“The Jewish mother of the atomic bomb”, was the name given to physicist Lise Meitner by journalists after the Second World War, even though she was the only nuclear physics expert on the Allied side who refused to take part in the making of the atomic bomb. She wanted nothing to do with it. She was not even attracted to Los Alamos by the fact that she had stagnated professionally in Stockholm and could have worked with friends in New Mexico. But the journalists did not know that when, after the atomic bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were looking for someone who could tell them about them. All the nuclear experts were “under lock and key”, the Allies locked up at Los Alamos and other nuclear research centres and the Germans locked up in England, but Lisa Meitner was their only credible interlocutor.
What she didn’t tell them, they made up themselves. For example, they turned her into a Jewish refugee who stole the secret of the atomic bomb from Hitler’s scientists and passed it on to her British friends. One newspaper reported how she telegraphed the secret to her nephew Otto Frisch, also a physicist, who was then working in Copenhagen.
Lise Meitner became famous overnight against her will. This fame was an embarrassment to her, and the one she wanted bypassed her. In 1946, her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for nuclear physics in the field of chemistry, but she was overlooked in the field of physics.
“Of course, Hahn fully deserves the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. There is no doubt about that. But I’m sure that Frisch and I have also contributed quite a bit to clarifying the course of uranium physics – how it starts and how it generates so much energy. And that was quite different from what Hahn did,” she wrote to a friend.
Otto Hahn’s experiments in nuclear chemistry led to the basic discovery of nuclear physics, while Lise and her nephew Frisch clarified the process physically. So why didn’t they win the Nobel Prize if, without them, the discovery would not have been made in the first place? Some believed that her employer at the time, Manne Siegban, had a hand in it.
Lise did not get along with him. She distanced herself from everything that was being done at his institute and did her own research on nuclear physics. Now her colleagues were furious. They felt that she had deliberately excluded them from her research, and they were supposedly returning the favour by undermining her chances of winning the Nobel Prize.
But as if she wasn’t hurt enough by the fact that her work was not recognised by her peers, she had to host and entertain the Nobel laureate Otto Hahn at the award ceremony in Stockholm, who pretended that their ideas had never intertwined and never given birth to new ideas together.
“It was quite painful for me that he did not say a word about me in his interviews, nor did he mention our 30 years of work together,” she wrote to a friend. But she quickly found an excuse for Hahn, saying that he was trying to repress the past because he felt that Germans were being wronged, and that was why he was only speaking in Stockholm in favour of Germany, “and I, I am part of the repressed past”.
After 40 years of collaboration, Hahn denied it without remorse, but she did not distance herself from him. She was used to being belittled by men when she threatened their position or simply because she was a woman. She did not expect Hahn to be the same, but by then she was already a top expert in the field of self-defence. Her self-esteem was so low that she swallowed the humiliation then and a few times later. She maintained their friendly relationship, although it cooled for a while, helped in no small measure by the fact that what really touched her in life was not people, but physics.
Pupil of a brilliant teacher
She was willing to suffer everything for it, and had to, if only because she was a woman born in Vienna in 1878, albeit in a liberal Jewish family in which all eight children were gifted. Her elder sister Auguste was a child prodigy in the field of music. She became a composer and concert pianist.
It was clear that Lisa’s path would lead to the world of mathematics and physics by the time she was eight, but the times were not on her side. Austrian girls were only allowed to attend primary school, not secondary school, so Lise had no chance of going to university. Well, almost none. She persuaded her father to hire her a private tutor, but she kept the book in her hand until she was ready for the entrance exams. She passed them after two years of preparation instead of four.
Now, fortune has finally smiled on her. She enrolled at the University of Vienna at the same time as Ludwig Boltzmann, who was not only a brilliant physicist, but at that moment the best physics professor in the world and an advocate for women among university audiences, was teaching theoretical physics. In his first lecture, he told the students:
“Forgive me if I haven’t achieved much today in areas dealing with theorems, very subtle concepts or complex proofs … I think that will be clearer later. Today I just wanted to give you something quite modest. I confess that this is all I have: myself, my whole way of thinking and feeling. I will expect a lot from you during the lectures: consistent attention, iron perseverance and an indomitable will. But, forgive me, before we go any further, I am asking you for what is most important to me: your trust, your affection and your love. In a word, for the most magnificent thing you can give: yourself.”
Lise gave herself to him and to physics completely, because Boltzmann knew how to attract people. All the universities wanted him for themselves, but he never lasted more than a few years at any of them. In 1894, when the Viennese wanted to introduce him to the Munichers, the Austrian Minister of Culture offered him the highest salary ever paid to a university professor in Austria at that time. He was, as he was described, “undisputedly the first” in the field of theoretical physics, which “all nations are aware of”.
