When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

When Haber returned victorious from the massacre at Ypres, Clara accused him of perverting science by devising a method for exterminating human beings on an industrial scale. Haber ignored her: for him, war was war and death was death, regardless of the means of its infliction. He used his two days’ furlough to invite his friends to a party that lasted until dawn, and, at its end, his wife walked down to the garden, took off her shoes, and shot herself in the chest with her husband’s service revolver. She bled to death in the arms of their thirteen-year-old son, who had run downstairs when he heard the shot. Still in shock, Fritz Haber had to travel the following day to oversee a gas attack on the eastern front. Throughout the war, he went on refining techniques for releasing the gas more efficiently, all the while haunted by his wife’s ghost. “It really does me good, every few days, to be at the front, where the bullets fly. There, the only thing that counts is the moment, and one’s sole duty is whatever one can do within the confines of the trenches. But then it’s back to command headquarters, chained to the telephone, and I hear in my heart the words that the poor woman once said, and, in a vision born of weariness, I see her head emerging from between the orders and the telegrams, and I suffer.”