Figure C.1 Max Planck during his daily piano time in Göttingen, 1946.
In August of 1945, Planck had recovered well enough to leave the hospital. He and Marga established themselves as best they could in Göttingen, where Max had family. Planck’s brother Adalbert had died in Göttingen just before the war, but Adalbert’s daughter Hildegard “Hilde” Seidel lived there with her husband and daughter. Their home at Merkelstrasse 12 became the Plancks’ last dwelling.1 According to Marga’s journal entries, Hilde gladly received them and gave them the main bedroom.2 Although they were fortunate to have shelter, the postwar months were still incredibly challenging. As the industrialist Carl Still (once the Planck’s Rogätz host), noted with the approach of winter: “The heat is more important than the food.”3
In his last years, Max Planck had returned to family headwaters. His great-grandfather, Gottlieb Jakob Planck, had spent his career there as a theology professor.4 If the Plancks could find an additional silver lining, their new environs were only lightly damaged compared with most German cities. (To this day, Göttingen retains a startling range of prewar architecture that has been lost elsewhere.)
We see glimpses of these last years in Marga’s correspondence. In a letter to Hilde’s sister in America, she fretted about the imposition she and Max placed on their hosts, “but I don’t how I would now organize my own household without all the furniture, linen and necessary things which daily life requires.” She thanked Frieda for the care packages, saying they had helped restore Max, even though the “little ones” (Planck’s great-grandchildren), tore them open and ransacked them first. “Uncle Max is really feeling the improved nutrition,” she wrote. “Now his memory is suffering horribly, and that is very sobering for me, but thank God he doesn’t notice. Along with that he is rarely not being stubborn—he is after all a ‘Plank.’ He can barely get over the loss of Erwin.” She also mentions her own son, who remained in the Russian zone. “Hermann struggles … and goes it alone in Berlin, as all others who don’t follow communism must.”5
After World War II, the German physics community would eventually start to reconvene in Göttingen. Hahn and Heisenberg, for instance, set up their postwar careers there. But while the 10 were still interned at Farm Hall, the Allies turned to the 87-year-old Planck to again serve his homeland, and he returned in 1945 to direct the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG). As he wrote at the time, “I am not one of those who let themselves be bitter.”6
Released from Farm Hall, Max von Laue visited his old friend and mentor, though it distressed him. “He has grown slumped and old, complaining of arthritis and bad pain,” he wrote to Lise Meitner in the spring of 1946. “He inquired about physics, but he does not talk about what he went through.” He reassured Lise that Planck still played piano for at least 15 minutes every night, even though two fingers of his left hand were too stiff to use (Figure C.1).7
Figure C.1 Max Planck during his daily piano time in Göttingen, 1946.
In the summer of 1946, the Royal Society of London held a delayed celebration for Isaac Newton’s 300th birthday. The war had eclipsed any notion of celebrating the actual anniversary, Christmas of 1942. They invited one and only one German scientist to the festivities. The Royal Society had long appreciated Max Planck, having elected him a Foreign Member in 1926 and then awarding him their highest honor, the Copley Medal, in 1929.8 Now, in the postwar festivities, he must have winced when hearing his official introduction, “Max Planck from no country.” What had been Germany was now occupied by four different nations. After stirring and sustained applause for Planck, the president of the Royal Society issued a correction: “The announcement should have been, Professor Max Planck from the World of Science.”9 The press noted the importance of Planck’s attendance and recognized his personal suffering at the hands of the Nazis. The New York Times headline read, “Scientists honor Isaac Newton in London; Planck Brought from Berlin for Ceremony,” and the short article, referring to him as a “shriveled figure,” noted, “His son was executed following the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944.”10
Lise Meitner was on hand and enjoyed her first postwar visit with her former boss. She later wrote to Marga that seeing her former teacher was, “like a gift from heaven … the purity and integrity of his personality have resisted all the years.”11 But she wrote to a friend about new qualities, previously inconceivable in Planck: physical weakness and a short-circuiting memory.12
