Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  • 3 •

  TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION

  DURING THE SPRING of 1946 I wrote my fellowship thesis on two problems in number theory that I had solved. The main subject of the thesis was a proof of a conjecture made by Hermann Minkowski, the mathematician who had not only been a pioneer in number theory but was also one of the first to grasp the mathematical implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The thesis was about number theory and had nothing to do with relativity. In September I returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Trinity College. During the summer of 1946 I lived with my family in London. My father sometimes invited me to lunch with him at the Royal College of Music when interesting people were there. The most memorable of these lunches was with Richard Strauss, the legendary German composer who was shunned by the international musical community after the war because he had been president of the Reichsmusikkammer, an official government organization, under the Hitler regime. My father believed strongly in reconciliation and invited Strauss to London as a gesture of friendship. As a representative of the younger generation, I helped to give Strauss a warm welcome in England. He was then over eighty years old but still vigorously alive and still writing marvelous music. He was happy to talk about the good old times before the First World War, when he was at the height of his creative powers and my father was a student in Dresden.

  The letters in this chapter are mostly from Germany. In 1947 there was a meeting of students at the University of Münster. This was the first opportunity for the German students to meet with students from other countries. Since Münster was in the British zone of occupation, the meeting was organized by the British military authorities. I took part, eager to meet with our enemies and hoping to achieve reconciliation with them as my father had with Strauss. I had killed enough Germans, and I wanted to make peace with the survivors. We all knew that the Germans had committed atrocities, and we had too. The victims who died in the camp at Bergen-Belsen were about as many as those who died in the firestorm at Dresden. I felt some personal responsibility for those who died at Dresden. To reach a tolerably peaceful world, we needed reconciliation more than we needed justice.

  AUGUST 8, 1947,

  c/o University Education Control Officer, HQ Mil Gov R B Münster, British Army on the Rhine

  I have arrived here safely and am finding this holiday very satisfactory. Particularly I am pleased to find that I understand almost all of the German lectures and conversation and can talk myself without as much difficulty as several members of our party. In fact, I was astonished to find on one occasion that a German mistook me for a German! The course is a triumph of organisation. Roughly, there are 150 students here, half from Münster university, a quarter from the rest of Germany, and a quarter from abroad including twenty English. We live and have meals in a large, well-designed, and extremely solid building called the Borromaeum, which is the Catholic Theological College (the students who live here in term-time are now mostly away). It is made of reinforced concrete, even the roof is made of concrete and faced with slate afterwards, so that it stood up to the bombing very well. It is about two-thirds intact.

  We have lectures each morning, given by all kinds of people, on historical and social subjects mainly. Some are dull, a few very good, and all are worthwhile from the point of view of learning the language. In the afternoons are discussions on the lectures, also sightseeing tours, exhibitions etc. In the evenings always some form of entertainment, concert, film, dance or party. Last night we had a symphony concert by the Münster Municipal Orchestra (a very good orchestra with complete outfit of evening dress etc. and I should say forty or fifty members) in a concert hall seating about two thousand, which lies some way outside the town and used to be the concert hall of a German army barracks, and so escaped destruction. The main work was Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, very solid and Germanic. We had a conducted tour over the ruins of the Cathedral, with the Catholic Bishop as guide. He is a middle-aged man, very energetic and with a great sense of humour, and made the tour interesting with all kinds of anecdotes. They are beginning to rebuild the cathedral, much to the annoyance of the non-Catholics, and it is a good indication of the position of the Catholics here that this is possible. The Catholic Church, in fact, seems to be the only body capable of getting things done effectively; this course would certainly have been impossible without their help. Here in the Borromaeum, for example, we live in beautifully clean and well-furnished bedrooms, with nuns to look after them and to cook for us.

