Student friends in Hanover, outside the flying school (c. 1947): from left, Dailonis Stauvers, Boris Bogdanovs, Andrejs Bičevskis and Mischka.
IN the photograph taken outside the flying school that was their official residence as displaced persons, Mischka and three fellow students, friends from Riga days, look on top of the world. They are good-looking, upstanding, even well dressed; who would think they were DPs? Bičevskis had happy memories of their student days in Hanover. He and Mischka and their friends hung out together and told a lot of jokes, Bičevskis told me; they were committed to not taking life too seriously. They didn’t dwell on the past or think about what had been lost during the war. They were enjoying the present and looking forward to the future.
At first glance, that doesn’t seem much like the Misha I knew, who took life seriously and, moreover, felt this was a human obligation. It isn’t exactly the Mischka reflected in the correspondence and diaries of the Hanover period either. There is a lot of philosophical musing in these documents, and a lot of anxiety—about his studies, his health, his girlfriends— which is sometimes addressed in oblique philosophical terms. And yet I can more or less believe in the Bičevskis version. Along with the essentially serious Misha, there was always another Misha around, someone who enjoyed company and flourished in it. It can’t have hurt, back in Hanover with his Riga friends, that he was the best-looking of the bunch (surely this is an objective judgement, not just my prejudice) as well as the brightest. That was the person his first wife, Helga, remembers meeting in 1948. Half a century later, I knew him too: the impromptu Misha, who was always ready to go out to celebrate nothing in particular or, if we stayed home, might dance me round the dining room table on the way to make dinner. Very early in our acquaintance, before I knew all this about him, I was surprised to find that Misha was in his element at parties, ‘drifting around’, as he would put it, with a relaxed half-smile on his lips, talking easily to everyone (or at least everyone but any Prominenz or self-important person who happened to be present, to whom he would also talk, but in a more challenging and less friendly way).
Misha kept many photos from the Hanover period, small, unlabelled black-and-white shots of him out on country walks with various unidentified girls, in groups at the university, running and pole vaulting at sporting meets. We can even document the fact that Mischka, as well as Misha, was capable of clowning around, because there are some photographs of that as well. Of course, the face we present for a casual snapshot with friends on a day out is different from that of the diarist, writing alone in the evening, and who knows which face is the ‘real’ one. In the photos, unlike the diaries of this period, Mischka comes across as happy.
Hanover in 1946 was not everyone’s idea of an earthly paradise. The British zone was the most highly populated in Germany and had contained much of Germany’s industry. But by the end of the war, its industry was largely destroyed and its towns devastated by bombing and flooded with refugees. The region’s own agriculture was nowhere near strong enough to feed the influx, and the supply of agricultural products from other zones was unreliable to say the least. In the cold winter of 1946–47, the food crisis in the British zone’s cities, including Hanover, was bad enough to produce strikes and street protests that continued into the spring.
Hanover itself had been a ‘disaster zone’ when Allied troops first entered it in the spring of 1945, looking ‘like a wound in the earth rather than a city’, as one British war correspondent remembered: ‘I could not recognize anywhere: whole streets had disappeared, and squares and gardens with them, covered over in piles of brick and stone and mortar.’ Allied bombing had levelled the centre of the city and destroyed or severely damaged most of the houses, as well as knocking out electricity, water and sewage systems. When the British established their occupation regime, Mischka was not the only person to find them arrogant. ‘They were the new Herrenvolk and lived a life tantamount to apartheid,’ a historian writes. ‘The officers kept separate from the men, the Army from the Control Commission, and everyone from the Germans.’
The British approach to the universities, as they gradually reopened between the autumn of 1945 and the spring of 1946, was relatively laissez-faire. Denazification kept some professors in limbo for a while, but the technical universities (Technische Hochschulen) were less affected than the universities proper. As for the student body, Wehrmacht veterans came flooding back into the universities, causing the British anxiety about rising Nazi sentiments. To counteract this, and punish the Germans, the Allies required that German universities accept a DP contingent of up to 10 per cent of the new enrolment in 1946. This was a huge target, never reached and soon lowered, but it served its purpose for the fairly small group of DPs like Mischka and his friends who were actually qualified for university study.
