them, ‘or who will take all those pills?’
He has many more lists. He makes a list of activities that, when they have been proposed to him, have always triggered the thought ‘That is not for me’. A list of things he would tell his son about himself, if he ever saw him. A list of things he never enjoyed, though he always said he did. A list of things that comprise, in his view, the minimal requirements for a happy life. He makes a list of his possessions, as if it were a will:
| Item: | One armchair. |
| Item: | One television. |
| Item: | One writing desk. |
| Item: | Two photograph albums with photographs. |
| Item: | Books, assorted. |
| Item: | Gramophone records, assorted. |
| Item: | Gramophone player. |
| Item: | One bed. |
| Item: | Kitchen utensils, various. |
| Item: | Clothes, various. |
| Item: | Tools, various. |
There are several things he does not include. Paint, ashtrays, various kinds of string and sewing thread, medical supplies, writing ink, cleaning fluids, playing cards. There is a host of objects like this that seem too insignificant to be part of a list.
7
SOME DECADES BEFORE Ulrich arrived in Berlin, German scientists made a philosophical leap that would change history. They rejected the idea that life is a unique and mystical essence, with different qualities from everything else in the universe. They reasoned instead that living things were only chemical machines, and they speculated that with enough research, chemical laboratories could emulate life itself.
They began to experiment with making medicines, not merely from trees or plants, but from man-made chemicals. A triumph came in 1897, in the laboratories of the chemical company Bayer, when chemists observed several positive effects of the first synthetic drug: aspirin. Not long afterwards, the chemist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for the sleeping sickness that devastated his compatriots in the German Congo, injected infected mice with hundreds of different chemicals until he found that an industrial dye cured the disease – and so discovered the first antibiotic. Ehrlich coined the term ‘chemotherapy’ to describe the great new work he had started off.
German scientists also wanted to see whether chemical laboratories could make materials that were usually found only in nature. The world was running out of natural nitrogen deposits, for instance, and agriculturalists were concerned about how they would continue to fertilise crops. Populations were exploding. Doomsayers began to warn of imminent famine, and people dying off in swathes. The Berlin chemist Fritz Haber began to seek a chemical solution to this problem. Working with BASF, he discovered a way of fixing the enormous supplies of nitrogen in the air, and turning them into ammonia for fertilisers. He won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and a large fortune, and the newspapers called him the saviour of the human race.
When its empire was taken away after the First World War, Germany was deprived of access to essential raw materials. It was set far behind Britain, which could take all the Malayan rubber it wanted, and Middle Eastern oil. Germany’s chemical firms – BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Casella, and the rest – were consolidated into a vast chemical cartel, I. G. Farben, whose objective was to produce chemical versions of these lacking natural resources.
Farben’s synthetic rubber and oil technologies soon became the envy of the world. Within a few years, it was the largest corporation in Europe, with stakes in oil companies, steelworks, armaments manufacturers, banks and newspapers – in Germany and across the globe. It had its own mines for coal, magnesite, gypsum and salt, and cartel arrangements with leading American companies DuPont, Alcoa and Dow Chemical.
It was in Farben’s laboratories that a chemist named Hermann Staudinger, while attempting to synthesise natural rubber, first hypothesised that there might exist molecules much more extensive than any hitherto imagined. These giant molecules, he suggested, would be arranged in mobile, chain-like structures, which explained the unusual flexibility of rubber. Staudinger’s work on polymers won him a Nobel Prize, and set the course for a new direction in chemistry: the development of plastics.
This new area of innovation transformed the human environment. Until that era, every human being had lived among the same surfaces: wood, stone, iron, paper, glass. Suddenly, there emerged a host of extraterrestrial substances that produced bodily sensations that no one had ever experienced before.
This was the production that Ulrich wished to be a part of.
When Ulrich arrived in Berlin he realised immediately he had walked in upon the wonder of his age. Berlin was the capital of world science, which lifted him upon its tremendous current, and made him certain of his own great future. But Berlin was also the studio of mighty artists and musicians. Bertolt Brecht was there, Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang. It was a carnival of boxing, jazz and cabaret.
Later on, after Ulrich left it, this miraculous metropolis ceased to exist. With the next war, old Berlin was gutted, tossed away and forgotten, and it sank into forgetful waters, until only a few bent tips were visible above the surface, twitching with the bad dreams below.
This has had a curious effect on Ulrich’s memories of the time he spent in that city. They do not hang together, or fall into sequence, because they were later scattered like refugees, and were forced to take shelter in other times and places. Some of them were lost entirely in the great dispersal.
Ulrich tries to assemble the remnants into one place.
Item
How lovely was the Jewish girl, Clara Blum, who took notes in the chemistry lecture with her left hand.
Item
As a boy Ulrich had wandered so many times among the parasols and dogs of Unter den Linden, but now there were staring, mutilated soldiers and penniless refugees. The men in Berlin had lost more limbs than the men at home.
Item
He saw Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst. Their thought was so clear it was terrifying, and Ulrich felt reborn with every lecture he attended. He often struggled to follow their theories. But he loved them because they were also practical men who reminded him of the old-fashioned inventors he had read about as a child. In his spare time, Walther Nernst applied himself to such tasks as the invention of light bulbs and the development of an electric piano. Fritz Haber, whose chemical weapons had failed to achieve a German victory in the war, was looking for a method to pay off his country’s war debts by distilling gold from the sea.
Item
Clara Blum had a habit of reading books as she walked in the street.
Item
Ulrich was afraid of spending money, for his father’s wealth was already exhausted by his university fees. But there was an irresistible world of jazz in Berlin, and Ulrich fell in love with the new sounds as deeply as he had once fallen in love with Gypsy music. He could not keep himself out of debt.
Item
In one of Max Planck’s lectures, he thought that his father, with his admiration of far sight, would have approved of all those eyes set on the remote country of atoms.
Item
He
