Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  ‘I am leaving my country, perhaps for good,’ confessed Szilard. He assumed that the man was local, possibly a farmer. It turned out that he was a Hungarian émigré who had spent the last forty years in Canada and was on a return trip to the land of his birth.

  The man smiled at Szilard. ‘Be glad! As long as you live you’ll remember this as the happiest day of your life!’3

  The winter train journey from Vienna to Berlin should have taken a day. But Germany was a shadow of its former, imperial self, riven by civil disorder and strikes. The shortage of coal halted the train for days at a time, marooning it in a silent, snowy landscape. The journey lasted a whole week.

  The flight from home was a recurrent theme in the restless life of Leo Szilard. From now on, ‘home’ would always be provisional. There was never time to grow attached to a locale. The nervous glance over a shoulder while clutching all his earthly possessions in a suitcase – these became defining experiences for Szilard.

  The year he arrived in Berlin, a failed Austrian artist and war veteran formed the National Socialist party in Munich. During the early 1930s, fearing an imminent Nazi seizure of power, he kept his bags packed by the front door of his rented room. Soon after Hitler became chancellor, Szilard caught the first Vienna-bound train out of Berlin, retracing the journey he had made in 1919. He had lived in Berlin for thirteen years. Now a refugee in a Europe poisoned by anti-Semitism, he travelled first from Vienna to London, and then eventually to America.

  But even in the land of the free, Szilard still lived out of a suitcase. How else could you live in a world where at any moment a lone bomber might appear high in the sky and drop a single devastating bomb? Edward Shils recalls that when he visited Szilard in his room in Chicago, his bookshelves were bare. ‘He had no physical property other than his clothing.’4 Even when he eventually married in 1951, he kept what he called his ‘Big Bomb suitcase’ packed and ready to go. ‘If you want to succeed in this world,’ said Szilard, ‘you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people.’5

  He only used his Big Bomb suitcase once. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he and his wife caught the first flight to Geneva. At the offices of CERN he called on a friend he had first met in 1920s Berlin, the physicist Victor Weisskopf. Never one to underplay the drama of the moment, Szilard announced: ‘I’m the first refugee from America.’6

  Berlin in the twenties was not just another European city; it was a state of mind. After the bloody revolutions and street fighting in the first years of the Weimar Republic came the hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923. Newspaper presses were used to print banknotes which were scarcely worth the paper they were printed on by the time they hit the streets. Then, with the currency reform of 1924 and American loans, came a period of prosperity and growth which lasted until the Wall Street Crash and the worldwide Depression that followed. In this decade the population of Berlin doubled to nearly four million; only London and New York were bigger. The city turned its back on its imperial past and embraced modernity. These were the Golden Twenties, a time of unparalleled sexual freedom, of easy living and easy money – for some at least. But despite the new prosperity, Berlin still felt like a ‘doomed city’, a modern Pompeii living on the edge of a volcano.7 The eruption came in 1933, throwing Hitler into power and casting a dark pall across Europe and the world.

  Through the bloodshed and the boom years, Berlin remained a cauldron of creativity. According to the historian of Berlin Alexandra Richie, ‘for a few brief sparkling years the city attracted a sheer concentration of talent which has not yet been equalled in Europe’.8 The sometimes harsh reality of life for ordinary Berliners was captured in remarkable works including Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, whose opening in 1928 was a night people remembered all their lives.9 The savage drawings and paintings of George Grosz portrayed Berlin street life, while the tortured symbolic images of Max Beckmann laid bare the inner torments of a people journeying into the abyss.

  Ordinary Berliners began a love affair with the moving image in the 1920s. In 1913 there had been just 28 cinemas, but by 1919 there were 245. The month after Leo Szilard arrived in Berlin, the expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari opened in the city. This chilling film about a murderous scientist who controls the mind of his zombie-like assistant, Cesare, echoes the story of the supersoldier in Sheehan and Davis’s play ‘Blood and Iron’. But Dr Caligari’s hypnotic power over Cesare is also a parable of political control. Thomas Mann’s 1929 story ‘Mario and the Magician’ picked up this theme, exploring the mesmeric control that demagogues like Hitler could exert over entire nations.