University students were the most privileged of DPs. They were mainly ‘free-livers’, which meant that although they were registered in a DP camp, they actually lived elsewhere, usually in town. (‘Free-livers’ is UNRRA’s terminology; it was a category of DPs for whom they remained responsible but about whom they knew very little.) Living privat, which is what Olga calls it in her letter, meant renting a room from a landlady, often a war widow, and paying in cigarettes (the DP cigarette ration was four packs a month, according to Stauvers’s recollection; cigarettes were essentially currency in Germany in the period before the Wdhrungsreform in 1947). Student lodgers would also be expected to help with heavy lifting round the house, and also sometimes contributed food from their DP rations, which their landlady would cook. Landladies often had books, pianos and pretty daughters. This was the way Misha had lived as a student in Dresden in 1944, and the way he and his friends lived as students in Hanover from the beginning of 1946.
There were more than a thousand DP students from the Baltic states in German universities in the British zone in 1946–47, with Latvians the largest group, probably in the range of 650–750. Hanover Technical University had more than a hundred DP students among its total of more than three thousand students, perhaps forty of them Latvians. Fifteen of them—including Mischka and his friends Stauvers, Bičevskis, Bogdanovs, Mārtiņ Kregŝde and Aleksandr Kors—were studying engineering. Among Mischka’s Hanover photos, members of this group appear often, separately and collectively, and he kept in touch with most of them for many years. The photo at the beginning of this chapter shows Mischka and his three closest friends outside the building of the former cadet flying school (Fliegerschule-Herrenhausen) in a suburb of Hanover, now the DP camp in which they were officially registered. They could have lived in the camp—which had rooms with four beds, with shower and lavatory along the corridor—but preferred to live outside in lodgings close by, all on the same street, Bičevskis remembers, but in different houses. (Stauvers fell in love with his landlady’s daughter.) They used to go to the Fliegerschule sometimes, though, to collect their rations, for lunch with table tennis or billiards afterwards and, in Misha’s case, to play the piano.
It was a great bonus for DPs who got into university to live outside the camps among Germans; it made them feel halfway normal, a Polish Jewish DP student remembered, able to believe in a future. That almost certainly applies to Mischka and his Latvian friends too. But in the case of these German-speaking Latvians, finishing their education in Germany was something they might well have done—and, in Mischka’s case, firmly intended to do—regardless of war. It was easy for them almost to forget that in actual fact they had landed at university in Hanover as wards of UNRRA whom war had forcibly displaced.
Hanover Technical University had come through the war without too much damage, other than to its buildings. But Mischka’s first impressions of the intellectual level of the institution—no doubt based on comparison with Barkhausen at Dresden—were not altogether positive. He wrote uneasily to Olga in May 1946 that he was feeling a bit as he had done back in Riga when he had had to transfer from his classical gymnasium to an inferior school: then, he ‘hadn’t wanted to go to school any more because it was just a way of passing the time’, and now ‘I have the unpleasant impression that the TH has nothing more to give me, nothing fundamental There may indeed have been problems, especially in theoretical physics, since some of Hanover’s theoretical positions (viewed with suspicion by the Nazis) had been filled by experimentalists. But a few weeks later, Mischka had discovered that there were actually some good (if not top) physicists in Hanover, ‘so perhaps something positive will come out of this semester’.
Although he was still studying electrical engineering, physics was what was on his mind. He reported almost reverentially to Olga on a talk by the great German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, from Göttingen, one of the founders of quantum mechanics:
Heisenberg is an unimposing, surprisingly young man [he was in his mid forties] with an unimposing voice [who gave] a paper completely without showmanship, absolutely unadorned, simple, clear and transparent. Conclusion: the more complicated a thing is, the more simply must one think. Heisenberg is one of the top people in the world.
This was an early indication of Mischka’s lifelong love affair not just with physics but specifically with theoretical physics. To be sure, in Dresden, Barkhausen had pulled him over to the experimental side, but as one of his Latvian friends commented at the time, that was something new for the ‘theorist’ Mischka had been in Riga. Mischka and Bičevskis seem to have briefly contemplated moving to Göttingen to work with Heisenberg and Otto Hahn (one of the discoverers of nuclear fission, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1944) before committing themselves to Hanover. Reflecting in a letter to Olga on the possibility of comparing human achievements in the natural sciences to those in philosophy and art, Mischka gave Heisenberg the edge over Goethe, if not over Beethoven.
Clearly Mischka had a commitment to science far beyond that of the run-of-the-mill student. But that didn’t mean that things were necessarily easy for him. Mischka liked learning, but he liked doing it in his own way. He was often resistant to being taught, and his teachers, accordingly, didn’t always appreciate his talents. All his life he had been very sensitive to what he called ‘the problem of academicism, of a teacher’s authority stifling independent thought’. In science and maths, he liked thinking up his own approaches and could be downright suspicious of those who tried to teach him standard techniques, which he suspected might compromise his sense of the whole. In Hanover, as earlier at the University of Riga, he tended to skip lectures and, in exams, insisted on working out his own proofs from scratch instead of reproducing the proofs that had been given in class. Nor did he always show the automatic respect for professors and the professorial status that was normal in German universities. No doubt, he wrote to a girlfriend [‘F.B.’] in 1946, he could become ‘a not so bad professor in high frequency technology’ (the area he had worked on with Barkhausen in Dresden), but he wasn’t sure that it was what he wanted: ‘I hate ordinariness and yearn for independent thinking.’
