Wedding of Mischka and Helga, 1949.
MISCHKA arrived in Heidelberg to take up his new job with Jensen on an early summer evening in May 1949. As he walked up the hill along Philosopher’s Way to the Physics Institute, his rucksack on his back, the river lay on his right hand and the old town beyond it. Heidelberg, a beautiful medieval town, was one of the only German cities not damaged by Allied bombing. Arriving there after Hanover was a shock in itself. But what made the moment transcendent for Mischka was that, as he climbed the hill, music came wafting down from the institute. It was the Beethoven Violin Concerto, played by Fritz Kreisler.
Misha told me the story in the 1990s, when we visited Heidelberg together. As always with Misha’s stories, it was related with such immediacy that it might have happened yesterday. He undoubtedly could have told me which movement of the Beethoven he had heard, if I had only thought to ask. In a letter written to his new girlfriend, Helga, back in Hanover, he told essentially the same story—another instance, like the Dresden bombing, of Misha’s unusual ability to keep his memories intact and unedited over half a century—but with less emphasis on transcendence and a few more technical details. It was ‘10.30 pm (22.30)’ when he arrived, he told Helga, and the Kreisler record was being played in Jensen’s room on an electric (not mechanical) turntable that was ‘not bad at all’.
Jensen greeted him hospitably, producing ‘the remains of the roast potatoes he had had for lunch’ for Mischka’s supper:
Then we sat down and started to talk … It got later and later: we had already once decided to stop talking and go to bed, and I was already standing at the door, but then we relapsed … and the [conversation] went on for an hour and a half (until 1.30) …
Mischka was bowled over by this. He knew Jensen already, of course, but not in a personal capacity. Hans Jensen was a great man in physics, if not quite of the stature of Heisenberg. During the war, he had been a member of the famous Uranium Club, led by Heisenberg and the physical chemist Paul Harteck, and he was also close to the Copenhagen physics group around Niels Bohr.
For Mischka, this evening arrival at the Heidelberg Physics Institute felt something like the pilgrim’s arrival in Mecca. But it was also the beginning of a friendship with Jensen that was of the greatest importance to Misha as a person as well as a physicist. Jensen, who remained a close friend and mentor until his death in the 1970s, played many roles in Misha’s life. He was his Doktorvater, the supervisor of his dissertation, who brought him into a particular area of physics and set him off asking particular kinds of questions. He became a family friend, particularly close to Helga but also on good terms with Misha’s second wife, Vicky. With his frequent visits to America after the Danoses moved there in 1951, he was a bridge between Misha’s new life and his old one.
One of the things that happened to Mischka in Heidelberg, as a result of joining Jensen’s theoretical physics group there, was that he came to see himself as part of a great tradition. He defined that great tradition in physics as international when I knew him, and so it was. But all the same, much of it took place in Germany, and Misha’s apprehension of it and sense of belonging came via Jensen and the (mainly German or German-trained) physicists who, as Jensen’s friends and collaborators, were habitual visitors at his institute in Heidelberg. Misha knew so much about the history of physics, and talked about it to me so often, that it came as a shock to realise how little of it he had known before he went to Heidelberg. Of course he knew about Heisenberg (‘one of the top people in the world’) as well as a few luminaries like Max Planck, Arnold Sommerfeld and Albert Einstein. But until his second year in Hanover, he hadn’t even heard of the notorious school of ‘German physics’ whose battle with ‘Jewish theory’ before the war had received Nazi patronage: he wrote to Olga that he had just
read with astonishment in [the American journal] Physical Letters what a hair-raising thing the Nazis had allowed, even in relation to theoretical physics: they tried to put a German physics in its place, not being embarrassed to write lampoons on Heisenberg, Sommerfeld and even Planck, the Nestor of German physicists.