  I share a room with a student of languages from Freiburg, who is a very pleasant companion. He lived in Hungary before the war, did five years in the German navy, and is now setting himself to master one fresh language every year. Since the war he has become fluent in French and English, next year comes Russian and the year after Spanish. In general, almost all the Germans seem to be equally energetic. The rations here are a share-out of British rations for the foreigners and of German rations for the Germans. As a result, the Germans consider themselves very well off; for us it is a bit of a strain, but fortunately we can slink off to the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) from time to time to supplement the diet. The life is for us, naturally, rather exhausting, but we shan’t come to any harm. The German students are as one would expect, serious-minded and industrious and ready to talk about metaphysics and theology at any length; they seldom mention food difficulties, and they look, especially the girls, very far from moribund.

  Tonight I have been to the Cinema, a large wooden building, in a pleasant style of architecture, one of the few which have been put up since the war. The film was In Jenen Tagen and was a first-rate effort, of which more will probably be heard. It was made in Hamburg, the first film to be made in the British zone since the war. As there are no film studios in this zone, it was taken entirely in the open air, but is none the worse for that. It is the story of a car, and of various people who drove it, beginning with the Jewish pianist who had to leave it behind in 1933; later it was requisitioned and went with the army to Russia; at the end it crashed into a wall during the fighting in Berlin and was abandoned, to be finally pulled to pieces by looters in search of spare parts. I went with a law student who was a wireless operator with the Luftwaffe in Russia, and he said the Russian scenes were excellent. He also talked a lot about the black market, which I intend to investigate myself one of these evenings.

  I might give a rough idea of the general impression one gets from three days here. The first and most striking thing is the lack of strangeness when one walks round the town. Münster is indeed a Trümmerstadt; about 90 percent of the buildings in the inner town are totally destroyed; but the ruins are all overgrown with grass and vegetation and one hardly notices them. The prewar population was 120,000; during the war, because of efficient civil defense, they lost only about one thousand killed; now the population is about 90,000. The people look very like English people, the main difference being that though there are many fairly healthy looking children, there are very few babies. Trams and buses are crowded, but not impossibly so. We have had a lot of rain in the last three days (which is much welcomed as it is needed for the potato crop) but in spite of this there is nothing one could call dismal in the appearance of the town, and very little which would distinguish it from an English provincial cathedral town. Obviously one cannot tell much from such a superficial survey, and I shall perhaps change my mind in the next two weeks, but at present I have a very strong impression of Germany as a resilient and in general hopeful country. This is what the authorities want visitors to feel; on the street plan of Münster which one buys to find one’s way about, is printed in large letters “Auch eine Trümmerstadt kann und soll trotz Not und allen Erschwernisse im Aussehen ihrer Strassen und Burgersteige, im Bilde ihrer Anlagen und Gärten, von der Heimatverbundenheit dem Ordnungssinn und dem Aufbauwillen ihrer Behörden und Einwöhner sprechen.” It is no wonder if the French feel rather like Cato in Carthage when they come here.

  The message on the stree
t plan says, “Even a city of rubble can, in spite of losses and difficulties, speak of the love of home and the sense of order and the desire to rebuild of its leaders and its inhabitants, through the appearance of its streets and sidewalks, and the beauty of its monuments and gardens.” Long sentences go better in German than in English.

  AUGUST 13, 1947, BAOR, MÜNSTER

  Life here continues as interestingly as it began, and I shall have a good deal to say about it. I am writing in the very comfortable lounge of the NAAFI, where we English come for seclusion as well as for sustenance. It is, of course, rather uncomfortable from the moral point of view; but the Germans well know that we have this place, and so one can only be thankful for it. You may be interested to hear what happened to me personally in this connection. When we arrived I was full of good intentions, and said, if the Germans could go through the course on the rations provided by the authorities, then so could I, and it would be good for my soul. In fact, I stuck it for four days; after that time I was so limp that I could hardly take an intelligent part in conversation, and I was sleeping for ten or eleven hours each night, and also a good deal during the day. So finally on Saturday night I swallowed my pride and a great pile of NAAFI buns; the effect was immediate, and since then I have been coming here regularly and living like a normal person. I thought it was a most useful demonstration of what this starvation means, even if I didn’t carry it far. The Germans, of course, are hardened to it by now; even so, their energy under the circumstances is astounding. A few of them are invited to come here with us from time to time; but it is an invidious business, and we cannot flood the place with Germans.