  Berlin became the intellectual centre of Europe, a cultural magnet which attracted, among others, English writer Christopher Isherwood, and later the poets Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which became the film Cabaret, immortalized the myth of the Golden Twenties. This is the Berlin of smoke-filled jazz clubs and seedy cabarets, of the Charleston and Josephine Baker – the black singer and actress whose dances wearing nothing but a girdle of bananas caused a sensation in a city that became, as Stefan Zweig put it, the orgiastic ‘Babylon of the world’.10

  In the late 1920s, the physicist Victor Weisskopf was studying for his PhD at Göttingen, not far from Berlin. He often travelled to the city to see his friend Eugene Wigner and recalls being ‘just a little shocked’ by the ‘sexual revolution’ going on in Berlin at this time. Weisskopf admits that he was ‘young, somewhat prudish, and certainly a bit provincial’.11 For his city friend, Leo Szilard, Berlin in the 1920s must have seemed a world away from the stately elegance of the Hungarian capital, where he had grown up.

  Mark Twain called the brash, edgy city the ‘German Chicago’.12 Berliners have a character all of their own: ‘They are the New Yorkers of Central Europe,’ says Otto Friedrich, in his study of Berlin in the 1920s.13 Einstein arrived in the city in 1914, having been lured there with an exceptionally generous deal that freed him from the need even to lecture. ‘I now comprehend the Berliners’ smugness,’ he said in 1914, ‘for there is so much happening around them that their inner emptiness does not pain them as it would in a quieter place.’14

  While Berlin’s nightclub and cabaret culture boomed, the Nazis and the Communists fought for dominance on the streets. Exactly a year before Leo Szilard set foot in Berlin, the bloody Spartacus uprising had filled Berlin’s wide avenues with gunfire. It ended with the Communist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, being murdered in cold blood by the authorities. Many hundreds died on the streets in the vicious fighting that flared up repeatedly throughout 1919. In the spring of 1920 it was the turn of the Right to make their bid for power. On 24 February, Adolf Hitler set out the Nazi programme in Munich. In Berlin the following month, when the right-wing militia, the Freikorps, were ordered to disband, they staged a coup.

  During what became known as the Kapp Putsch, Otto Hahn and other scientists formed a Technische Nothilfe, a Technical Flying-Squad, to keep essential services running. Hahn and James Franck travelled every evening from leafy Dahlem to the district of Schöneberg to stoke the furnaces of the power station that had been deserted by striking workers, working from 10 p.m. until first light. During the day, back in their Dahlem laboratory, Hahn and his colleague Lise Meitner pushed at the frontiers of nuclear knowledge, exploring the decay products of uranium.15 Einstein’s friend Max Born, now in Frankfurt, was an ‘ardent supporter of socialist government’ and opposed to the right-wing counter revolution.16 Again, politics had spilled onto the streets of Berlin, as it would again and again in the years before Hitler took power.

  Despite ‘unfriendly’ officials whose job it was to enforce the limits that were placed on foreigners studying in Berlin, Szilard eventually enrolled at the Königliche Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) at the start of 1920. Here he continued the electrical engineering studies
he had begun in Budapest in September 1916. First war then revolution had interrupted his studies. Now another revolution intervened – a revolution in physics.

  Although he completed the spring term at the Institute of Technology, a new horizon beckoned: ‘physics attracted me more and more’.17 Before the year was out, Szilard had switched to the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, where he could take courses in physics. This university was a world leader in physics, boasting scientists of the calibre of Max Planck, who began the quantum revolution with his 1900 investigation into black-body radiation, and Max von Laue, who had pioneered the use of X-rays to obtain diffraction images of crystals, which made it possible to calculate how the atoms were arranged in the crystal lattice.

  Max Planck, a rather austere and gaunt man, was the most respected physicist in Germany at this time. In November 1920, Szilard applied to Planck to take one of his courses. ‘I only want to know the facts of physics,’ he told the Nobel laureate. ‘I will make up the theories myself.’ Fortunately Professor Planck was amused by the young student’s chutzpah and mentioned his comment to James Franck. He in turn told Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi, also in Berlin, that a ‘curious young man called Szilard’ had appeared at the university.18 For the first time, Leo Szilard had made an impression on the physics community.

