A Physicists Labour in War & Peace E-Book

E Walter Kellermann

• Herausgeber: M-Y Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 389

Beschreibung

This book is of interest to historians of science and to scientists as well as to the general reader. Historians will be interested in the author's 'revealing view' of the British pre war university system, the establishment of Theoretical Physics as a new discipline in Britain and his commitment to preserve science during the funding battles of the Thatcher years. Physicists will find a clear introduction to the research into one of the greatest puzzles in astrophysics namely the enormous energies created in our cosmos manifested by [ Auger's discovery ] of the 'Grandes Gerbes', the showers of particles currently incident on the earth now investigated by a major international cooperation.

The book. is 'a great combination of autobiography and history of the sciences during a long and exciting period of History' (Stefan Sienell, Atistrian Academy of Sciences), 'A very, important source of reference' (Professor John Dainton, Liverpool University). 'The book has authority and relevance' (Jeff Hughes, Manchester University), 'Perceptive assessments of contemporary events' (Geoffrey Cantor, Professor of the History of Science, Leeds University).

His research in Edinburgh with the future Nobel Laureate Max Born, one of the giants of Theoretical Physics, led to a breakthrough in solid-state physics. In Manchester he worked with Patrick Blackett, also a future Nobel Laureate, measuring ‘Extensive Air Showers’. These are sprays of particles, which fall on the earth generated by nuclear particles from the cosmos. Later in Leeds he was one of the initiators of the National British Air Shower Experiment. - He writes about some of the famous scientists he has met, and also of his disappointments which are often the fate of a working scientist.

Reviews
From Cern Counter Book Shelf

Kellermann's account makes fascinating reading, describing the aspirations and frustrations of a physicist who was not centre stage, but moved among a cast of famous names. These included not only Born and Blackett, but also Klaus Fuchs, best known as a spy. The book also presents a revealing view of the British university system, with some alarming examples of racism, in particular in the 1930s and 1940s when departments were keen to keep down the number of refugees.
Christine Sutton, CERN.

These intelligently written memoirs (Professor Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds) offer perceptive assessments of contemporary events and of many of the scientists and politicians Kellermann encountered.

The Leitmotiv during Kellermanns later years was his research on cosmic ray extensive air showers. The non-specialist will find a clear account of how these showers, caused by enormously energetic particles from the cosmos are clues to its understanding, an account leading right up to the present state of the art.

Leseprobe

A Physicists Labour In War And Peace

Memoirs 1933 - 1999

© Copyright 2010

E Walter Kellermann

The right of E Walter Kellermann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All Rights Reserved

No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Chapter 1 - Nazis Change Our Lives

My mother and her two boys, my brother Heinz (later Henry) and I, lived in a 4-room flat in the Knesebeckstrasse, one of the streets crossing the Kurfürstendamm, not in one of the imposing buildings fronting the street, but in a ‘Gartenhaus’, the secondary building which was reached by a separate entrance after crossing a quite pleasant yard. She had no other regular income than her widow’s pension. Salary wise, therefore, we belonged to the lower middle class.

 My mother, Thekla Lehmann, was born in Warburg, a little town in Westphalia, which in the middle ages had been a prosperous market town, a centre of commerce and farming. Its relative importance had declined by my time, but it has recently expanded again and attracted some tourism. Its medieval past was and still is recognisable in its ‘Altstadt’ with its church in the valley near the river crossing. There was also a small synagogue and cemetery with some gravestones at least two centuries old. The Neustadt on a hilltop overlooking the Altstadt also had its church as well as a Protestant chapel whose clear sounding bell contrasted with the weighty and imposing bells of the two Catholic churches on a Sunday. The three communities lived together peacefully although, as my mother told me, the main Protestant farmer in the Altstadt could not resist annoying the Catholic community when on the highest Catholic holy days he would cart manure through the streets. My grandfather, my mother’s father, owned a general store in the Altstadt and the family lived over the shop in a quite imposing building flanking the market square on one side. The family had lived there for a long time. My grandfather had fought with the Prussian army against the Danes in 1866 and until very old age would take part in the annual march of the local veterans. My mother was one of the few Jewish girls at the time to receive a secular higher education and would qualify as a teacher.

