How Tycho Brahe Led a Marrano Rocketeer to Genius

Arthur’s father wanted him to be a lawyer or banker, his mother a doctor, but he had been intent on becoming a scientist ever since the age of thirteen when an uncle had given him a telescope as a confirmation present. By his last year at the Gymnasium there had been terrible arguments. “It will never put a roof over your head!” his father yelled. “Who needs a roof when you have the stars!” Arthur shouted back, and his mother pleaded with them to stop before his father had a heart attack.

Then one day his mother told him that she and his father would support him no matter what he wanted to do. Law and medicine were dropped as subjects of dinner-table conversation, and Arthur noticed that his father seemed happily resigned. A few weeks later when Arthur was rummaging through the rolltop desk looking for a pencil, he found out why. At the bottom of a letter to his parents about upcoming graduation ceremonies, the headmaster had written, “Your Arthur is a genius! You will be proud of him. He will do great things!”

While Arthur had only suspected genius before, he had never doubted the great things. Or rather, the one Great Thing: Raumschiffahrt. Space travel.

Long before the telescope, he had learned about space from a grandmother who had reclaimed the faith of her Marrano forebears, the secret Jews of Spain, and steeping herself in the mysteries of the Zohar, affirmed that each night her soul traveled between their house in Trier and a blue-white dwarf in Scorpio where the Heavenly Academy of Akiba and ben Yohai convened. She called herself the Last Marrana. Hoping to follow her some night, he had secretly drawn maps, based on her descriptions, of how the night sky looked on planets millions of light years from earth. He later grew to understand the symptoms of his grandmother’s loneliness and dementia, but the seed had been planted. He would attain the heavens, too, though by means more mechanical than mystical.

In the fall of 1929 Arthur left Trier for Berlin and the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Germany’s finest, where he had quietly determined to learn everything there was to know about the new science of astrophysics by the age of twenty one, or he would seriously consider killing himself.

Was Arthur Waldmann so naive to think that he was the only brilliant young man in Weimar Germany dreaming about space? Of course not. He knew about the Society for Space Travel in Breslau, and subscribed to their journal, The Rocket, but found in its pages only a vulgar fascination with the purely technical aspects of the enterprise. The former student of the Zohar wanted more.

Curiously, Arthur belonged to the pragmatic rather than the romantic school of genius. While Einstein would flunk algebra, take a dead-end job as a Swiss bureaucrat, and then produce the Theory of Relativity like Houdini conjuring an elephant out of thin air, Arthur would play it straight down the middle. His would not be a case of the rejected stone becoming the foundation, just to make it seem even more incredible. He had always been an “A” student and was not about to stop being one now. But since what he had come to think of as his Annunciation, Arthur had grown restless and bold.

One afternoon Herr Doktor Professor Leopold Levitas, chair of the physics department, was lecturing the class on the cosmological constant and theory of a static universe. Although in those days questions were as rare as transits of Venus, Arthur raised his hand. Levitas turned in his direction, smiling a sarcastic, toothy grin.

“Yes, Mr. Waldmann?”

“With all due respect, how does the Professor judge the alternative theory of an expanding universe?” While Arthur disliked Levitas personally, he thought he respected his intelligence.

“Inelegant,” snapped Levitas. “It assumes a beginning and middle, but no end.” His disciples in the front row nodded their approval of the master’s wisdom.

“But Einstein says here”—Arthur had in front of him the latest issue of Proceedings of the Anglo-American Astronomical Association—“that Dr. Hubble’s demonstration of the red shift proves the dispersion of galaxies at speeds approaching that of light.”

There was silence in the physics amphitheater. Levitas sniffed and adjusted his bowtie. “I know who Dr. Hubble is,” he said. “But whether he has made a genuine contribution to knowledge is not for you or I or even Dr. Einstein to decide. We must wait and see if it stands the test of time!”

“Would that be time on earth, or would it be time in a galaxy moving at the speed of light?” asked Arthur.

Afterwards, a crowd gathered to congratulate him on nailing old Leopold. While Arthur’s instinct was to savor victory in isolation, he now found himself holding forth on spectroscopy, the red shift, gravitational bending, and remote spiral nebulae. Two fellow Rhinelanders followed him to a cafe where, lowering his voice, Arthur explained his belief that it was human destiny to leave planet earth. He took a napkin and sketched out the itinerary of a lunar expedition, though he doubted whether this would be possible in their lifetimes. They told him that if anyone could do it, it would probably be he.

Berlin circa 1930 was itself an education for some, but Arthur found its sex and politics distracting. When not in class, his rooms, or the library, he took refuge in the tea room on the top floor of Wertheim’s Department Store, upon whose high ceilings cavorted fat cherubs who looked like they would grow up to be full professors. He would be almost the only man, and the only young person, among a clientele of older ladies in cloth coats and fur hats. He ate ladyfingers and drank tea sweetened with Franconian honey. While Arthur read little that was not about Raumschiffahrt, he thought of his afternoons at Wertheim’s as holidays, and to clear his brain, lost himself in the heroic sagas of medieval Icelanders. Here were a people who refused all blandishments and mitigations! Toward the end of Burnt Njal Kari and Flosi are slugging it out over some forgotten point of honor when Kari’s sword slices through Flosi’s thigh. He says to him, “You don’t need to look, the leg is off,” and Flosi doesn’t look because he knows the leg is off, and he dies without fuss. That’s what good science was about, too, thought Arthur. Facing facts and not making a fuss about it.

