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SOUGHT AFTER as a speaker, at a university event Lauterpacht was introduced to Rachel Steinberg, an intelligent, strong-willed, attractive music student from Palestine. She was much taken by the young law student, “so quiet, so gentle—not a movement of hand—so unlike the other students from Eastern Europe.” She liked the absence of emotion in his character, and both were soon smitten. On their first date, she played an early Beethoven piano sonata, as set by her teacher, unnamed but described in a letter only as “very lovely but not too easy to execute” (maybe it was Sonata no. 8, the Pathétique?). Lauterpacht invited Rachel to a concert at the Vienna Symphony Hall, with a program that included Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, perhaps conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. She was entranced by the music and her companion, who was polite and correct, with a quiet and acute sense of humor. He dressed well, too.
Berlin, December 18, 1922, engagement
When Lauterpacht invited her to accompany him to Berlin, she accepted. They lodged separately (she at the Excelsior Hotel, he at a boardinghouse in the Charlottenburg district), remaining in Berlin for three weeks. On the evening of December 17, 1922—a day after the assassination of the Polish president, Gabriel Narutowicz, by a nationalistic art critic—Lauterpacht dared to take her hand, kiss her on the lips, and declare his love. Knowing of her desire to study at the Royal College of Music, he offered a quick engagement, marriage, and a move to London. She said she’d think about it, wondering if he was serious.
He was. The next morning he returned to the Excelsior with a telegram from his parents in Lwów, expressing happiness at news of the engagement. Lauterpacht was surprised, and probably irritated, that Rachel had not yet written to her parents. She agreed to the engagement.
A month later, Rachel’s parents in Palestine too agreed to the marriage. Lauterpacht wrote from Berlin to thank them, “from my heart.” In February, the couple returned to Vienna, where they married on Tuesday, March 20. Two weeks later, they journeyed by train through Germany and then by boat to England.