My father, Benzion Kellermann, had been one of the rabbis of the Berlin Jewish ‘Gemeinde’ (Congregation), the organisation recognised by the government as representing all Jews residing in Greater Berlin. He had died in 1923 when I was eight years old of heart failure which today might have been avoided by by-pass surgery. He, too, was born in a small town, Gerolzhofen in Bavaria. The town’s records show that his grandfather, a Moses Kellermann, was a draper in the town at the beginning of the 19th century, and that his father, Joseph Löb Kellermann had been a candidate for the rabbinate and was employed as a teacher of religion. My father, too, worked at first as a teacher of religion. He taught in Berlin, where he qualified as a Rabbi and in Frankfurt before his first rabbinical appointment in the small East German town of Konitz. Although his inclinations were more to be a teacher and writer he more than fulfilled his duties as minister in this first appointment. One of his first duties was to protect the Jewish community in Konitz from violent attacks during a near-pogrom just before the first world war. Antisemitism was not a Nazi invention. Antisemites in those days still peddled the legend that Jews required the blood of a Christian child to bake their Matzots, the unleavened bread sheets Jews were eating during the Passover period. When a child was found murdered just before the time of the Passover feast all hell broke out in Konitz. My father had to put a wardrobe in front of his windows to protect himself from missiles and broken glass. He did what he could to protect his congregation and was successful in persuading the government to send troops to the town and quell the disorder. Nor was this his last action to fight antisemitism. In 1922, when the Konitz events were described in a German paper with unpleasant allusions the Jewish Defence organisation ‘C V’ sued the paper and called him as a witness. He was deeply disturbed that in his day and age a German court would ask him to state under oath that it was not part of the Jewish religion to demand Christian blood for the baking of Mazots. My father had faced very strong opposition when after heading religion schools in Berlin for some time he applied to be appointed as rabbi. He had started his Jewish studies in the orthodox Jewish seminary, but could accept the orthodox teaching there no longer. His time coincided with the new climate of theological ideas and political liberalism. Bible criticism was pervading all faculties of divinity, and humanistic views ran through all spiritual life. With his friend Joseph Lehmann, whose sister would become his wife, my mother, and his best friend, H Sachs, who would leave Jewish studies altogether and become a cardiologist, he left the orthodox seminary. My uncle Joseph and my father then enrolled as students in the new Jewish Academy, the ‘Hochschule der Wissenschaften des Judentums’. Other Jewish scholars who became rabbis, notably his colleague in the Gemeinde, Rabbi Leo Baeck, later the Chief rabbi of the German Jews in the Nazi period, had been graduates of this academy, but my father’s views were more extreme. For him the teachings of the prophets were the essentials of Judaism, rather than its orthodox formalism. Nevertheless the Berlin Gemeinde eventually appointed him one of its rabbis. We, his two boys, my brother and I, were brought up in the same spirit and had a far more liberal education than one would expect a rabbi’s sons to receive. The Jewish Gemeinde paid my mother’s widow’s pension out of funds collected by the state through the ‘Kirchen’ Tax, a tax levied on all members of churches (as well as of synagogues and other recognised religious congregations). The Gemeinde was the roof organisation responsible for all major Berlin synagogues except for the Reform Synagogue which had more progressive services, rather like those of the London Liberal Jewish Synagogue. In the 'Reform' my uncle Joseph Lehmann was a leading rabbi.

 When eventually my father overcame the conventional resistance in the Gemeinde’s executive and was appointed rabbi in Berlin in 1917 he revelled in his teaching duties. He gave public lectures in addition to his sermons where he could develop his ideas of Judaism in a contemporary setting and he continued to write his pamphlets and books on philosophical and religious themes. His most notable works were two books, one on the Kantian concept, Das Ideal im System der Kantischen Philosphie (1920), and another on the interpretation of Spinoza’s ethical ideas, Die Ethik Spinozas, (1922). The first volume of this book appeared. just before his death. A draft for Volume 2 was left when he died, in which he hoped to establish his new fundamental ideas, his philosophical ‘system’ which would have established him as an original philosopher. He had acquired his doctorate of philosophy after receiving his diploma from the Hochschule at the University of Marburg, the German university well known for its strong philosophy and divinity faculties. This had not been easy for him when he had to earn his living as a peripatetic teacher of Hebrew texts and had to gain his Abitur, his university entrance qualification, by private study. He was accepted as undergraduate in Marburg and eventually obtained his doctorate in philosophy, all this while earning his living. He often spoke to my mother, herself a good linguist and with a wide ranging knowledge of literature, of his sons’ future. He was confident of the successes of his sons who with regular schooling and, he thought, assured entrance to university would have it easier than he had. He did not foresee the pernicious influence of racism on our future. 

The policy of the Weimar republic was to ensure a liberal climate in the country in education, and in this the Prussian government at least partly succeeded in Berlin’s schools. My brother and I indeed profited from this policy. We were known to be Jews, but apart from some antisemitic teachers, who nevertheless kept their opinions mostly to themselves until the Nazi regime began, we did not suffer any discrimination. At Berlin University, however, prejudices emerged. Jews were rarely attacked by other students, but running fights in the corridors between right-wing and leftist students were frequent in the pre-Nazi period. The police did not intervene, because university ‘autonomy’ made universities out of bounds to the state-controlled police force, a curious interpretation of the law which stipulated that the state should not interfere in university education, even though it paid for the universities’ upkeep. This state of affairs of policing terminated when the Nazis came to power and the SS entered the universities.