That ‘German physics’ episode was remarkable, but even more remarkable were the developments in physics in Germany around the time of the First World War to which it was a reaction. The publication of Einstein’s relativity theory in Berlin inaugurated a period of breakneck advances in atomic and nuclear physics in the interwar years. The process was international, or at least pan-European, with the theoretical and experimental discoveries that led to nuclear fission and ultimately to the atom bomb coming in a brilliant sequence that leapfrogged national boundaries, starting in Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory in Cambridge, going through Göttingen, Copenhagen and Enrico Fermi’s laboratory in Rome, and culminating in Otto Hahn’s and Lise Meitner’s demonstration of nuclear fission, which won the Berlin-based Hahn a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1944. But, international though the community was, Germany was in the vanguard, and its contribution was particularly strong in the theoretical realm. In the ‘beautiful years’ for physics from the turn of the century until the early 1930s, Germany produced a string of Nobel Prize winners: Wilhelm Rontgen, Philipp Lenard, Max von Laue, Max Planck, Johannes Stark, Albert Einstein, James Franck and Werner Heisenberg. With the exception of three experimentalists—Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays, and Lenard and Stark, who would become the key figures in ‘German physics’ in the 1930s—all were theoretical physicists.
But then came the Nazis. They were against Jews, and Einstein and many of the other German theoretical physicists were Jewish. On top of that, they were against cosmopolitan theoretical ‘Jewish physics’ and in favour of experiment-based ‘German physics’. Experimentalists like Philipp Lenard, who held the chair at the University of Heidelberg, were particularly offended by ambitious theorising like Einstein’s relativity theorem, which lacked immediate experimental demonstration; they thought of it as pure speculative fantasy that would take physics away from its true path. You didn’t have to be Jewish to come under their condemnation: the young (Aryan) German Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer in quantum mechanics (almost as objectionable as relativity theory), was berated by Nazi periodicals as a ‘white Jew’.
The result of the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 was that about a quarter of all German theoretical physicists in university posts were dismissed because they were Jews, and a large emigration of physicists followed. Einstein led the way, publicly condemning the Nazi regime and becoming the number one villain in Nazi eyes, his property being seized and eventually a price being put on his head. Berlin, Göttingen and other great centres lost their senior physicists and a whole cohort of the coming generation, including the young Edward Teller and John von Neumann, who would later join the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and work for the United States on the production of the first atomic bomb.
The heyday of anti-modern, anti-theoretical ‘German physics’ was in the mid 1930s. By the end of the decade, it had become clear even to the Nazis that if they wanted to remain in the game of developing atomic energy, they couldn’t afford to dismiss modern theoretical physics. The nuclear fission effect identified in 1939 by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner (now, as a Jew, exiled in Stockholm) opened up the way to the production of huge amounts of energy, once scientists had worked out how to produce and control chain reactions. This was the task of the informal group known as the Uranium Club, of which Jensen, still in his thirties, was a member. Another key participant was the somewhat older Walther Bothe (born in 1891), who was Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Heidelberg when Mischka arrived there in 1949.
As war loomed, the Uranium Club’s activities were naturally of great interest to the German military and supported by them, but never on anything like the scale of the Manhattan Project in the United States, and without the short-term objective of building an atomic bomb. The Uranium Club physicists—whose lack of drive to invent a bomb probably reflected some disinclination to trust Hitler with such a weapon, even if less than they later claimed—focussed on building a ‘uranium machine’ (that is, a reactor) and got tied up with some false leads and technical problems along the way. On a wartime visit to Denmark immortalised in Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, Heisenberg tried to tell Niels Bohr in a roundabout manner that Germany was not making a bomb, but succeeded only in appalling him by the idea that it perhaps could. The young Jensen had a walk-on part in this story too, because it was he who, after a subsequent wartime visit to Copenhagen, made his colleague Heisenberg aware for the first time of the intensity of Bohr’s reaction. The Americans, meanwhile, were convinced that Germany, that world centre of nuclear physics, was well on the way to making a bomb and would naturally be trying to do so. It came as a shock at the end of the war to discover how far from the truth this was.