He bargained for wages with gusto until Vienna had had enough of him and gave him a condition: they would only take him back a third time if he promised not to take a job outside Austrian borders this time. He promised, but he found it difficult to keep his promises. He did not change jobs because he was running around for a better salary, or because he did not like German cuisine, or because the students he was currently teaching were disinterested, as he liked to complain, but because he had to.
With migraines, asthma, visual impairment and heart problems, he was still getting there, dragged down by bipolar disorder. The depressions were becoming more painful and nightmarish. The only way he could get out of them was to travel and move, but after each move he would soon fall back into another depression and he would have to hit the road again. At the University of Leipzig, for example, his depression returned after only a year and pushed him over the edge, but his life was saved in time.
When she didn’t have him in her clutches, he was absolutely brilliant. Lise Meitner later described what it was like at his lectures:
“He used to write his equations on a very large blackboard. He had two smaller ones on the side, on which he wrote the intermediate steps. Everything was written clearly and neatly. I often had the feeling that one could reconstruct the whole lecture just from what was on the blackboard. He lectured with such enthusiasm that after each lecture it seemed as if he had introduced us to a new and wonderful world.”
But he was wonderful not only during the lectures, but also afterwards. He was completely informal with the students. “Anyone could ask him anything and even criticise him. The conversations were calm, he treated the students as colleagues. It was only later that one realised how much one had learnt from him. He did not judge anyone by the yardstick of his own greatness. He was kindly appreciative of even modest achievements, if only he perceived that a serious and honest effort had been made,” one of his students described him.
Some of his colleagues were offended by his accessibility. Ernst Mach, for example, complained that “Boltzmann is not evil”, but that he is “incredibly naive and ordinary … he simply does not know where to draw the line”. This is what many people thought when he married Henriette von Aigentler. She was young, beautiful, blue-eyed and a lush, fluttery-haired woman.
At first glance, they were a completely unsuitable couple, but time has proved all those who predicted a dark future for them wrong. Henriette was interested in her husband’s work and he encouraged her. “It seems to me that eternal love cannot last if the wife has no understanding and no interest in her husband’s efforts, if she is only his housekeeper instead of his companion in trouble,” he wrote to her when he asked for her hand in marriage.
She remained his companion when their three sons and two daughters were born. They adored their children. Boltzmann once brought home two bunnies because their youngest daughter Elsa wanted them. Henriette was against it, but the bunnies lived in his study, which was considered neutral territory and Henriette had no authority there.
Although biographers do not report much about her, she must have been a very strong and resourceful woman to live with a husband who was slipping from depression to depression. For a long time, she successfully treated this by travelling.
For example, he spent the summer of 1905 in Berkeley, which he later described vividly. He liked it, but paradise was not perfect: “Berkeley is completely abstinent: drinking or buying beer or wine is strictly forbidden.” He had to drink water, but his “stomach rebelled” and he had to take care of his health.
A colleague asked where they sell wine. “He looked around in horror to see if anyone might be eavesdropping, sized me up to see if he could really trust me, and finally told me the name of a great shop in Oakland that sold Californian wines. I managed to smuggle a whole case into Barkeley, and from then on the road to Oakland was very familiar.”
Life immediately became easier, although he still had problems with food. Oatmeal was for him “an indescribable mixture with which people in Vienna could keep geese, although perhaps not, because I doubt if any Viennese goose would want to eat it”. His initial disappointment was quickly overwhelmed by joy when he realised that Mrs Hearst, the mother of the newspaper tycoon William Ranfolph Hearst, with whom he was staying, had a very fine piano.
“At first I was a stranger to mechanics, but you get used to good things quickly. I did well in the second part of the first tempo, but in the second, the andante, I completely forgot about myself. I didn’t play the melody, the melody led my fingers. I had to force myself to hold back so that I didn’t play another allegro. It’s a good thing I did, because my technique is worse there.” At the piano, he forgot everything that had got on his nerves in California.
He returned to Vienna in high spirits and ready for new battles with his physical opponents, but did not get the chance. Early in 1906 he was again gripped by depression. This time, its darkness was quite overwhelming. In spring and summer it grew stronger and stronger.
He published summer lectures, Ernst Mach recalled, but “had to cancel them because of mental problems. Those who knew him knew that he would probably never be able to lecture again. People said that he had to be under supervision because he had already attempted suicide several times.” He went on holiday to Trieste with his wife and youngest daughter. A few days before returning to Vienna, he committed suicide. He hanged himself.
