137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession Part 8

Yet Pauli's mandala contains both the masculine Trinity (three pulses) and the feminine quaternity (four colors, four Cabiri), combined to create an alchemical hermaphrodite. Bearing in mind that Pauli is a physicist, Jung speculates on the cosmic significance of this image. Could it be that the mandala symbolizes the four-dimensional source of s.p.a.ce-time? But this seems overly scientific. Jung does not have the knowledge to pursue this line of speculation and turns instead to medieval symbolism.

Guillaume's vision.

In the last canto of Les Pelerinages de l'ame (Pilgrimages of the Soul), the fourteenth-century Norman poet Guillaume de Digulleville describes a vision of paradise made up of forty-nine rotating spheres. (Guillaume's three exquisitely ill.u.s.trated allegorical poems Pilgrimage of Human Life, Pilgrimage of the Soul, and Pilgrimage of Jesus Christ were to inspire John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.) An angel informs Guillaume that these forty-nine spheres represent earthly centuries, not in ordinary time but in eternities. A vast golden heaven surrounds all the spheres. A blue ring, a mere three feet across and half-submerged in the vast golden heaven, glides by. So there are two intersecting systems, one vast and golden, the other small and blue. Guillaume asks the angel why the blue circle is so much smaller than the golden circle of heaven. The angel tells him to look up and he sees the King and Queen of heaven on their thrones.

The angel then explains to Guillaume that the small blue circle is the ecclesiastical calendar and carries the element of time. This very day is the feast day of three saints, the angel says, and begins a rapid discourse on the zodiac. As he tells Guillaume about Pisces, sign of the fishes, he adds that the feast of the twelve fishermen will be celebrated during the sign of Pisces and that all twelve will appear in the Trinity. Guillaume is totally bewildered. What most irks him is that he has never really understood the mystery of the Trinity. The angel launches into a discourse about the three princ.i.p.al colors, green, red, and gold, then stops abruptly and orders Guillaume not to ask any further questions. That is the end of both the canto and the poem.

Guillaume's vision and Pauli's mandala-the quest for the fourth.

Guillaume's vision of heaven provides Jung with vital clues both to Pauli's mandala and to his feeling of sublime happiness. In Guillaume's and Pauli's visions the blue circle represents time. In Pauli's mandala it intersects with another of equal diameter, giving a more harmonious fit. The blue circle with its equally s.p.a.ced segments and ticking hand represents rationalism and thus the masculine Trinity. It drives the circle it intersects, which is segmented into four colors-red, green, gold, and blue, on which stand the four Cabiri. This circle, Jung decides, represents the fourness, the quaternity. The pendulums the Cabiri carry denote the eternal nature of the world clock. The whole mechanism causes the golden circle to rotate. This great circle is no longer dark. In Pauli's psyche, the shadow or dark side has been separated from the anima-his female aspect-which now s.h.i.+nes like the sun. No longer buried in the unconscious, it has become enlightened.

The clock on the blue circle sets the entire process in motion. This, says Jung, is because the Trinity is the pulse of the threefold rhythm of the system, which in turn is based on thirty-two, a multiple of four. The circle and the quaternity interpenetrate so that each is contained in the other: three is contained in four.

In a way it was not surprising that Pauli and Guillaume should have had similar visions, in that Pauli too was brought up as a Catholic. Throughout the Middle Ages the problem that hung over the Trinity was that it excluded the feminine. It makes sense that the missing color in Guillaume's dream is blue, the color of the small undeveloped circle. Blue, of course, is the color of Mary's cloak. It is Mary who is missing.

Guillaume was given this clue but he missed it. Instead he saw the King and Queen sitting side by side. But is not Christ the King also in himself the Trinity? Guillaume, a man of the Middle Ages, focused so much on the King that he forgot the Queen. Put the two together-King and Queen, Christ and Mary-and the result is four, a quaternity. Perhaps this was why the angel slipped away before Guillaume started asking awkward questions.

The problem for Guillaume and all the philosophers of the Middle Ages was to find the fourth. Perhaps Pauli's vision provided "a symbolic answer to this age-old question. That is probably the deeper reason why the image of the world clock produced the impression of 'most sublime harmony.'" wrote Jung.