  On Sunday we went for a long charabanc tour of the Westfalen Wasserburgen, or moated castles. It was a lovely day, and we enjoyed it enormously. The castles themselves are picturesque, but still better was the Westphalian country and villages and woods through which we drove. It was a long day, and I got a great deal of German conversational practice as we drove along; when sitting in a charabanc and rattling over bumpy roads, one does not have to worry so much about endings! Also I spent some two hours talking Russian to a German student, and got on very well with him too; he is a Communist and is learning the language with the idea of being ready to make use of it when the time comes. (In this connection, another German remarked that this chap might have a good time while the next war lasted, but would be entbolschewisiert afterwards.) Unfortunately, he did not know the language as well as I, but it was good practice nevertheless. Last night we went to a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana by the Münster Opera Company, in the open air in the garden of the Schloss. The performance was not very good, but the theatre, a grassy amphitheatre overshadowed by magnificent beech and chestnut trees, and the beauty of the evening, and the silhouette of the ruined Schloss, amply made up for it.

  On another evening we had a party at the Borromaeum at which the university quartet played Mozart quartets, and I was sitting at an open window gazing out at a landscape of ruins and shrubs and flowers and trees and twilight and feeling distinctly mystical. After that, we had performances of national songs by each national group in turn, which was interesting for the purpose of discovering who belonged to which country. We gave them “Loch Lomond” and “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” and made up in vigour for what we lacked in quality. Afterwards came a succession of gradually dwindling groups, ten French, seven Dutch, six Swiss, two American, one Hungarian. Then at the end the Germans took over, and things really got going with Studentenlieder in large numbers.

  More valuable than any of the amusements laid on for us are the conversations which occur from time to time. I will describe two of these which made a deep impression on me. First, a gathering of five men including myself; one from the Nineteenth Light Infantry (the most famous division) of the Afrika Corps, one from the motor-torpedo-boat section of the German navy in the North Sea, one from the U-boat service, one from RAF Transport Command, and one from RAF Bomber Command. We began talking about the war years, and the different views which we had of the events of that time; gradually we drifted towards personal reminiscences. I said very little, but the Germans soon became warmed to their subject and unburdened their hearts without restraint. I have seldom found the Germans so genuinely and obviously happy; a description by the U-boat sailor of what happens when a petrol tanker is torpedoed was given with the most single-minded enthusiasm. It reminded me vividly of the descriptions we used to read at Bomber Command of successful incendiary attacks, and of the elation we felt when such attacks succeeded. It is ironic that when finally enemies meet and come together as friends, they should still be able to entertain each other with such stories.

  The second conversation which I wanted to mention occurred last night and was practically a monologue by a certain German Catholic theological student. He has a deep and resonant bass voice and talks in a slow and rhythmical way, with a solemn ring on the open vowels which is enough to send shivers down one’s spine. He talked about God and the Church and Germany and about his own history (he piloted dive-bombers for the Luftwaffe). It was just what one usually calls German Profundity, but to meet it in the flesh was a stirring experience. He really believes, in a way which in England would be impossible, that material sufferings and adventures are of no importance in comparison with the metaphysical realities behind them. He gave a description of Russia, with its vast distances and gloomy forests, its intense loneliness and the constant terror of attack by partisans, and at the end said, Yes, Russia would make anyone into a philosopher. Naturally, not all the Germans are tiefsinnig like this; but it is surprising how many of them are, when they begin talking. The German character is not as mythical as I had believed.

