Mischka's War

by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)

  The return trip was miserable, with an overnight stay at the border at a primitive barracks (‘pigs in their stalls have cleaner conditions than people sleeping there on straw that hasn’t been changed for at least a month’), and Nanni was clearly rattled by the whole experience. In a long letter written quickly in pencil after she got home, she implicitly reproached Mischka for double standards in having his fun with other women while she was shut up in Chemnitz, and moreover (this accusation was a bit more deeply buried) treating her as damaged goods because of her lack of ‘purity’. While this was all expressed in abstract terms in the guise of a philosophical discussion of man–woman relations, it naturally caught Mischka on the raw, and he fired off a priggish and angry letter harshly rebutting the implicit charges as well as correcting her understanding of the philosophical issues involved. (Poor Nanni. Assuming she was not naturally philosophically inclined, as the bulk of her correspondence suggests, she had made a big effort to meet Mischka’s standards with her painstaking references to Kant and Schopenhauer.) He couldn’t imagine what in their conversations in Hanover could have given her the impression he regarded her as tainted: ‘What I was talking about was the horrifying and disappointing cheapness of people, girls and young men alike, who give themselves away for a couple of Reichsmarks.’

  Nanni must have been sadly discouraged, but she still did not want to break off the relationship. In August, she sent Mischka greetings from Berlin, and in September a jocular letter to her ‘dear faithless tomato’, followed three days later by a less jocular plea that Mischka break his ‘icy cold silence’ and let her hear from him. But apart from the quarrel and the guilt, the bottom line was that they could no longer pretend that their separation was involuntary, something neither of them could change. Nanni, it was clear, could have decided, and still could decide, to leave her home permanently and come West. Mischka, for his part, could have urged her before her visit to come and marry him (which there is no indication he did); he could have repeated his urging after her visit instead of telling her off. But neither of them was ready to risk it. Mutual inaction left both of them feeling injured, unloved and increasingly distrustful.

  Mischka’s other passion was sport, and it still mattered enough to him half a century later that he told me a lot about it. It was the unproblematic part of his life, I gathered, something he was good at and enjoyed that carried no guilt and relatively little anxiety. His Hanover sports club (Turnklub zu Hanover) was the centre of his social life and, incidentally, the place where he met most of his German girlfriends (the ‘experienced woman’, for example, was a world-class long jumper). Locating the sports club—which in Germany was always open to everyone—was always the first thing he did in a new city, and he felt at a loss when he went to America and found out that it wasn’t so easy there. As we once happened to walk past the New York Athletic Club in Manhattan, he related his chagrin at showing up on its doorstep shortly after his arrival in New York, to discover that it was an exclusive, membership-only social club, formally inaccessible to women and informally to Jews, blacks and penniless foreign immigrants.

  Pole vaulting was Mischka’s main athletic event in Germany, though he ran in 800-metres races and did some high jumping and long jumping as well. Bičevskis described him as ‘typically fearless’ as a pole vaulter, which you needed to be in the days of bamboo poles and landing on hard ground. Actually Mischka was already looking for a replacement for the bamboo pole that, along with his knapsack full of physics journals, belongs to my Dick Whittington picture of him in 1944-45. It was before the days of flexible fibreglass poles, which started to come into use in the 1950s and greatly improved performance, but Mischka experimented briefly in 1946 with one of the new aluminium poles, acquired with the help of a sympathetic UNRRA official, which, however, turned out to be too short.

  He had started to analyse his pole-vaulting style in order to improve his performance, and this no doubt explains the profusion of small black-and-white photos of Mischka in flight, sports pants flapping, like a large and rather ungainly bird. Bičevskis said the analytic approach didn’t actually improve Mischka’s results—but then, as a top athlete himself, member of a basketball team that competed in Paris in May 1947, Bičevskis had high standards. Mischka’s results were good enough to make him the winner at the British zonal championships in August 1946. These were DP competitions, but Mischka was hoping to compete at the German national and international level. According to the story he told me, he was in line for selection when the German team decided not to accept DPs, even though on form he was better than the German who ultimately won the pole-vaulting competition.

