This Sunday morning, I listened to the german podcast of the Spektrum der Wissenschaft about Hermann Weyl. Weyl is of course important to ETH Zürich. We had many classes and seminars in the Herman Weyl room (I had my thesis defense there for example). All Nachdiplom classes like Ruelle’s, Tromba’s or Baumslag’s took place there. The bust of Herman Weyl was created by Weyl’s second wife Ellen Baer who was a sculpturer. (see picture to the left). The First wife Hella (seen to the right) was a philosophor and mathematician who would later mostly work as a translator. When Hella died of cancer in 1948, Weyl wrote a long memorial pages. I have let it translated to English below. The picture source for the header is “Herman Weyl the Reluctant Revolutionary” an article of David E. Rowe (the picture is also displayed at the end).
Weyl’s home during his ETH years was Carmenstrasse 23. A contemporary primary source is the Naturforschende Gesellschaft in Zuerich which gives this address. This is quite close to Zuerichberg above Hottingen and in walking distance to ETH. The document from 31 December 1920, contains the entry “Weyl, Hermann, Dr. Prof. Math. an der techn. Hochsch. – Carmenstrasse 23” and places him in Zuerich district 7 (by the way, I lived as a grad student in that area too in a 1 room appartment on Hoeschgasse, closer to the lake).
There is an interesting coincidence: Eva Wannenmacher, the hero of the recent novel of Matthias Ackeret has her consulting firm there now. Matthias Ackeret is the one from our radio pirate adventures in 1980/81. Further search shows that Bergstrasse 27, 8032 in Zürich was the house associated with the last years of his life, as the Bär family house was on Berstrasse 27 , when they were in Zürich.
Weyl’s first wife Hella was intellectually and emotionally close to him. She died of cancer in Princeton in 1948. Hella had come to Goettingen to study philosophy with Husserl and math as a secondary. What happened at the end of her life is well documented because Weyl wrote “In memoriam Helene Weyl” in June 1948 while she was still alive, but terminally ill. The original is preserved in Weyl papers. Here is a translation done by Chat GPT 4.6 Sol: ( I highlighted a few things in bold which I myself found particularly interesting):
IN MEMORIAM HELENE WEYL by Hermann Weyl (written at the end of June of 1948)
A sketch, not so much of Hella as of our life together. Hella, Friederike Bertha Helene Joseph, was born in 1893 in the small Mecklenburg town of Ribnitz on the Baltic Sea. Her father was a physician, a very capable and extremely busy country doctor, and in his worldview a decided positivist, with all the optimism of the nineteenth-century Enlightenment. This outlook of her father meant that as a child his daughter grew up without any connection whatever to religion. She knew nothing either of the Jewish faith, to which her parents nominally belonged, or of Christianity. The religious images and ideas which most of us, so to speak, absorb with our mother’s milk came to her only later, by way of the visual arts. She was baptized shortly before our marriage. The step was consistent with her views concerning the formative powers of our civilization; but she took it primarily for the sake of my devout Christian mother. A younger sister grew up beside her and still lives in the parental house as the wife of a physician who later took over her father’s medical practice. Hella was, and remained as long as they lived, deeply attached to her parents. All the events of her life were reported to her mother in long letters’for she was an extraordinarily brilliant letter writer. As a child she often accompanied her father on his rounds, whether in his carriage or by sleigh along the narrow, snow-covered country roads of Mecklenburg. Her mother came from an old-established Mecklenburg family; her father had immigrated from Pomerania. The Joseph family, and particularly her father, enjoyed great respect in the town and countryside and maintained close, even intimate relations with many Mecklenburg families, including members of the landed aristocracy. The barriers of race and confession were by no means impermeable in Germany at that time. Her parents recognized the child’s abilities early and decided that she should receive an education preparing her for university study. In Mecklenburg, the most backward of the German states, this path was not yet open. Thus at the age of fourteen Hella was sent to a boarding school in Berlin, where she attended one of the Realgymnasien there, one of a very few girls among all the boys, until at eighteen she graduated with the certificate admitting her to university study. During these Berlin school years she developed a great passion for the theater. The important actress Tilla Durieux evidently took pleasure in the young and beautiful creature, and Hella spent many hours backstage in Durieux’s dressing room when perhaps she ought to have been sleeping or sitting over her schoolbooks. A somewhat dangerous youthful association, considering Durieux’s character; but the young girl, wholly absorbed in poetry and its representation on the stage, was evidently proof against all the temptations of the milieu. Hella always remained intensely interested in the theater. Much later here in Princeton she repeatedly took part in performances of the Community Players. She spent the first semester of her university studies