Norman Moss - Klaus Fuchs - The Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb

I believe I still owe the Rennies some money for milk and rations etc. Could you please ask Marjorie and settle it?

After this, he tried again, with Arnold’s help, to search in his heart and mind, to work out the meaning of what he had done and its significance for his own character:

I think it was better that Skardon handled the matter, because I would be certain that my decisions were really my own, and not made because of mental stress. When first you told me that you [word illegible] about it, I was already prepared to go through with it, even though Skardon, I suppose, was not yet sure about it.

What I am trying to say, and I haven’t succeeded very well, is that you must not blame yourself for anything that you did. Blame me — and if you can’t do that, blame Hitler and Karl Marx and Stalin and their blasted company.

However, the real hurt is much farther back. How could I deceive in this way? I am not trying to excuse — in fact I am trying hard to understand it myself — because it hurts me too. I know I got myself to the point when I myself did not know that I was deceiving you, whilst I was actually doing it. Sometimes I knew it immediately afterwards, when you praised me, and those were the worst moments. But usually I could go on for days and weeks.

Then he went on to explain his drinking, in a passage quoted earlier:

Mrs Peierls asked me today: [22] This must have been a mistake. She visited him in Brixton but not in Wormwood Scrubs. how could you drink the way you did? As a matter of fact, it did surprise me when I found that I could get drunk without any fear. I thought at the time that even then I could control myself, but I don’t think that explanation is correct. I think the truth is that under the influence of alcohol the control disappeared, but not only the control but also the whole other compartment of my mind. Does it make sense? And if it does make sense, if just a little alcohol could turn it into schizophrenia, how far gone was I in my ‘normal’ life?

I don’t dare yet to pretend that I really know the answer to these questions. But I think that I am getting nearer to it every day. You can help me — if you are frank with me, without fear of hurt.

Please give my love to Eva [Arnold’s wife].

In another letter, he told Arnold he had been reading Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and had been ‘bowled over’ by the first paragraph:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Evidently Fuchs, who liked clear-cut answers, was powerfully impressed by this depiction of opposites coexisting.

Fuchs was searching to find what it was within himself that enabled him to ignore so boldly the normal requirements of relationships with other people, to divide his mind in the way that he did, and keep reality at bay. He felt some trepidation, as anyone must who conducts such a search seriously.

We don’t know enough to understand his inner motivations, but we can see some areas of his mind and his life where the motivations that he did not understand may have developed. Fuchs said his childhood was a very happy one. But the experience of psychiatrists is that a person may not be a good judge of whether or not his childhood was happy. His memory may bend itself to meet some requirements in his mind, something that says he ought to recall a happy childhood (or an unhappy one in some cases). A family in which the three women members suffer two suicides and a mental illness contains dark areas, remembered or not.

It would be interesting to know what Fuchs’s relationship with his mother was before she committed suicide. And what his reactions were to the event: Grief? Pity? Loss? Guilt? Relief? Why was this woman who was his mother for nineteen years apparently so remote from his recollection? In subsuming his emotions and replacing them with political beliefs — for even as a student in Germany, he chose his friends from his political comrades, his affections following ideological lines — he would be able to suppress feelings about his mother along with others.

Emil Fuchs wrote about his wife Else in his memoirs with respect, but he did not write about her very much; in fact, she hardly features in them at all. The traditional German family has a strong, authoritarian father and a soft, compliant mother. In this family, the mother seems almost to be absent.

Emil Fuchs does not seem like an authoritarian figure. Decent, humane, concerned for others, brave, he encouraged his children to form their own beliefs and find their own ways, yet somehow, they all went most of the distance along his way. Parents instruct their children on a verbal, conscious level and at the same time on another, unconscious level. Sometimes, those two sets of instructions contradict one another. A family, or any other close-knit group, may have relationships on both of these levels, the one conscious and visible, the other unconscious and observable only by the effects it creates, like sub-atomic particles.

The picture that emerges of the Fuchs family is cloudy and of necessity very incomplete. It is of a family in which extraordinary pressures are felt by the women, the mother and two daughters, but apparently not by the father and two sons; two of these, at least, have strong personalities and lead successful lives. But the mother seems to be partially erased from the memories of these two. The father appears to be permissive, yet the effect is as if he had issued commands and had been obeyed, as if, in fact, on one level he was commanding. It seems almost as if he played the roles of both parents in the traditional German family, replacing the mother.

The second son, Klaus, is highly intelligent, closely attached to other members of the family, but, as regards the outside world, very independent. He is able to establish relationships of mutual affection and support while remaining on one level detached.

He follows his father’s precepts all his life. He has women friends: one is a ‘spoiler of men’, another his ‘English mother’. But he does not form a strong, exclusive sexual bond with a woman, nor even, it appears, acknowledge the need for one, until comparatively late in life, when as we shall see he has returned to the country that is both his father’s land and his fatherland. (Britain, by contrast, is always the mother country.) He has a powerful, even dominant, sense of right and wrong. In Freudian terms, one can say that he has a very strong super-ego, and an id that is almost buried out of sight.

Speculations along these lines should not be taken as an attempt to explain away Fuchs’s political beliefs, to invalidate them by describing them in terms of unconscious motivations. He deserves to have his belief in Communism and his later change of mind treated at his own assessment. For one thing, they parallel the changing beliefs of a lot of other people during this period. His story belongs to the real world of politics and ethics.

His crime was treason. But it cannot be answered simply by an appeal to patriotism. Other causes besides Communism are international. No democrat would have blamed Fuchs because, while a German citizen, he helped the war effort against Nazi Germany, nor would a democrat accept an accusation of treason against Soviet citizens who oppose the Communist system. Today there is a possibility of a war that threatens not merely one nation, but the planet, the whole biosphere. Many major issues — in fact, all the really major issues — transcend national boundaries. Now, more than ever, patriotism is not enough.