As for the absence at the center of Pauli's mandala, Jung concludes that it is "an abstract, almost mathematical representation of some of the main problems discussed in medieval Christian philosophy." It is only through his knowledge of Guillaume's vision that Jung is able to understand the connection of Pauli's dream with preoccupations going far back into history.

But how could the concept of fourness-the quaternity-arise in the unconscious? The conscious mind could not have put it there. Jung concluded that there must be some element in the psyche expressing itself through the concept of fourness, driving toward the completeness of the individual. Jung emphasizes that the concept of fourness is found in prehistoric artifacts all over the world. It is an archetype often a.s.sociated with the Creator-though, far from being a proof of G.o.d, it proves only "the existence of an archetypal G.o.d-image" within human consciousness.

A changed man?

Jung claimed that as a result of his a.n.a.lysis Pauli "became a perfectly normal and reasonable man" and even gave up drinking. He often spoke about the case of the intellectual young scientist as a prime example of the way in which his work on alchemical symbols had helped to shed light on the "development of symbols of the self." It cast light on physics, too.

Two years after he first approached Jung, Pauli wrote to him describing how difficult it had been to cope with the very different but equally repellent parts of his personality before he started a.n.a.lysis: The specific threat to my life has been the fact that in the first half of life I swing from one extreme to the other (enantiodromia). In the first half of my life I was a cold and cynical devil to other people and a fanatical atheist and intellectual "intriguer." The opposition to that was, on the one hand, a tendency toward being a criminal, a thug (which could have degenerated into me becoming a murderer), and, on the other hand being detached from the world-a totally unintellectual hermit with outbursts of ecstasy and visions.

It shows what an extraordinary degree of self-awareness he had achieved through his dreams and Jung's a.n.a.lysis of them.

A few months later Pauli wrote again to Jung: With regard to my own personal destiny, it is true that there are still one or two unresolved problems remaining. Nevertheless, I feel a certain need to get away from dream interpretation and dream a.n.a.lysis, and would like to see what life has to bring me from the outside. A development of my feeling function is, of course, very important to me, but it does seem to me that it cannot emerge solely as the outcome of dream a.n.a.lysis. Having given the matter much thought, I have come to the conclusion that I shall not continue my visits with you for the time being, unless something untoward should arise.

That was the end of Pauli's face-to-face sessions with Jung.

Thanks to Jung, in later years Pauli was somewhat calmer, less acerbic, and less hypercritical, although he was still never seen without a gla.s.s of wine in his hand or the occasional martini. Friends guessed that alcohol enabled him to cope with his lifelong bouts of depression.

"The naive certainty of my former Hamburg days, with which I could easily declare, 'That's all nonsense,' is something I have since rather lost," he wrote to Erich Hecke, a former colleague and friend from those same riotous Hamburg days some years after he stopped his sessions with Jung. Later still, in the middle of a string of critical comments on the work of his former mentor Born, Pauli added wryly to Born, "You will certainly remember old times where I did not have the habit to mix my critical remarks with so much sugar."

As Jung put it, "On a conservative estimate, a third of my cases were really cured, a third considerably improved, and a third not essentially influenced." Pauli fell in the middle.

The Superior Man Sets His Life in Order.

Franca.

PAULI WAS still deep in his sessions with Jung when he happened to go to one of Adolf Guggenbuhl's parties in 1933. It was at another of Guggenbuhl's famous parties, three years earlier, that he had had his second fateful meeting with Kathe Deppner. On this occasion he was introduced to an elegant and striking young woman named Franziska Bertram.

Born in Munich, Franca was thirty-two, a year younger than Pauli. Always fas.h.i.+onably dressed, she was cultured and well traveled, a woman of determination and strong opinions. Her parents had divorced and she had been brought up by her mother, first in Italy, then in Cairo, where she went to high school. When World War I broke out the family returned to Munich. She moved to Zurich in 1922, where she had been the personal a.s.sistant of Friedrich Adler, an eminent Communist politician-famous for having shot the prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire-among several high-level secretarial positions.

Franca moved in high cultural circles and had just ended a relations.h.i.+p with the Swiss author and film writer Kurt Guggenheim. She was still in a fragile state, but was intrigued by Pauli's strange personality. When Guggenbuhl suggested that Pauli drive her home, as they both lived on Hadlaubstra.s.se-Franca at number 17, Pauli at number 47-Pauli replied off-handedly, "I suppose I could take you along." Franca was not impressed.