My brother and I went to the Kaiser Friedrich Schule, situated a short walk along our street, one of the more prestigious schools in West Berlin. Both of us took the classical option, the stream with a ‘Humanistic’ curriculum. This meant that Latin and Greek were taught up to the A-level equivalent instead of modern languages which could be studied but would not be examined by the final exam, the ‘Abitur’. Not long after I had left the school in 1933 the classic stream was discontinued and the school’s name changed to Kaiser Friedrich Realschule. 

Our state was Prussia which then had a left-of-centre government. Syllabus and the Abitur examination questions were moderated by the state ‘Kultur’ ministry which on the whole was educationally progressive. The history syllabus did not include the study of the last fifty years, and thus avoided events whose interpretation was contested fiercely by the political parties of my day. Even events before 1880 were avoided if possible. I remember once bringing up in a discussion at school the subject of the beginnings of the 1870-71 war between Prussia and France. Here I pointed to the doubtful ‘editing’ by Bismarck of the so-called Ems Dispatch which I had read somewhere had been instrumental in triggering the war. My intervention was hotly resented by the right-wingers in my form, the teacher avoiding an opinion. Later I heard that the teacher had feared dismissal if he agreed with me. He dared not suspect openly Bismarck’s motives. The ‘Iron Chancellor’ was venerated in Prussian history as founder of the German Reich and beyond reproach. 

Our teachers professed in the main middle of the road politics leaning to the centre-right, and Jewish pupils seldom heard antisemitic remarks in school, but I heard that in other secondary schools in West Berlin Jewish students had more unpleasant experiences. These increased during my last spring in school in 1933, just before my Abitur exams. Hitler had come to power in January1933, and suddenly many ‘new’ supporters of the Nazi party crawled out from inside the school and outside. Even then, however, Nazi supporters were still in the minority in Berlin for some time.

Berlin with its mainly Social-Democratic administration during the Weimar republic had become a cosmopolitan capital with a flourishing cultural life in which many Jews played their part. It had great theatre productions and many progressive directors and writers. There was generous funding of the State theatres, and the trade unions had founded and financed the new Volksbühne theatre. Berlin had three opera houses of international standards. I still remember the first performance of Fidelio in the Städtische Opera, which was financed by the City, with Lotte Lehmann in the title part and Bruno Walter as conductor. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was then as now one of the world’s leading orchestras. In all these events Jews played their part. There was so much Jewish cultural talent that when, after the Nazis came to power and Jews were forbidden to be active in theatre or music, the Jewish population would create their own cultural organisation, the ‘Kulturbund’, which would for some time produce theatrical and musical performances of high standard for the Jewish population, until these were terminated by the government.

In contrast to the liberal cultural life in the city Berlin’s university, as academia elsewhere in Germany, remained conservative. Contrary to the arts there were hardly any openly Jewish university staff. On the other hand Jewish students had access to higher education as laid down by the laws of the Weimar republic. 

All this changed in step with a succession of antisemitic government decrees issued by the Nazi government. The Reichstag had passed an Enabling Act resulting in a stream of decrees restricting Jewish activities and participation in public and in private life. I remember particularly the date of 1st April, 1933, the day declared by the Nazi government as the day of the Jewish Boycott. Its purpose was to draw attention to as many aspects as possible of Jewish participation in commerce, the arts and in the professions and to eradicate it. That day of the boycott was the undisguised start of persecution of the Jews, and the German population did not demur. I remember sitting in our study at home with my mother, my brother and a few friends, all of us shaken by the most sinister foreboding. Would we be allowed to study or, as in the case of my brother, at least complete our studies, and obtain a degree? Would we be allowed to work at all? Would exceptions be made for some and on what grounds? Indeed, would we survive? What if the Reich was really to last ‘one thousand years’ as Hitler had promised? Was there an escape? Where could we go? There were restrictions on immigration in most countries. Palestine was an option only for the few who would come under the quota fixed by the British government. Some of the would-be emigrants had money to pay for temporary asylum abroad and wait there until the immigration procedure of the United States allowed them to enter as part of the allotted quota. Children of wealthy parents, and a gifted few students supported by grants, could enter Great Britain and some other countries for the purpose of study if they could afford the fees and the money to pay for their upkeep.