While ‘German physics’ was on the wane elsewhere, in Heidelberg it remained ascendant. Lenard, the experimentalist founder of the institute that Mischka entered in 1949, had held the chair at the university since 1907 and had criticised Einstein’s relativity theory as early as 1910; his antipathy to modern theoretical developments in physics predated his Nazi sympathies, which arose out of a sense of German national humiliation in the First World War. A local hero in Heidelberg, Lenard’s influence remained great even after his retirement in the early 1930s, and he insisted successfully that ‘only a master of experimental physics’ should be appointed to the chair, rejecting the candidates initially proposed as too ‘theoretical’ and one-sided. Walther Bothe was the compromise candidate, a distinguished experimentalist who, however, was not averse to modern theoretical physics. But Lenard’s supporters made Bothe’s tenure so uncomfortable that after two years, he retreated into the more congenial surroundings of Heidelberg’s Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, where he built Germany’s first cyclotron.
Thanks to the efforts of some ardent Nazi disciples of Lenard’s, the Heidelberg Physics Institute was already so judenfrei in 1933 that, in contrast to the rest of Germany’s physics institutes, there was no need for a purge. The main Nazi activist was a former student of Lenard’s, Ludwig Wesch, who became a lecturer professor of technical (applied) physics at Heidelberg in 1943. It was said that one of the reasons for Bothe’s precipitate flight to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute was that Wesch was in the habit of organising military drills in the loft above the office where he was trying to work. Though not of the same stature as a physicist as Lenard or Bothe, he was nevertheless a real scientist rather than a charlatan on the lines of Trofim Lysenko (the opponent of genetics in the Soviet Union), working primarily on defence-related radio technology during the war. But he was and remained a staunch opponent of modern theoretical physics.
For Jensen and his fellow members of the Uranium Club, the war’s end was a dangerous time. Agents of both the Soviet Union and the United States were running around scooping up nuclear scientists they thought might be useful for work on the bomb. The British whisked a group of Uranium Club leaders, including Heisenberg and Harteck, off to a secret holding place in England, Farm House, to try to find out the real story about the (non-existent) German bomb. The Farm House contingent were released and returned to Germany in the spring of 1946, Heisenberg becoming director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute (renamed for Max Planck, like other Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes, after Planck’s death in 1947) in Göttingen. Jensen in Hanover and Bothe in Heidelberg both remained at liberty, though they had to go through a not very rigorous denazification process.
For the former ‘German physics’ proponents, the outlook was bleaker. Heidelberg was in the American occupation zone, where denazification was more stringent than in the British zone, and Lenard and Wesch were in any case notorious for their Nazi connections. The Americans decided not to prosecute Lenard because of his age, and he died, a free but embittered man, in 1947. Wesch, on the other hand, was one of the few to be convicted as a ‘major offender’ in denazification proceedings and dismissed from the university. The Physics Institute was left in a shambles, partly because towards the end of the war Wesch had removed a lot of equipment for safekeeping in a village some 70–80 kilometres away. The whole university was closed when occupation forces came in at the end of March 1945, and even when it reopened, the Physics Institute led a ghostlike existence, almost empty of furniture, equipment and personnel and without heat. Its last Nazi-era director, the experimental physicist August Becker, a close colleague and friend of Lenard’s, had his own house in Heidelberg confiscated by the military government and was dismissed from his position in February 1946. Bothe’s cyclotron was seized by the Americans as well, though as scientific booty rather than punitively; he didn’t get it back until 1949, the year of Mischka’s arrival.
It was Bothe who had the job of getting the university’s Physics Institute back on its feet, moving back from the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute to the position Wesch and his acolytes had forced him out of before the war. But it was tough going at first. He had to get the building running again, heat and furnish it, organise the return of the institute’s scattered scientific equipment and, at the same time, hire new staff, trained in modern physics, and get rid of the Lenard/Wesch legacy. This was only partially achieved by the summer of 1949, when Mischka showed up. Memories of the Lenard era were still vivid in Mischka’s time, and he had a stock of Lenard anecdotes to prove it, mainly heard from the institute’s mechanic, a survivor of several changes of regime. One of the stories concerned Mischka’s own office in the institute. Under Lenard’s reign, it had housed a lecturer in theoretical physics whom Lenard couldn’t get rid of, but as Lenard hated theory, he had instructed that ‘Theoretical physics apparatus’ be painted on the door. That sign was still there when Mischka arrived—he was tickled by the idea of being a piece of apparatus.
