Master Mind

The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare

Daniel Charles

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2009
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061871269
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

ONE

Young Fritz

He was a patriot, even more extreme than I was. He was thirteen years older. The influence of time and surroundings can’t be denied.

—Nobel laureate James Franck,
speaking about Fritz Haber in 1958

RAISE A BLOODY CURTAIN on the year 1871. German armies encircle and capture tens of thousands of French soldiers along the border with Belgium. Napoleon III, emperor of France, surrenders. Princes from Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and many other German states gather in the court of their enemy, at the palace of Versailles near Paris. They proclaim Prussia’s King Wilhelm I emperor of a new German Reich. Germany unites; a popular dream is fulfilled. A fever of exultation sweeps the nation.

A few pessimistic voices—a tiny minority—warn of perils to come. Friedrich Nietzsche, still a young professor of classical languages, writes sourly of the “evil and perilous consequences” of wars, especially ones that have ended in victory. He complains about the delusion that German culture and civilization have triumphed, rather than simply its weapons; this delusion, he warns, was likely to lead to “the extirpation of the German spirit for the benefit of the German empire.”

In the Prussian city of Breslau, a young boy bravely faces the camera, perhaps for the first time. He appears to be three or four years old. He wears his finest clothes for this portrait, and fine clothes they are. The buttons on his jacket march upward toward his neck; his hair is neatly parted and combed. He stands stiffly, left hand supporting himself on the seat of an elaborately carved chair that’s just a bit taller than he is. His right hand holds the barrel of a toy gun.

The boy carries the name Fritz, the most German of names. It recalls “old Fritz,” Frederick the Great, Prussian leader of the previous century.

This Fritz, however, does not appear triumphant. He looks sad and a little bit lost. His eyes are anxious. This is a picture of a motherless child.

Fritz Haber was born into a large and tightly knit Jewish clan. His parents, Paula and Siegfried, were cousins. When Paula and Siegfried were young, their families had even lived in the same house for a time, filling it with the noise and chaos of fifteen children.

Fritz was the couple’s first child, arriving on December 9, 1868. It was a hard and painful birth, and Paula never recovered. She died three weeks later, on New Year’s Eve.

Siegfried, twenty-seven years old and already a successful dye merchant, was devastated. For years, he could barely face the world. He retreated into his expanding business and, according to one family member, “lived from his memories.” It’s unclear who cared for his infant son; one of Fritz’s many aunts may have taken the boy into her home.

It was seven years before Siegfried Haber found love again. He met and married nineteen-year-old Hedwig Hamburger, noted for her beauty and her talent on the piano. Music and laughter entered the Haber house once again. And children: Three daughters—Else, Helene, and Frieda—were born within five years.

By all accounts, Hedwig became a loving stepmother to Fritz, and Fritz returned her affection. Siegfried, on the other hand, doted on his daughters; he never found it within himself to fully love or accept the son whose birth had brought so much sadness.

Fritz grew into a talkative, energetic teenager, an enthusiastic student but not a spectacularly gifted one. He soaked up everything available to an upper-middle-class boy in Breslau: theater, an education heavy in classical philosophy and literature at the elite school known as the Gymnasium, and hours of friendly debate and drinking in the city’s beer cellars.

At home, he fought with his father. “The two of them were too different,” wrote one relative. The father was cautious; the son reckless. Siegfried was a “born pessimist”; Fritz found promise in every new possibility. Siegfried regularly chased guests out the door at ten o’clock by opening windows and remarking that he “liked to air things out before everyone leaves”; Fritz, throughout his life, lost track of time when engaged in conversation. Where Siegfried was “devoid of imagination,” Fritz fairly bubbled with fantastic ideas and creatively embroidered tales. Siegfried kept close account of his money; Fritz let it run through his fingers.

One younger relative was moved to wonder what Paula Haber had been like, since Fritz seemed to have inherited nothing of his father’s temperament. Another, however, suggested that dour Siegfried, rather than Fritz, was the oddity in the family tree. Several of Siegfried’s sisters and brothers had led lives of adventure, settling in far-off places such as Japan and the United States. And all, apart from Siegfried, had been irrepressible talkers, “a characteristic that’s been inherited by Fritz Haber and his generation.”