Doctor in the basement
Lise Meitner was desperate. He made her fall in love with physics. He made her study theoretical physics, even though she had chosen experimental physics for her PhD. A year before her mentor’s death, she graduated with honours and became the second woman in the history of the University of Vienna to receive a PhD. Now, in the wake of Boltzmann’s death, she has decided to stay in physics and keep alive the light he lit in her.
But it was not as simple as it first seemed. Stefen Meyer, the pioneer of radioactivity research, invited her to join him, but she was captivated by the eminent physicist Max Planck and went to see him in Berlin in 1907. At that time, and afterwards, she always oriented her career according to who she worked with, not what she was paid.
Her colleagues had to be her friends too, but that was much harder in Germany than in Austria. Women could listen to lectures but were not allowed to go to university. She had to ask Max Planck’s permission if she was allowed to cross the threshold of his lecture theatre.
“But you’re already a doctor! What more do you want?” he wondered. When she replied that she really wanted to understand physics, he brushed her off with a few kind words. “Of course, I concluded that he didn’t have a high opinion of female students, and that was true at the time.”
He didn’t really appreciate her as a physicist, but he liked her as a 29-year-old shy and timid girl, and she didn’t proudly refuse him when he invited her to his home, which was famous for its musical evenings. He played the piano, the violin was first played by the famous concert violinist Josef Joachim and then by Albert Einstein. Lise just enjoyed music, she did not know how to play instruments.
Otto Hahn, a chemist a year older, a smiling and easy-going man in his thirties, was not a musician, but he was a singer with a beautiful voice. One day he casually suggested that she work with him on nuclear chemistry. She immediately accepted, even though she was a physicist. She was lost in Berlin, but her friend came in handy and, above all, she was “convinced that he could teach me a lot”.
So in 1907, a chemist and a physicist, who worked in both theoretical and experimental physics, began to work together to study radioactivity. They worked at the same institute for 31 years until Lise had to leave in 1931 because of Nazi racial laws, after which they secretly collaborated by correspondence.
Even though they became close friends and were both attractive, they never fell in love. For sixteen years they consistently shouted and addressed each other as Herr Hahn and Fraülein Meinter, even though they were together all day long. Well, not exactly.
At the Berlin Chemical Institute, there were strict rules. Women were not allowed to go to the same bars as their male colleagues. Women were not allowed in the laboratories because the eminent chemist Emil Fischer feared that they would start a fire with their hair. Women were not allowed to walk around with men and could not go to the toilet at the institute. There was none for women.
But Lisa didn’t care about any of that when Hahn managed to convince Fischer to let her work in the basement room where the janitor used to keep his things. The entrance was on the outside, and so Lise worked there without ever setting foot on the floor of the institute. She went to the toilet in the restaurant at the end of the street.
She accepted all humiliations stoically, including being turned into an invisible woman. When she walked beside Hahn, her colleagues greeted him, but it was as if she did not exist. She was not paid for her work, of course, but her mother helped her partly, even though she could not do much. Her husband died at the beginning of the century and she had 8 children, not only Lisa. So she taught in the day school during the day and worked in the cellar in the evenings.
She survived the first years until women were finally allowed to go to university in 1909. Now she was even allowed to work in the laboratories of the chemical institute and she could go to the toilets at the university because they had finally sorted it out, but she was still not paid for her work.
Despite the poor working conditions, he and Hahn published three important studies between 1908 and 1909. This was enough for the otherwise over-honest Lise to realise that it would be wise to sign them with L. Meitner to disguise their gender, otherwise they would not be read by colleagues at all.
So she did research from the housekeeper’s room until, by 1912, her reputation had grown sufficiently to allow her to move to the new Institute of Chemistry and Physical Chemistry.
Slowly and steadily upwards
Hahn became a research associate and was given the radioactive chemistry department, Lise became a visiting physicist and didn’t even get a job. Then her friend Max Planck took her on as his assistant. What did that mean? She was allowed to mark students’ papers. Again, she silently swallowed her humiliation and accepted the job. At least it paid.
She liked Planck but he did nothing for her, and surprisingly, a few years later, Emil Fischer took her up on it after he had shaken off his paranoia about women in laboratories telling him they would set fire to their hair. He gave her the same formal status as Hahn, but at a much lower salary. At least it was good for her soul that the laboratory had now been renamed Hahn-Meitner.
She met quite a few people that day, including the Danish physicist Eva von Braun. The two women moved into an apartment together. The wealthier Eva helped her financially, but Lise was used to living very modestly. She hardly ate, but chain-smoked.
