Leaving Europe;s shores was a huge relief. The Nazis dominated what had been a liberal democracy shaking off the cobwebs of the Kaiser and his empire. The Right Wing were rattling the sabres of war and using Jews as scapegoats for a mismanaged economy and excessive reparations for the Great War. Aryan purity became the ideology that was fuelled by medieval myths and legends. Opposition to the Nazis fizzled out or was quashed by brute force.
So it was that Erwin Schrödinger, his wife Annemarie, his five-year-old daughter, Ruth, Anny, his lover and their cat arrived in Dublin at the invitation of the taoiseach, Éamon de Valera.
Graz University were about to fire the Nobel prize winning physicist, and it took subterfuge to aid his escape via Rome and Geneva to Oxford. The trio’s loose morals were an affront to the sensibilities Oxford’s academics, and so, in 1939, they moved on to Ireland.
The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies may have been de Valera’s vanity project, but it established Dublin as a world centre for theoretical physics. It gave Erwin Schrödinger a free rein to pursue his interests in physics, oriental philosophy and Hinduism and turned a blind eye to the sexual antics of the Schrödingers.
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