While Siegfried Haber acted as patriarch and domestic despot, Fritz became the court jester. Stories of him in this role abound. Once, when his sisters were six, four, and two years old, their mother discovered them lined up in small chairs in their room while Fritz marched back and forth in front of them, speaking loudly but incomprehensibly. Asked what he might possibly be doing, Fritz replied, “I need to acquaint my sisters with the sound of the Greek language!”

Young Fritz developed a knack for composition of rhyming verse, even on the spur of the moment. His teasing doggerel became the centerpiece of the family’s annual New Year’s Eve celebrations. Fritz composed the verses and taught them to his sisters, who presented them while dressed in costume. “Our childhood and youth were illuminated by our brother’s talents, which always came forth at the right moment,” recalled Else, the oldest of the sisters. For Siegfried, these were bittersweet occasions, for they also marked the anniversaries of Paula’s death.

On the evening after Fritz graduated from the Gymnasium with moderately good marks in the written tests, but a masterful performance in the oral examination, he celebrated with friends in the pubs of Breslau until the wee hours of the morning. Fritz was sound asleep when the family breakfast began at seven-fifteen. Siegfried, furious, marched the three sisters to Fritz’s bedroom. “Look well!” the father told them. “This is how the life of a drunkard begins!” More remarkable than the episode itself is its apparent wounding effect on the son. Forty years later, Fritz Haber’s eyes filled with tears and his voice shook as he told the story to one of his closest friends.

Young Fritz wanted out. Out of his father’s house, preferably out of Breslau altogether. For evidence of this, we have Fritz’s own words, scribbled in letter after letter to his friend Max Hamburger, who was learning the textile trade in distant cities.

Breslau, Fritz wrote, was an intellectual swamp. “Nothing, absolutely nothing; nothing satisfying to do, no stimulation, only irritation and tedium, having to watch out for this and that; I’m so disgusted with my entire life here that I could burst….

“It’s the same feeling that makes both of us dissatisfied—the urge to extricate oneself from narrow surroundings; to abandon, at all costs, the harbor into which my father has withdrawn himself after arduously weathering the storms of life; to sail out into the limitless ocean of life and future, guided by no other star than by one’s own will and striving. Oh, I could work myself into a fury over the exaggerated caution that continually limits this yearning, which the mature understanding of age considers correct without recognizing that the word ‘limit’ is a curse that we fight against, because we only want one limit, the limit of our own ability. I hope to achieve what I want when I first break free of the chains that wear me down and confine me within circles that I find repugnant…. First, I’ll go to university….”

In Haber’s mind, the university represented his longed-for port of departure. He dreamed of the “hours of genuine life” that he might experience there. And during the summer that followed his graduation from Gymnasium, he decided that he wanted to study chemistry. As a teenager, Haber had already begun homemade experiments, some of them dangerous. One of his aunts, who lived alone, allowed the budding chemist to use one of the rooms in her house for his experiments.

A familiar obstacle, his father, stood in the way. University studies were expensive; a year at university cost nearly as much as the total annual earnings of the best-paid mine workers of the time. Fritz would need the financial support of his father, and Siegfried wasn’t inclined to offer it.

Money wasn’t the issue for Siegfried Haber. He could pay. But like all pragmatists, he readily accepted the conventions of his time and the limits imposed by circumstance. He knew exactly who he was—a Jew in Breslau—and refused to step beyond what was safe or prudent for a Jew of Breslau in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Siegfried pursued ambitions that were within reach: prosperity and a position of respect within his local community. Eventually, he would become a member of the Breslau city council.

The academic world, on the other hand, was unfamiliar and inhospitable. Siegfried had not attended university, nor had any of his ancestors. Jews were rare in the upper ranks of Germany’s universities. The elder Haber foresaw roadblocks at every turn, eventual failure and frustration.

It was Siegfried’s cousin Hermann, brother of his first wife Paula, who broke the deadlock. Hermann was like a brother to Siegfried; the two were the same age, and had grown up together in that busy house in the center of Breslau. Hermann was also a merchant, a wool trader. Unlike Siegfried, though, Hermann was an optimist; he was open to all modern things, wrote his granddaughter, convinced “that everything would get better.” It was a reasonable expectation; at that time, everywhere one looked, yesterday’s dreams—of national unity, of prosperity, of full civil rights for Jews—had become reality. Why look to the past for guidance? Why not seize the opportunities of the future? Hermann became Fritz’s advocate, and Siegfried relented. In the fall of 1886, Fritz Haber left Breslau, bound for the university in Berlin.

