The Night of the Physicists by Richard von Schirach

Author:Richard von Schirach [von Schirach, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haus Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2015-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Visions and Setbacks

Making jam

The mood of Heisenberg’s letters from Berlin or Hechingen to his ‘Dear Li’ in Urfeld during the last three years of the war strikes one as almost idle compared to this spirit of optimism carried by an unshakeable belief in victory. It is sheer deprivation that drives him to pick the fruit trees in the institute’s garden clean, then preserve the fruit or make it into jam for his family. He has to provide for his wife Elisabeth, who is sitting in Urfeld on Lake Walchensee with five small children constantly wondering how to make ends meet. And it grows more arduous with every passing day. His messages of success now read: ‘Things are going as incredibly well as ever here. Yesterday I fought for three hours to purchase a hundredweight of apples in Boll.’ Back in May 1943 he had already asked: ‘Just write and tell me what I should preserve and how. Mum can show me the purely technical aspects. What you really must send are the necessary containers – bottles and jars.’

Now though, in the last year of the war, even the simplest things have become a chore. It can take hours to send a parcel of fruit to Urfeld. ‘One has to queue up at the railway postal office before eight, then stand there for an hour, only to run the risk that the quota is already full. I already wrote to you that there is a ban on sending any fruit out of Württemberg.’

Scarcity is tangible everywhere. Heisenberg is struck by how thin everyone around him has become. While plutonium production is running at full speed in Hanford, Germans are busy thinking about egg ration cards, cancelled or strafed trains, and service in the Volks­sturm, the national militia. His letters only rarely mention happy times in Hechingen: ‘We sit together in the evenings listening to music and talking about good books – and the war seems like just a bad dream.’ His wife also feels ‘incredibly melancholy’ as she listens to Schubert’s B-flat major piano trio amid the firewood and coal shortages in Urfeld, and recalls Heisenberg’s music-making and the time when they ‘breathed warm air smelling of good things and happily lived life to the full’.

There is little comforting news from his friends and colleagues either: a card from the great physicist and quantum ‘mechanic’ Friedrich Hund tersely informs him that his Institute of Theoretical Physics has been destroyed by a high-explosive bomb; there are reports that Department Head Professor Wirtz’s wife has prepared a sackful of carrots but is not allowed to send it off; there are ideas about how to get hold of a plane for woodwork, and news of mushroom hunting, trouble with tradesmen, coal, firewood and milk for the children, travel bans and trivial matters such as whether one can get round the ban on transporting bicycles more than 100 kilometres by packing them in boxes or breaking up the journey into small stages.

‘Write to Osnabrück again

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