137 - Arthur I. Miller [15]
Young Wolfgang even tried to teach Hertha science. He showed her his collection of Jules Verne novels, precociously pointing out errors in the physics. When Wolfi was sixteen and Hertha was nine he decided to teach her astronomy. He informed his long-suffering sister that the so-called fixed stars were actually not fixed. In that case they must be falling, she replied. Pauli said no, but Hertha insisted. One can imagine the two arguing back and forth, the intellectual but blinkered young man and his equally stubborn sister.
It would have seemed there was not much point of contact between them, but in fact although they were never close, Hertha played an important role in Pauli’s mental life, as he discussed with Jung. In later years the two maintained an affectionate relationship. Writing in 1958, Hertha reminded Wolfgang of the Aunt Erna story and signed the card, “I embrace you. Always, Your Hertha.”
Pauli was ten when he entered the prestigious Döblinger Gymnasium in Vienna. He was popular with his fellow pupils, who remembered him as instigating many pranks. He had a talent for imitating professors. One, a particularly diminutive man, used to pop up unexpectedly amidst large groups of students. Pauli gave him the colorful and apt appelation das U-boot (the submarine). Four years later he had mastered geometry, calculus, and celestial mechanics, poring over books by the French poly-math Henri Poincaré.
Among the odd events in Pauli’s childhood, one of the oddest is his parent’s conversion, when he was eleven, from Catholicism to Protestantism. Whether or not there was much discussion of the subject, no letters or records remain to explain this decision or the effect it might have had on the young Pauli.
Then, when he was sixteen, his father’s mother made a rare visit. She revealed to him that his father’s name was not Pauli but Pascheles and that he was Jewish.
This is Pauli’s story. But the physicist Paul Ewald, who was the assistant to Arnold Sommerfeld—soon to become Pauli’s mentor—has a different version. He recalls that when he first saw Pauli, he thought immediately that he looked Jewish and told him so. Pauli denied it. Ewald advised him to go and look in the mirror. When Pauli went home for a visit he asked his mother and father about their backgrounds and in this way found out about his Jewish ancestry. Of course any discussion of this issue was almost certainly taboo in the Pauli family. To further obfuscate his Jewish origins, Wolfgang Sr. often went to such extremes as to enter into polemical exchanges over a certain discovery with a chemist named Pascheles—who was in fact himself.
Pauli never spoke of the events surrounding his father’s name change and his own discovery that he was Jewish. His widow, Franca, considered the change of name to be a family secret and became angry when interviewers mentioned it.
Nor did Hertha ever speak of it. In fact, taking the exact opposite stance to her brother, she insisted on speaking of herself as “half-Christian,” and went on to write books for children about the lives of Catholic saints.
For some years Pauli was not altogether happy to have discovered his Jewish ancestry. He found himself exposed to virulent anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, fanned to even greater heights by rumors that the Great War (World War I) had been lost because of Communist and Jewish conspiracies.
One year after his mother