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Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics

University of California Press

And even today I am filled with deep gratitude for the unusual goodness of my parents, and the extraordinarily stimulating intellectual atmosphere in which my sisters and brothers and I grew up.

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878, the third child of Hedwig and Philipp Meitner. She would live in Vienna twenty-nine years, and then she would leave, not realizing how permanently, to make her professional home in Berlin. Part of her remained sentimentally, irreversibly Viennese. She gave in to it, laughing at herself each time she paid the special fee to maintain her Austrian residency. "Na ja," she would shrug. "Foolishness costs money." And later still, after she fled Germany for Stockholm, after every member of her family was gone from Vienna, after the community from which she came was lost forever, even then she clung to her Austrian past, refusing to take Swedish citizenship until she could have both.1 Had she stayed longer in Vienna, she might not, perhaps, have remained so strongly bound.

Of Lise's childhood we have few details. Even her date of birth is not entirely certain. In the birth register2 of Vienna's Jewish community it is listed as 17 November 1878, but on all other documents it is 7 November, the day Lise herself observed. It may be that her parents, already ambivalent about their Jewish affiliations,3 somehow delayed the record, or perhaps the discrepancy was merely a case of Schlamperei , that well-known imprecision that contributed to Vienna's charm. Neither explanation is satisfactory. Lise's name also changed slightly, from its original Elise. In Berlin such things might have caused a flurry of paperwork; in Vienna it made no difference.

Like many of their generation, Lise's parents were recent arrivals in the capital, a move whose sense of future may explain their lack of attention

to a detailed family history. The Meitners traced themselves back only a few generations,4 to the village of Meiethein in Moravia, the fertile region north of Vienna that is now part of the Czech Republic. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, not long before the Rights of Man began drifting toward Austria, Kaiser Josef II initiated a series of reforms designed to consolidate power and secure the loyalty of all his subjects: he made German the official language of government, curtailed the Church, gave peasants some relief from serfdom, and granted Jews their first very limited access to civic employment, military service, and education. The Kaiser's tolerance did not extend to his own environs—fewer than two hundred Jewish families were permitted to live in Vienna—but he cracked the ghetto walls, so that Jews flooded the schools, joined the military, and looked to German language and culture for its promise of emancipation, opportunity, and humanism.5

Among Kaiser Josef's administrative reforms was the requirement of a family name. Lise's great-great-grandfather took the name Meietheiner, an indication that the family had lived in the village a long time; the name eventually shortened to Meitheiner, Meithner, Meitner. The family lived modestly;6 if some achieved special distinction, it was for their character and good deeds. Lise's great-grandfather, it was told, crept through the town after dark every Friday night to lay a loaf of challah, the Sabbath bread, at the door of every poor Jew. He did this as secretly as possible and did not permit anyone to thank him, but everyone knew it was the work of Reb Meitner. "Reb" did not mean "rabbi"—there were none in the Meitner family—but was a traditional title of respect.

Reb Meitner's son Moriz, Lise's grandfather, married Charlotte Kohn Lowy, a widow with two small boys who had inherited an inn, some property, and a guest house in the town of Wsechowitz. Her granddaughters would remember her as beautiful, well dressed, and as cheerful as she was self-disciplined. "The house might burn down," it was said, "and grandmother sings; there is cholera in the village, and still grandmother sings!" Moriz and Charlotte's son, Philipp, was blond and blue-eyed like his mother; like his grandfather, Reb Meitner, he would later be known for his integrity and kindness. In 1873 he married petite, dark-eyed Hedwig Skovran, whose grandfather had emigrated from Russia to Slovakia to escape the ongoing persecution of Jews.

Philipp and Hedwig Meitner grew up with Austria's transition from late feudalism to a recognizably modern society. The liberal revolutions of 1848 were crushed in Austria, but the struggle for individual freedoms and national autonomy went on. Industrialization came to Vienna and with it, a great internal migration from throughout the empire. In 1858, the medieval fortifications ringing the old inner city were torn down; in their place came the imposing Ringstrasse, grand new public buildings, and a parliament with little real power whose Liberal majority pressed for a modern secular state and constitutional government. At a time when the old order was failing and the very notion of empire was threatened by nationalist dissensions, the Hahsburg monarchy was humiliated by a string of unwise military ventures and diplomatic blunders. By 1867, Kaiser Franz Josef saved what he could by dividing the empire and letting Hungary go. He granted his people a number of constitutional laws: national and religious toleration, a laissez-faire economy, an impartial judiciary, greater individual freedoms of education, belief, speech, and press. For Jews, this meant full civic equality, including access to professions from which they had previously been barred.7 Philipp Meitner was among the first group of Jewish men who were free to study law and be admitted to its practice.

In the twenty years from revolution to constitution (so the saying went), Austria had been dragged into the nineteenth century. By the time Lise Meitner was born in 1878, imperial Vienna was mostly theater, set with palaces of impossible opulence and a Kaiser, the popular and long-lived Franz Josef. It hardly mattered any more. The new Vienna was bursting with life of its own, sprawling into the countryside, its population doubling and doubling again with an influx so constant that for generations most Viennese would be born somewhere else: overwhelmingly Catholic with some Jews and virtually no Protestants, mostly German-speaking with large contingents of Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Croats, Ukrainians, and others who retained their languages and national identities in newspapers and ethnic associations. To many of the new arrivals, Vienna was a place of marginal work and much unemployment, water shortages, and summer cholera, with congestion so severe that even the wealthy lived in apartments and the very poor shared beds and slept in shifts. The most heterogeneous city in Europe, it was among the most crowded and un-

sanitary; it had the highest rate of suicide. Still people came: conditions in the provinces were not better. Vienna at least promised improvement and pleasure: music of every sort, opera and theater, newspapers by the dozens, a renowned university, famous physicians and scientists, good food, vineyards at the edge of town, and blue hills shimmering hazily in the distance. If the Danube seemed muddy or the waltz overrated, Vienna was beguiling...