Jensen, selected in 1948 as the new professor of theoretical physics, was the key appointment, and it was after his arrival at the beginning of 1949 that things really started humming. But as a modern theorist, he met considerable opposition. Some of the Lenard group remained in Heidelberg, fighting to get their old jobs back, and there were still many in the Heidelberg university and social establishment who sympathised with them. With the establishment of the German Federal Republic in 1949, enthusiasm for outcasting and punishing former Nazis quickly waned. Becker, already of retirement age, successfully petitioned for emeritus status (which carried a pension) in 1951. Wesch, now working in industry after serving a prison term, got his ‘major offender’ conviction reduced to ‘minor offender’ on appeal and spent more than a decade agitating to get his university job back (he was turned down for a second time in 1956 after both Jensen and Bothe’s successor in the experimental physics chair threatened to leave if he were reinstated).
Postwar Heidelberg physics was surrounded by such a golden aura in Misha’s memory that I found it hard to judge how it stood, objectively, in the history of nuclear physics. Perhaps that didn’t matter for my story, but it niggled away at me. I read the classic accounts, but they are all written in terms of a teleology that leads to Los Alamos and the making of the bomb—in other words, a German–American competition to make the bomb that the Americans won. In this story, Germany loses its good physicists in successive waves of emigration, mainly to the United States. The world centre of physics moves from Europe to the United States. Once the Americans have the bomb and Germany loses the war, physics in Germany drops out of view.
All this makes a lot of sense, but teleologies tend to smooth out any deviations along the way that don’t fit the big picture. I think that’s what probably happened with postwar German nuclear physics, at least up to the mid 1950s, when another wave of emigration took yet more physicists (including Misha) to the United States. It looks to me as if Misha wasn’t deceiving himself, and there really was a minor golden age for theoretical nuclear physics in postwar Germany, with Heidelberg one of the most lively centres. The ten years after the Second World War were not a peak period of Nobel Prizes being awarded to Germans, which scarcely comes as a surprise. But then, when Germans started winning Nobel Prizes for physics again, Heidelberg scooped the pool. Walther Bothe, the Heidelberg cyclotron man, won a Nobel in 1954, and a Heidelberg-trained spectroscopist called Rudolf Mössbauer won in 1961. In 1963, Mischka’s mentor Hans Jensen was joint winner, along with the German-American Maria Goeppert-Mayer, for work on the nuclear shell model they were doing when Mischka was his student.
The excitement of those years was recalled by one of Mischka’s contemporaries, Berthold Stech, who was also Jensen’s student. Stech’s arrival in Heidelberg actually preceded Jensen’s, and he remembered the shock of Jensen’s appearance on the scene, which put them ‘suddenly in contact with modern theoretical ideas and approaches’:
It was challenging. Jensen was unconventional … [He] managed to make Heidelberg a leading center of nuclear physics in experiment and theory … Of course it was the high time of nuclear physics and the shell model. We students were witnessing an exciting period with hot and lively discussions. But even more important, we experienced the outstanding scientific and social atmosphere created by Bothe and Jensen which extended to the newcomers and students. Besides scientific competence, there was also heart. Coming back from years of war the institute became our home where we spent all day and half the night.
The centre of it all was the Tea Colloquium (Tee-Colloquium), lovingly remembered all his life by Misha. He walked in on his first one, evidently having just arrived from Hanover, when the colloquium was already in session and was admitted by Jensen’s senior assistant, Helmut Steinwedel:
There around a long combined table sat the professors, Jensen, Bothe, [Heinz] Maier-Leibnitz and some more who I did not know, the assistants Steinwedel and others, and graduate students. Steinwedel announced my name and I sat down. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was served a chemical beaker (100 cc) with tea, and the general discussion continued. After a while a graduate student went to the blackboard and commenced to report on a paper from a recent Physical Review. Quite soon he was interrupted by questions and comments from different people, including myself. I found that whole situation exceedingly stimulating, and interesting, and informative.