In science, Misha often had an instinctive understanding of phenomena, which he saw in pictures rather than words. It was a perennial issue for him that his mind operated differently from other people’s, and he was never sure whether his idiosyncratic way of approaching scientific problems made him intellectually inferior to other people or superior. This self-doubt was simultaneously assuaged and intensified by his mother’s unwavering belief in his genius. It was a problem all his life, as witness the musing on the topic he sent me early in our marriage: ‘First, I know—but better not admit!—that I am top. [But at the same time] I know that it is not true, that actually I am a fraud. By not admitting the first, I can keep also the second under wraps.’ Misha was a mature physicist with a solid reputation in his field when I met him, but it quickly became clear to me that some physicists saw him as a genius while others—probably the majority—ranked him lower or simply couldn’t understand him, and that this disparity of reactions worried him. Communicating his insights to other physicists was not easy, and my sense was that he did best when working with a collaborator who could act as a mediator. I experienced the communications problem at first-hand when he tried to teach me some physics: not only was it hard to understand him, but it was particularly hard when he thought he was making it completely simple.
In the Hanover period, things were complicated for Mischka by difficulties with concentration and memory that were evidently after-effects of the diphtheria or perhaps of wartime trauma in general. His concentration was ‘absolutely not good enough for anything theoretical, not even for having an idea, let alone working it out’. He could only study for about two hours before losing focus, and his brain ‘seemed like a tough mass, where an impression can be let in via a pinprick, which then closes up; it is somewhat comparable to paraffin on tar. God knows when it will be normal again.’
His first exams at Hanover in May 1947 were a misery to him—in letters to Olga he reported poor memory, sleeping badly, anxiety dreams and inadequate preparation, lamenting that ‘stupidity is now my normal condition, and that moments of a little clarity come only as an exception’. Not surprisingly, he ended up with what was in effect a C grade average (‘quite good’, which was second from the bottom of the German four-tiered system of passing grades). It was no better in the exams in October, when one professor actually gave him the lowest passing grade (‘satisfactory’) in electrotechnical theory, a subject in which he ought to have done well. He was outraged about this grade and tried to challenge it or at least get the professor to justify it, but to no avail.
The exam results didn’t give the whole picture, however. Even as one professor was giving him a low grade for electro-technical theory, another was so impressed by his work in a related field that he invited him to deliver a paper at an important colloquium attended by ‘the big men of the university and in industry’. ‘I am a bit out of place in this company,’ Mischka reported to Olga with satisfaction.
As a budding scientist, Mischka had another string to his bow: his contact with Fritz Sennheiser, who had arrived from Berlin to take up the chair in high-frequency physics and electro-acoustics. Mischka encountered Sennheiser in the lab in his first months at Hanover and was taken on as his assistant, apparently on the basis of what Sennheiser had heard of his work with Barkhausen in Dresden. One would think this would have pleased Mischka, but his account in a letter to Olga on 20 July 1946 doesn’t give that impression: he got the job ‘without having wanted it’, he writes, and seems, in this letter and all subsequent references, to view Sennheiser with a certain suspicion.
Sennheiser was in the process of setting up a high-frequency electro-acoustical business that was soon to become spectacularly successful, and another person in Mischka’s place might have welcomed the chance to get in on the ground floor. But Mischka seems to have thought Sennheiser was trying to pigeonhole him as someone who could solve technical problems, whereas he was already aspiring to the theoretical side of physics. Perhaps, in addition, he simply didn’t much like the man. In the course of denouncing the professor who had given him the ‘satisfactory’ grade in a letter to Olga, he noted in passing that Sennheiser belonged to the same species— ‘a learned man, but no Personlichkeif. Personlichkeit is defined as ‘personality’ according to the dictionary, but in Mischka’s usage it conveys something between individuality and depth of character. I take it that he found Sennheiser (whose later publicity photos radiate genial bonhomie) rather shallow and uninteresting as a person.
