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JUDGING EDWARD TELLER
A CLOSER LOOK AT ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SCIENTISTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
By Istvan Hargittai
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2010 István Hargittai
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-221-6
Chapter One
TELLER IN HUNGARY Origins and Background
The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses. —Edward Teller
Teller spent his first eighteen years in Hungary during which he experienced: the "happy peace time" of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy; a lost war; the dismemberment of Hungary; democratic revolution; communist dictatorship; counter-revolution and right-wing terror with vicious anti-Semitism; the first anti-Semitic legislation in post–World War I Europe; and a degree of stabilization. He was too young to truly appreciate the benefits of the "happy peace time," but it remained a point of reference for most people around him. His childhood and early teenage years were typical of the Jewish–Hungarian upper middle class, and his lifelong friendships originated from the encounters of his youth. Many of his values, but also some of his limitations, dated back to this period. Being a Jew in Hungary in the 1920s was an important factor in shaping his views and outlook over his lifetime.
Teller was not born in the house where the memorial plaque was unveiled on January 15, 2008. The building of his birthplace used to stand a few blocks away; it was typical of the architecture of fin de siècle Budapest. A few years ago, the building was demolished to give way to a modern glass-and-steel office complex. Teller was five years old in 1913 when he and his family—his father, mother, and sister—moved into the house in Szalay Street.
He was often taken to play at the big square of the Parliament building a few hundred yards away. The neo-Gothic complex dated back to the prosperous last decades of the nineteenth century and was large even for the Kingdom of Hungary, which was not a fully independent country but part of the Habsburg Empire at the time. The building was hugely out of proportion with the much smaller Hungary at the time of Teller's youth. The two lions standing guard in front of its main entrance remained imprinted in the child's mind forever. When decades later Nelson Rockefeller asked Teller if he would like anything from Budapest, Teller mentioned the image of these lions.
It was from his boyhood house that Teller traveled to Germany in 1926; there, his boyhood home, is where he returned to recuperate after his trolley accident in Munich, and where he and later he and his wife came for periodic visits—the last in 1936—first from Germany, then from Denmark and from England, and, finally, from the United States.
BROADER BACKGROUND
Teller's nephew, Janos Kirz, remembers how his grandfather, Edward's father, even in the late 1940s, talked continually about the good old days of the period before World War I. In Janos's words, "The period prior to World War I was a tremendous formative time that bordered on illusion. Edward lived through a period of well-being and comfort and security—false as it turned out to be—and a sense of Hungarian identity that went with it, something that people who were born in that period kept yearning for."
The Budapest of the "happy peace time," 1867 to 1914, was a uniquely fertile time for promoting talent. The first date, 1867, refers to the so-called Compromise between the Habsburgs and Hungary, and the second, 1914, to the outbreak of World War I. In the Compromise, the Habsburgs and the Hungarians came to an agreement following the crushed Hungarian Revolution and war for liberation of 1848–1849 against Austria. The Habsburgs alone could not defeat the Hungarians, so they had to call in the mighty Russian czar to their rescue. A ruthless period of terror followed, but in a few years' time, Austria, weakened by lost foreign wars, could no longer live with a rebellious nation under her rule.
The Compromise created a dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary and a personal union under Franz Joseph I. In 1867, he became the king of Hungary in addition to being the emperor of the rest of the Empire, which he had been since 1848. The Austrians and the Hungarians henceforth reigned over smaller nations. The Kingdom of Hungary, for example, included Croatia and Slovakia, which today exist as independent nations. The monarchy had Vienna and Budapest as its twin capitals, and the two cities often competed against each other, which was beneficial to both. Budapest was born from uniting Buda, Pest, and Óbuda (ancient Buda) in 1873, with Buda and Óbuda on the west bank of the Danube and Pest on the east. Buda is hilly, and Pest is considered to be a plain because its elevation is gradual; its outer districts reach the altitude of the conspicuous Gellért Hill of the Buda side.
In 1867, the door opened to unprecedented progress in Hungary, and Budapest became one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe. Immigration was encouraged. At the end of the nineteenth century, Budapest was one of the main destinations of Jewish immigration in the world; second only perhaps to New York City. According to some, the more well-to-do Jews congregated in Budapest and the poorer went to New York. The large class of the Hungarian nobility monopolized the political bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the military. The chairman of the first congress of the Hungarian chemists in 1910 lamented: "We are first of all a nation of lawyers and all who aim at dealing with and improving the fate of our fatherland have the mistaken belief that only a law degree enables us to do so." He called for turning the attention of aspiring young people toward studying science and technology.