Including myself is a nice touch: here was Mischka jumping in to discussion with the great men, his bags not yet unpacked and the ink still fresh on his PhD diploma. That was unconventional but in local disciplinary terms not outrageous: democracy of discussion between professors and students had been an important part of the Göttingen tradition in physics before the war too. Obviously Mischka, like Jensen, enjoyed flouting hierarchical conventions. Even in the Tea Colloquium, there were some conventions relating to seniority, but Mischka ignored them:
The traditional rule was that the newest member of that circle was supposed to prepare and serve the tea. I was blithely unaware of that and found out about it only after a new graduate student appeared and took over these duties. I felt a little uncomfortable about not having done my turn and told it to my predecessor, who said that it is perfectly OK, since I was a theorist. In fact I was quite happy about my ignorance.
Scientific life was a lot livelier in Heidelberg than in Hanover, Mischka wrote more than once to his mother: ‘Since I came here, I have got a whole lot cleverer.’ The best part was the Tea Colloquium discussions, where every aspect of the topic was clarified by ‘comments and questions, even mini-lectures’ by members of the audience in an atmosphere that was ‘light and free’ but, as far as the underlying intellectual issues were concerned, dead serious. ‘It was by far the most important learning experience I encountered throughout my career,’ Misha wrote later. The greats of the German nuclear physics world—people like Heisenberg and Fritz Houtermans from Göttingen and Hans Suess from Hamburg—would turn up at the Tea Colloquium and present their latest work. Jensen and Bothe, working hard to end Germany’s international isolation after the war, persuaded even émigrés reluctant to revisit Germany to come to Bothe’s sixtieth birthday celebration in 1951. Jensen’s collaborator Maria Goeppert-Mayer and the now US-based Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi were among others who visited the Heidelberg Institute in this period.
Young physicists were scarce on the ground, the war having wiped out a large part of Mischka’s age group in Germany, and no doubt they were the more valued because of it. When Mischka had been around in Heidelberg for a few months and got friendly with Steinwedel, Jensen’s senior assistant, they had a discussion one night about their prospects. Their conclusion was that ‘we are too old to come up with a discovery of the magnitude of Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger. They were all 25–26 years old when they did it. We are 27, and as far from that kind of discovery now as anybody else.’ It was characteristic of the Heidelberg atmosphere that they should think in such ambitious comparative terms; probably, despite their stated pessimism, they all secretly hoped to win Nobel Prizes themselves one day. Actually none of them did (except the spectroscopist Rudolf Mössbauer, who was a bit younger than Mischka and arrived in Heidelberg after he had gone), and I think Mischka at least always felt that to be a bit of a failure. But there are cycles in science, and the great age of Nobel Prizes for German physicists was coming to an end. By the time Mischka’s cohort got into their stride for the competition in the 1960s, the buzz had moved out of their area of nuclear physics. Hans Bethe, the Sommerfeld-trained German émigré who relocated to Cornell and who won in 1967, was the last of the line.
The question of physicists’ past Nazi affiliations was naturally a matter of interest. In Hanover, Mischka had never paid much attention to it, but once he got to Heidelberg, that changed. Jensen had been a party member, though after the war Heisenberg had vouched for his lack of enthusiasm in one of the attestations of political harmlessness known as Persilschein (after the laundry powder) that were part of the denazification process in these years. According to a memoir by Berthold Stech (one of Mischka’s Heidelberg contemporaries), Helmut Steinwedel and Mischka, when they arrived successively from Hanover, ‘told us about Jensen with great admiration, his attitude during the “Third Reich” and how he managed to survive inhuman times and still do interesting physics’. This probably came mainly from Steinwedel, who had been closer to Jensen in Hanover and had known him longer. But the question of Jensen’s Nazi past was one that Mischka gave a lot of thought to in his first months in Heidelberg. He and Jensen talked about it, at least obliquely. Quoting Jensen in a letter to Helga, Mischka set out his argument:
If you see over and over again that people whom you have trusted have thrown in their lot with the party and actually become addicted to those nationalistic resentments, and you are always being pushed against the wall, then you think: to hell with this rubbish, let’s leave, go far away from here, go to Australia; then one can at least be a free man again. But then after a while you get back your courage and start pushing back against it again. That is all you can do. So he [Jensen] didn’t go to Australia, Argentina or America.