 Because the anti-Jewish restrictions at first came in dribs and drabs some of us still hoped at least to start a career. Perhaps, we thought, once accepted by a university before new decrees had been issued we could profit from better times to come and might even finish our courses. I went to the offices of the Gemeinde to enquire about the possibilities of qualifying for a grant to study. There I was soon disillusioned. The staff advising me took the bleakest possible view of the future for young people like me in Germany. They suggested I should take up an apprenticeship in farming or in other technical careers with a possible view to work in the then Palestine or in a trade elsewhere. I certainly would not be given a grant even if accepted by a university either in Germany or abroad to study medicine or, like my brother, law. I was told that there were already too many Jewish doctors or lawyers. In fact the presence of the large numbers of Jews in these professions had attracted the ire of the Nazis. Even before coming to power they had threatened to reduce the number of Jewish students drastically, demanding a ‘numerus clausus’ for them in the universities and in the professions. True the number of Jewish practitioners of medicine and lawyers was indeed proportionally large, but many other walks of life, even in the Weimar days, were closed to Jews. Hence their preponderance in these so-called ‘liberal professions’. 

The officers of the Gemeinde took a more lenient view of my aims when I told them I wanted to study mathematics and physics. One in fact told me that he was relieved to hear this, because the world would always need people like Einstein. I had not pitched my hopes that high, but they promised to consider my case, if I could find a university place. They advised me to wait and see whether a German university would accept me thinking that there might be fewer restrictions on Jews studying my subjects than on those asking for a place in, say, a medical school. 

They were quite wrong. I had left the Kaiser Friedrich Schule with my First Class (‘Mit Auszeichnung’) Abitur. The certificate also stated that I intended to read mathematics and sciences at university. There was no doubt that I was gifted in these subjects, but I had been advised to choose between mathematics and physics only when I had studied the subjects for some time at university level. My mathematics teacher had told me that even in the first of my two pre-Abitur years, corresponding to the lower 6th form in England, I was by far the best mathematician in my school. I had also done some extra work in mathematics to make up for the somewhat restricted syllabus in my humanistic stream. To make up for omissions in the humanistic syllabus I had volunteered also for an extra 3 hours per week physics course in the newly furnished physics laboratory of my school. At the same time I was warned that to make a successful career in mathematics would require of me a concentrated effort to the exclusion of many extracurricular activities. At that time, and in later years too, I was not prepared for such sacrifice. The study of Greek had awakened my interest in philosophy and I had decided to submit an essay on Plato’s Republic as part of my final Greek examination, where regulations allowed such an essay to replace one of the Greek papers. I had also joined a philosophy of religion study group led by Rabbi J Galliner, a friend and colleague of my father’s. 

Before the Nazi regime any school leaver with my qualifications would have applied to the German university of his choice for admission in the summer term and be accepted with a minimum of formality. I had of course made enquiries which were the leading universities in the subjects I wanted to study, and the general consensus was that the most exciting university at that moment was Göttingen. At the same time I was warned that I would not profit from the scientific atmosphere there before I had reached an advanced standard in my studies. Berlin like many other German universities had an excellent reputation, and I should make my mark in my undergraduate studies there first. After the first day of April 1933, the day before my 18th birthday and the day of the boycott of the Jews, it became clear that my chances of being admitted in Berlin were minimal. I applied for admission to Berlin university as a kind of test and was told that the question of admission of Jewish students had not yet been decided on, but that in the meantime I could attend lectures. 

I followed some well-delivered lectures in mathematics given by a Dr Feigl and the basic lecture course in ‘Experimentale Physik’ given by Professor Walther Nernst, the Nobel prize laureate and discoverer of the Third Law of Thermodynamics, who although a physical chemist held the principal chair of experimental physics. This lecture course was a great attraction for hundreds of students who attended it not only in their first year, but returned year after year, for individual lectures. There was Nernst pontificating not just about physics, but about many general subjects from a conservative and often antifeminist point of view, but with a good sense of humour. He was held to the straight and narrow by his assistant who for every lecture had prepared some often brilliant demonstration experiments. In the course of two semesters the lectures would cover in basic outline the principles of classical physics. However, my own attendance at these lectures hardly lasted three weeks.

I was told to appear before the university’s political officer to be vetted before matriculation. This gentleman turned out to be an SS man in full uniform complete with revolver in its holster who informed me that he would not let me, a Jew, proceed to matriculation. The result of the interview did not surprise me, although I had not expected it would be conducted by an armed SS man who could have arrested me there and then and sent me off to a camp.

 Eight years later I told this story to a student reporter who interviewed me for his Union paper on my appointment as Temporary Lecturer at Southampton University, then ‘College’. Nothing gave me a greater insight into British attitudes than the reaction of this young man. I expected him to be outraged, but his reaction was a smile of embarrassment. To him this, for me, tragic event seemed almost like a music hall situation when school leavers applying for a university place would be interviewed by an armed SS man.