Some believe that their relationship was also romantic, at least judging by Lise’s letters in which she describes her longing for Eva’s closeness, but Lise was very attached to all her friends. Their relationship soured when Eva got married and the First World War broke out, but they never broke off contact.
During the war, Lise worked mostly alone because Hahn had to go to the front, but they exchanged letters and were able to publish important research again at the end of the war. It was valuable for Lise because it was the only way to move up the hierarchical ladder.
She received a tempting offer from Prague for a junior lectureship with the possibility of promotion, but her friend Max Planck quickly broke the news to Emil Fischer, who doubled her salary. She now earned three thousand marks, or two thousand less than Hahn, although he also received an allowance for his wife.
Then she got her own laboratory and a salary of four thousand marks, and two years later she finally became a professor. Although this probably made her the first woman in Germany to hold this title, it meant nothing to her, but she “enjoyed the real joy that my friends felt”.
She has had many, but she has also had her detractors, thanks to her forbearance, flexibility and kindness. When she made a mistake, she did not hesitate to admit it. Equally, it was not difficult for her to say that she did not understand something. For example, after one experiment, she wrote honestly to her critics: “I don’t happen to understand the results either.”
So she lived for physics alone when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. She saw what was happening around her, but refused to believe that it would stay that way. “The political situation is rather strange, but I sincerely hope that it will soon turn in a calmer and more reasonable direction,” she wrote to Hahn, who was in America at the time. Two weeks later, she was reporting to him that the whole of society was filled with political upstarts.
She then met Eva von Bahr again. They did not see each other for five years, probably because they had different views on the war. Eva was a liberal anarchist, Lise, surprisingly, a social democrat who had helped out as a hospital orderly during the First World War.
While she opposed the war in principle, she felt that Germany was fairer and more powerful than other countries during the First World War. She was also convinced at the time that Germans were truly racially and culturally superior to other nations, even though she herself was an Austrian Jew who became Protestant in 1908.
She was soon forced to change her mind. In April, Jews began to be withdrawn from the public professions. To make the campaign as dramatic as possible, the Prussian Minister of Education, Bernahrd Rust, sacked Albert Einstein, then the most famous German Jew in the world.
He was abroad at the time. He wrote home that he would not return to Germany, which did not guarantee “individual liberty, tolerance and equality of citizens before the law” and which was ruled by “a bloody and rabid rabble of Nazi police”.
Germany’s best Jewish scientists and intellectuals began to emigrate. Minister Rust asked the eminent mathematician David Hilbert whether the institutions had suffered any blow from the “exodus of Jews and their friends”. “Suffered? No, they have not suffered anything, Minister. They just no longer exist!”
A prisoner of Germany
But Lisa hasn’t moved anywhere. Max Planck assured her that in time the violence would subside and life would return to normal. He advised her to stay, and so did Hahn. She trusted them both.
Later, she wrote to a friend that she felt the danger was growing, but “I let Planck and Hahn convince me too much”. She could not bring herself to leave. Even in exile it was not easy. The world was in the throes of an economic depression and there were few vacancies for scientists. She could not bring herself to step out into the unknown and experience once again what she had experienced in her first years in Berlin, when she was a frightened and overlooked stranger in a strange land.
She clung to her laboratory: “I built it from the first stone. It was, if I may say so, my life’s work. It was so infinitely difficult for me to part with it.” She turned down a year’s professional work in Copenhagen and a post in America because Swarthore College could not offer her the laboratory, equipment and colleagues she wanted. She still did not understand the danger she was in.
She only saw it when she had lost everything. She was, of course, dismissed from the University of Berlin. Soon she was no longer even allowed to go to meetings with colleagues. Planck and Hahn were not Nazis, but they could only protect her with her Austrian citizenship until 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria.
After that, she no longer had any protection. Hahn’s nerves were failing under constant pressure from ambitious, pro-Nazi colleagues. When pressured by his superiors, he begged Lisa not to come to the Institute any more. “In fact, he threw me out,” she wrote in her diary in frustration. She no longer believed that everything would end well. “There is no use in promises, no one keeps them. The options are shrinking,” her diary read.
She knew she should have left Germany, but now she no longer had a valid passport. On top of that, new decrees prevented technicians and academics from leaving Germany legally. She was trapped.
Her friends entered the scene. They had been trying to get her out of Germany for some time. They were raising money so that she could spend a year at a university or institute, but there was not enough. Paul Scherrer, a chemist in Zurich, regularly told her to come to a “conference”, but the roads were closed and she could not enter Switzerland without a passport.
Physicists and chemists from all over Europe communicated with her through Peter Debye, Director of the Berlin Institute. He was a Dutch citizen and therefore safer than his colleagues. Finally, after having exhausted all his ideas, Niels Bohr remembered the experimental physicist Mann Siegbahn. Perhaps he would take her to his new institute in Stockholm?
