137 - Arthur I. Miller [60]
As well as its scientific importance, Zürich was a center of German culture and Pauli became a habitué of its intellectual salons. There he met, among others, the philosopher Bernard von Brentano; the writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann; Waldimir Rosenbaum, a wealthy political activist and lawyer; and the artists Max Ernst and Hermann Haller, the son of Einstein’s stern but beloved former boss at the Swiss Federal Patent Office, Kurt Haller. Haller made a bust of Pauli that stands in the La Salle Pauli at CERN. He looks as if he is in deep contemplation, pondering weighty problems. “The sculptor Haller in Zürich has made a bust which makes me look rather introspective—i.e., Buddha-like,” Pauli wrote to Kronig rather proudly.
Pauli in love
Amid this whirl of nightlife and salons Pauli was also building up the prestige of his department and conducting intense physics research. But no matter how much he filled his days and nights, he still anguished over his mother’s death. It was only in 1929 that he hinted at his feelings, signing the papers on quantum electrodynamics that he had written with Heisenberg simply “Wolfgang Pauli,” omitting the suffix “Jr.” He no longer cared whether he was confused with his famous father whom he now loathed.
Then in May 1929 he made a rather strange decision that may or may not have had something to do with his mother’s death: he left the Catholic church and unofficially adopted his father’s original religion, Judaism. Perhaps it was his response to the harsh judgment of Catholicism, which condemns suicide as a mortal sin, that led him to take this step. He later described himself as a “Jew from the waist up.” This may seem odd, in light of his ill feelings toward his father. But he had little regard for either Catholicism or Protestantism, to which his parents had converted in 1911, and he was well aware of how Jewish he looked, with his swarthy complexion, dark wavy hair, and dark eyes.
For all its pleasures Zürich had no Sankt Pauli red-light district where Pauli could seek consolation for his sorrows. He took to making frequent trips back to Hamburg and Berlin. Then, in December 1929, he suddenly announced, to the amazement of his colleagues, that he was going to marry—and, not only that, but that his intended was a cabaret dancer. He had always dismissed marriage as a bourgeois institution.
Perhaps the Zürich academics were surprised that no one else’s wife was involved. In those circles extramarital affairs were common and most marriages quite open. Schrödinger, for example, had had a legendary number of liaisons. He usually traveled with both his wife and current girlfriend. Schrödinger’s wife, meanwhile, was infatuated with the elegant mathematician Hermann Weyl, whose own wife was having an affair with Scherrer.
Pauli had fallen in love. He had met Käthe Deppner some years earlier, during one of his jaunts into the demi-monde of Berlin. Born in Leipzig, she was six years his junior and had trained at the famous Max Reinhardt School for Film and Theater in Berlin. Reinhardt had brought high-class theatre to Berlin and established a film industry that served as a model for Hollywood. Pauli’s sister, Hertha, was with the Max Reinhardt theater and he later revealed that it was when he went to visit her that he had met Käthe for the first time. The two women were friends.
At first Pauli bowled Käthe over by boasting what an eminent physicist he was. Shortly afterward he ran into her again at a party in Zürich given by his friend Adolf Guggenbühl, a wealthy publisher and one of the founders of the magazine Schweizer Spiegel. Käthe was performing with a dance school founded by Trudi Schoop, an old girlfriend of Scherrer’s. Zürich was a small world.
Why anyone falls in love is difficult to work out, especially when no hints are