War. Hunger prevailed throughout the country except on the farms, where our poor women were sent to ask for eggs, butter and milk. Despite the goods with which they paid -knitted garments, pretty petticoats, etc. – they were sneered at and treated like beggars.
In Vienna it had become virtually impossible to socialize and entertain friends. There was simply nothing to offer, and even the simplest dishes were reserved for Sunday lunch. In some ways this lack of social activities was compensated by the daily visit to the community kitchens. The Gemeinschaftsküchen were often referred to as Gemeinheitsküchen (Gemeinschaft = ‘community’; Gemeinheit = ‘a mean trick’). There we met for lunch. We had to be grateful to the women who considered it their responsibility to create meals out of nothing. It is no doubt easier to do this for 30 or 50 people than for three. Besides, relieving others of a burden must in itself be rewarding.
My parents and I met a number of people with similar interests there and some of them, the Radons, for example, both of them mathematicians, became great friends of our family.
I believe that in one way my parents and I were particularly disadvantaged. At that time we lived in a large flat (actually two flats made into one) on the fifth floor of a rather valuable building in the city, which belonged to my mother’s father. It had no electric light, partly because my grandfather did not want to pay for having it installed and also because my father, in particular, had become so used to the excellent gas light at a time when light bulbs were still very expensive and inefficient that we really saw no need for them. And we had the old tiled stoves removed and replaced by solid gas stoves with copper reflectors – servants were hard to come by in those days, and we had hoped to make things easier for ourselves. Gas was also used for cooking, although we did still have an enormous old wood-burning stove standing in the kitchen. This was all very well until one day one of the higher bureaucratic offices, probably the city council, decreed that gas was to be rationed. From that day on every household was allowed one cubic metre per day regardless of how the fuel had to be used. If anyone was found using more, they were simply cut off.
In the summer of 1919 we went to Millstadt, Carinthia, and my father, who was sixty-two, showed the first signs of ageing and of what was to be his final illness, a fact we did not become aware of at the time. Whenever we went for a walk he would lag behind, especially where it got steep, and he would feign botanical curiosity to mask his exhaustion. From about 1902 on Father’s main interest was botany. During the summer months he collected material for his studies, not for setting up a herbarium of his own, but for experimenting with his microscope and microtome. He had become a morphogeneticist and phylogeneticist and had abandoned his dedication to Italy’s great painters and also his own artistic interests, which consisted of sketching innumerable landscapes. Father’s rather bored reaction to our coaxing: ‘Oh, Rudolph, do come on’ and ‘Mr Schrödinger, it’s getting rather late’, did not alarm us either; we were actually used to that; so we put it down to his absorbed concentration.
After our return to Vienna the signs became more apparent, but still we did not take them seriously as a warning: frequent and heavy bleeding from his nose and retina, and finally fluid in his legs. I think he knew long before everyone else that his end was near. Unfortunately this was just the time of the gas calamity mentioned above. We acquired carbon lamps, and he insisted on tending them himself. A dreadful stench spread from his beautiful library, which he had turned into a carbide laboratory. Twenty years earlier, when he had learnt to etch with Schmutzer, he had used the room to
soak his copper and zinc plates in acids and chlorinated water; I was still at school then, and had shown great interest in his activities. But now I left him to his own devices. I was glad to be back at my beloved physics institute after serving in the war for almost four years. Besides, in autumn 1919 I became engaged to the girl who has been my wife for forty years now. I do not know whether my father had adequate medical treatment, but what I do know is that I should have looked after him better. I should have asked Richard von Wettstein, who was after all a good friend of his, to seek help at the medical faculty. Would better advice have slowed down his arteriosclerosis? And if so, would it have been to the advantage of a sick man? Only Father was fully aware of our financial situation after the closing down of our oilcloth and linoleum store on the Stephansplatz in 1917 (due to lack of stock).
He died peacefully on Christmas Eve 1919, in his old armchair.
The following year was that of rampant inflation, which meant the depreciation of Father’s meagre bank account, which would never have kept my parents’ heads above water anyway. The proceeds of the Persian rugs he had sold (with my consent!) dissolved into nothing; gone for ever were the microscopes, the microtome and a good part of his library, which I gave away for a song after his death. His greatest worry during the last months had been that at the ripe old age of thirty-two I was earning virtually nothing – 1,000 Austrian kronen (before tax, that is, for I am sure he listed it in his tax declaration except when I was an officer during the war). The only success of his son that he lived to see was that I had been offered (and had also accepted) a better-paid post as private lecturer and assistant to Max Wien in Jena.
My wife and I moved to Jena in April 1920, leaving my mother to fend for herself, in fact which I am not at all proud of today. She had to bear the burden of packing and clearing the flat. Oh, how blind we all were! Her father, who owned the house, was rather worried after my father’s death about who would pay the rent. We were in no position to do so, and Mother had to make room for a more affluent tenant. My future father-in-law kindly turned up with the man, a Jewish businessman working for the Phoenix, a prosperous insurance company. So Mother had to leave, where to I do not know. Had we not been so blind we would have foreseen – and thousands of similar cases would have proved us right – what an excellent source of money the big, well-furnished flat could have proved for my mother had she lived longer. She died in the autumn of 1921 of cancer of the spine after what we believed had been a successful operation on her breast cancer in 1917.
I rarely remember dreams, and I seldom had nasty ones – except maybe in my early childhood. For a long time after my father’s death, however, a nightmare kept recurring again and again: my father was still alive and I knew I had given away all his beautiful instruments and botanical books. What was he to do now that I had rashly and irretrievably destroyed the basis of his intellectual life? I am sure it was my guilty conscience that caused the dream, as I had cared so little for my parents between 1919 and 1921. This can be the only explanation, as I am not normally bothered with nightmares or a guilty conscience either.