In the same letter, Mischka assured Helga that ‘I have not the least grounds to assume, but rather all grounds against assuming, that [Jensen] was ever a Nazi … He was in the party, of course. But to put it even more strongly, it can be claimed with a probability bordering on certainty that if anybody ever joined because there was nothing else to do, that person was Jensen.’ With Mischka, such rather awkward formality of style often conveys uneasiness. But in this case it may also reflect the fact that the question of Nazi membership and general German guilt were closely linked in Mischka’s mind, and he was writing to a German girl he was proposing to marry. The big thing to understand, Mischka instructed Helga, was that Jensen, although a German, is ‘primarily a human being (Mensch), thus a cosmopolitan [first] and only secondarily also a German’. This made him even better than Obst, the German intellectual Mischka had met and briefly admired in Hanover, because with Obst it was the other way round: German first, and only then cosmopolitan (weltbürgerlich). Moreover, Jensen had the proper critical attitude towards Germans—‘shares the opinions of my mother and myself’, as Mischka put it to Helga—that Helga herself needed to adopt. Germans are arrogant because they feel inferior. They claim Germany is the country of poetry and philosophy, but this (whatever the teenage Mischka may have thought back in Riga) is actually completely unfounded. He quoted Jensen’s categorical dismissal of the claim: ‘there is one superior thinker who was an East Prussian: Kant. Otherwise the rest are no greater than their French or English counterparts.’
Helga Heimers was the other thing on Mischka’s mind. Five years his junior, she was the daughter of a solid Protestant, North German family (her father was director of a school for the blind). In terms of athletics, she was a sprinter as well as a hurdler and long jumper. At first Mischka didn’t pay any particular attention to her because she looked so young (his previous girlfriends from the sports club were older and more worldly and experienced). Helga, for her part, had already taken note of him as a lively and popular member of the club, admired for his personal qualities as well as his excellence as a pole vaulter (within the sports club, evidently, his being a DP was not a social handicap). Helga was surprised and flattered when Mischka turned his attention to her. It happened on a bicycle trip, probably in the summer of 1948, to Hamburg, Lübeck and the Baltic coast. The person she fell in love with, as she later remembered, was light-hearted and fun to be with, the life of any party. He was also unconventional, which was both appealing to Helga and sometimes embarrassing, and critical of German formality, including that of her family. The qualities in Helga that Mischka stressed in his letters to Olga were her youth (and, by implication, her innocence and impressionableness) and her appreciation of music and painting. She had the same hatred of German rigidity as he had, he told his mother optimistically: she just hadn’t previously realised, for lack of experience of the wider world, that this rigidity was a specifically German trait. The other good thing about Helga, conveyed to Olga by Mischka in particularly convoluted prose, was that she loved him.
Mischka seems to have made up his mind to marry Helga in the early spring of 1949, perhaps in response to her plans to go to England as an au pair for a year (on in January, cancelled late April or May). Like all his major decisions, as he wrote in a letter to her parents, the decision to marry was made suddenly, but on the basis of ‘earth that was already ploughed’. He took Helga to meet Olga around Easter. This seems to have been only a qualified success. Helga wasn’t sure that Olga thought she was good enough for Mischka and felt envious of, and no doubt excluded by, the close understanding between mother and son. She wasn’t altogether happy when, in Olga’s next letter to Mischka, she sent her greetings to ‘little Helga’ (die kleine Helga), which Helga took as a bit of a putdown. (Olga switched to a different diminutive, Helgalein, after Mischka passed that on.) As Mischka’s move from Hanover to Heidelberg came closer, he informed Olga, without further elaboration, that ‘the probability that I will be taking the young lady (Jungfrau) with me continues to grow’—that is, that they were planning to get married. Olga replied slightly tartly (‘If I understand you rightly, you want to take the young lady with you’) with an abstract disquisition on the difficulties of choosing the right life partner, ending with the observation that
at least one of the two partners must have their eyes open [sehend sein]. In your case, it must be the wife, so that you can live up to your talents and bring them to fruition. For both your sakes I hope that Helga brings enough strength to the task.