Otto Hahn also noted Planck’s frailty. “I was somewhat shocked by the rapid decline in Planck’s intellectual strength,” he wrote later to Meitner. “He has aged greatly in the last six months, when I compare him, for instance, to the King of Sweden.”13 This last detail shows not only a blunt insensitivity to Planck but near cruelty to Meitner. Just three months after the first use of atomic weapons, the prize committee in Stockholm awarded Otto Hahn its Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Although the official citation mentioned a “dangerous” side to the technology, it emphasized the long-term prospects for peaceful use. And while it also mentioned Lise Meitner as a contributor, she shared neither the prize nor the recognition of her long-time collaborator.14
Tensions between Hahn and Meitner lingered for years, but this owed much more to the topic of Nazi Germany than any scientific snub. She felt Hahn compartmentalized Nazi atrocities as separate from Germany itself. Even von Laue disturbed her in this way. Although he’d been one of the most public German scientists in opposing Nazism, he fought to create distance between German citizens (particularly German scientists) and their Nazi government. After the war, von Laue wrote an article called “The Wartime Activities of German Scientists.” This offering stumbled onto a brightly lit public stage: the aftermath of Goudsmit’s public accounts of the Alsos Mission and his revelations that German physicists had indeed worked for the Nazis on a secret nuclear project. Von Laue wrote “a few words of protest” against international claims that German scientists worked with the Nazis and even exploited concentration camp labor.15
Meitner wrote to Hahn about von Laue’s article.
Is it really justifiable to say that the majority of scientists were against Hitler from the beginning? … When Planck held the memorial for Haber, Laue and Huebner were the only professors to dare to come to it: At the same time the Chemical Society and the Glass Engineering Society … had forbidden their members from attending. … Doesn’t this all seem to show that the subordination to the Hitler ideas was very prevalent and that the opposition … was a minority? I truly do not have the intention of saying unpleasant things with these observations, but I am afraid that with his inclination to defend everything that has happened—out of understandable attachment to Germany—Laue is not helping Germany but risks achieving the opposite.16
She was similarly dismayed when her old colleagues defended the name of Kaiser Wilhelm. The Allies had come to see the Nazis as part of a larger bellicose pattern in Germany. Hyperbolic Nazis aside, they worried about the warrior mystique surrounding the name of the one-time Emperor, he of pointy helmet and military regalia. They didn’t want a rebuilt Germany to look with pride on the Kaiser’s name, so they forced a sort of rebranding. The Allied command started dissolving the KWG sector by sector, in 1946. Planck, Hahn, von Laue, and seven other Nobel Prize–winning German scientists telegrammed their protest to a governing American general, asking that he reconsider. They sought to draw a line between Nazis and the Society’s independent work. General Lucius Clay replied politely, denying the request, but assuring them that the future of their scientific institutes were “being carefully considered” and that new policies would soon be announced.
Meitner wrote to Hahn with patient logic regarding the KWG.
What the best people among the English and the Americans wish is that the best Germans understand that this unfortunate tradition, which has brought the whole world and Germany itself the greatest misfortune, must finally be broken. And a small token of this insight is to change the name of the KWG. What meaning is there in a name, when one is concerned with the existence of Germany, and with it, Europe?17
The old title, and the image of the empire’s monarch, quietly faded, as one uniting name rose to replace it. The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science was first founded in the British Zone in 1946.18 Having never embraced the Nazi party and having lost a son to the Führer’s vengeance, Max Planck had a unique standing among Allies and Germans alike. Here, nearing the end of his turbulent life, the widespread comfort and respect attached to his name reminds one of his early reports from grade school, where he was well liked by teachers and classmates alike. Planck gave his blessing to the use of his name, as an aid to reconstruction. He said he especially wanted to preserve a society committed, “only to the truth of science, independent of all currents of a particular time.”19 The rebranding campaign spread to the American and French zones, and the official launch year for the Max Planck Society—today boasting 82 separate institutes and thousands of employees across Germany—is now recognized as 1948.
