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The Maniac
On the morning of the twenty-fifth of September 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walked into Professor Jan Waterink's Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son, Vassily, in the head, then turned the gun on himself.
Paul died instantly, while Vassily, who suffered from Down syndrome, was in agony for hours before being pronounced dead by the same doctors who had cared for him since his arrival at the institute, in January of that same year. He had come to Amsterdam because his father had decided that the clinic where the boy had spent the better part of a decade, located in Jena, in the heartland of Germany, was no longer safe for him with the Nazis in power. Vassily-or rather Wassik, as almost everyone called him-had to endure severe mental and physical disabilities during his short life; Albert Einstein, who loved the boy's father as if they were brothers and was a regular houseguest at the Ehrenfests' home in Leiden, nicknamed Wassik "patient little crawlikins," for he had such trouble getting around, and would sometimes feel so much pain in his knees that he could not stand. And yet, even then, the child did not lose his seemingly boundless enthusiasm, dragging himself along the carpet, with his useless legs trailing behind, to meet his favorite "uncle" at the door. Wassik spent most of his life institutionalized, but he was a cheerful child nonetheless, often sending postcards to his parents in Leiden featuring quaint German landscapes, or letters with accounts of his daily life, written in his unsure hand, telling them what new things he had learned, how his best friend had fallen ill, how hard he was trying to be a good boy, just as they had taught him, and how in love he was with not one but two girls in his class, as well as his teacher, Mrs. Gottlieb, who was the most caring and wonderful person he had ever met, a thought that would bring tears to his father's eyes, as Paul Ehrenfest was, first and foremost, a teacher.
Paul had suffered from extreme melancholy and bouts of crippling depression all his life. Like his son, he had been a weak boy, often ill. When he was not nursing nosebleeds, coughing due to his asthma, or dizzy and wheezing from lack of breath after escaping the bullies who teased and taunted him at school-Pig's ear, donkey's ear, give 'em to the Jew that's here!-he would feign some other ailment, a fever perhaps, a cold, or an unbearable stomachache, just to stay at home in his mother's arms, hidden from the outside, safely wrapped in her embrace, as if deep down, in some way, little Paul, the youngest of five brothers, could foretell that she would die when he was ten, and all his prior suffering was nothing but a premonition, an anticipation of loss that he dare not speak of, to himself or to others, afraid that if he said it out loud, found the courage to put it into words, her death would somehow hasten forward to meet him; so he remained silent, fearful, and sad, shouldering a weight that no child should bear, a dark foreknowledge that haunted him past her death, past his father's demise six years after hers, and that would follow behind him like the toll of a bell up to the day of his undoing, by his own hand, at fifty-three years of age.
However much he was at odds with himself and the world, Paul was the most gifted member of his household and the best student of any class he ever took part in. He was well liked by his friends, highly esteemed by his classmates, and appreciated by his teachers, but nothing could convince him of his self-worth. Yet he was by no means an introvert; on the contrary, he would pour out everything he took in, delighting those around him with fabulous displays of knowledge and his uncanny ability to translate the most complicated ideas into images and metaphors that anyone could understand, threading together concepts from disparate fields that he drew from the ever-growing number of books he fed on with ravenous, spongelike intelligence. Paul was capable of absorbing everything around him while making no differentiations. His mind was fully porous, lacking, perhaps, some essential membrane; he was not so much interested in the world as he was invaded by its many forms. With nothing to keep him safe, he felt raw and exposed to the information flowing constantly back and forth across his blood-brain barrier. Even when he obtained his PhD and became firmly established as a distinguished professor, after succeeding the great Hendrik Lorentz in the theoretical physics chair at the University of Leiden, the only thing that really sparked joy in Paul was giving himself to others, to the point that, as one of his many beloved students remarked, "Ehrenfest distributed all that was living and active in him," such that sometimes it looked like "he gave away everything he had found or observed, without building up a reserve, a kind of stronghold, within himself."
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.
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