Pauli was certainly lacking in social graces but nevertheless, despite his apparent coolness, he set out to court her. Perhaps his gauche behavior had simply been shyness. After all, Franca must have been rather intimidating. Shortly afterward, Franca moved in with him. A year later, she recalled, Pauli said abruptly, "Now we marry."

As the great day approached, Pauli maintained his usual air of indifference. But his a.s.sistant at the time, Victor Weisskopf, tells a different story. Being Pauli's a.s.sistant was a full-time job. It involved grading problems for Pauli's courses as well as being available for discussions with him about his work and keeping him updated on developments in physics. It was always a struggle to obtain his permission to leave Zurich. Late in March that year, Weisskopf with great trepidation asked for one week's leave to go to Copenhagen. "Why?" Pauli demanded impatiently. "I intend to marry and come back with my wife," Weisskopf explained. To Weisskopf's amazement, Pauli replied, "I approve of that, I am going to get married also!"

Pauli and Franca married in London on Sunday, April 4, 1934. Most likely Pauli chose London because he had never been there. Franca's hooded eyes and half smile make her look uncannily like a female version of Pauli.

A couple of weeks later Jung sent Pauli his "best congratulations." Jung had predicted that Pauli's marriage "would constellate the 'dark side of the collective'," meaning that it would bring the good side of otherwise potentially dark archetypes into his consciousness. Pauli, elated, declared Jung was "perfectly correct." To Jung, Pauli described Franca as someone who had "a similar problem of opposites, but the reverse of mine.... She fell in love with my shadow side because it secretly made a great impression on her."

Shortly afterward the couple found themselves seated across the table from Jung at yet another of Guggenbuhl's dinner parties. Strangely, Jung totally ignored Franca. To make matters worse, Pauli had only just told her that he had previously been married, to Kathe. How could Jung not speak to her when he "was aware that the new marriage could lead to a devastating catastrophe," she later demanded. Pauli rea.s.sured her that "Jung knew [from Pauli's dreams] that the binding would be good."

Franca's conclusion was that Jung had ignored her because of "Pauli's decision to marry" in other words, that Jung had lost Pauli to her. "Pauli, the extremely rational thinker, subjected himself to total dependence on Jung's magical personality," she remembered bitterly. Her distrust of Jung was augmented by her anger that he had sent Pauli to be a.n.a.lyzed by a mere student, Erna Rosenbaum. She insisted that Pauli end his sessions with Jung. Perhaps, in fact, it was she who was jealous of Jung.

Nevertheless, Pauli acquiesced. He ceased dream a.n.a.lysis with Jung. Colleagues at the ETH such as Hermann Weyl thought that Franca had done him a favor.

Nevertheless, Pauli remained somewhat disturbed and insecure. On a skiing trip with Franca that December he panicked that the "earth was shaking under his feet" and screamed that he wanted to "thrash someone." Weisskopf and his wife were skiing nearby and dropped in to see them. Pauli was angry with Weisskopf because he had made an error in a physics paper and was not speaking to him. Weisskopf was eager to get back on speaking terms but Pauli refused to see him. Weisskopf asked Franca to intervene but Pauli had stopped speaking to her too because she had dented their car.

Back in Zurich, Pauli tried to make it up with Weisskopf. "Don't take it too seriously," he said grandly. "Many people have published wrong papers." Then he ruined everything by adding, "But I never did!"

The following year, Erich Hecke wrote to Weyl that he was concerned about Pauli's mental health. He seemed too preoccupied with "dreaming and waking fantasies." Hecke felt sympathetic toward Franca and referred to the "huge piece of work" she had to contend with in her marriage.

In fact Franca contended well. She took care of day-to-day tasks, put up with his cynicism and, all in all, provided a secure home for him. She gave Pauli what he sorely needed-an ordered life in which he could get on with his work. Theirs was an affectionate relations.h.i.+p. The two of them always appeared comfortable with one another.

Over breakfast, Pauli regularly told Franca his dreams and then wrote them down. She recalled that this routine became increasingly important to him as he grew older. To her his dreams were useless exaggerations. After his death, she destroyed all the records of them she could find.