Soviet-controlled East Germany claimed Planck as well. They underlined that Planck, just like Lenin, had verbally fought against the philosophy of Ernst Mach. During the 1958 “pan German national celebration” of his 100th birthday, the nation’s central committee announced, “only the working class that built socialism and defends world peace has the right to celebrate the great scientist Max Planck. … What Planck and a younger generation of physicists has created, capitalism can no longer contain.”20
The recovering nations of Europe faced an unusually nasty winter in late 1946 and early 1947. The continent teetered with millions of homeless refugees, demolished infrastructure, fuel shortages, and scarce nourishment. Even mild cold would have been difficult, but Europe endured one of the worst winters on record. “But I can assure you of one thing,” Marga wrote to Lise Meitner, “without the help of our friends abroad, my husband would very certainly not have survived the winter.”21 Care packages kept many Germans alive. Despite incredible frailty and the bleak conditions, Planck delivered his last guest lecture in late March 1947, just a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday.22
Planck’s former student Gabriele Rabel provides a window into his last days, as she corresponded with Marga from London. After Rabel learned of the Plancks’ Göttingen address, she sent along one of her new research papers with a short note.
Marga replied,
Unfortunately, he can no longer write himself. After overcoming surprisingly well a severe pneumonia last winter, he had a fall six weeks ago. … I am wondering whether he can at all recover. Alas, he has a very sad old age. Loss of his home, loss of four children, ill and feeble—what good are now to him all his honours?
“I hastened to send a few of the dainties which we enjoyed here and which were unknown in starving Germany,” recalled Rabel. “Marmalade and tea and so forth.”
Marga thanked Rabel, but Max
could not enjoy the treasures which you had meant for him. On the fourth of October, he has closed his eyes for ever. My husband might well have recovered from the consequences of his fall, but haemorrhages in the brain were added, and now no medical art could help … He was so tired, so exhausted. … I must not grudge him his rest and I look gratefully back on the life I was allowed to live at the side of this rare man.23
At Planck’s memorial, the Lutheran theologian Friedrich Gogarten presided, weaving bits of Planck’s own writings seamlessly into his comments.24 Max von Laue then delivered an address to those assembled in Göttingen’s Albani Church. As his friend and mentor would have liked, he focused primarily on Planck’s work, and especially the breakthrough of 1900. In concluding his remarks, von Laue gestured to the many wreaths sent by museums, academies and scientific societies, and spoke to simplicity, one of Planck’s favorite qualities.
“And here is a plainer wreath, without any streamers. It was placed here by me on behalf of all his pupils, among whom I count myself, as a perishable token of our never-ending affection and gratitude.”25
Max Planck was buried in the City Cemetery in Göttingen, where his memorial is joined now by those of Max von Laue and Otto Hahn, among many others.
After the funeral, Marga received a letter from Princeton, New Jersey, of familiar script and unmistakable prose.
Albert Einstein wrote:
Now your husband has finished his days after he achieved greatness and experienced much bitterness. His gaze was fixed on the eternal things, and yet he took an active part in all that was human and he lived in the temporal sphere. How different and better the human world would be if there were more such unique people among the leaders. So it seems not to be, as the noble characters in every time and every place must remain isolated without being able to influence the events around them.
The hours that I spent in your home, and the many conversations that I conducted in private with the wonderful man will for the rest of my life belong to my beautiful memories. It cannot change the fact that a tragic event tore us apart.
In today’s loneliness, may you find comfort in that you have brought sun and harmony into the life of this revered man. From a distance, I share with you the pain of parting.26
Despite Planck’s advising Einstein to avoid dreaming of outer space, the satellite bearing Planck’s name now glides in Earth orbit, looking where the scientist himself never did. As of this writing, the Planck mission has successfully scanned the entire background signal of the universe: the hiss we hear in the cosmic speakers after the music stops. Although the radiation perfectly fits Planck’s radiation law, the mission has also found a few surprises. The primordial fireball was not symmetrical—it appears to feature an unexpected cool patch, as if the infant universe brushed a cheek against a cold window. In a methodical attempt to explore one question, the satellite has uncovered a different and even more puzzling question. One has to believe its namesake would nod with approval. As he wrote shortly before Hitler’s rise and Einstein’s departure:
For it is just this striving forward that brings us to the fruits which are always falling into our hands and which are the unfailing sign that we are on the right road and that we are ever and ever drawing nearer to our journey’s end. But that journey’s end will never be reached, because it is always the still far thing that glimmers in the distance and is unattainable. It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.27