  Olga probably read the frequent and detailed discussions of sports events and preparations in Mischka’s letters in much the same indulgent but not deeply interested spirit that I later did. On philosophical discussions, however, she did better. In Mischka’s letters, philosophy rivalled sports, study and girlfriends as favourite topics, and Olga’s replies were reliably interested and encouraging, if not always fully comprehending. I, on the other hand, was tempted to skip them altogether. My low tolerance/lack of aptitude for philosophical generalisation was well known to Misha, who tolerated it as a deformation professionelle of historians. I felt guilty, even so, as I flipped through the closely written pages of philosophical argument (all in German, and handwritten), but the problem was that when it veered off into philosophy of science, I could barely understand it. When, as happened with about equal frequency, it involved abstract discussions of men-women relationships, I just wanted, in my empirical historian’s way, to know which specific relationship of his own he was really talking about.

  There is a whole section of his papers, probably dating from 1947, devoted to an article on nihilism by one Manfred Buttner, which had recently stirred up controversy. Mischka’s contribution—neatly typed out, headed ‘A Response’ and signed by Michael Danos, student in electrotechnics, Hanover—was very likely published, though I don’t know where. For a long time, I avoided reading this essay carefully because I thought he was off on his man-woman/ Bogdanovs-sex musings again. So when I finally read it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not about sex but rather a Nietzschean reflection on the plight of man without God, which clearly had practical significance for Mischka, a lifelong atheist:

  From the nihilist standpoint, a correct life leads to the same results as one built on ‘Christian truths’, but it demands incomparably more strength to carry through, since you have the responsibility to bear it all alone, and there is no control over your actions except your own. It is no wonder that this burden may finally be too heavy, that so many people turn off this road and find themselves some support. The beauty of nihilism is that life lies unrestricted before you, that you stand alone in the storm. If one takes this position, then one grows and gains a strength whose potential would otherwise be unthinkable. But one can also be destroyed.

  If Mischka still felt himself to be standing alone in the storm, his worry about being destroyed as a scientist by trauma-related failures of concentration and memory was starting to recede by the time he took his final exams at Hanover in the spring of 1948. Already in the autumn of 1947 he had started to notice an improvement in intellectual stamina: ‘It seems as if I might be getting back to normal again. My memory is getting ready to want to return.’ A few months later, he was more, if not completely, confident: ‘The gap seems to have closed.’ He could once again plumb the depths of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which he had thought irretrievably lost after his sighting of the Jewish graves in Riga in 1943. He now felt that ‘there was a possibility of regaining all that I once possessed, meaning also concentration and the ability to grasp problems precisely and finally see a way of solving them’. Olga had never doubted that this would eventually happen, he noted, but he had, and such doubts still sometimes plagued him. ‘But there is no doubt, the gap has been closed.’

  Die Schlucht scheint sich geschlossen zu haben. That phrase ju
mped out at me from his diary. Geschlossen was what he kept saying in Washington DC in August 1999, after the first of two strokes that a week later killed him. He had lost his English, and I, with my poor German, was struggling, as in a nightmare, to understand him. I thought he meant by geschlossen that something was shutting down on him, despite his stubborn efforts to keep it open. But there was remarkable consistency over the years of Mischka’s way of thinking, so now I surmise that it was really the opposite: he was saying that a gap had opened up (as when he stopped reacting to the Moonlight Sonata), but he was doing his best to close it.

  Whatever he meant, it was typical Mischka to treat a stroke as a scientific problem to be solved by his own, rather than the doctors’, efforts. If not for geschlossen, and the awfulness of not understanding what he was trying to tell me, I might not have spent the 2000s trying to improve my German. My story was that I was working on German in order to write this book, but actually it was magical thinking a la Joan Didion: next time Misha urgently needed me to understand his German, I would be ready.