Though Pauli had stopped going to Jung for a.n.a.lysis, the two never ceased corresponding. Franca could not stop his dreams and Pauli continued sending Jung dreams that "perhaps [may be] of some interest to the psychologist." Jung was ecstatic and promised to "'excavate' [the] ancient and medieval lines that have led to our dream psychology,"-to continue unearthing the mythical and alchemical aspects of Pauli's dreams and working out what they revealed about archetypes. Jung referred not to "my" but to "our dream psychology," a phrase he never used to anyone else. His patient had become a co-worker.

In search of a fusion of physics and psychology.

In October 1935 Pauli had a dream in which he was at a physics conference. In his dream he was trying to explain his dreams to colleagues using everyday language but they could not understand. He realized that his dream was all about the need to find a common language that could be understood by both physicists and psychologists. Writing to Jung about it he played with the idea. Perhaps the term "radioactive nucleus," for example, could be interpreted in psychological terms as the Self. Jung declared it an "excellent symbol" for a constellated archetype in the collective unconscious which then made an appearance in individual consciousness and thus encompa.s.sed both the unconscious and conscious Selves.

Over the next few years Pauli forged ahead in his research. He worked on crucial problems in physics and maintained a huge correspondence. He pursued infinities in quantum electrodynamics, d.a.m.ning certain of his colleagues' results as deplorable; mulled over the myriad end products of cosmic rays smas.h.i.+ng through the earth's atmosphere; delved into the exciting new subject of nuclear physics; and sought a deeper understanding of his greatest discovery, the exclusion principle.

But he never revealed to his scientific colleagues another issue that continued to preoccupy him: the need for a fusion of physics with Jung's a.n.a.lytical psychology in order to understand first the unconscious and then the conscious. Weisskopf recalled that in all the years he knew Pauli, Pauli never once mentioned the topic.

Pauli's dreams and Jung's a.n.a.lyses of them had led Pauli to the rather extraordinary conclusion that "even the most modern physics lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes," he wrote to Jung, adding that there are "deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time."

In January 1938, Pauli recorded the following dream and ill.u.s.trated it with a drawing: Pauli's drawing showing his dream of January 23, 1938.

In the dream he sees three layers or lines. The top line contains a rectangle, labeled "window," and a circle divided into three sections and labeled "clock." The two other lines are waves with different degrees of oscillation. Pauli and his anima, his female aspect, are both present, but neither can see the time on the clock because it is too far above the lower two levels which he is moving along. So his anima tries to create her own time with what he calls "these odd oscillation symbols," the same as those produced by the dwarves with their pendulum clocks in his "world vision."

Pauli tries to work out the meaning of the dream. He realizes that the rate at which the oscillatory forms vibrate per second must be related to the notion of time. To bring harmony into this system he must find a way to relate all "3 layers to a four-part object (clock)." Once again he is torn between three and four.

Pauli began to notice symbols in his dreams that related to concepts in physics, such as pendulums and time. "In my dreaming and waking fantasies," he informed Jung, "abstract figures are appearing." These included "acoustic rhythms" or "alternating dark and white stripes" like spectral lines or wasps about which Pauli had a severe phobia. "It will become a matter of life and death for me to understand more about the objective (communicable) meaning of these symbols than I do at the moment," he wrote to Jung.

Jung and the rise of Hitler.

But no matter how otherworldly they were, in the end neither Jung nor Pauli could ignore the ominous changes in the world around them-to be specific, the rise of n.a.z.ism.

Back in 1935 Jung was invited to attend the tercentenary celebrations at Harvard University, scheduled for August 31 to September 18 the following year, as an honored guest.

Behind the scenes, however, there had been a great deal of struggle over whom to invite from Germany-if anyone at all. By now Hitler was in power and professing rabidly racist policies. The situation was particularly complex in the case of Jung who, early on, had become interested in the rise of n.a.z.i Germany from the standpoint of a.n.a.lytical psychology. "Would you have believed that a whole nation of highly intelligent and cultivated people could be seized by the fascinating power of the archetype?" he wrote, adding "the 'blond beast' is stirring in its sleep." He saw this as the archetypal image of Wotan, the mythical warrior king, wors.h.i.+pped before Christianity arrived in central Europe, who had been awakened by the "Hitler movement [which] literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet.... Wotan the wanderer is on the move," he declared, awestruck at witnessing what he saw as his psychology in action.