Many years later, after Fritz Haber’s death, his sister Else warned a biographer that it would be a mistake to overemphasize her brother’s Jewishness. Jewish ritual was absent from the Haber household. Yom Kippur was less important than Christmas—though tree, gifts, and meals were the center of the holiday, not the Christ child.

Religion itself was changing. Rabbis reinterpreted the scriptures, creating new forms of Judaism for a new age of reason and political freedom. They abolished many practices that made Jews distinctive. Services were held on Sunday, dietary restrictions abandoned. In a small Prussian town, Victor Klemperer’s mother bought pork sausage for the first time and tasted it with reverence. It was, her son wrote later, “a form of communion,” a passage into new life.

Barriers of all sorts were falling. Fritz Haber was part of the first generation of Prussian Jews in a thousand years who could imagine that their Jewish heritage might create no insurmountable hurdles in life. In 1871, the unified German Reich had abolished all restrictions on civil rights based on “religious difference.” Some regions of Germany had dropped restrictions on Jews many years earlier. Jews became teachers, civil servants, and were elected to public office. Discrimination persisted, and anti-Jewish campaigns erupted from time to time, but for Fritz Haber, all doors seemed open. He wanted to rush through them. It was, in its own way, a response to his Jewish heritage.

Fritz Haber’s yearnings—to transcend his past and explore a wider world—were also those of his nation. His departure from Breslau mirrored the German experience of the late nineteenth century. Provincial loyalties were loosening; grand ambitions were forming.

Before Haber’s lifetime, “Germany” had been a vague and indeterminate idea. Before 1871, there was no country of the name. The people who lived along the banks of the Rhine, the Spree, and the Oder Rivers spoke many regional dialects and considered themselves mainly Silesians, or Prussians, or Bavarians. For the first time, they now began to think of themselves as “Germans.”

Fritz was a child of the second German empire, the Kaiserreich, established just a few years after his birth. He breathed the intense nationalism of his time, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

The Kaiserreich was a Johnny-come-lately empire, and not really an empire at all. It controlled no significant foreign territories, at least nothing on the scale of the English and French holdings. But Germany was on a forced march into modernity. Its new steel mills were the most modern in Europe; its railroads the most efficient. In the 1880s, while Fritz Haber sat drinking beer in the pubs of Breslau, Germany was passing France as a military and economic power and closing the gap with Britain. Germans read of their nation’s accomplishment with pride. The nation was feverish with a sense of limitless possibility.

Innovation brought social disruption. In 1850 only a quarter of Germans lived in urban centers. Fifty years later, half of them did. Millions of them left agricultural estates in Germany’s eastern regions and migrated westward to the coal mines and steel mills that lined the Rhine River.

Economic growth, however, was erratic and unpredictable. Boom times were followed by economic collapse, like the rise and crash of waves on a beach. Prices for many goods kept falling because of overproduction.

Henry Adams, a perceptive American visitor, chronicled the transformation of Germany. He saw Germany first as a college student in 1859, before its great transformation. At that time, he was struck by the “blundering incapacity of the German for practical affairs.” He saw no evidence that Germany would ever be able to compete with France, England, or America. “Germany had no confidence in herself, and no reason to feel it. She had no unity, and no reason to want it…. [S]he was medieval by nature and geography,” Adams wrote, and he confessed that he liked it that way.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Adams returned to Germany and barely recognized the place. “[H]ere was a Germany new to mankind. Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years the green rusticity of Düsseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of Birmingham.”

Suddenly, Germany resembled every other industrial society. “Coal alone was felt—its stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The Rhine produced the same power, and the power produced the same people—the same mind—the same impulse…. One great empire was ruled by one great emperor—Coal.”

Looking back on this upheaval in his later years, Fritz Haber described it in poetic fashion: “The transformation of the agrarian state into an industrial state broke over our new political world like a force of nature, and no one protected himself against a power that seemed only to bring unending bounty…. Coala woke from the deep, and its limitless riches rose to the light of the working day.”

Industrialists, steel-helmeted military officers, and university historians all preached the gospel of national progress and unity; so did religious leaders. The partisans of nationhood exhorted Germans to put aside narrow loyalties and unite in service to the cause of German power.

Science and technology were among the battering rams of the German assault. Germans considered mastery of science and technology to be among their great stre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Also by Daniel Charles
• Copyright
• About the Publisher