At this point, Sennheiser certainly seemed to like Mischka, or at any rate to think highly of his abilities. Indeed, given Mischka’s prior experience at VEF and with Barkhausen, he was a lucky find. Very soon after their first discussion in Hanover, Sennheiser took Mischka out to his other lab, part of his electro-acoustical business, in the village of Wennebostel outside Hanover (it had been moved there during the war to be safe from bombing) and immediately asked if he would be interested in taking a job there after graduation. Mischka’s answer was that after graduation he wanted to go to Göttingen to study physics, which Sennheiser accepted. As Mischka remarked to his mother, at least ‘I have already got a guarantee of a job if I should want to get married.’ It’s a surprise to have marriage suddenly coming into the picture, but this may be connected to his relationship at the time with the unknown ‘F.B.’, to whom he also reported the job offer. He had been expecting the offer, he told F.B., and it ‘would have guaranteed a quite viable, professionally not uninteresting future for me’. But ‘I turned it down, of course, without the slightest hesitation. I must not bind myself, limit my development.’
Sennheiser was still in the picture at Easter 1947, when he ‘had the tactlessness to set a date for 31 April’, thus preventing Misha’s planned trip to his mother’s for the holiday. A year later they had a reasonably successful conversation about some work that Mischka had given Sennheiser to read: Sennheiser ‘made quite an impressive impression’, he wrote, the awkwardness of the phrasing suggesting his uneasiness about the man, despite the unusually positive evaluation. A few months after that, Mischka went to talk to Sennheiser about supervising him in a possible doctoral thesis on acoustics, indicating a major shift in their relations, at least from Mischka’s point of view. But the conversation went badly. Sennheiser didn’t fully understand the problem Mischka was proposing to investigate and thought of it as experimental rather than theoretical. He also seems to have been steering Mischka to a possible job as an experimental physicist with Northwestern Radio Hamburg. This, or perhaps Olga’s positive reaction to the idea, very much annoyed Mischka: ‘A job like that would be just killing time … The things that interest me to work on in the long term don’t need any Hamburg Radio. I can do them at my writing desk.’
Mischka gave up the idea of specialising in acoustics and doing a doctorate with Sennheiser. In their final conversation, he had discovered ‘something that is not surprising and quite natural: Sennheiser doesn’t like me’. It may not have been surprising, given that Mischka didn’t particularly like Sennheiser either, but it obviously hurt. He used to mention him sometimes to me (though I then had no clear idea who he was), and there was always an edge in his voice. Sennheiser had shown himself to be in the category of scientists who didn’t appreciate and were perhaps even jealous of Mischka’s special insights and instinctive feel for physics, or at least recognised them only on the technical and experimental level, not the theoretical. ‘So much for Sennheiser,’ Mischka ended his report to Olga. But perhaps a feeling of disappointment or missed opportunity remained. The Wennebostel lab was the basis for the Sennheiser Electronic Corporation, founded in June 1945, which was to grow into one of the world’s foremost developers and producers of audiotechnology: voltmeters (the first product, probably what they were working on when Misha first went), microphones, headphones, telephone accessories and so on. The company is still flourishing today, according to the web, and Sennheiser is remembered as ‘a legend in audio’. Ten years older than Mischka, he outlived him by more than ten years, dying at the age of ninety-eight in 2010.
German professors are quite frequently mentioned in Mischka’s letters, German students hardly ever, or at least not the males. The DP students and the native Germans didn’t mix much, apparently: there was a tinge of condescension on the German side, according to the recollections of Mischka’s friends Bičevskis and Stauvers, perhaps related to the fact that a substantial proportion of the Germans were former active or reserve officers in the German armed forces, often overt or covert Nazi sympathisers.
A new note of anti-Germanism is evident in Mischka’s letters of the Hanover period. His adolescent pro-Germanism had completely disappeared, and his tone when he wrote of Germans, individually or collectively, was often critical. Writing to Olga, he described a potential landlord as ‘a typical German [the word being given in Latvian, thus invoking unfavourable stereotypes of Baltic Germans]—pigheaded, thick-skinned and easygoing’, though ‘withall polite and obliging’. Mischka had a tendency to describe Germans that he encountered casually almost as ethnographic specimens: exhibit A, an ‘idealistic Nazi’ whose patriotic education had been so perfect that he didn’t even realise that was what he was; exhibit B, an upper-class German manager met on a train who was ‘naturally a Communist idealist’ (that ‘naturally’ is typical Misha, conveying his ironic appreciation of the predictable unpredictability of the world at the level of individuals and atoms).