Jung also expressed ambivalence and downright fear at what he saw happening in n.a.z.i Germany, but nevertheless for him it was an opportunity not to be missed. In 1933 Freud's books had been among those burned in Berlin. Psychoa.n.a.lysis, so long a.s.sociated with the Jews, was now banned in Germany. Jung's a.n.a.lytical psychology was the only one allowed in the German cultural scene. Jung wrote several tracts in praise of National Socialism (n.a.z.ism) and in condemnation of the Jews, making statements no doubt intended to curry favor with the authorities, such as "The 'Aryan' unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish." Condemning Freud's psychology, he wrote sternly, "it has been a grave error in medical psychology up till now to apply Jewish categories-which are not even binding on all Jews-indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom."

Jung cemented his control over psychoa.n.a.lysis in Germany by becoming president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy as well as editor of its journal Zentralblatt fur Psyschoa.n.a.lyse. But he made sure that the organization's rules were vague enough that they banned Jews only from the German section.

Rumors even reached the Harvard tercentenary selection committee that Jung was "The Mephistopheles in the n.a.z.i drama"-that is, that he was the eminent grise behind the n.a.z.is-and that he was amused at the n.a.z.i's treatment of "Freud's brethren"-the Jews. After many acrimonious sessions the committee decided to invite Jung, placing academic unity over political concerns. It was a decision for which Harvard would later be criticized.

Pierre Janet from France and Jean Piaget from Switzerland were among other psychologists who were invited. Freud, then eighty years old, was not invited. The tercentenary committee decided he was too old to attend and would probably decline.

Einstein declined and Bohr decided not to attend. Heisenberg had also been invited and had accepted but was forced to withdraw. In fact, the German government had granted him permission to travel, but his military obligations and his need to reply to attacks on science in the press required him to stay in Germany. Pauli was not invited. Either the Harvard University scientists did not consider he had the required stature or perhaps they wanted to invite only physicists who were n.o.bel laureates.

The ceremonial sessions were attended by a distinguished audience of 17,000 who took their seats in Harvard's inner sanctum, Harvard Yard, where the fledgling Continental Army had drilled in 1776 and George Was.h.i.+ngton had been headquartered. Most of the major figures of European academia were there. Sixty-seven thousand people formally registered to attend the proceedings.

The featured speaker was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was then running for his second term in office. Jung's opinion of him made headlines in The New York Times: "'Roosevelt Great,' Is Jung's a.n.a.lysis." He thought less about Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor: "the nightmare on the way to being dreamt," he was quoted as saying.

James Conant, Harvard's dynamic young president, read out Jung's official citation for his honorary degree thus: "Doctor of Science. A philosopher who has examined the unconscious mind, a mental physician whose wisdom and understanding have brought relief to many in distress."

Jung's lecture, on the morning of September 7, drew the largest crowd of all the seminars given. He spoke on "Psychological Factors Determining Human Behavior," of how the "human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body." Afterward there was a spellbinding conversation between Jung and the American modernist poet Charles Olsen on mandala imagery in Herman Melville's novel Moby-d.i.c.k.

The Jungs stayed in Milton, Ma.s.sachusetts, at the home of G. Stanley Cobb, an eminent medical researcher. As was European custom, every evening Jung left his shoes outside their bedroom door to be s.h.i.+ned, apparently unaware that they did not have live-in help. So as not to embarra.s.s his guest, Cobb s.h.i.+ned them himself.

As part of the climax of the splendid celebrations, on September 17 there was a spectacular fireworks display on the Charles River. Half a million spectators lined the banks.

After the celebrations at Harvard Jung gave a series of lectures at Bailey Island (Maine), New York City, and Yale University, where he spoke about how he had treated a brilliant but troubled scientist. Back home he got down to work on his "long overdue" book on alchemy.

According to one (unsubstantiated) story Jung shortly afterward interrupted his work for an undercover a.s.signment. Josef Goebbels, n.a.z.i minister of propaganda, summoned him to Berlin to attend official ceremonies with Hitler, Hermann Goring, commander of the German Air Force, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the feared SS. Jung's task was to a.s.sess whether they were crazy. Presumably, if so there would have been a coup. According to the story Jung quickly realized they were all madmen, and, fearing for his life, left immediately.