My childhood and adolescence (1887–1910 or thereabouts) was mainly influenced by my father, not in the usual educational manner, but in a more ordinary way. This was due to his spending a lot more time at home than most men who work for a living and to my being at home, too. In my early years of learning I was taught by a private teacher who came to see me twice a week, and at grammar school we still had the blessed tradition of attending for twenty-five hours a week, mornings only. (On two afternoons only we had to attend for protestant religious education.)
I learnt a great deal on those occasions, although the result was not always related to the subject of religion. Time limitations concerning school commitments are a great asset. If a pupil feels inclined, he has time for thinking, and he can also take private lessons in the subjects which are not part of the curriculum. I can only find words of praise for my old school (Akademisches Gymnasium): I was rarely bored there, and when it did happen (our preparatory philosophical course was really bad), I would turn my attention to some other subject, my French translation, for example.
At this point I should like to add a remark of a more general kind. The discovery of chromosomes as the decisive factors in heredity seems to have given society the right to overlook other better-known but equally important factors such as communication, education and tradition. It is assumed that these were not so important because from the point of view of genetics they are not stable enough. This is quite true. However, there are cases such as that of Kaspar Hauser, for example, and that of a small group of Tasmanian ‘Stone Age’ children who were only recently brought to live in English surroundings and granted a first-class English upbringing, with the effect that they reached the educational level of upper-class Englishmen. Does this not prove to us that it takes both a code of chromosomes and civilized human surroundings to produce people of our kind? In other words, the intellectual level of every individual is bred by ‘nature’ and by ‘nurture’. Schools are therefore (not as our Empress Maria Theresa liked to see it) invaluable for human guidance, and much less for political purposes. And a sound family background is just as important for preparing the soil for the seed the schools will sow. This is unfortunately a fact overlooked by those who claim that only the children of the less educated should attend schools for higher education (will their children be excluded for the same reasons?) and also by British High Society, where it is deemed upper class to replace family life by boarding school and considered a sign of nobility to leave home early. So even the present Queen had to part with her first-born and send him to such an institution. None of this is strictly speaking any of my concern. It only came to my mind when I once again realized how much I gained from the time I spent with my father as a young boy and how little I would have profited from school had he not been there. He actually knew far more than they had to offer, not because he had been forced to study it thirty years earlier, but because he was still interested. If I went into detail here, I should end up telling a long story.
Later on, when he had taken up botany and I had virtually devoured The Origin of Species, our discussions took on a different character, certainly different from that conveyed at school, where the theory of evolution was still banned from our biology lessons and teachers of religious education were advised to call it heresy. Of course I soon became an ardent follower of Darwinism (and still am today, for that matter), while Father, influenced by his friends, urged caution. The link between natural selection and the survival of the fittest on the one hand and Mendel’s law and de Vries’s theory of mutation on the other had yet to be fully discovered. Even today I don’t know why zoologists have always tended to swear by Darwin, while botanists appear to be rather more reticent. However, one thing we all agreed on – and when I say ‘all’, I particularly remember Hofrat Anton Handlisch, who was a zoologist at the museum of natural history and the one I knew and liked best of all my father’s friends – we were all unanimous in holding that the basis of evolutionary theory was causal rather than finalistic; and that no special laws of nature, such as vis viva, or an entelechy, or a force of orthogenesis, etc., were at work in living organisms to abrogate or to counteract the universal laws of inanimate matter. My religious teacher would not have been happy about this view, but he did not concern me anyway.
Our family was accustomed to travelling in the summer. This not only brightened my life, but also helped whet my intellectual appetite. I remember one visit to England a year before I started intermediate school (Mittelschule), when I stayed with relatives of my mother at Ramsgate. The long, wide beach was ideally suited for donkey rides and learning to handle a bicycle. The strong tidal changes claimed my full attention. Little bathing huts on wheels were set up along the beach, and a man and his horse were always busy moving these cabins up or down according to the tide. On the Channel I first noticed that one could make out the funnel smoke of distant boats
on the horizon long before they themselves appeared, a result of the curvature of the water-surface.
In Leamington I met my great-grandmother at Madeira Villa, and as she was called Russell and the street she lived in was called ‘Russell’, I was convinced it was named after my late great-grandfather. An aunt of my mother’s also lived there with her husband, Alfred Kirk, and six Angora cats. (In later years there were said to be twenty.) In addition she had an ordinary tomcat who would very often come home from his nocturnal adventures in a sad state, so he was given the name Thomas Becket (referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury who was killed in office by order of King Henry II) – not that this meant a great deal to me then, nor was it very appropriate.
It is thanks to my Aunt Minnie, Mother’s youngest sister, who moved from Leamington to Vienna when I was five, that I learnt to speak fluent English long before I could write in German, let alone English. When I was finally introduced to the spelling and reading of the language I thought I knew so well, I was in for a surprise. It was thanks to my mother that half-days of English practice were launched. I was not too pleased about that at the time. We would walk from the Weiherburg down to the pretty and in those years still quiet little town of Innsbruck together, and Mother would say: ‘Now we are going to speak English to each other the whole way – not another word of German.’ And that is just what we did. I only realized later how much I profited from it to this day. Though forced to leave the country of my birth, I never felt a stranger abroad.
I seem to remember visiting Kenilworth and Warwick on our bicycle tours round Leamington. And on the way back to Innsbruck from England I remember seeing Bruges, Cologne, Coblenz – a steamboat took us up the Rhine – I remember Rüdesheim, Frankfurt, Munich, I think; then Innsbruck. I can recall the little boarding house which belonged to Richard Attlmayr.
What Is Life (Canto Classics) Page 18