Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

been a hidden conspiracy, conscious or half-conscious, to do with the Nazis not getting the Bomb.

How much Franz, and Eleanor's father Professor Anders, might have had to do with this, can, by the nature of the case, never be known. The nature of the case was, as Eleanor and Franz had recognised in their conversation on the first day of the war, that to be effective it had to remain secret; both at the time, for obvious reasons, but also later, because of the participants' sense of self-responsibility. (This was a good example, Eleanor used to say, of the way in which certain attitudes and effects cannot be talked about without the loss of their virtues.) Some shelvings of important information and false trails laid during these years could be explained by the interdepartmental rivalry that always existed in the gangster style of the Nazi regime (yet another example of the Nazis allowing to take root the seeds of their own destruction); some occurrences might indeed have been the result of psychological blockages in men responsible enough to fear the prospect of a Nazi Bomb yet too loyal in a traditional sense to take responsibility for deliberately preventing this. But there was evidence of delays and diversions that were uncanny if they were not intended. There was one experiment to do with testing the suitability of graphite as a moderator for irradiating neutrons that was wrongly recorded or interpreted so that the Germans abandoned the line of research which was in fact the one that led the Americans to success; there was a report on the feasibility of the use of plutonium as a fissionable material that was locked away in a safe. Nothing, of course, could be proved about what might have been deliberate: what would constitute proof? Max, looking back, used to say 'The hand of God, of chance, of responsible humans, of a universal unconscious — how could you tell the difference?' And nothing could be asked of Eleanor's father or of Franz after the war: Eleanor's father died, probably by his own hand, after being suspected of implication in the plot against Hitler which failed in July 1944; Franz, having been in a reserved occupation for much of the war, took up arms at the very end and was killed fighting against the Russians on the outskirts of Berlin. Hans survived; and after the war remained in friendly contact with Max. But he would talk little about the war years: he would say just 'What is odd, in human affairs, about things being uncanny?'

Regarding the Russians — there is evidence that they, possibly under the guidance of Kapitsa, were quite far ahead in research into

the Bomb by 1945: they were helped comparatively little by the spying that Max had been unwilling to be part of. Max's friend Kolya, from Odessa, did eventually find his way to Cambridge, in the 1940s: but he too did not like to become involved in fruitless speculation.

With regard to Eleanor — when she rejoined Max in England in the autumn of 1939 (she used to maintain that she could not remember what exactly in the end had happened in the matter of Rudi and Stefan and the diamonds, because the subject was too boring and was it not the job of memory to get rid of stuff that was boring? but to those who knew her it seemed obvious that she had given what was not her share of the diamonds back) — when Eleanor got back to England in 1939 she stayed with Max for a time in a village near the country house to the north-east of Cambridge where he was working. (It was Eleanor who used to tell the story of what happened to the girl with fair hair: she did marry the child's father, who was an undergraduate at Cambridge; he later joined the army and was sent abroad and the girl spent much of the war alone with her child, who was indeed a girl called Lilia.) Eleanor and Max took a room in the village and there Eleanor began to write her first book, which was some sort of history or meditation on the history of the Jews: it was never published in its original form. Eleanor had had the subject in mind, I suppose, ever since she had been in Spain: something of the substance of the first version of the book can be gleaned perhaps from what she wrote later of her time in Spain.

Eleanor had had the vision of the Jewish and Christian versions of history as being essentially not contradictory: Jews were a chosen people, to be sure — this was their own conviction, thus could be explained the destructive jealousies of the people around them. Their 'chosenness' could be understood in the sense of their being endowed, genetically even, with some special trait: this could be seen as a gift of God just as well as a result of chance. The special trait of the Jews, Eleanor argued, was to do with their ability originally to hold a view of humans both as entities subject to laws of cause and effect but also as agents, components, in the working-out of a larger pattern. Those who were not endowed with this trait — who had no vision of'God' or 'chance' in fact working out a pattern — of course felt a threat from those who had: this was a characteristic of evolution: those who possessed a special trait might supersede, if circumstances favoured them, those who did not. But, having thus been endowed with a special trait, it seemed that Jews had not been

endowed at the same time with a gift for creating circumstances in which it could flourish — and this too was a characteristic of evolution, that a coincidence of chances, gifts, is required for successful adaptation to be achieved. The Jews, that is, with their faculty for seeing a pattern for themselves and through this for the things around them, yet had little ability to prevail over nor indeed to live at peace with their neighbours. And their neighbours, of course, without the ability to see any pattern (if it could be so called) except that of one organism flourishing at the expense of another, were apt to set out to disprove the claims of 'chosenness' by the Jews by turning on them every now and then and killing them or carrying them into captivity. This was indeed the Jews' own view of their history and mythology. This had at one time been particularised into the expectation of a Messiah — the coming of the Messiah would be the circumstances in which their facility which had been potential could become actual; what had hitherto been a predicament could become a triumph.

But then when either the Messiah did not come (the Jewish version) or did come and was not recognised by Jews (the Christian version) there occurred what might have been expected to occur according to either interpretation — the Jews were scattered throughout the world. Either they were being punished for apparently not being sufficiently worthy of a Messiah, or they were being punished for not recognising a Messiah when he came. But also might they not have been scattered (this was Eleanor's interpretation) in a way that had nothing to do with punishment but be part of a required pattern whether or not a Messiah had come: might they not have been scattered, that is, as seeds, so that their special trait — their view of the working-out of a pattern — might have had a chance to take root around the world. But as things were, everyone seemed stuck within a cycle of hopelessness or vengeance: Jews with their faculty for seeing that there was some design for the world but still without the ability to find much of a part in it for themselves except through suffering; Christians with their taking over of the triumphal Messianic idea but still without a faculty for trusting any pattern except that of so-called Victory' by the elimination of one thing by another. Neither Jews nor Christians in their formal protestations seemed to have the attitude of mind to see their responsibilities as agents of self-creation within a larger pattern — a trust that, by attending with care to means, ends would look after themselves. Christians had glimpsed something of this with their doctrine of the