at the nearby University of Rostock, barely an hour by train from Ribnitz. At that time she intended to turn to German literature or history. But in Rostock she came into contact with the aesthetician Emil Utitz, who was a student and follower of Husserl and told her about phenomenology. The first article by Husserl that she read struck her like lightning. What opened itself to her there seemed to be the truth about the world. And so she came to Göttingen, where Husserl was teaching in 1911, and became a student of philosophy with mathematics as a secondary subject. Phenomenology always remained the foundation of her philosophical thinking. She probably followed Husserl’s later development toward an idealism with a metaphysical coloring, and she also owed much to Max Scheler, who combined the basic phenomenological attitude with a philosophical anthropology and with ethical and religious ideas. Yet on the whole the movement toward metaphysics remained foreign to her. When I first met her, I stood on a decidedly more scientific-positivistic side than she did; later the relationship was reversed. Toward the end of the First World War in Zürich, a circle of friends of ours read several of Fichte’s principal writings. A little later I was powerfully seized by the mystic Meister Eckhart. Hella took a lively interest in all of this = she loved philosophical conversations – but in thoughts directed toward transcendence she found at most questions, never answers. In later years we were in agreement in our fundamental view that the world of existence borne by consciousness is not closed and intelligible in itself. The image suggested itself of an open space surrounded everywhere by darkness, or of a house without a roof. The positivists might deny the open sky and shut it out by nailing on a roof; dogmatic theology seeks closure by building transcendence into the structure. We rejected both. Later we also concerned ourselves together with existential philosophy, with Heidegger and Jaspers. Already during Hella’s first semester in Göttingen we met at the home of a Göttingen professor of jurisprudence, Lehmann, who was acquainted with Hella’s parents from Rostock. A close friendship developed with the Lehmann children, Karl and Eva, who were about Hella’s age, and also with the young Gerhart Husserl. These friends of our youth too were later driven to America when the Hitler catastrophe descended upon Germany. Eva, an important linguist, died a few years ago in Bryn Mawr. I can still see Hella before me on that first evening, her long black braids wound into coils. Even then she had that extraordinarily supple body, the bright intelligence that shone from her forehead, and that utterly radiant joy of life which filled her to the tips of her fingers. She later claimed that on that evening I told her about a barn fire which I had just witnessed, and that she immediately fell in love with me while I was telling the story. We saw each other often, particularly during the intervals between lectures in the corridor of the old Göttingen Auditorium. I was a Privatdozent. Erich Hecke was Hilbert’s assistant at that time, and we became friends. A fourth member soon joined our little group, a young aspiring mathematician, Helga Unruh, whom I had met during the summer holiday and who, at my urging, came to Göttingen for the first semester of her studies. The four of us soon formed an inseparable quartet. Helga Unruh became Helga Hecke. The two couples were married on the same day, and I believe that until the very last moment the Göttingen gossips remained uncertain how the pairings would finally turn out. From Hella’s student days I especially remember a student celebration at the old ruins of Hardenberg, where by torchlight the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet was performed. Hella played Juliet, and for several years afterward her friends called her ‘Julia.’ Between our engagement and our wedding I had the good fortune to be appointed professor at the Technische Hochschule in Zürich. We could hardly have wished for a more beautiful city in which to begin our life together. But still thoroughly caught up in the customs and habits of imperial Germany, at first we did not find our way easily in Switzerland. Switzerland in the second decade of this century was by no means as closely connected with the German Reich and German culture as the writings of Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had led us to imagine. We found ourselves much more abroad than we had expected. The pervasive democratic element and the very noticeable Romance influence’features which later became so valuable and attractive to us’at first seemed strange. In addition, it was at this time that I first began to suffer for extended periods from the plague of asthma. Nevertheless, we were a cheerful young couple. We did everything together, even the shopping down in the city, on foot and by tram, managing still without telephone, refrigerator, or automobile, and were quite content. Household worries were slight, for Hella had brought with her from home a good cook who remained faithfully with us for many years. We spent our first Christmas vacation in the Engadine. It was Hella’s first encounter with the high mountains; she found them overwhelming, almost oppressive. Before our engagement we had secretly made a few skiing excursions together in the Harz, and that now proved