By extraordinarily unfortunate timing, Mischka’s decision to marry Helga coincided with Nanni’s long-delayed departure from the Soviet zone to the West. I found it hard to read her increasingly less hopeful letters to Mischka without wincing, but it wasn’t only Nanni I felt sorry for. The first mention of a planned departure is in a letter from Mischka to Olga, evidently written in August or September 1948, where he reported that ‘Nanni was here’ and that ‘she has become independent and wants to move to the Western zone’. (The approving tone suggests that at this point he was not yet in too deep with Helga.) As of January 1949, however, she was still sitting at home in Chemnitz waiting impatiently for departure to become possible (the nature of the obstacles are not spelt out), congratulating Mischka on his new job and urging him to work hard (‘Genius equals hard work [Fleisse]. Otherwise you’ll never get to America!’). By the beginning of April, she had reached Göttingen in the British zone, after a traumatic two-week imprisonment in the Soviet zone en route, and with rather forced cheerfulness suggested that if Mischka found himself in the area, he might come and see her; she couldn’t come to him in Hanover just yet because she had no money, and anyway ‘it doesn’t behove a woman to visit a man’. She was working as a housemaid, but that didn’t matter: ‘in America lots of people start off washing dishes’. If he heard of any work for a chemical technician, he should let her know. But above all, he should write. He didn’t, so on 14 April she wrote again, this time without sending greetings to his mother as in the earlier letter, and signing herself formally ‘Marianne Schuster’ instead of Nanni. ‘No doubt you have so much work that there is no leisure for private life. Should it be so, you are forgiven … If it’s a woman that is the obstacle, you are forgiven as well. But you could let me hear from you anyway, I won’t be jealous and would only rejoice in your happiness, or do you begrudge me that?’
Mischka did reply to that letter, evidently sticking to a light tone and steering clear of awkward topics or too many specifics. In her reply on 9 May, Nanni commented rather acidly on a joke (recycled from an earlier letter to Olga) about his landlady and daughter constituting ‘1.5 women’, hoping that ‘you are having a lot of fun with your 1.5’. She was in Reutlingen in the French zone by this time, intending to go on to the Swabian university town of Tübingen. Mischka must have emphasised his (long-term) emigration plans, perhaps to indicate non-availability, because she wished him well with them, adding that she herself preferred to stay in Germany where she had the credentials to finish her education—and ‘in any case’, she added, ‘I am a hateful “German”’, thus ineligible for the IRO resettlement available for DPs. She hoped that in his next letter he would ‘express himself somewhat more concretely, since it sometimes remains a riddle to me’.
Mischka must finally have promised to come to Tübingen to see her, for she wrote again on 16 June discussing possible dates. As far as I can tell, this meeting never took place. Instead, Mischka had some kind of nervous collapse that brought Helga hurrying to his side and had her parents sending him off to a ‘nerve doctor’ to determine if his health was sound enough for him to marry.
The specific episode, a ‘mild fit on waking up’, occurred when he was away on a sports trip in the middle of June. In contemporary terminology, he seems to have been suffering from panic attacks. Helga remembers that he sometimes had to get off a crowded tram to recover from such an attack, and at her parents’ place had had fits of uncontrollable shaking when he had to lie down, frightening himself and the Heimers. Since he had arrived in Heidelberg, he had been prone to get ‘nervous’ in the evening when he was tired, expressed in ‘a feeling of light internal shaking’. Describing his symptoms to the Heimers’ Dr Malkus, evidently a psychiatrist, he referred to ‘the mistrust of myself’ and sense of insecurity that occurred at such moments, ‘in which I am frightened by this anxiety and become more anxious’. Mischka attributed this to ‘nerves’, which he had to try to strengthen. He was shocked when, in response to his question about whether there was any impediment to his marriage, Dr Malkus failed to provide the expected reassurance but instead suggested waiting for a month to see how his condition developed. After the month had elapsed, he evidently gave the go-ahead, and Mischka wrote to Helga on 27 June to say that, being confirmed in his opinion that his symptoms were just ‘nervousness’ in a basically healthy person, he saw ‘no ground why we shouldn’t get married as quickly as possible’.