On the rare occasion that he met a German he liked, it was flagged as an exception. ‘Even among Germans there are some positive people,’ he wrote of his meeting with the international-minded Professor Erich Obst, who held the chair of geography at Hanover and was planning to set up an International University in Bremen. I did a bit of research on Obst and discovered that he doesn’t look all that positive in retrospect: he was one of those German colonial geographers whose geopolitical bent made them, initially at least, sympathetic to the Nazis, but could be reconfigured after the war as internationalism. The trouble with doing research, however, is that one may end up knowing more about the subject than Mischka did. From his point of view, Obst was a non-nationalist German whose ‘youthful enthusiasm’ and humanistic-philosophical bent were appealing.
The other thing that was appealing about Obst was his friendliness. Evidently viewing multilingual Mischka as a potential teacher at his International University, Obst invited him and another student out to his house for tea—a most unusual gesture from a German God-Professor to students other than his own—and, in parting, urged them warmly to come back. It wasn’t often that Mischka encountered such gratuitous friendliness in Germany, and it moved him, perhaps disproportionately. I remember that kind of overreaction from my own foreign-student days in England, and I wasn’t even a displaced person. Mischka and Bičevskis reacted similarly to the kindly interest of Miss Broadhurst, formerly of UNRRA, who, after moving to Canada at the end of her posting, unexpectedly wrote the two of them a friendly letter: they were ‘moved almost to tears’, Bičevskis remembered, as they composed their reply.
If Mischka and his Latvian friends didn’t have much to do with German men of their own age, the situation was quite different with regard to young (and even not-so-young) German women. Presentable young German men were thin on the ground because of war losses, and healthy, educated, German-speaking DPs were consequently in great demand. Bičevskis was too shy to take advantage of these opportunities, according to his own report, and after a few years met and married a Latvian girl. At the other extreme in the little group of friends, Boris Bogdanovs was the Don Juan—a good dancer who went in for dancing competitions and had multiple affairs with war widows (who gave him their husbands’ clothes and shoes). One girlfriend, the daughter of a very rich German business family, wanted to marry him, but the family disapproved and sent heavies to scare him off. Bogdanovs was always relieved when his syphilis tests came back negative, Bičevskis recalled, but his friends were more amused by his exploits than judgemental.
Mischka, however, took the whole question very seriously, and agonised in his diary about whether the Bogdanovs approach to women was permissible. But it was himself he was judging (or deciding not to judge) rather than Boris. Mischka was neither as promiscuous as Boris nor as lighthearted and open about affairs, but he too was not short of offers, both of sex and marriage, from German girls.
One such sexual offer that Mischka evidently accepted came from an ‘experienced woman’ with a child from a former relationship. Given the prevalence of rape by soldiers as well as the general breakdown of social norms at the end of the war, a whole cohort of German women were undoubtedly sexually experienced, not necessarily by choice. Mischka did not reflect on the circumstances in which his temporary partner had acquired her experience, but he judged her for it. She would be ‘ideal company for Boris’, he wrote in his diary at the beginning of their acquaintance; moreover, she was a person without depth or independence of mind, an ‘absolute average’, as one might expect of a German. Not to mention calculating and materialistic. But it would do him no harm to ‘go through a training in superficiality’ through an affair with her, Mischka reflected, and the inevitable eventual parting wouldn’t particularly hurt her as girls ‘don’t take it so tragically, if one doesn’t take it so tragically oneself’. This, of course, implies that Mischka was going against the grain of his own habit of ‘taking things tragically’. But it’s still uncharacteristically mean, even if slightly mitigated by the fact—revealed in a letter to Olga, though not in the diary—that the experienced woman had ultimately found a better marriage prospect and dumped him. (I don’t know what Olga thought of this story, but I thought it served him right.)
In Mischka’s diary, there are several drafts of letters in which he earnestly explains to German girlfriends why he is not interested in marrying them. One explanation was that he didn’t feel ready for marriage, and saw it more as a restriction on his future development than something positive. The other explanation was that he was in love with someone else, but she had been locked up in the Soviet zone and therefore inaccessible since the end of the war. Undoubtedly both these things were true: Mischka was too honest to lie, even about such awkward matters. But of course there were contradictions here: if he was in love with Nanni, he should be actively trying to get her to come out and marry him, which he wasn’t; and he shouldn’t be having affairs with other people, which he was. For someone like Mischka, these contradictions were painful, a pain he passed in varying degrees to Nanni and his German girlfriends in the West.
Nanni, his ‘great love from Dresden’, had been being kept ‘in reserve’, as he explained in one of these letters, but now (January 1948) ‘might be flying the coop’ (getting out of the Soviet zone). She ‘might be his future’, he wrote—although in the same paragraph he expressed his general reservations about marriage.