But now she was really up to her nails. Debye wrote to the Dutch physicist Dirk Coster: “If you come to Berlin, can I ask you to stay with us and (provided, of course, that the circumstances are still favourable) to come as soon as possible – as if we were hearing an SOS – it would be even more of a pleasure for my wife and me.”
Coster immediately went to Berlin. Lise packed a few things carefully, so as not to attract attention, and fled with Coster towards the Dutch border. Coster had already made an agreement with the guards there that they would be allowed to cross the border without any problems.
Before she set off, Hahn gave her a diamond ring. It was a family heirloom, but he wanted her to at least have something in case she got into trouble. She was safe now, but still had no job.
The Swedes offered her a place at the Institute and changed their minds again. After a few months, when they were serious, she accepted. This time the decision was the right one, because the Netherlands subsequently fell into Hitler’s hands.
On the way to Stockoholm, she was almost killed by the weather when the plane almost crashed in a storm, but arrived safely at her destination on 1 August 1938. “One dare not look back and one cannot look forward,” she wrote to Coster.
Disappointing
Unfortunately, it turned out that he and Mann Siegbahn, who is eight years younger than him, don’t have much in common. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924 and in 1937 he started building the cyclotron, or the first circular accelerator. Lise knew nothing about modern technology, nor was she interested in it, but she was interested in the salary of a junior assistant, which was paid by the Swiss Academy.
Her German bank account has been frozen. She had been living on borrowed money for some time. She wrote to Hahn asking him to somehow get hold of her German money. He complained back to her that his ambitious Nazi colleagues were desperately pressuring him. She explained to him that the Siegbahn Institute was beautiful but a little empty, that nobody was interested in experiments and that there were “only four young physicists in the whole building”.
It has not found its place in the hierarchical system. It had its own laboratory, but not its own staff, equipment and technical assistance. She did not even have her own keys to the workshops and laboratories. Soon she felt as invisible as she had felt during her first years in Berlin. Yet it was then that she and her nephew Otto Frisch discovered the course of nuclear physics.
It was just before Christmas in 1938, shortly after she had received Hahn’s letter telling her about his discoveries in uranium fission. She thought about the letter when she and Otto visited Eva von Braun in Kungäl on the east coast of Sweden. Lise loved nature. She had no hobbies, she just relaxed by walking. She could walk for miles, but nowhere did she love walking as much as in nature.
Otto was on skis, she claimed she was just as fast without them, and they hurried through the snowy Swedish forests. At one point, they sat on a tree trunk. Lise started to write calculations on a piece of paper. Before long, they could imagine how uranium fissions when it is bombarded with neutrons.
Frisch immediately broke the news to Niels Bohr. “Oh, what fools we were! Ah, but this is wonderful! It’s really so that it could be true! Have you and Lise Meitner already written an article about it?” said Bohr like a thread. Physicists have been tormented by fission for years. Of course, they didn’t have a paper yet, so Bohr promised to keep his mouth shut until it was published.
He sailed to America and Lise and Otto started writing on the phone. They decided to call the fission process nuclear physics, but first they had to prove it by experiment because one of their colleagues did not believe them. Two days later, they also experimentally confirmed that they were right. Otto Frisch sent their paper to the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
Meanwhile, on board, Bohr spoke with his colleague Léon Rosenfeld. He told him what he had learned, casually, and forgot to mention that he had to be quiet, but Rosenfeld was already lecturing on the subject at Princeton a few days after landing.
The news exploded in public, physicists rushed to their labs, but no one mentioned Lisa and Otto because their paper was still waiting to be published. Niels Bohr almost stopped breathing. He was only relieved when he realised that they had been credited with the discovery after all.
Lise didn’t want anything to do with the atomic bomb, but after the war it made her so famous that they wanted to make a film about her. “Nonsense from the first page to the last,” she wrote to her nephew when she read the script. “It is based on a bullshit newspaper story that I left Germany with a bomb in my handbag, that Himmler’s people came to Dahlem and informed me that I had been sacked, and so on.” I’d rather walk naked on Broadway, she picturesquely refused to be in the film.
Shortly after the war, she moved into her own little laboratory, which was built for her at the Royal Institute of Technology. Twelve years later, at the age of 82 and with dual nationality because she refused to renounce her Austrian one, she moved to live with her nephew Otto Frisch in Cambridge, UK. She continued to travel, lecture and attend concerts.
When she died, aged just a few days short of 90, Otto inscribed on her tombstone the words: “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.”
