Madam, - It would certainly not have surprised me if Neil Belton's essay "Schrödinger in Clontarf" (Weekend Review, April 16th) had appeared in one of the tabloid newspapers. Words and phrases such as "behaved disgracefully", "attempting to curry favour", "frustration", "anguish", "pagan", and "defeated by forces. . .and by scientific ideas" should never have been used to describe my father. It looks as though the dead are treated differently to the living, because the dead cannot respond.
Neil Belton, who has recently published a novel based on my father, Erwin Schrödinger (A Game with Sharpened Knives), acknowledges at the very end of his essay that his chronicle of my father as a real historical figure is "utterly unreliable". It would have been better if this had appeared at the beginning of his essay in large type.
He refers to reading a biography of my father by Walter Moore - an unreliable biography, in my opinion. I had not heard of Walter Moore until he - an elderly gentleman accompanied by his wife, Pat - knocked at my door in the mid-1980s and introduced himself as my father's biographer. As an ardent admirer of my father he considered himself fully competent to take on the task; that he had never met my father did not seem to bother him at all. As a biochemist he was convinced he could write about both the person and the scientist.
I had my doubts, and they were confirmed when it turned out that he had trouble deciphering the vast amount of material he wanted to see. It would have been essential for him to study the German language and the Gothic script and the Gabelsberg shorthand before undertaking what he had set out to do. He would then have found out that the period and the society he wanted to write about were a territory he had yet to discover.
What de Tocqueville said about the time before the French Revolution applies to history in general and also to Europe, especially Germany of the early 20th century up to the end of the second World War: no one who had not lived before the French Revolution could imagine what life was like then. No one who did not live in the Nazi regime could imagine what life was like then, or understand the situation that prevailed in Germany and Austria under Hitler,
When Moore realised he was short of time he amplified the sparse information he could gather by filling the gaps with fiction. And by doing this he concocted a new character, one that did not resemble the one he had set out to describe. The result of Moore's book was a flood of critical and nasty reviews in which the fictitious figure given the name Erwin Schrödinger was torn to bits. This misleading book defames the name Erwin Schrödinger.
Neil Belton appears to feel competent to write about my father because he grew up in Clontarf where my father lived between 1939 and 1956. That seems to be the only connection. Apart from that, he refers to Moore's book, which he found "lucid and comprehensive", regardless of the fact that he had no proof of its truth. I do not get the impression that he is able to judge Moore's book from a scientific point of view. Did he conduct sufficient serious research to get a true picture of my father? I do not believe he gained a true picture. When he visited Vienna, the recently renovated house in which my father spent his childhood struck him as giving evidence of a brilliant and easy early life at the beginning of the 20th century - 100 years ago! What the house does not reflect now is the devotion of his father, the tender loving care of his mother and the financial difficulties when the child was growing up.
Without further explanation Neil Belton writes in his essay: "Then it began to go wrong; he felt marginalised by younger men". He is probably referring to the time in Germany in the early 1930s. Indeed things were beginning to go wrong then. It was one of the darkest periods in German history. Many of my father's colleagues were being dismissed and replaced by others. The criteria were acceptance of the regime's ideas and proof of pure Aryanism.
My father could have fulfilled both. But he was not prepared to accept the new regime and co-operate with it. So "marginalised" and "younger men" do not fit into the picture, as they do not explain the situation. My father left Berlin, where he had spent many happy years; and because he did not foresee - like many Austrians, among them Jews - what was going to happen in the near future, he returned to Austria. When Austria ceased to exist he was immediately dismissed, for obvious reasons. This time he had to choose between internment and escaping. He chose the latter.
As Neil Belton refuses to talk to me, I have to react to his essay by writing to the Editor of the paper that published it and yet again do all I can to keep my father's memory unflawed.
Neil Belton has no right to describe my father as a "pagan". I believe that the word "pagan" implies a person lacking culture and moral principles.
The poem my father wrote for his grave nearly 20 years before he died reflects his belief that we are immortal:
"What is, is not because we
feel it,
And is not not, because we
cease to feel it.
Because it is, we are, and are
forever.
Thus all being is an only being,
And that the world goes on
when one is dead,
Shows that we go on forever." -
- Yours, etc,
RUTH BRAUNIZER, Alpbach, Austria.