Olga, meanwhile, had reacted with a mixture of reassurance and astringent commonsense. ‘I know these gentlemen,’ she wrote. ‘Nerve doctors are the biggest charlatans.’ To make Mischka wait for a month before passing him as fit for marriage was ‘unforgiveable rubbish—what difference would a month make?’—and could have no result but to upset the patient:
You have been assessed as having sensitive nerves. You had scarcely emerged from puberty (and one doesn’t know how long the afterlife of that is) when you were hit with a mass of [upsetting] experiences … and you had to deal with them with weakened bodily capacity for resistance. So the nerves were under ever greater strain, until finally the tension was continuous, if also not always consciously, and it was not possible to relax. If tension becomes too great, there is going to be a moment when control weakens and they give way. In yourself, you are a healthy man and what can stand in the way of your marriage? I would even expect there to be a certain nervous tension, along with spiritual wellbeing, associated with being together with the person you love …
She recommended long walks, breathing exercises, more sleep and a better diet (more butter).
It looks as if Mischka, untypically, hadn’t yet told Olga about Nanni’s reappearance, no doubt because the whole subject was too painful. But after a while he did, and he also gave her a wry paraphrase of Nanni’s response when he finally informed her (probably after the fact) about his marriage to Helga. Nanni’s letter was ‘very decent’, he said. She gave him the slightly barbed advice that being unfaithful to his wife was the main potential danger, but otherwise ‘seemed to assume that I possessed in reasonable measure the other qualities necessary for a successful marriage’. Olga replied staunchly that Nanni (whose side she was not going to take against her son, even if she liked her) had not got it quite right: ‘You have all the qualities to make a happy marriage.’
On the eve of his marriage in August, Mischka sent his prospective in-laws a statement of his qualifications as a husband and his attitude to the marriage. It started off ordinarily enough with a survey of his current position, salary and prospects. The path to an academic chair (highly prestigious in Germany) lay open before him, and although ‘I have not firmly decided that I will necessarily be a professor,’ he would probably take it. Science was his life, and he had pursued it systematically, even if from the outside his course might seem to encompass a number of quantum leaps. Marriage to Helga was another of those quantum leaps, but as he stated in one of his favourite negative statements of a positive, ‘I am not very sceptical about Helga’s and my life together’. Conceding that people tend not to be sceptical at the beginning of a marriage, he cited his own powers of ‘objectivity and self-criticism’ in support of his non-scepticism (optimism?) about the marriage and concluded that for it to break down, ‘both parties would have to behave stupidly, or one party would have to behave very stupidly’. There was nothing in the letter about being a DP and a foreigner who was likely to take their daughter away from Germany.
Whether or not the letter was reassuring for Helga’s parents, they accepted the inevitability of the marriage and put a good face on it. On 4 August 1949, the scientific assistant and engineering graduate Michael Danos, of the Orthodox faith, born in Riga, Latvia, on 10 January 1922, married the student Helga Dorothea Helene Luise Heimers, of the Lutheran-Evangelical confession, born on 14 June 1927 in Hanover. The church marriage followed an earlier civil ceremony in Heidelberg (chosen over Hanover because the Americans required less documentation than the British). The Hanover wedding was largely a Heimer family affair, but of course Olga was there, cutting a fine figure in a dress she had made herself. Judging by the photographs, not only was the bride beautiful and blushing, but so was the groom. Herr and Frau Michael Danos had made their debut.