useful. The ski trips in the Engadine and its side valleys in the winter of 1913’14 have remained luminous in my memory, although neither of us ever became particularly accomplished skiers. In Zürich Hella continued to attend mathematics lectures. While already expecting her first child, we read Hilbert’s Zahlbericht together. We did not get very far. For now the cares of children began, and events soon occurred that gave Hella’s interests another direction. Later in life she was happy to listen when I told her, in broad outline, about my mathematical ideas and those developing around us, but she no longer wanted to enter into genuine mathematical detail. Sometimes she said that one does not like to be reminded of a building that was abandoned when it had scarcely risen above its foundations and is now being washed away by the rain and falling into decay. Not even a year had passed since our move to Zürich when war broke out. On our return from Göttingen, where we had spent the first days of the summer holidays, mobilization overtook us. We wandered for a night along the Rhine trying to find a crossing into Switzerland. When at last we reached our Zürich apartment, all the church bells of the city began to ring, as they did every Saturday evening, swelling together into a great peal. It seemed to us like a prayer for peace. But on the following morning came the Russian-German declaration of war. During the first year of the war our son Joachim was born in Zürich. Two months later I was drafted as a common soldier into the German army. Hella soon moved with her little child into her parents’ home in Ribnitz. But when month followed month and I remained stationed in Saarbrücken without being sent to the front, she finally came there. After a year, at the request of the Swiss government, the German military authorities released me to Zürich. I can scarcely remember an hour of more concentrated happiness in our lives than that beautiful spring day in May 1916 when, after crossing the Swiss frontier, we approached Zürich and then walked through the magnificent peaceful city from our apartment down toward the lake. A period of long walking tours followed. Automobiles were still rare, and crossing the Alpine passes on foot was a great pleasure. We were never real mountaineers. Only much later, during two summers in the Second World War, did Hella acquire a taste for actual mountain climbing under the guidance of Reinhold Bär’ and that was in the Rockies, not the Alps. In the autumn of 1917 our second son, Michael, was born. It must have been shortly afterward that Hella, driven by her love of theater, appeared as an extra in a Zürich production of Werfel’s adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women. There Hella met Yvonne, who became the closest friend of both her and me. Earlier, in a philosophical seminar given by Medicus, she had met Walter Dällenbach, who became by far our closest friend among the Swiss. Other acquaintances arose through the theater, and during the next two years we led a social life with a slightly bohemian flavor, among writers, actors, and all sorts of intellectuals whom the war had driven into Switzerland. Elisabeth Bergner and William Dieterle, in their early youth, were frequent guests in our house. After the war ended, all this scattered to the winds, and there followed several rather restricted years for us. Then came numerous offers of professorships, whose chief advantage was that they relieved our financial misery. In 1922 I received calls simultaneously to Berlin and Göttingen; in Göttingen Felix Klein’s chair was waiting to be filled. I found it very difficult to decline the call to Göttingen. I still remember that, when the decision could no longer be postponed, I walked for hours with Hella around a block of houses in Zürich, discussing the pros and cons yet again, finally crying to her, ‘I simply must accept,’ and jumping onto the last tram going down to the lake and the telegraph office there. But when I arrived below’so at least the legend goes’the rich and delightful life unfolding by the lake on a summer evening cast its spell on me, and terror of Germany, still shattered by the war and threatened by inflation, seized me so strongly that instead of telegraphing my acceptance I sent a refusal. Hella was, naturally, utterly astonished when I returned. But it soon became only too clear that I had made the right decision. A new gate onto the world opened for us when in 1923 we went to Spain for three months, where I had been invited to lecture in Barcelona and Madrid. On a little steamer of 1,300 tons we traveled through a veritable succession of storms, taking eleven days from Hamburg to Msslaga. There, for the first time, the magic of the southern landscape enveloped us both with all its force and an almost African heat. We were intoxicated. For a month before my lectures began, we lived like gitanos in Msslaga, Granada, and Seville. In Spain relationships were formed which had decisive consequences for Hella. She grew so fond of Spain that she now finally bade farewell to mathematics and began to concern herself intensely with the Romance languages, particularly Spanish. Before long she established contact with the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset and, after returning home, began translating several of his books into German. She returned to Spain several more times for months at a