Since the end of the war, Nanni had been working in her father’s medical practice in Chemnitz. She had suspended her university studies in 1944, perhaps involuntarily: the disruption at universities in the Soviet zone was more profound than in the Western zones, and a ruthless purge of Nazi sympathisers among the professors, together with mass flight to the West, left only a quarter of the old professoriate in place when the universities reopened in 1946. To complicate matters further for a ‘bourgeois’ student like Nanni, the universities were also required to practise affirmative action in enrolment on behalf of working-class students, who should constitute at least 30 per cent of total enrolment. Still, whether it was Nanni’s fault or not, Mischka’s letters to her have an underlying motif of dissatisfaction on his part both at the ‘lack of independence’ that kept her tied to her family and at her lack of initiative on the question of finishing her university studies.
Their correspondence continued, but with obvious tensions. In the autumn of 1946, when Mischka heard from Nanni that she was enrolling in a local trade school, he hit the roof, denouncing trade schools root and branch as a form of anti-enlightenment whose effect was to suppress the faculty of independent thought, and expressing his great personal disappointment at her decision. In reporting this to Olga, he noted that his letter in response might have been a bit ‘shattering’ to Nanni, as indeed it might, but that it was really appalling that Nanni should have taken what even she admitted to be a step backwards: ‘the disappointing thing, which is actually so typical … is the recidivism: back home again, straight back into the old pattern’. A few months later, Nanni wrote with anxious whimsy that ‘one has the impression that Hanover wants to break diplomatic relations with the state of Saxony, particularly Lichtenwalde [the suburb of Chemnitz where her family lived]. Lichtenwalde awaits clarification on the part of Hanover-Weitenhausen’.
Travel between the Soviet zone and the West had been risky in the first months after the end of the war, but then became reasonably easy, though you were supposed to get an official inter-zonal pass from the Soviet authorities. Nanni could therefore have come to the West without too much difficulty at any time in this period, if she had felt it possible to leave her family. But by mid 1947, regulation of inter-zonal travel was tightening up again, as the Cold War took hold and Germany moved towards permanent division into two successor states (the Federal Republic of Germany, based on the postwar American, British and French occupation zones, and the German Democratic Republic, based on the Soviet zone). It was beginning to look like a now-or-never situation for those who, like Nanni, had some inclination to leave but had not previously made up their minds. At the same time, the call of family responsibilities on Nanni was weakening. Her younger brother Roland was about to finish school and would probably leave home to go to university. Her sister Lilo crossed the border in May 1947, visiting Mischka in Hanover before settling somewhere in the West. And then, in June, it was Nanni’s turn to make the trip.
Travel from the Soviet zone was already becoming hazardous by the summer of 1947, with persons caught crossing without permission liable to be interned or sent to work in the Saxon uranium mines. Nanni escaped this, but her trip wasn’t a success. It was bad timing as far as Mischka was concerned: his affair with the ‘experienced’ woman was still either on or very recently over, and the reunion with Nanni clearly went badly. Whatever her original intentions, Nanni went back to Chemnitz after about a week.
The return trip was miserable, with an overnight stay at the border at a primitive barracks (‘pigs in their stalls have cleaner conditions than people sleeping there on straw that hasn’t been changed for at least a month’), and Nanni was clearly rattled by the whole experience. In a long letter written quickly in pencil after she got home, she implicitly reproached Mischka for double standards in having his fun with other women while she was shut up in Chemnitz, and moreover (this accusation was a bit more deeply buried) treating her as damaged goods because of her lack of ‘purity’. While this was all expressed in abstract terms in the guise of a philosophical discussion of man–woman relations, it naturally caught Mischka on the raw, and he fired off a priggish and angry letter harshly rebutting the implicit charges as well as correcting her understanding of the philosophical issues involved. (Poor Nanni. Assuming she was not naturally philosophically inclined, as the bulk of her correspondence suggests, she had made a big effort to meet Mischka’s standards with her painstaking references to Kant and Schopenhauer.) He couldn’t imagine what in their conversations in Hanover could have given her the impression he regarded her as tainted: ‘What I was talking about was the horrifying and disappointing cheapness of people, girls and young men alike, who give themselves away for a couple of Reichsmarks.’