  Tomorrow we go for another long charabanc tour, this time to inspect the big Ruhr towns. Before I stop, I may as well put together a few definite conclusions which have emerged during the past week about the state of Germany. First, all the Germans agree that we must stay and occupy the country at least until the starvation is over. If we left now, they say there would at once be civil war between the towns (Communist and hungry) and the country (Christian and well-fed). Second, the general hatred and fear of Russia is quite genuine and not put on for our benefit. They believe firmly that we shall eventually be sensible enough to give them food and allow them to rebuild heavy industry so that they will be able to defend us against Russia; and, in fact, this does seem to be the best that they can hope for. Third, the democratic institutions that are being set up in this zone are held in general contempt; the outstanding problem that faces the government is to compel the country to deliver a fair share of food to the towns, and in this it has conspicuously failed. When I last wrote, I was much struck by the liveliness and energy of the people here and by the superficial normality of things. Now, after going a little further, I am struck by the deep psychological gulf which separates a country like Germany from one like England; here there is no academic and intellectual pessimism but a pessimism which permeates the people’s lives.

  Germany was then divided into four zones, the Northwest occupied by Britain, the Southwest by France, the Southeast by the United States, and the Northeast by the Soviet Union. The three Western zones later became West Germany, and the Soviet zone became East Germany.

  AUGUST 17, 1947, BAOR, MÜNSTER

  Since I last wrote, the main event has been the trip to the Ruhr on Thursday. It was arranged that we should do things thoroughly, and so we started with breakfast at six a.m. and got back to supper at eleven p.m. As it was a stiflingly hot day, we were fairly finished before the end of it; but it was very well worth it. The first place to be visited was the synthetic rubber factory at Huls, which you may remember the Americans bombed in 1943. We went over a representative selection of the works and had its functions and history explained by the members of the staff who were showing us round. The impression the place made is impossible to describe briefly; it is about forty acres in extent and consists of rectangular buildings laid out accurately, with str
aight roads separating them running the length and breadth of the plant; along the roads run a mass of enormous pipes and cables carrying the gases and liquids from one process to another. The buildings themselves are made of steel and concrete; there is a central control room of semicircular shape, where a man sitting at a desk in the middle has the state of each section of the works automatically displayed by electric indicators on the walls, and he can control the movements of every stage of the process by pressing various switches on his table. The whole factory was built in eighteen months, starting in the autumn of 1938. From 1940 to 1945 it produced a steady sixty thousand tons of rubber a year; the air raid of 1943 did not keep it out of action for long. It is now completely undamaged and is limited to an output of about fifteen thousand tons a year only by shortage of coal and methane gas, which are the necessary raw materials. It gave one a good idea of what the Germans can do when they get moving.

  A few years later we understood why the attempt by Bomber Command to destroy the German wartime economy had failed. In 1952 Der hochrote Hahn, a book by Hans Rumpf, who had been chief of the German firefighting services throughout the war, was published. The title means “The Flaming Red Rooster.” Before the war, when the plans for Bomber Command were begun, the British made a fundamental strategic mistake. We did trials to measure the effectiveness of high-explosive bombs and firebombs for destroying cities. The trials showed clearly that firebombs were five times as effective, weight for weight, as high explosives. So the decision was made to use firebombs as the primary weapon for destroying Germany. Our bombers were designed and built to carry firebombs in big quantity. High-explosive bombs were a small fraction of the payload. Our attacks were intended to destroy the German war industry by fire. Hans Rumpf understood that there was a simple way to defeat these attacks. The defense could afford to be selective. He put heavy concentrations of firefighters to protect essential military buildings and machinery and let the rest of the buildings burn. As a result, the essential factories in a destroyed city lost only about six weeks of production on the average. The workers were protected by adequate shelters, and the loss of their homes did not stop them from working. The synthetic rubber factory at Huls was a good example. It was repeatedly attacked by Bomber Command with heavy loads of firebombs and lost only a few weeks of production from start to finish. When we saw it in 1947, it looked as good as new.