Haber , Clara

During the summer of 1901, Haber met Clara Immerwahr at a chemistry conference. Like Haber, Clara came from an assimilated Jewish family in Breslau. Her father was a well-to-do chemist who operated a beet sugar factory on his estate. As students, Clara and Fritz had met in a dancing class and fallen in love, but parental opposition had prevented the match. When they met again, Haber immediately proposed. 

During World War I. Haber was in charge of the German poison gas program. In April of 1915. the Germans used chlorine for the first time on the Western front, causing 5000 fatalities. Haber s wife. Clara, was aghast she pleaded with her husband to forsake poison gas. When he adamantly refused to do so. she committed suicide. 

Haber, then 33, joyfully wrote to her uncle, Fate has been kind to me. Your Niece, Dr. Clara Immerwahr, of whom I was fond as a student and then for ten years tried very hard but unsuccessfully to forget, has said yes to me. We saw each other at the Congress in Freiburg, spoke to each other, and finally Clara allowed herself to be persuaded to try a life with me.. . . [We were] like a prince and princess in a fairy tale wrapped up in a dream. On August 3, 1901, three months after becoming engaged, Clara and Fritz were married. 

At first, Clara tried to continue her work in chemistry. She attended chemistry seminars and events, translated two articles from English to German, and helped her husband with his 1906 book, Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions. In an unusual move by a German scientist at the time, Haber dedicated the book to her To my loving wife Clara Haber, Ph.D., thanks for the quiet helping work. ... 

As Clara struggled, Haber gloried in his teaching responsibilities. He could be dictatorial, impatient, and outspoken, but with students he was... 

Haber was mortified and shaken by Nernst s dressing down. Afterward, he suffered from stomach, intestinal, and skin problems, and Clara worried about his health. Years later at a large conference, he and Nernst shared a rostrum but pretended not to notice each other. 

The institutes were built on a royal farm in rural Dahlem, now an affluent suburb of Berlin. Rabbits and partridges nibbled at Haber s garden. The area was so isolated that, when his chemist friend Richard Willstatter moved next door, Haber advised him to buy a guard dog. The Habers lived next door to the institute when he worked late, Clara brought him dinner on a tray. 

Clara Haber reportedly pleaded with Haber to stop his poison gas work. She visited the training site for poison gas workers and was horrified by experiments conducted on animals. Early in the war, an experiment in the institute laboratory exploded moments after Haber left the room. One scientist lost his hand, and a young physicist, Otto Sackur, one of Clara s classmates at Breslau University, was killed. As Sackur lay dying, Haber stood speechless, unable to do anything but shake his head in shock. It was Clara who thought to try first aid and who ordered her friend s necktie cut away so he could breathe more easily. Haber later found a job at the institute for Sackur s daughter. 

At dawn, Clara took Haber s army revolver, fired a test shot, and then shot herself in the heart. Her 13-year-old son, Hermann, found her still alive... 

Haber was buried in a Basel cemetery. At his request, the body of his first wife Clara Immerwahr was buried next to his, and his gravestone read, He served his country in war and peace for as long as was granted to him. ... 

After the Nazi takeover, Haber s second wife Charlotte moved to England where one of her sons, Ludwig Haber, became a prominent historian and wrote about chemical warfare, including his father s role in its development. Clara Haber s son Hermann moved to New York City where in 1946 he, like his mother before him, committed suicide. 

Margit Szollosi-Janze. Fritz Haber 1868-1934 Eine Biographie. Munich Verlag C. H. Beck, 1998. This authoritative biography of Haber scrupulously sorts fact from fiction unfortunately there is no English translation of this 928-page book. Source for facial scar attempt to become reserve officer role of sanitariums and Habers stays in them Clara as chemist and professor s wife Haber s BASF contract Reform Movement Clara s despairing letter Prussian ideals Haber as Archimedes his responsibility for poison gas and wartime authoritarianism Clara and poison gas Sackur Haber leaves after Clara s suicide Haber s postwar depression, Nobel Prize, postwar gas research, and help for Weimar Republic April 1933 events to end and Zyklon B. 

During World War I, Haber helped to develop the technology for deploying phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas as weapons of chemical warfare. His wife Clara, also a chemist, was disgusted by the use of science in war. When her husband refused to stop his support of the war effort, she committed suicide. 

In Breslau, Richard Abegg also became Fritz Haber s link to a person who belonged to his past and his future. She was a young woman, the first woman ever to acquire a doctorate from Breslau s university. Richard Abegg was her academic adviser. Her name was Clara Immerwahr. 

The postcard did reach its intended recipient, thirty-year-old Clara Immerwahr, whom Fritz Haber had met many years earlier. And Immerwahr did travel to Freiburg. 