Nanni must have been sadly discouraged, but she still did not want to break off the relationship. In August, she sent Mischka greetings from Berlin, and in September a jocular letter to her ‘dear faithless tomato’, followed three days later by a less jocular plea that Mischka break his ‘icy cold silence’ and let her hear from him. But apart from the quarrel and the guilt, the bottom line was that they could no longer pretend that their separation was involuntary, something neither of them could change. Nanni, it was clear, could have decided, and still could decide, to leave her home permanently and come West. Mischka, for his part, could have urged her before her visit to come and marry him (which there is no indication he did); he could have repeated his urging after her visit instead of telling her off. But neither of them was ready to risk it. Mutual inaction left both of them feeling injured, unloved and increasingly distrustful.
Mischka’s other passion was sport, and it still mattered enough to him half a century later that he told me a lot about it. It was the unproblematic part of his life, I gathered, something he was good at and enjoyed that carried no guilt and relatively little anxiety. His Hanover sports club (Turnklub zu Hanover) was the centre of his social life and, incidentally, the place where he met most of his German girlfriends (the ‘experienced woman’, for example, was a world-class long jumper). Locating the sports club—which in Germany was always open to everyone—was always the first thing he did in a new city, and he felt at a loss when he went to America and found out that it wasn’t so easy there. As we once happened to walk past the New York Athletic Club in Manhattan, he related his chagrin at showing up on its doorstep shortly after his arrival in New York, to discover that it was an exclusive, membership-only social club, formally inaccessible to women and informally to Jews, blacks and penniless foreign immigrants.
Pole vaulting was Mischka’s main athletic event in Germany, though he ran in 800-metres races and did some high jumping and long jumping as well. Bičevskis described him as ‘typically fearless’ as a pole vaulter, which you needed to be in the days of bamboo poles and landing on hard ground. Actually Mischka was already looking for a replacement for the bamboo pole that, along with his knapsack full of physics journals, belongs to my Dick Whittington picture of him in 1944-45. It was before the days of flexible fibreglass poles, which started to come into use in the 1950s and greatly improved performance, but Mischka experimented briefly in 1946 with one of the new aluminium poles, acquired with the help of a sympathetic UNRRA official, which, however, turned out to be too short.
He had started to analyse his pole-vaulting style in order to improve his performance, and this no doubt explains the profusion of small black-and-white photos of Mischka in flight, sports pants flapping, like a large and rather ungainly bird. Bičevskis said the analytic approach didn’t actually improve Mischka’s results—but then, as a top athlete himself, member of a basketball team that competed in Paris in May 1947, Bičevskis had high standards. Mischka’s results were good enough to make him the winner at the British zonal championships in August 1946. These were DP competitions, but Mischka was hoping to compete at the German national and international level. According to the story he told me, he was in line for selection when the German team decided not to accept DPs, even though on form he was better than the German who ultimately won the pole-vaulting competition.
Olga probably read the frequent and detailed discussions of sports events and preparations in Mischka’s letters in much the same indulgent but not deeply interested spirit that I later did. On philosophical discussions, however, she did better. In Mischka’s letters, philosophy rivalled sports, study and girlfriends as favourite topics, and Olga’s replies were reliably interested and encouraging, if not always fully comprehending. I, on the other hand, was tempted to skip them altogether. My low tolerance/lack of aptitude for philosophical generalisation was well known to Misha, who tolerated it as a deformation professionelle of historians. I felt guilty, even so, as I flipped through the closely written pages of philosophical argument (all in German, and handwritten), but the problem was that when it veered off into philosophy of science, I could barely understand it. When, as happened with about equal frequency, it involved abstract discussions of men-women relationships, I just wanted, in my empirical historian’s way, to know which specific relationship of his own he was really talking about.
There is a whole section of his papers, probably dating from 1947, devoted to an article on nihilism by one Manfred Buttner, which had recently stirred up controversy. Mischka’s contribution—neatly typed out, headed ‘A Response’ and signed by Michael Danos, student in electrotechnics, Hanover—was very likely published, though I don’t know where. For a long time, I avoided reading this essay carefully because I thought he was off on his man-woman/ Bogdanovs-sex musings again. So when I finally read it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not about sex but rather a Nietzschean reflection on the plight of man without God, which clearly had practical significance for Mischka, a lifelong atheist:
From the nihilist standpoint, a correct life leads to the same results as one built on ‘Christian truths’, but it demands incomparably more strength to carry through, since you have the responsibility to bear it all alone, and there is no control over your actions except your own. It is no wonder that this burden may finally be too heavy, that so many people turn off this road and find themselves some support. The beauty of nihilism is that life lies unrestricted before you, that you stand alone in the storm. If one takes this position, then one grows and gains a strength whose potential would otherwise be unthinkable. But one can also be destroyed.