Germany heads for war.

Shortly afterward a very serious problem arose for Pauli-the question of his status in Switzerland. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and as a result Pauli's Austrian pa.s.sport became a German one. He immediately applied for Swiss citizens.h.i.+p but his application was refused. There were problems with residency requirements, added to which Pauli's command of the Swiss-German dialect was not good. The mayor of Zurich informed him that his residency requirement would be fulfilled in spring 1940, after which he should reapply for Swiss citizens.h.i.+p.

So Pauli ended up back at the German consulate in Switzerland. After a cursory examination of his family history, the officials there declared him half Aryan, qualifying him for a straightforward German pa.s.sport without the "J" stamp (meaning "Jewish"). His German pa.s.sport was issued in November 1938 and was valid for two years. In Jewish tradition being Jewish is pa.s.sed through the mother and so Pauli actually was not Jewish. But in German terms he was, because he had Jewish ancestry through his father's family. In fact, under the grotesque arithmetic of n.a.z.i racial theory, Pauli was 75 percent Jewish. As well as his father being Jewish, his mother's father was too. If the Germans were to occupy Switzerland his pa.s.sport would receive the dreaded "J" stamp, which would mean almost certain death.

As Pauli put it in his inimitable English to Frank Aydelotte, the director of the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey: By the fact that Switzerland didn't make possible my naturalization in the moment of the annexation of Austria by Germany I was forced to accept a German pa.s.sport. The German consulate counted me to the half-Aryans without further examination and so I got a non-Jewish (that means without J) pa.s.sport. Actually I suppose I am after German law 75 percent Jewish. This would mean that in the case of German occupation of Switzerland I would be really menaced and treated as a Jew.

The following year Arthur Rohn, president of the ETH, suggested that Pauli apply again for Swiss citizens.h.i.+p. He did so in December 1939 but heard nothing for six months.

By the end of May 1940 Germany had Switzerland surrounded. Pauli acted quickly. He had been invited to the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study as a visiting professor for the winter term 19401941. He immediately arranged visas for Franca and himself to travel to the United States. He also pressed Rohn to resolve his citizens.h.i.+p case.

Rohn warned the head of the police division, Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, that the eminent Professor Pauli could be lost to the United States if Swiss citizens.h.i.+p was not granted soon. Pauli also wrote to Rothmund about the delay in processing his application and his att.i.tude toward Germany's annexation of Austria. He received a negative reply.

In a more detailed letter to Rohn, Rothmund declared that Pauli's disapproval of the political situation in Austria and his desire to rid himself of his German citizens.h.i.+p, which he had never wanted in the first place, were not grounds for accepting him as a Swiss citizen. The decisive factor, he added "follows from [Pauli's] characterization, reflected in one of the present police reports from Zurich, given by a closer colleague [regarding] his fitness for naturalization." In other words, as Charles Enz, Pauli's last a.s.sistant, wrote, "Pauli's difficulty was due to a colleague!" Pauli was well aware of the animosity of several colleagues to him due to his being a Jew. One, it seemed, had written antagonistic comments about him.

Rohn questioned the police report, even calling for support from Pauli's close friend and colleague Paul Scherrer and the ubiquitous Adolf Guggenbuhl, but to no avail.

By now the Swiss authorities were well aware of German expansionist ambitions. Granting a famous Jewish scientist citizens.h.i.+p would not be a politic move. It was only on their second attempt that Pauli and Franca managed to make it to the United States after an arduous and sometimes nail-biting journey. They traveled by train through southern France, then across to Barcelona and Lisbon, from where they took a s.h.i.+p to New York, arriving on August 24, 1940. During the journey Pauli lost his nerve several times. Franca had to argue with him fiercely to persuade him to push on through Portugal. Just before he left, Pauli wrote a letter to Jung, concluding in all sincerity, "With my best wishes to you in this difficult time."

Franca Pauli wrote of this 1940 pa.s.sport photograph, "To my opinion, it is the best existing photo of W. Pauli."

