Excerpt from The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The direction in which theoretical physics was heading went completely against his grain: real, physical intuition was being replaced with brute-force artillery, and mathematical formulae were set in place of matter, atoms, and energy. Paul detested the likes of John von Neumann, that Hungarian wunderkind, with his "terrifying mathematical guns and unreadably complicated formula apparatus," as much as he despised the indigestion that the "infinite Heisenberg-Born-Dirac-Schrödinger sausage-machine factory" caused him. He lamented the attitude of his younger students, who "no longer noticed that their heads had been turned into relays in a telephone network for communicating and distributing sensational physics messages" without realizing that, like almost all modern developments, mathematics was hostile to life: "It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn't conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels." His already excruciating self-criticism and inferiority complex became truly unbearable, for although he knew mathematics, it was not simple for him. He was not a computer. He could not calculate with ease, and his inability to keep up with the times fueled a self-destructive streak that was his constant companion and torturer, an inner voice that whispered to him, and continuously betrayed him. By 1930, his letters to his friends spoke of nothing but death and despair: "I clearly feel I'll destroy my life if I don't succeed in pulling myself together. Every time I have a chance to review my affairs, I see some sort of chaos in front of me-a gambler or alcoholic has to see similar pictures when sober." His inner turmoil mirrored the economic and political turbulence that was beginning to tear Europe apart. Paul was officially nondenominational; Jews were not allowed to marry Christians in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and both he and Tatyana had given up their respective religions to marry each other back in 1904. But with anti-Semitism growing on all sides, he began to entertain increasingly morbid thoughts. In 1933, he wrote to his friend Samuel Goudsmit with a macabre plot to shock German society out of its Nazi-induced trance: "What if a group of eminent, elderly Jewish academics and artists collectively commit suicide, without any demonstration of hatred or issuance of demands, in order to prick the German conscience?"

Goudsmit wrote back in a fury, sick of his friend's obsession with suicide and disgusted by the utter absurdity of his idea: "A group of dead Jews can do nothing, and their deaths would merely delight das teutonische Volk." Three days before Ehrenfest wrote that letter, Hitler's regime, barely two months old, had enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, putting all Jews who held government jobs at risk, a move that convinced Ehrenfest that "the remarkably open and carefully planned extermination of the Jewish 'plague' from German art, science, jurisprudence, and medicine would quickly be 90 percent effective." During the last year of his life he used his contacts and influence to help Jewish scientists find work outside of Germany, even though he had lost all faith in a possible future for himself. His thoughts went around in a furious circle, with money never far from his mind: his Leiden home was mortgaged many times over. He longed to put an end to his own suffering, but he could not bear to leave his wife with the care of poor Wassik-she had lost all her investments in Russian stock in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution-or inflict such a lifelong burden of charge on his two eldest daughters, Tatyana and Galinka, or his older son, Paul Jr. His suicidal fantasies, which up to that point had been exclusively centered on his own death, began to include his youngest child: "Surely you understand my wish that Galinka and Tanitschka should not in the future have to work themselves to the bone simply to keep their idiot brother alive?" he wrote to Nelly Posthumus Meyjes, an art historian with whom he was having an intense love affair that brought him a small measure of joy and happiness, but also inflamed his already disordered mental state.

Excerpted from The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut . Copyright © 2023 by Benjamin Labatut . All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.