 It was not long before the Jewish Gemeinde informed me that their small fund for support of students was exhausted and also advised me to try my luck abroad. My uncle Julius Lehmann, my mother’s brother, then lived in Saarbrücken. This was the capital of the small territory which the treaty of Versailles had provisionally separated from Germany, subject to a referendum to be held in 1935. Profiting from the separation of this territory, and therefore not subject to German legislation nor an integral part of the German economy, my uncle could carry on with his business and live with his wife without restrictions. In fact the independence of the territory had made him, instead of being merely an agent of some of the big German and Swiss insurance houses, a director of an independent firm of insurance brokers that handled the insurance business of those big companies in the autonomous Saar region. They had no children and were able and willing to help their nephews and nieces caught up in the Nazi disaster. When he knew of my predicament he immediately agreed to help and support me in my studies, which meant I could study abroad, if the costs of my studies were not too high.

I had always wanted to go to Great Britain, ever since I had read André Maurois’ biography of Disraeli, a book I was given when I was thirteen on my Bar Mitzvah. I was captivated reading about his career, his speeches in Parliament, the great debates with Gladstone, the way governments could be scrutinised in public and how a political party of the Right could be persuaded to adopt the one-nation idea. Maurois’ romantic biography was bound to impress a young person like myself. I was fascinated by a political system that could enable a man like Disraeli to emerge and become prime minister of Great Britain, a man, who would be called an ‘Old Jew’ by the German chancellor Bismarck when he encountered him at the Congress of Berlin of 1878, and yet command his respect.

 In my enquiries about British universities I was told that in the sciences and in mathematics Cambridge was the outstanding university in Great Britain and therefore made enquiries how to apply there. In Cambridge, one of the world’s citadels of mathematics and science Lord Rutherford and his school at the Cavendish Laboratory continued to make important discoveries which fired a young man’s interest and ambition. I had also considered going to Strasbourg, only about 120 km from Saarbrücken, but heard that French government policy was not to allow me, a German national, to be a student in this city so near to the German frontier and in a province which Nazi Germany had included in its territorial demands. On the other hand I heard that studies at Cambridge would be costly, because fees and maintenance expenses in Cambridge were high so that to study there would be far more expensive than in a provincial British, let alone German, university and might exceed the sums my uncle was willing to pay.

My uncle suggested that I should study in Vienna. I would have no language difficulties there, living costs and fees were affordable for him and I had an aunt, his and my mother’s sister, Johanna, in Vienna who in many ways could help me. I was advised, too, that the teaching in Vienna was good and that if I hoped to do research in physics, as I did, there was no need to think of a university as famous as Cambridge, or pre-Nazi Göttingen, until I had succeeded in my undergraduate studies. So Vienna it was, and Cambridge remained an unfulfilled dream. When I had turned my back on Berlin I heard that I was leaving in distinguished company. I heard later that almost to the day Professor Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel Prize winner and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Berlin, resenting Nazi ideas and disgusted by their politics, had left the university dropping a postcard in the porter’s lodge that read ‘I am not coming back’. I believe his formal resignation was sent in much later.

Chapter 2 - Studies in Vienna amid Political Danger

Vienna at that time was a place of fading glamour. When it was the capital of the Austrian-Hungarian empire it had attracted brilliant persons, many of them Jewish, from all its constituent parts. Music, literature, painters, its scientists and engineers made it a scintillating capital of a large empire. But after the end of World War I in 1918 it was a capital with 1 million people of a small, German speaking country with a population of just over 7 millions. Good theatre and opera still existed, magnificent buildings, famous churches and wonderful museums and art galleries were still to be found. But there was not enough capital to keep up Vienna’s cultural inheritance at the same standard as pre-war. Famous producers, actors, musicians and other intellectuals found more scope in Germany. The Jews remaining in Vienna after the World War still had some influence on the cultural life in Vienna, but the more prominent ones, like Max Reinhardt, the famous Producer-Director, or Arnold Schoenberg, the composer, had emigrated to Germany before 1933. Those left behind made a marginal impact, for instance by running political cabarets. Jews were finding it near-impossible to reach positions of influence in the judiciary, in academia, medicine or industry. As in Germany many, therefore, had turned to the liberal professions as independent lawyers or general practitioners of medicine. This professional imbalance led, as in Germany, to an increase in antisemitism which in Austria had been endemic in a very virulent form since its imperial days, but where under the Hapsburgs baptism and assimilation had at least offered career possibilities for many Jews. This was no longer an effective way out of discrimination because racism regarded converted Jews still as ‘non-Aryans’. There was a fairly strong Nazi party in Vienna whose avowed goal was both Jewish persecution and union of Austria and Germany, the ‘Anschluss’, the adsorption of Austria to Germany. This dual aim very much appealed to a large part of the students, as most students whether Nazis or not had an admiration for German Kultur and a yen to be part of a Greater Germany. Vienna University had much suffered from the break-up of the empire. It was still reasonably well funded and had some excellent teachers, but it could no longer draw on the immense hinterland of the empire for new talent. As in other walks of life brilliant young Austrian faculty members were glad to accept positions in Germany where they had the opportunity of better careers.