time, sometimes alone; after our first year at the Institute, in 1934, she went there together with me. Ortega’s philosophical world of ideas attracted her, but so too did his sparkling style. She delighted in finding the properly shaded German version, one that reproduced the high spirits and elegance of the original and even allowed something of its Spanish foreignness to shimmer through, without ever violating the spirit of the German language. Hella also translated books by Eddington and Jeans from English into German, and during our Princeton years she undertook the daring task of translating into English various collections of Ortega’s essays, selected by herself, although naturally she did not command English in all its finest nuances as she did German. In such work her sensitivity to language was supported by an iron discipline for work. After I had resisted all attempts to lure me away from Zürich, several particularly happy years followed for us in Switzerland. From the balcony of our apartment, floating high on the Zürichberg, we had a magnificent view over the lake toward the mountains. Especially magical were the summer evenings, when a shimmering sea of lights encircled the shores of the lake. With the families of our physicist friends Schrödinger, Paul Scherrer, and Edgar Meyer, we spent many summer hours in the newly opened public bathing beach; we rowed or sailed on the lake, made cheerful excursions on foot through the surrounding countryside, or went for afternoon tea on the terrace of the Grand Hotel Dolder. At that time the mathematician Lulu Hofmann, now Lulu von Bechtolsheim, became our close friend. The children grew up happily and healthily. There are mothers who have the most intimate relationship with their children when they are still very small. Hella was not like that. The children meant more and more to her as they developed into independent, rational beings. To the growing boys, and even to the young men already preparing to detach themselves from the parental home, she was a companion more candid, loving, and sympathetic than they could possibly have wished for. Hella was a creature thoroughly open to the world and to her fellow human beings, and fundamentally affirmative toward life. She possessed a natural graciousness toward people and saw above all their good sides. Only toward one vice’stupidity’did she sometimes lack the necessary patience. She had no sympathy with vulgarity. Perhaps there was sometimes in her a streak of intellectual pride; it could flash out of her for an instant like a little bright flame. I often admired how, in the most indifferent social gathering’at a cocktail party, for example, where most people merely exchange a few commonplaces’she repeatedly managed to pick out some person who attracted her and then, through conversation, bring that person to tell her what truly concerned him at the deepest level. She possessed the rare gift of intelligent listening. She was made for maintaining a house through which many people, loosely or closely attached to her, came and went. In this respect, with my shyness of people, I was always a dead weight around her ankle. She maintained an intensive correspondence with many male and female friends. She was a master at describing landscape or human incidents and also at characterizing people. Whenever circumstances forced her to change the plan of her life, she tackled the new tasks resolutely, and soon the loss, however painful at first, was replaced or even more than compensated for by a gain in another field. Of a creature so full of life as she was, one could not expect that all the confusions of passion would be spared her. They were spared neither of us. She was never unfaithful to the nobility of her nature; only that could be a source of joy to her which sprang forth like a pure fountain. I believe that we always took the greatest care’even when we had to hurt one another’that the bond uniting us should not be disturbed or wounded at its deepest point. I know how once, during such a time of confusion, she said to me: ‘If you were to turn away from me, then I should no longer wish to live.’ Her soul possessed a marvelous equilibrium. ‘Self-control’ is not the right word for it, because it was not a matter of forced mastery’although she possessed that too to a high degree’but of natural calm, strength, brightness, and confidence. Anyone who visited her in the hospital before her first operation was surely impressed by her serenity, by the almost radiant strength and composure she emanated; and at that time she knew very well what was at stake. The good Zürich years, during which friends from old-established Swiss circles gradually came to us as well, ended in 1928. That year we came to Princeton University for one year. This coincided with an inner crisis in my relationship to mathematics. After returning to Zürich we found ourselves in an intermediate state, for I knew that the call to Göttingen to succeed Hilbert was imminent. When it came, I found it impossible to refuse. Even all my Swiss friends advised me to accept. If any of them had political misgivings, the most they foresaw was a Communist danger in Germany; no one took the Nazis seriously. But before we moved to Göttingen, the Reichstag elections of September 1930 took place, in which the number of Nazi Party seats suddenly rose from an insignificant figure to 110. I was deeply disturbed, and from the