  Along with Mischka’s renewed confidence in his mental powers in 1947-48 came a growing sense that he was getting the hang of quantum nuclear physics. As always with Mischka, that meant that he was beginning to understand it well enough to see anomalies in the conventional wisdom— that is, to strike out on his own. He had noticed that one of the standard axioms ‘doesn’t seem to work’, as he wrote to Olga in March 1947, and ‘the exciting thing is that the thing that doesn’t seem to fit is a universally acknowledged fact’. Eighteen months later, he reported with pleasure that he had independently arrived at the same conclusion about one such anomaly that had just been reached by three of the great physicists—Heisenburg, Max von Laue and Wolfgang Paul—at a seminar in Göttingen.

  Mischka graduated from Hanover Technical University in May 1948 with the same ‘quite good’ grade that he had got in his exams the previous year. But it no longer mattered much, since he had found a mentor who recognised his abilities. This was the theoretical physicist Hans Jensen, whose courses in atomic (that is, nuclear) physics Mischka had taken since the summer semester of 1946. Jensen, though young, had made his name during the war with work on the separation of uranium isotypes; he had taught at Hanover TH since 1941 and had recently been appointed professor, though not the top grade of ordinarius. There are only occasional mentions of Jensen in Mischka’s correspondence before his graduation, although in his diary for July 1946 he notes, in the midst of a lot of Sturm und Drang about his personal life, an epiphany in the middle of Jensen’s seminar on atomic physics: when he came out onto the street after the seminar, ‘the sun shone so beautifully that I felt really happy’. The next year, he reported that Jensen had encouraged him to work on a problem whose solution had the potential to be ‘an event in the field’.

  Straight after his graduation, Mischka started work as Jensen’s assistant in the Hanover Institute for Theoretical Physics. It was his first real adult job. Assistent is more like a young right-hand man to the professor than a teaching assistant or tutor in Anglophone universities, and Mischka was almost awed by his new responsibilities, including standing in for Jensen in classes when he was out of town—‘it’s something quite strange, having such independence as a substitute’. His excitement at moving into the world of theoretical physics did not prevent him noting ‘another joke of world history’, namely that after a period of dearth as far as girlfriends were concerned, he had just taken up with a young woman from the sports club by the name of Helga Heimers. (New girlfriends didn’t usually get identified by their full names, so Olga was meant to take note.)

  The association with Jensen brought a new direction and purpose to Mischka’s life that was to prove lasting. Mischka already knew about the ‘the overwhelming probability’ that in the winter semester Jensen would move to the University of Heidelberg to take up the position of ordinarius professor of theoretical physics there. The move was firmly decided by the autumn of 1948, by which time Mischka, in addition to working as Assistent, was also enrolled as a PhD student under Jensen. Jensen was going to Heidelberg in January of the new year. And his scientific assistant and PhD student, Michael Danos, aged twenty-six, was going with him.

  10

  Physics and Marriage in Heidelberg

  Wedding of Mischka and Helga, 1949.

  MISCHKA arrived in Heidelberg to take up his new job with Jensen on an early summer evening in May 1949. As he walked up the hill along Philosopher’s Way to the Physics Institute, his rucksack on his back, the river lay on his right hand and the old town beyond it. Heidelberg, a beautiful medieval town, was one of the only German cities not damaged by Allied bombing. Arriving there after Hanover was a shock in itself. But what made the moment transcendent for Mischka was that, as he climbed the hill, music came wafting down from the institute. It was the Beethoven Violin Concerto, played by Fritz Kreisler.

  Misha told me the story in the 1990s, when we visited Heidelberg together. As always with Misha’s stories, it was related with such immediacy that it might have happened yesterday. He undoubtedly could have told me which movement of the Beethoven he had heard, if I had only thought to ask. In a letter written to his new girlfriend, Helga, back in Hanover, he told essentially the same story—another instance, like the Dresden bombing, of Misha’s unusual ability to keep his memories intact and unedited over half a century—but with less emphasis on transcendence and a few more technical details. It was ‘10.30 pm (22.30)’ when he arrived, he told Helga, and the Kreisler record was being played in Jensen’s room on an electric (not mechanical) turntable that was ‘not bad at all’.