I knew before I had arrived in Vienna how unstable the political situation was. When I told my friends in Berlin that I was going to Vienna, they shook their heads. For them there was no doubt of Hitler’s intention to annex Austria by Anschluss. The only question seemed to be when this would happen.

I realised that study in Vienna could only be a temporary expedient, but given my circumstances it was the only choice open to me. The signs that Austria would not remain an independent country for long were plainly visible when I arrived, but for the moment Hitler considered that the time for annexation was not ripe, and had given ‘assurances’ to that effect. I just hoped that the Anschluss would not happen soon so that I had time at the university to prove my ability in my chosen subjects of study, perhaps even complete my degree course. 

When I arrived in Vienna in late spring of 1933 a clerical-conservative government was in power that would turn fascist. Facing the social-democratic party’s opposition on the Left and the Nazi party on the Right it had dissolved parliament and now ruled by decree. It was in fact a dictatorship supported by the army and the church. The social-democratic party, far more radical than the social-democratic party in Germany, had lost its influence in national politics, but still had power bases in the big cities like Vienna and Graz. In Vienna the city administration was run by the social-democrats. These, unlike their German namesakes, were not only prepared, but willing to engage in armed conflict with the government whose fascism appeared to them as of only a slightly different hue from that of the Nazis. Naturally, because Austria had in effect a minority government the political situation was not stable. In the meantime, although few doubted the Nazis’ intention to effect an Anschluss in the future, Hitler’s ‘guarantee’ to regard Austria as an independent German state seemed to distance him from the Austrian Nazis, who were clamouring for an immediate Anschluss. The reason for this ‘guarantee’ was to placate Mussolini. The Duce at that time refused to have the German army at the Brenner frontier which separated Austria from what had been the pre-first-war Austrian South Tyrol with its large German speaking population, but now under Italian rule. The question was how long Mussolini would feel strong enough to resist Hitler and allow me to complete my studies.

 The omens that this could be even a medium term solution were not favourable. I soon realised that my move to Vienna would be only a short episode in the tangle of physics and politics that was to remain the scenic backdrop of my life. Immediately on arriving in Vienna I saw signs that my choice of this university had been more foolhardy than I had thought. There was evidence of a highly unstable situation the very day I arrived in Vienna. On the previous day there had been demonstrations by Nazi students. In the anatomy department they had attacked Jewish students and thrown them bodily out the first floor laboratory into the street. The Nazis then unfurled a vast swastika flag which was still hanging from the first floor window when I walked past it. The choice of the anatomy institute was deliberate. It was not only a demonstration against the large number of Jewish medics of which in the opinion of right wing students there were too many, but the director, Professor Tandler, was of Jewish extraction and a leading member of the strongly anti-Nazi Austrian social-democrats. Professionally he was widely known as a proponent of preventive medicine. He had achieved world wide attention by his reforms when in charge of the City of Vienna health department, where amongst other schemes he had introduced free dental care for school children.

There were further disturbances that week created by the Austrian Nazis clearly designed to achieve a quick access to power. Almost immediately the government reacted by declaring the Nazi party illegal and, in order to preserve the universities from further Nazi disturbances, by suspending all university lectures and by strengthening security with armed police in the university and in other public buildings. The administrative offices were kept open and I now found myself at a university ready to matriculate me, but offering only empty classrooms for the whole of the summer semester. Nevertheless the physics and mathematics institutes were open, and I could make some useful contacts and work out plans of study during the summer.

I faced further obstacles in my attempts to become a student. Hitler raged when the Austrian government outlawed the Nazi party. I had come back to Berlin for the summer break between semesters in August, and while I was there he imposed deterring restrictions on travel to Austria. Germans wanting to travel to Austria had to apply for an exit visa from the German authorities obtainable only after paying the for me exorbitant sum of 1000 Reichsmark. It seemed that my studies were over even before they had begun. My aunt, fortunately, found a way around. She had a friend in the German embassy, a diplomat of the old, pre-Nazi, school who decided that as I had already officially began my studies I could be regarded as resident in Austria and therefore entitled to a visa issued by the German embassy in Vienna without charge. He asked for my passport to be sent to him, and my despair was relieved when in spite of my darkest premonitions I found an amended passport in my mail giving Vienna as my residence and displaying the visa. 

That antisemitism in Austria was rampant and more rabid than in Germany was clearly demonstrated by widely reported incidents after the Anschluss. BBC television reports screened as late as 1996 have shown that the endemic antisemitism in Austria is still taking its time to fade away. The student body in Vienna, too, was on the whole more racist than that in German universities, whereas in pre-Hitler days Germany antisemitism was strongly promoted mainly by the ‘elite’ student Verbindungen (fraternities). 