  It was, said Szilard, ‘the heyday of physics’, and Berlin was the place to be if you were a physicist.19 One of the highlights of studying in the capital of physics was the Wednesday afternoon colloquium of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, the German Physical Society, held at the old university building in the heart of the city beside the River Spree. At this forum all the latest advances in physics from around the world were summarized and debated – from Rutherford’s artificial transmutation of the atom just the year before, to the fluorescence of uranyl salts, and how to reconcile light interference with the photoelectric effect.

  Through war, strikes and revolutions, the colloquium continued. When bullets were flying in the streets outside, participants were simply asked to keep away from the windows. In the winter, when fuel was short, participants sat in their overcoats; Berlin’s bitter cold was soon forgotten in the heat of the debate. According to no lesser authority than Einstein, the Berlin colloquium was the most extraordinary gathering of physicists anywhere in the world.20

  The meetings were held in a large classroom containing three rows of seats. At the front sat past and future Nobel prizewinners: Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, as well as the chemists Walther Nernst and Fritz Haber. In the second row were James Franck, Hans Geiger, Gustav Hertz and Lise Meitner, whom Einstein called ‘our Madame Curie’.21 The quantum physicists Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger also attended when they were visiting Berlin. In April 1920 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr came to the colloquium and met Einstein for the first time. At about the same time, Leo Szilard started attending the weekly meetings.

  From 1921, Eugene Wigner was also a regular participant. Like Leo Szilard, he had fled Budapest after becoming the victim of anti-Semitic abuse and was now studying chemistry at the nearby Institute of Technology.22 At first Wigner was bewildered by the technical language used at the colloquium – phrases such as ‘ionization energy’. But so enthralling was the level of debate that he kept coming back.

  Eugene Wigner (1902–95) left Budapest in 1921 to study chemical engineering in Berlin and became a lifelong friend of Leo Szilard. This photograph was taken in about 1948.

  During each colloquium, the organizer, Max von Laue, would announce the titles of four or five new scientific papers that had just been published and choose someone to read each paper and prepare a spoken review of it for the following week. Unclear reviews would provoke probing questions from the intimidating front row. When Wigner’s first turn came, he was apprehensive; as he later recalled, Einstein in particular was ‘always ready to comment, to argue, or to question any paper that was not impressively clear’. Einstein’s favourite comment was, ‘Oh no. Things are not so simple.’23 Einstein himself had perfected the art of asking deceptively naive questions. ‘Einstein’s questions,’ recalled physicist Philipp Franck, ‘which very often threw doubt upon a principle that appeared self-evident, gave the seminar a special attraction.’24 But despite the presence in the audience of these stellar figures from physics, Wigner never felt nervous about speaking: ‘Albert Einstein made me feel I was needed.’25

  After each colloquium, discussions continued in the coffee house late into the evening. For both Szilard and Wigner, Berlin’s cafés were a home from home. Wigner recalled that in Budapest ‘you were not only allowed to linger over coffee, you were supposed to linger, making intelligent conversation about science, art and literature’.26 Szilard’s favourite haunt was the neo-Gothic Romanisches Café. It was ‘the centre of everything’, recalled one regular some fifty years later, ‘a big, ugly place, across from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, but everybody went there, the writers, the actors, everybody’.27

  Like many who met him, Eugene Wigner was immensely impressed by Einstein’s ‘simplicity and innate modesty’. He ‘inspired real affection’ in people and had ‘a great many lovable traits’.28 When Wigner first met him, Einstein was already a celebrity. On his visit to America in 1921, thousands had flocked to his public lectures. Wigner was clearly awed by meeting the great physicist: ‘His personality was almost magical,’ he recalled seventy years later.29 Einstein himself confessed at this time that in Berlin ‘every child knows me from photographs’.30 Even so, he remained approachable. ‘He could have made a great show of his own importance,’ said Wigner. ‘He never thought to do so.’31