If Mischka still felt himself to be standing alone in the storm, his worry about being destroyed as a scientist by trauma-related failures of concentration and memory was starting to recede by the time he took his final exams at Hanover in the spring of 1948. Already in the autumn of 1947 he had started to notice an improvement in intellectual stamina: ‘It seems as if I might be getting back to normal again. My memory is getting ready to want to return.’ A few months later, he was more, if not completely, confident: ‘The gap seems to have closed.’ He could once again plumb the depths of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which he had thought irretrievably lost after his sighting of the Jewish graves in Riga in 1943. He now felt that ‘there was a possibility of regaining all that I once possessed, meaning also concentration and the ability to grasp problems precisely and finally see a way of solving them’. Olga had never doubted that this would eventually happen, he noted, but he had, and such doubts still sometimes plagued him. ‘But there is no doubt, the gap has been closed.’
Die Schlucht scheint sich geschlossen zu haben. That phrase jumped out at me from his diary. Geschlossen was what he kept saying in Washington DC in August 1999, after the first of two strokes that a week later killed him. He had lost his English, and I, with my poor German, was struggling, as in a nightmare, to understand him. I thought he meant by geschlossen that something was shutting down on him, despite his stubborn efforts to keep it open. But there was remarkable consistency over the years of Mischka’s way of thinking, so now I surmise that it was really the opposite: he was saying that a gap had opened up (as when he stopped reacting to the Moonlight Sonata), but he was doing his best to close it.
Whatever he meant, it was typical Mischka to treat a stroke as a scientific problem to be solved by his own, rather than the doctors’, efforts. If not for geschlossen, and the awfulness of not understanding what he was trying to tell me, I might not have spent the 2000s trying to improve my German. My story was that I was working on German in order to write this book, but actually it was magical thinking a la Joan Didion: next time Misha urgently needed me to understand his German, I would be ready.
Along with Mischka’s renewed confidence in his mental powers in 1947-48 came a growing sense that he was getting the hang of quantum nuclear physics. As always with Mischka, that meant that he was beginning to understand it well enough to see anomalies in the conventional wisdom— that is, to strike out on his own. He had noticed that one of the standard axioms ‘doesn’t seem to work’, as he wrote to Olga in March 1947, and ‘the exciting thing is that the thing that doesn’t seem to fit is a universally acknowledged fact’. Eighteen months later, he reported with pleasure that he had independently arrived at the same conclusion about one such anomaly that had just been reached by three of the great physicists—Heisenburg, Max von Laue and Wolfgang Paul—at a seminar in Göttingen.
Mischka graduated from Hanover Technical University in May 1948 with the same ‘quite good’ grade that he had got in his exams the previous year. But it no longer mattered much, since he had found a mentor who recognised his abilities. This was the theoretical physicist Hans Jensen, whose courses in atomic (that is, nuclear) physics Mischka had taken since the summer semester of 1946. Jensen, though young, had made his name during the war with work on the separation of uranium isotypes; he had taught at Hanover TH since 1941 and had recently been appointed professor, though not the top grade of ordinarius. There are only occasional mentions of Jensen in Mischka’s correspondence before his graduation, although in his diary for July 1946 he notes, in the midst of a lot of Sturm und Drang about his personal life, an epiphany in the middle of Jensen’s seminar on atomic physics: when he came out onto the street after the seminar, ‘the sun shone so beautifully that I felt really happy’. The next year, he reported that Jensen had encouraged him to work on a problem whose solution had the potential to be ‘an event in the field’.
Straight after his graduation, Mischka started work as Jensen’s assistant in the Hanover Institute for Theoretical Physics. It was his first real adult job. Assistent is more like a young right-hand man to the professor than a teaching assistant or tutor in Anglophone universities, and Mischka was almost awed by his new responsibilities, including standing in for Jensen in classes when he was out of town—‘it’s something quite strange, having such independence as a substitute’. His excitement at moving into the world of theoretical physics did not prevent him noting ‘another joke of world history’, namely that after a period of dearth as far as girlfriends were concerned, he had just taken up with a young woman from the sports club by the name of Helga Heimers. (New girlfriends didn’t usually get identified by their full names, so Olga was meant to take note.)
The association with Jensen brought a new direction and purpose to Mischka’s life that was to prove lasting. Mischka already knew about the ‘the overwhelming probability’ that in the winter semester Jensen would move to the University of Heidelberg to take up the position of ordinarius professor of theoretical physics there. The move was firmly decided by the autumn of 1948, by which time Mischka, in addition to working as Assistent, was also enrolled as a PhD student under Jensen. Jensen was going to Heidelberg in January of the new year. And his scientific assistant and PhD student, Michael Danos, aged twenty-six, was going with him.