The one-sided interest of the Hungarian nobility left wide open other intellectual trades, which became vastly popular among the recently emancipated Jews as well as among the Germans and other minorities in Hungary. Jews even graduated from law school in large numbers, but they remained lawyers and only seldom became members of the judiciary. Such division of labor between Hungarians and Jews did not slow the intensifying Jewish assimilation. The political elite welcomed this assimilation because the Hungarian population was in the minority in large areas of this multiethnic country, and the Jewish Hungarians could be counted on as loyal Hungarians.
There are opposing views as to the origin of the great possibilities for Jews in fin de siècle Hungary. According to one view, it was because the country was so liberal. The opposing view maintains that it was exactly Hungary's backward feudalistic regime that brought about those unique opportunities for Jews. In any case, their numbers were swelling because the absence of persecution attracted immigration. They burst onto this scene after centuries of having been excluded from higher professions, so they were looking for new opportunities.
Budapest of the early 1900s has been the subject of scrutiny and admiration because of its extraordinary production of gifted scientists, artists, composers, and playwrights. One-fifth of its population at that time was Jewish, a group consisting of native city inhabitants, incomers from the provinces of Hungary proper, and immigrants from all directions. My own ancestors came from the northwest on the paternal side and from the southwest on the maternal side. They spoke German, and soon learned Hungarian. Many came from the East, from Galicia, and they spoke Yiddish. Interestingly, Galicia has produced an extraordinary number of first-rate scientists, often going through Hungary. This fact is little known because often these outstanding contributors to world culture lost their Eastern origins at some point and are now regarded as Austrians. An example is the great American physicist Isidor I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate, whose autobiography states that he was born in Raymanov, Austria. His biographers write more precisely that he was born in Rymanow, Galicia, "then a province of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy, now in Poland."
The Hungarian–Jewish coexistence prospered in the "happy peace time," and the Jews in Hungary spoke Hungarian and German; relatively few spoke Yiddish. Conversion to Christianity helped Jewish careers, but in many professions nonconversion did not constitute a barrier. Even though some professions did not open up for Jews between 1867 and 1914, there were numerous new opportunities for the Jewish middle class, and even for recently arrived immigrants. This was not unlike the modern American scene where recent educated immigrants may find their fastest road to success by becoming scientists, doctors, and engineers.
The outcome was spectacular. Its impact was magnified in the decades to come because much of this talent would leave and find self-fulfillment abroad, initially in Germany, and ultimately in the United States. Teller and other scientists were not unique in this respect. In addition to scientists, Hungary was the launching pad for many significant playwrights and composers, artists and film directors, mathematicians and economists, and others who would make their mark on the international scene.
For prominent Jews the ultimate sign of assimilation in Hungary was to become a member of the hereditary nobility. And what could have been better evidence of the liberal atmosphere of the Habsburg Empire than the fact that even nonconverted Jewish families could acquire such a distinction? In the early 1900s, even a few members of the Hungarian government came from Jewish families, though they had names that sounded genuinely Hungarian. But World War I, known also as the Great War, brought an end to this seemingly ideal situation. The most forward-looking Jewish families had sensed that the peaceful conditions could not last forever. So they made sure that their children received a good education that would help them survive in any part of the world. To further this end, they stressed the cultivation of modern languages and practical professions. The Teller family was typical in this respect.
In 1867, new legislation guaranteed civil and legal equality for Jews in Hungary. There was also budding anti-Semitism, to be sure, that would grow into a formidable force after World War I and the ensuing revolutions. The anti-Semitic outbursts during the period from 1867 to 1914, however, did not disturb the peaceful atmosphere, and, if anything, the response showed the resilience of society by resisting it. There was, for example, the case of a young Christian peasant girl allegedly killed by the Jews as part of their religious ritual in Tiszaeszlár (a village in eastern Hungary). A trial followed, with a divisive impact on Hungarian society at large, but the accused were acquitted. "Respectable opinion, including most of the aristocracy and the gentry, rejected anti-Semitism." Thus Hungary fared better on this occasion than France did in the Dreyfus affair.