The Austrian government outlawed Nazi student groups as well as the Nazi party in 1934, but in the university one knew only too well who was and who was not a Nazi sympathiser, both among students and teachers. Antisemitic discrimination had been rooted in the university long before Nazism. For instance I could not join the undergraduates’ Mathematical Society, but only the ‘Allgemeine’ (General) Mathematical Society which accepted Jews and consequently had an almost entirely Jewish membership. The university did not give us a meeting room as the other society had been allotted. We were allowed only to have a cupboard in one of the corridors of the mathematics institute where we stored what we proudly called our library. Our meetings took place in classrooms which were momentarily not occupied, and there we discussed tutorial problems. The latent antisemitism nevertheless would not prevent me from attending courses and find some sympathetic lecturers providing a stimulating atmosphere and real incitement to work. 

A new student would find that Vienna University was conscious of its famous traditions and was determined to maintain them. The mathematics department boasted some brilliant members. I personally was impressed by Professor Menger and the brilliant teaching of Professor Furtwängler, but less so by one or two of his assistants. In experimental physics there were four full professors, and in theoretical Physics there was Professor H Thirring also a brilliant teacher. There were, however, none of the big names, as there were in German universities and in the German ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’, now renamed ‘Max Planck’ Institutes. Some of the professors had gained international recognition, but great names like Planck in Germany or other Nobel prize recipients had been absent from Vienna for some time since the deaths in 1906 of Boltzmann and in 1916 of Mach, who was born in what is now the Czech republic. 

Younger brilliant people like Lise Meitner, O Frisch and V Weisskopf went to Germany, Weisskopf, I think, before achieving his PhD. There was no work on nuclear physics except in the Radium Institute where an important discovery was soon to be made. 

Professor Ehrenhaft, a Catholic, but of Jewish extraction, was one of the four full Professors of Physics. He delivered the fundamental lecture course of ‘Experimentale Physik’ in a Viennese accent that had many Austrian-Jewish resonances. His extrovert mannerisms made some of the hypersensitive Jewish students feel self-conscious, but his large audience enjoyed the lectures that were packed with interesting demonstration experiments. He was an excellent physicist and showed this in his lectures which in a qualitative way opened up at least my understanding of the basics of classical physics. The students gladly accepted this introduction to classical physics, but one knew that some of his ideas on contemporary atomic physics had stained his reputation. He had put himself outside current thought in physics by insisting that his later research provided evidence for the existence of a fractional electronic charge, smaller than e, the charge of the electron determined by Millikan and widely accepted as the fundamental unit of electricity. His research ‘though had yielded other interesting results. Like Millikan who had made important measurements in the field of viscosity enabling him to measure e, Ehrenhaft also had made discoveries in a field related to his research, electrophoresis. Here he had devised some very interesting experiments which he continued during my time in Vienna. He ran a very fine laboratory and one felt that in spite of his assumed posture he was becoming reconciled with the new physics. He did not regard himself as Jewish, but when young Jewish students later asked for his help in providing references for them abroad he proved himself supportive and fearless. The arrival of the Nazis in Vienna in 1938 meant for him the destruction of his world and of the Vienna school of physics as he had idealised it. His personality had made it difficult for him to gain friends abroad after he had been dismissed, and he died a bitter man. 

Professor H Thirring occupied the chair of Theoretical Physics, at one time held by Boltzmann. We understood that on filling the chair of Theoretical Physics the university had preferred Thirring to Schrödinger. It was said that the University realised it had made the wrong choice when Schrödinger was awarded the Nobel prize. Yet whatever were the university politics resulting in this appointment the undergraduates had no cause to complain. Thirring was a brilliant teacher whose 4-year course of theoretical physics carried on the German and Austrian physics tradition of expecting all undergraduates, whether intending to be experimentalists or theoreticians, to have a thorough grounding in theory. Roughly the syllabus was that outlined in Joos’ ‘Theoretical Physics’, but Thirring went into greater detail, and the proseminars were just the right kind of tutorials for undergraduates for learning how to solve problems, whereas the seminars were at high postgraduate level. He was also a man who made no secret of his liberal views, often pointing out that such political problems as students and the state regarded as important, faded into insignificance when seen on a cosmic scale where the earth, and certainly the state of Austria, could be regarded as minuscule. The Nazis did not regard him as one of theirs, but he managed not to be dismissed when they came to power. I was not certain of the field and extent of his research, but he infected all of us with his keenness on physics and on…skiing. His emphasis on the fundamental principles governing physics was impressive. Examinees would bear witness to his convictions when he was their examiner in the vivas, exams that could well go on for more than an hour and range over the whole of physics. But such an examination would finish abruptly with the candidate’s failure if he or she omitted to write down the minus sign in Maxwell’s equations, the four equations summing up electromagnetic theory.