beginning in Germany I sensed the political tensions and felt a stranger in my own fatherland. The seventeen years in Switzerland had done their educational work upon us, politically as well. At that time we also lost the modest fortune we had accumulated in Switzerland. I had entrusted it to a foundation, Pro Familia, managed by a well-known Swiss philanthropist who had also established the foundation Pro Juventute, which continues its beneficial work today. But in the case of Pro Familia his enthusiasm overcame his sober judgment, and the enterprise was completely destroyed by the New York stock-market crash of autumn 1929. The three years in Göttingen that now followed, from 1930 to 1933, were the most exhausting Hella and I ever passed through in our lives. The call to the Institute, which had already come in March 1932, seemed to me on the one hand to open a road into the light; on the other hand, we found it indescribably difficult to reconcile ourselves to the thought that henceforth, in communicating with other human beings, we would no longer’or at least no longer primarily’be able to rely upon our mother tongue. During the days of decision Hella’s mother died; the children and Hella herself came down with severe influenza; and amid the confusion and darkness of those hours I withdrew my already-given acceptance of the Princeton offer. That was around the turn of the year 1932’33. One month later Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich. In the course of these inner struggles I suffered a severe nervous breakdown. For another semester we then had to hold out under the Nazis in Göttingen. Most people at that time believed that the ugly excesses of the movement would be overcome within a few months. I was not among these optimists. I scented the terrible disaster that was approaching and now strove with all my strength to get out. Hella was prepared to follow me in whatever decision I made; but I could not conceal from myself that her heart was tied much more strongly to Germany than mine. The renewed invitation from the Institute in the autumn reached me while I was already abroad; from Zürich I resigned my professorship in Göttingen. Hella and I then enjoyed a long and happy period in Princeton. The first years especially were for us a time of renewed unfolding of life. Much friendship was shown to us. We had the feeling that after one year in Princeton we had been accepted by those around us with fewer reservations than had been granted us after seventeen years in reserved Switzerland. We were happy to take part in the intensely active mathematical life developing at the Institute, and many valuable human relationships, permanent or temporary, came into being. We were happy to be in a place where there existed the greatest willingness to bring aid to European scholars who had become victims of Nazism. Nevertheless, the fate of the immigrant, however favorable the external conditions may be, is psychologically more difficult than perhaps most of our American friends realize. Nothing can replace the mother tongue in which the world around us first became articulated and which accompanied all our experiences from earliest childhood onward. For us this rupture could never completely heal. We were happy to see that in the next generation, in our children, it was healed. There is no need here to tell the story of our Princeton years in greater detail. In the spring of 1938 we moved into our new house, built essentially according to Hella’s plans. It was the first time in our lives that we had had a home on land of our own. That meant a great deal to Hella. She always kept house and garden in the finest condition, chiefly through the industrious labor of her own hands; the beautiful setting she created in this way increased her own sense of well-being. After the serious operation which Hella had to undergo at the beginning of last year, we were still granted one summer in our old beloved Zürich and in the familiar Swiss mountains. We knew that Hella’s life was threatened. All the more intensely did we enjoy those weeks: seeing our old friends again and the many cheerful pleasures of life to which the graceful cultivated landscape of Lake Zürich invites one. All tensions seemed to have dissolved. Life shone before us as though against a golden background. For Hella it was the farewell. One word comes to my lips whenever I think of her: Wohlgeratenheit. She was well made, fortunate in body, soul, and spirit. Our existence is divided and held in tension between subject and object, between meaning and being. If the light of consciousness has its origin in the transcendence of God, that origin nevertheless remains hidden from consciousness itself. We therefore do not know how an individual human life is represented in the Being of the Origin; and so perhaps it is blasphemous to say of a human being that the blessing of God rested upon that person. But this I believe I may say of Hella: that her life among human beings was a blessing to others. Many who encountered her may have carried away from that meeting a little light, cheerfulness, confidence, affirmation of life, and enrichment in their souls. To me she was infinitely more. Her love shone over my life. I must be grateful that I possessed her for so long. I do not know what I am without her.
Int he folowing picture from 1917, Hella is recognizable with the white hat. To her right is Weyl.