Fin de siècle Budapest was conspicuously attractive. "Foreign visitors arriving in that unknown portion of Europe, east of Vienna, were astounded to find a modern city with first-class hotels, plate-glass windows, electric tramcars, elegant men and women, the largest Parliament building in the world about to be completed." This description is characteristic at more than one level and conveys the perception of ambition as well as pretension. Budapest was like a younger brother to Vienna. The period witnessed prosperity in many areas. And Budapest became a banking center for the broader region.
Considerable technological innovation and large-scale industrialization took place in Hungary, with Budapest leading the rest of the country. Modernization was more conspicuous in Budapest than in most other great cities in Europe because in many areas it was not just the new gradually replacing the old, but the new being created where nothing had existed. Having lacked industry in many areas before, it could start with the most modern concepts and constructions.
The Elizabeth Bridge was completed in 1902, and at that time it was the largest single-span bridge on Earth. It stands today but completely rebuilt because it was—as all the other bridges of Budapest were—blown up by the retreating Germans in 1945. The city became a world-class metropolis by around 1896—the Hungarian Millennium—and one hundred years later it was still the progress of that earlier period that made Budapest attractive. Typical of this progress is the Castle Hill, which is recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. The first subway on the European Continent was built and running in Budapest. The Ganz factory developed and built the first electric railroad engine in the world. Soon after the telephone system was introduced in Budapest, a telephone service for news and entertainment was initiated—a forerunner of radio.
There was unprecedented growth in educational and cultural opportunities, never approximated since. New buildings went up for the University, the Technical University, the Music Academy, and many other institutions. During the period from 1867 to 1914, Budapest was the fastest-growing city among the major cities in Europe, and may have been the fastest growing in the world, save for Chicago. Budapest had close to one million inhabitants by the time World War I began. That meant that roughly one in every twenty people in Hungary lived in the capital city, which was considered to be a healthy proportion. Part of the progress was the development of the school system; parents expected their children to surpass them in all facets of life. In addition to the old landed aristocrats, a new upper class emerged, the financial aristocracy, but there was a well-defined division of influence between them. This division was bridged on occasion, however, by intermarriage between aristocratic sons and the daughters of rich, often Jewish, members of the financial aristocracy.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the gentry class had lost their land and largely congregated in Budapest, gaining positions in the civil service regardless of their qualifications. They would have found it beneath their pride and dignity to deal with commerce, finance, industry, or business of any kind. There is some resemblance in this behavior to the English attitude reflected in Jane Austen's novels, but the Hungarian version was being played out a hundred years later. The Hungarian gentry formed the so-called Christian gentlemanly middle class, which remained characteristic through World War II. The label stressed Christians to signify the exclusion of Jews from their ranks, and this echelon would foment future anti-Semitism. The sons of this class went preferentially into the army and law and seldom studied to become medical doctors and engineers. The division between the two strata was the "division between the urban and the populist, between the commercial and the agrarian, between the cosmopolitan and the nationalist," that is, between the Jewish Hungarian and the non-Jewish Hungarian culture. In the period of growth and prosperity, the animosities seldom came to the surface, but this would change later.
Although the great majority of the Jewish population was not politically active, there was a vocal and visible layer of it. After World War I, this group was conspicuously among the former prisoners of war returning from Soviet Russia who wanted to change the social system and took their example from Lenin's revolution. The bourgeois democratic government of Count Mihály Károlyi came about at the end of the war, in October 1918. However, it soon folded under the pressure of the Western Allies' demands for the dismemberment of Hungary. Fearing an attack from neighboring countries, Károlyi handed over the government to the communist Béla Kun and his comrades in March 1919. An ill-fated and ill-managed communist rule of 133 days followed. Kun was Jewish, as were the majority of his people's commissars.
By the time Admiral Horthy entered Budapest on a white horse, the relationship between Hungarians and Jews had changed drastically. The peace treaty of June 4, 1920, signed in Trianon (a palace in Versailles), dismembered historic Hungary. It gave independence to Croatia and Slovakia in the new Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, respectively. It also carved out large chunks of the country to add them to Romania and even some territory to Austria. There was no longer any need for assimilated Jews to enhance the Hungarian population. In Hungary proper, there were hardly any sizeable minorities, whereas Hungarians were trapped by the millions in the neighboring countries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from JUDGING EDWARD TELLER by Istvan Hargittai Copyright © 2010 by István Hargittai. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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