  According to a physicist who worked with Einstein, ‘there were two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand was Einstein, and on the other all the rest’.32 Philipp Frank, who took over the chair of physics at the German University in Prague after Einstein left, was told by his students that Einstein had said, ‘I shall always be able to receive you. If you have a problem, come to me with it. You will never disturb me, since I can interrupt my own work at any moment and resume it immediately as soon as the interruption is past.’33 Frank noticed that Einstein remained an outsider in the Berlin academic community, with its Prussian emphasis on formality and rank.34

  The young Leo Szilard soon became a close friend of Einstein. According to Wigner, who got to know Szilard at the weekly colloquia, his fellow Hungarian was never intimidated by great men: ‘If Szilard had seen the President of the United States at a meeting or the President of Soviet Russia, he would have promptly introduced himself and begun asking pointed questions. That was Szilard’s way.’35

  Szilard had introduced himself to Einstein after one of the colloquia and soon he was accompanying Einstein on his way home each Wednesday, a journey which took them first past the Reichstag, then the Brandenburg Gate and the Tiergarten, until they reached Einstein’s apartment in the well-to-do Schöneberg district. Szilard also became a regular at the afternoon tea parties Einstein and his wife held for young researchers. At the time, Szilard was surviving on the modest amounts he earned by tutoring fellow students in mathematics. The Russian émigré Eugene Rabinowitch, who was studying chemistry at Berlin, recalls being invited back to Szilard’s room after one of Einstein’s seminars. The room was so frugal that they all had to sit on the floor to drink tea.36 There’s no doubt that Szilard would have relished the opportunity to indulge his boyish sweet tooth on Einstein’s free tea and cakes. Edward Shils recalled how, even in the 1950s, lunch for Leo Szilard ‘was a glass of buttermilk into which he poured the entire contents of the sugar bowl, followed by sherbet’.37

  Both the student and the professor saw themselves as outsiders in the conservative world of German physics. They shared many other things too: a contempt for bourgeois values, a boyish sense of humour, strong socialist convictions, a healthy lack of respect for all forms of authority and (both men having grown up in liberal Jewish families) a dislike of o
rganized religion. For Leo Szilard, Einstein became an intellectual father figure.

  Although he respected Einstein immensely, Szilard did not hesitate to challenge his mentor. Once, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem, as Albert Einstein was slowly but methodically explaining to colleagues how to conduct an experiment with X-rays, a voice interrupted him.

  ‘But, Herr Professor, what you have just said is simply nonsense!’

  There was a barely audible gasp from the those present, and many turned to see who had the audacity to contradict the world-famous physicist. Even Einstein looked surprised at first, although as a student in Zurich he had been notorious for his casual if not rude attitude towards his own professors. Einstein thought for a moment about what he had said, and then smiled. His Hungarian friend was right.38

  Within a year of meeting Einstein, Leo Szilard felt that he knew the great physicist well enough to ask him a favour. Would he take a special seminar on statistical mechanics? Einstein agreed, and in the winter term of 1921 Szilard invited a select group of friends to take part in the seminar on this area of physics that seeks to explain the properties of a system by applying statistical methods to its atomic or molecular constituents. The course was a great success, and it gave Szilard the inspiration he needed for his doctoral thesis. According to Wigner, it was a ‘splendid seminar… Einstein beautifully projected the spirit of the theory and showed us its inner workings’.39

  As well as Eugene Wigner, Szilard invited three other Hungarian friends studying in Berlin to Einstein’s course: John von Neumann, who would play a key role in the development of the computer in the cold war, Dennis Gabor, who later invented holography, and Albert Kornfeld, an engineering student who was staying in the same apartment block as Leo and his brother Bela. Wigner and von Neumann later worked on the Manhattan Project with Szilard, as did another of his Hungarian friends, Edward Teller, who came to Germany in 1926. Not only were they from the same country, but all four men (as well as Gabor) came from the same quarter of Budapest. They were christened the Hungarian Quartet by Wigner.40 These four brilliant minds helped to create the most terrible weapons the world has seen – the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. They also opened the door to the ultimate weapon – the cobalt doomsday bomb. For this, and for their hawkish stance in the cold war, Edward Teller and John von Neumann (who came to Berlin to study with Haber) would later become models for the fictional Dr Strangelove.