  Jensen greeted him hospitably, producing ‘the remains of the roast potatoes he had had for lunch’ for Mischka’s supper:

  Then we sat down and started to talk … It got later and later: we had already once decided to stop talking and go to bed, and I was already standing at the door, but then we relapsed … and the [conversation] went on for an hour and a half (until 1.30) …

  Mischka was bowled over by this. He knew Jensen already, of course, but not in a personal capacity. Hans Jensen was a great man in physics, if not quite of the stature of Heisenberg. During the war, he had been a member of the famous Uranium Club, led by Heisenberg and the physical chemist Paul Harteck, and he was also close to the Copenhagen physics group around Niels Bohr.

  For Mischka, this evening arrival at the Heidelberg Physics Institute felt something like the pilgrim’s arrival in Mecca. But it was also the beginning of a friendship with Jensen that was of the greatest importance to Misha as a person as well as a physicist. Jensen, who remained a close friend and mentor until his death in the 1970s, played many roles in Misha’s life. He was his Doktorvater, the supervisor of his dissertation, who brought him into a particular area of physics and set him off asking particular kinds of questions. He became a family friend, particularly close to Helga but also on good terms with Misha’s second wife, Vicky. With his frequent visits to America after the Danoses moved there in 1951, he was a bridge between Misha’s new life and his old one.

  One of the things that happened to Mischka in Heidelberg, as a result of joining Jensen’s theoretical physics group there, was that he came to see himself as part of a great tradition. He defined that great tradition in physics as international when I knew him, and so it was. But all the same, much of it took place in Germany, and Misha’s apprehension of it and sense of belonging came via Jensen and the (mainly German or German-trained) physicists who, as Jensen’s friends and collaborators, were habitual visitors at his institute in Heidelberg. Misha knew so much about the history of physics, and talked about it to me so often, that it came as a shock to realise how little of it he had known before he went to Heidelberg. Of course he knew about Heisenberg (‘one of the top people in the world’) as well as a few luminaries like Max Planck, Arnold Sommerfeld and Albert Einstein. But until his second year in Hanover, he hadn’t even heard of the notorious school of ‘German physics’ w
hose battle with ‘Jewish theory’ before the war had received Nazi patronage: he wrote to Olga that he had just

  read with astonishment in [the American journal] Physical Letters what a hair-raising thing the Nazis had allowed, even in relation to theoretical physics: they tried to put a German physics in its place, not being embarrassed to write lampoons on Heisenberg, Sommerfeld and even Planck, the Nestor of German physicists.

  That ‘German physics’ episode was remarkable, but even more remarkable were the developments in physics in Germany around the time of the First World War to which it was a reaction. The publication of Einstein’s relativity theory in Berlin inaugurated a period of breakneck advances in atomic and nuclear physics in the interwar years. The process was international, or at least pan-European, with the theoretical and experimental discoveries that led to nuclear fission and ultimately to the atom bomb coming in a brilliant sequence that leapfrogged national boundaries, starting in Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory in Cambridge, going through Göttingen, Copenhagen and Enrico Fermi’s laboratory in Rome, and culminating in Otto Hahn’s and Lise Meitner’s demonstration of nuclear fission, which won the Berlin-based Hahn a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1944. But, international though the community was, Germany was in the vanguard, and its contribution was particularly strong in the theoretical realm. In the ‘beautiful years’ for physics from the turn of the century until the early 1930s, Germany produced a string of Nobel Prize winners: Wilhelm Rontgen, Philipp Lenard, Max von Laue, Max Planck, Johannes Stark, Albert Einstein, James Franck and Werner Heisenberg. With the exception of three experimentalists—Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays, and Lenard and Stark, who would become the key figures in ‘German physics’ in the 1930s—all were theoretical physicists.