One of the best lecture courses on atomic physics were given by the physical chemist, Professor Hermann Mark. He and his research group had a worldwide reputation gained by his work on polymers. His lectures were brilliant and crowded out by both physics and chemistry students. His 4-semester course on physical chemistry began with lectures on atomic physics. It was very much appreciated by physics students whose school syllabus had not included the Bohr-Rutherford model. Physics students stayed loyally with him even when he lectured on applications of thermodynamics to chemistry. I certainly was impressed that one could actually calculate why a chemical reaction went from, say, right to left of the equation, a process one had ‘simply to learn and remember’ at school. His high scientific achievements - and one presumed his industrial connections - made him the only professor who could be seen driving an American Packard car, often only to purchase cigars from the nearest tobacconist. He was popular with the undergraduates and found time to come down into the first year laboratory to meet and talk to the new undergraduates. He very kindly demonstrated to me personally some fundamental reactions when he happened to see me, a mere physics undergraduate, in his teaching laboratory for which I had volunteered as an extracurricular activity. The Nazis soon dismissed him after the Anschluss as a descendent from a not racially ‘pure’ forebear.

Another lecture course recommended to physics students was given by the philosopher Professor Moritz Schlick, the Viennese positivist. It took place in one of the larger auditoriums in the main building of the university. We physicists found it difficult to arrive on time. Even running at full speed after a Thirring lecture from the Boltzmanngasse to the university building at the Ring took most of us longer than the ten minutes allowed between lectures and would make us late. But what we could hear and digest certainly was worth our while. To look at physics from the outside, as this philosopher did, and to talk of modern physics and contemporary philosophy in a civilised manner, was in welcome contrast to the rantings and ravings of the physics professors and Nobel laureates Lenard and Stark in Germany. They were at that time the leading opponents in German speaking countries of the still young theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Physics students in Austria as well as in Germany knew well that Lenard’s lecture on ‘relativity’ given at that time in Heidelberg consisted almost entirely of a diatribe against the Jews and ‘Jewish’ physics as personified especially by Einstein. My brother who had been an undergraduate in Heidelberg a few years earlier confirmed to me that Professor Lenard’s lecture on relativity was the event of the semester. It was packed out by right-wing students, not many of them physicists, who screamed their approval every time Lenard attacked ‘Jewish’ physics and Einstein. Professor Stark’s remarks referring to Heisenberg as a ‘white Jew’, because Heisenberg did not reject relativity and relativistic quantum mechanics, have recently been reported again in Physics Today. 

The positivist Schlick knew his contemporary physics and attracted many undergraduates who shared his disdain of woolly thinking. They appreciated this philosopher’s approach to the recent discoveries, to Niels Bohr’s concept of complementarity, to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and to the statistical aspect of modern physics. For me it was refreshing to see that views clearly denying racism and upholding progressive ideas could still be held and expressed from a Viennese academic pulpit in spite of the rising wave of Nazism in this German speaking country and in its universities. But not for much longer. One year after I attended his lectures Schlick was killed as he was descending the splendid staircase of the main university building by revolver shots fired by a right wing student. In those days the Austrian criminal law differentiated between plain murders and killings that had political motives which could carry a lesser penalty. Also right wing motives seemed to be regarded with more sympathy by the Austrian judiciary than those of the left. The student was sentenced to two years and a half in prison. He was released after a short time and no doubt qualified for acceptance by the SS after the Anschluss.

It is about that time that I decided to treat physics as my principal subject with mathematics as the subsidiary. I still liked mathematics, but there were so many new and exciting things happening in physics which attracted me. The new quantum mechanics was still developing fast. One of its great successes had been the treatment of the hydrogen molecule, by Heitler and London published in 1927. I would attend a seminar where we discussed the paper and the vistas it opened. Heisenberg came to Vienna and gave us a public lecture which was crowded out. Nuclear physics seemed to have entered a new stage. We heard that Fermi in Rome was opening up the chapter of neutron physics. We heard of the experiments in the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute by Hahn and Liese Meitner, who was Viennese by birth, and Strassmann. What could be more natural for a young student than wanting to get closer to these new frontiers of physics? In choosing physics as my main subject there was also a practical consideration. Should I not be good enough in the end to do research - and I did not want to teach - the only industrial employment open to a mathematician was that of an actuary whereas I knew that more and more industries were looking out for physicists. I would definitely prefer to work in industry rather than for an insurance company. Since there was little high technology industry in Austria I would have to look for a country whose politics allowed me to enter and make my career as a physicist whether I was going to do research or work in industry.