Unknown to Pauli, just a few weeks later his sister Hertha took a similar escape route. Her journey was even more harrowing. She had had to leave Berlin in 1933 after the n.a.z.is began to suppress the arts. She went back to Vienna where she founded a literary agency, did some journalism, and began writing novels-all very much in the footsteps of her mother. She arrived with her lover Odon von Horvath, a Hungarian author of political plays that lampooned the n.a.z.is. Hertha had fallen madly in love with him in 1932 and divorced Carl Behr. The two fled Berlin together. In Vienna they were the toast of the town. His plays were highly acclaimed and along with her beauty and talent as an actress, writer, and sometimes painter they gained easy access to the city's vibrant intellectual world. Her first breakthrough book was the biography of Baroness Bertha von Suttner, the first woman n.o.bel laureate, awarded the Peace Prize in 1905 for her pacifist activities. Hertha also painted a portrait of her that bears a touching resemblance to her mother, both a pacifist and a journalist. In fact, Hertha's mother had been a close friend of von Suttner's.

When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the couple fled to Paris where Hertha worked in publis.h.i.+ng and continued writing novels. Not long after they arrived, the couple were caught in a violent rainstorm on the Champs Elysees. In a freak accident a branch of a tree fell on von Horvath, killing him instantly.

Two years pa.s.sed. As the Germans invaded France, Hertha headed south to Ma.r.s.eilles, braving air attacks on refugee columns, German tanks, and the constant threat of arrest by the Vichy police. With the help of the legendary Varian Fry, the American Schindler, she managed to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and from there made her way to Lisbon. After obtaining an "emergency rescue visa" from the International Rescue Committee she arrived in New York City in September 1940. A year later Hertha was in Hollywood writing for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. In 1942 she returned to New York City where she discovered her talent for writing books for children, usually with Catholic themes. She had always been convinced her escape from France was a miracle, which she attributed to the fact she had pa.s.sed through the town of Lourdes.

The war years.

Arriving in Princeton in 1940, Pauli spent his time working with Einstein on general relativity and continuing his prewar research. He also became close friends with the art historian and Kepler expert Erwin Panofsky, whom he had first met in Hamburg in 1928. Pauli quickly adapted to his new life. He bought a car and drove cross-country to visit colleagues and give lectures on his work. But this was also a trying time. Pauli's German pa.s.sport meant that he was stranded. At the inst.i.tute he had difficulties finding funds to extend his stay, which had initially been planned for only one year.

In Zurich, officials and students at the ETH wrote demanding that Pauli return by the end of 1942. Otherwise, they said, his position would be in jeopardy. They regarded his leaving the country as a defection. Colleagues who were jealous of Pauli or had anti-Semitic feelings took the opportunity to vent their anger openly.

In the files of the ETH there is a letter that Paul Scherrer, supposedly Pauli's friend and colleague, wrote to Arthur Rohn, the president of the ETH, in October 1941, saying he opposed allowing Pauli to continue his leave of absence. "Mr. Pauli is naturally having a very good time in the United States; but his productivity has suffered very much-as for all emigre physicists," he wrote. It seems likely that the person who wrote to the police chief Heinrich Rothmund, advising him not to accept Pauli's request for naturalization, was Scherrer and that Scherrer was probably causing Pauli further difficulties in maintaining his professors.h.i.+p at the ETH. He seems to have been more concerned about the future of the physics department in the event of a German invasion than the safety of the man he pretended was his friend.

To the end of his life, Pauli never knew of Scherrer's treachery. What had happened to their previous friends.h.i.+p? Franca always noticed that at ETH functions and in group photographs Scherrer stole the limelight from Pauli. Scherrer's manic need for self-publicity was well known and Pauli used to joke about it, rating people's self-importance in "Scherrer Units." Perhaps he felt he had to support Franca's distrust of the academic hierarchy and drew away from Scherrer. As a result Scherrer began to resent what he saw as a lack of support from the department's most important physicist.

Pauli replied to President Rohn that the ETH officials who ordered him to return were ignoring "the practical impossibility of the journey for me" and threatened to take legal action against the ETH. In response President Rohn hastened to secure Pauli's position until 1948, the end of his second ten-year contract.

Pauli sometimes complained of being lonely at Princeton. "The past years have been rather lonesome, particularly '42 and '43," he wrote to a former postdoctoral student, Hendrik Casimir, in Holland. His one-time colleagues from Europe were now at Los Alamos, working on the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Pauli was not, as he later made clear, a great enthusiast of the bomb project. But he was running low on funds and offered his services to the director of the project who happened to be one of his first postdoctoral students, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer rejected his offer. He advised Pauli that he was better off doing pure research, setting an example for physicists who because of "legal complications cannot work on military problems."