She also converted to Christianity, and was baptized under the distinctive wedge-shaped steeple of Breslau s Barbarakirche, a few steps from the house where Fritz Haber had lived during his school years. Like Fritz, Clara was a crosser of boundaries. Her parents put up little resistance to her conversion. The family rarely, if ever, ventured into the synagogue, and Clara s father was considered a free-thinking humanist. 

In 1899, fate brought Fritz Haber s former classmate and good friend Richard Abegg to Breslau. He took a position teaching chemistry at the university, and became Clara Immerwahr s academic adviser. The two developed a friendship that was both properly formal and heartfelt. 

Dr. Clara Immerwahr stayed at the university and became Richard Abegg s laboratory assistant. And this is where, a few months later, Fritz Haber s postcard found her. Two weeks later, another letter from Haber arrived, repeating his desire to see Abegg and Immerwahr during the upcoming conference in Freiburg. 

Clara Immerwahr joined Fritz Haber in Freiburg. And there, over the course of just a few days, Haber persuaded her to link her life with his. 

Fritz s own letters contain hints of Clara s reluctance. Fate has been good to me, wrote Fritz Haber to an uncle of his betrothed, announcing his engagement. Your niece. . . has accepted my proposal. We met at the congress in Freiburg, we talked, and in the end Clara was prevailed upon to give it a try with me. ... 

There were, to be sure, happy times. One amusing letter to Abegg takes the form of a dictation delivered by Fritz and recorded by Clara, who added her own playfully subversive remarks concerning the dictator. And Fritz was always lively and high-spirited when he invited students or colleagues from the institute to their home, as he liked to do. Yet Clara Haber s letters to... 

On August 18, shortly after his and Clara s first anniversary, Fritz Haber sailed for America. Clara, left to cope on her own with ten-week-old Hermann, retreated to her father s house in Breslau. 

Back in Karlsruhe, Haber resumed his frenetic pace of research. Fritz is so scattered, if I didn t bring him to his son every once in a while, he wouldn t even know that he was a father, wrote Clara. 

Home life, of course, meant Clara. Fonda knew her only from dinner parties at the Haber home, a quiet figure in the background tending to her young son Hermann while Fritz entertained the guests with an endless series of stories, jokes, and rhymes composed on the spot. But Fonda knew her reputation It was said that Haber was under continuous nagging from his wife and that he was disturbed by it. ... 

It was obvious to many, apparently, that discord and disappointment filled the marriage of Fritz Haber and Clara Immer-wahr. And most of their acquaintances—or at least those whose memories ended up in archives—blamed Clara. 

How could they feel otherwise They knew Fritz Haber well, and he seemed a perfectly attentive and gracious husband. Yes, he might be lost in his work at times and gone a great deal, but that was the normal life of a university professor. Fritz was fulfilling his proper social role as they understood it why could Clara not perform hers with equal good cheer It seemed clear to them that the problem lay within Clara, in her anxieties, her melancholy, and her refusal to play the social role that was expected of a professor s wife. As one acquaintance wrote He suffered a great deal from her pettiness. ... 

One contrary note survives, from the hand of Paul Krassa, one of Haber s students. He also happened to be Clara s second cousin, and the two became good friends when Krassa arrived in Karlsruhe. She completely recognized the outstanding talents and personality of her husband, but it certainly was not easy for her to be the wife of a great man, Krassa wrote later. She sacrificed her profession for him, and she never really found the necessary substitute for it in family life. She had no interest in playing a prominent social role, nor was she particularly good at it. ... 

At an important university ceremony, Fritz Haber was scheduled to give the keynote speech. I assumed that Clara would be up front, recalled another scientist s wife. But she was hidden all the way in the back. He would have liked her to be more socially prominent. This same woman recalled her astonishment upon finding Clara one morning in the kitchen sitting with her domes-... 

As Fritz Haber and a number of friends returned from an excursion in a steamship during which everyone had gotten soaked by rain, someone asked where Clara was. Haber replied, She s at home thinking about which family member might have caught what illness in which way ... 

Acquaintances found Clara emotionally rigid and prone toward absolute moral judgments. I felt that she was a person with acute ethical standards, fanatically held, wrote one of Haber s students. A friend of Haber s family from Breslau hinted at the same trait She was fanatical about the truth. Nothing could remain unspoken or ambiguous. 

On April 23, 1909, Clara Haber sat at her writing table, her hands hunting in vain for a pen. She silently blamed the men of... 

Clara didn t mention those things in her letter. She probably didn t need to. Abegg had recently visited the Habers, and after his visit, he d written Clara a postcard. Whatever he wrote in that card—whether congratulations to Fritz or concern about Clara s well-being—broke a dam in her heart. Anger and despair came rushing out onto paper. 

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