Pauli, in any case, was not a specialist in nuclear physics, nor had he ever been a team player. His brilliance was in research at the highest theoretical level, whereas what was required at Los Alamos was very much applied research.

All the same, it is striking that Oppenheimer should have turned down such a distinguished scientist. Perhaps the Pauli effect was on Oppenheimer's mind? After all, there was plenty of delicate machinery, not to mention powerful explosives, at the site.

Pauli inadvertently almost played a part in the war effort. In 1942, his old friend Gregor Wentzel wrote to tell him that Scherrer had invited Heisenberg to give a lecture at the ETH. It was the first time during the war years that Heisenberg had left occupied Europe. Pauli pa.s.sed the information on to Weisskopf as a bit of friendly gossip. Weisskopf was working on the Manhattan Project and knew that Heisenberg was involved in the German atomic bomb program. He immediately hatched a plan, in which he too would have played a part, to have Heisenberg kidnapped. He pa.s.sed the plot on to Oppenheimer who pa.s.sed it to the military. But in the end nothing came of it.

Hertha, meanwhile, who was in New York, had discovered that her older brother was not just an important scientist but a famous one, and that he was near New York. Life was not going well for her and she needed financial and personal help. From time to time, she took to visiting the Paulis. Franca had misgivings about her. Possibly it was connected with Hertha's drive to have a career, while Franca devoted her life to her husband. Or perhaps it was Franca's innate jealousy of any female acquaintance of Wolfgang's, even his sister-perhaps with good reason.

Agent 488.

Pauli had the choice to opt out of the war, but Jung could not. As war loomed, Zurich became a nest of espionage and counter-espionage. In neutral Switzerland people moved freely about while keeping constant watch on each other. Parties, social gatherings, and universities were all potential places for exchanging information, finding out who was an agent and for what side, or trying to be a double-agent. Double-crossings were not uncommon, sometimes with dire consequences.

Ordinary citizens had to cope with food and fuel shortages. Like everyone else the Jungs dug up their landscaped lawns to grow vegetables. As a family of means they were able to come up with enough food, tobacco, and wine to maintain at least a vestige of their opulent prewar lifestyle.

Then Allen Dulles arrived, sent by Colonel William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan, head of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, to establish a listening post in Switzerland. Dulles's official t.i.tle was Special a.s.sistant to the American Amba.s.sador in Bern. Before the war Dulles had been a successful Wall Street lawyer. He also had extensive experience in intelligence affairs from World War I. Just hours after he had slipped into Switzerland the Germans invaded Vichy France and closed the French border. Dulles would have to work with whomever he could recruit locally. Meanwhile there was two-way traffic of German spies across the German border with northern Switzerland, aided by a sympathetic population.

One of Dulles's earliest recruits was Mary Bancroft, a thirty-six-year-old American and a well-known socialite. She was famous for her affairs and also for her loose tongue.

Dulles quickly added her to his list of lovers. He impressed upon her the seriousness of her task as a go-between, gathering information from Germans working for the OSS as well as advising him on who was who in Zurich. He cautioned that if she talked too much lives could be lost.

Bancroft knew Jung socially and mentioned him to Dulles in her reports. Aware of Jung's reputation as a n.a.z.i sympathizer, Dulles had him investigated and concluded that the allegations were untrue. The two men met and were impressed with each other. Perhaps Jung was intrigued at the prospect of folding together espionage and psychology.

On Dulles's suggestion, Jung embarked on a series of psychological profiles of n.a.z.i leaders. "It is Jung's belief that Hitler will take recourse to desperate measures up to the end, but he doesn't exclude the possibility of suicide in a desperate moment," Dulles wrote. It turned out to be an accurate prediction.

Dulles considered Jung's profiles dependable and referred to him as Agent 488 in his despatches to the OSS offices in Was.h.i.+ngton. Jung may also have given him information obtained from patients.

Bancroft had also started a.n.a.lysis with Jung, to bolster her confidence in the spying game. As part of their sessions Jung advised her on how best to question someone based on psychological type, as well as how to apply a.n.a.lytical psychology to the speeches of the top n.a.z.is.