One day toward the end of spring term Arthur’s Rhinelanders mentioned seeing the notice of a lecture by Dr. Hermann Oberth, sponsored by the Berlin chapter of the Society for Space Travel. Arthur knew all about Oberth. When he was twelve, he had picked up Oberth’s Rocket into Interplanetary Space, but could make little of its complex equations and uninspired prose. Though still bored by the writing, he could now pick out flaws in the math. Just last year Oberth had made a fool of himself when his promise to launch a stratospheric rocket for the premiere of Fritz Lang’s movie Woman in the Moon resulted in nothing more than a few publicity stills and a nervous breakdown that sent him back to Transylvania in disgrace. Besides, at 36, Oberth was over the hill as far as genius went, and Arthur dismissed the lecture as a waste of time.

Two days later, he set out, alone, just to make sure.

It was across town at the Technical University in Charlottenburg, a vocational institution founded by Kaiser Wilhelm II to mass produce the engineers who would help Germany beat England in the race for dreadnoughts and empire. The lecture hall itself was both new and shabby, illuminated by bare light bulbs that dangled from the ceiling. A few dozen young men were scattered around a room which could have held twice that number.

When Oberth got up to speak, he was at first hard to understand through his thick Transylvanian accent. Not once did he condescend to look at his audience. Every few minutes he would pause, as though mentally drained, and release through his pursed lips a sigh that rippled the hairs of a thick mustache which stood out like a pushbroom in the middle of his face. At one point when he turned his head in profile, the rationale behind the comical mustache became clear: it was a pathetic attempt to distract from a nose so humongous that it made him look destined for a title role in Goebbels’s film version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Oberth’s subject was the small rocket motor he had built called the Kegeldüse for its conical shape. He had nothing to say about cosmological constants or expanding universes or about the metaphysics of man’s penetration of space. The climax was his solemn announcement that the German National Bureau of Standards had awarded him a certificate, complete with an official seal (which he held up), attesting that his motor had produced a thrust force of seven kilograms for a period of ninety seconds. “The Kegeldüse now takes its place in the Fatherland’s family of scientifically respected combustion engines,” he said in closing, and sat down.

A wave of relief passed through Arthur. He had caught not the slightest whiff of genius, and was down the center aisle before the moderator opened the floor for questions.

But as he neared the doors at the back, he saw another young man shadowing his movements down the right aisle and gesturing for Arthur’s attention. He passed through the foyer and a voice cried, “One moment, please!” Arthur was two steps from the exit, but he could not ignore him now without seeming rude. Being a genius didn’t excuse you from being a gentleman.

His pursuer extended a hand and introduced himself as the Society’s corresponding secretary. “I don't believe we’ve met,” he said. He was two inches taller than Arthur and solidly built without seeming stocky. His bright blue eyes were set in a face that retained the pudginess of childhood, and the curly blonde hair that he wore longer than most students further exaggerated his youth. Indeed, despite an adult-sized body, his head seemed disproportionately large. He wore a nicely tailored wool jacket and tie, but what Arthur would remember most were the knickers.

The two exchanged names, and when Arthur explained that he was a student at Friedrich-Wilhelm, he nodded approvingly. “One can’t do physics without metaphysics, as I’m always telling them here. It’s more than just how much gas you can squeeze through a nozzle. Any old fart can figure that out,” he said, rolling his eyes back toward the hall. Arthur was surprised at this display of sarcasm toward Oberth, who had, after all, made significant contributions to knowledge, for a Gymnasium teacher from the backwaters of Transylvania. But before he could offer anything in Oberth’s defense, the foyer doors flew open and in came a squad of crew-cut engineering students. One of them boxed the corresponding secretary on the ear as he went by and said, “Time to put the Count to bed, Sunny Boy!” Sunny Boy blew them a kiss along with an obscene gesture, and said to Arthur, “I have to drive Oberth to his hotel in my roadster. He refuses to take public transportation.”

Back in his room that evening, Arthur ran his finger over the raised lettering of the card that had been pressed into his hand, along with a request that he call the number printed thereon. He had never known anyone his own age to carry calling cards, much less anyone whose multiple names included the aristocratic title Freiherr. He had always thought of barons as old men in dinner jackets and cummerbunds, but here was a young baron still dressed in knickers. The surname sounded familiar, too. He looked through some week-old newspapers and found an article about von Papen’s efforts to address the deepening economic crisis. The Chancellor had turned to the “First Families of the Fatherland,” and appointed several men of noble backgrounds to high places. This “Cabinet of Barons,” as the press called it, included one new minister whose picture showed an unmistakable resemblance to the Society for Space Travel’s corresponding secretary.

The combination of the Freiherr’s pedigree and his understanding that the penetration of space would have both physical and metaphysical consequences frankly unnerved Arthur. Had he dodged one bullet in that dingy lecture hall only to find himself in the path of this other?

A week later he made the call, and though he was ashamed to admit it, he secretly thrilled at the prospect of knowing such a well-connected person. He remembered his father’s stale maxim about “hitching his wagon to a star,” and even imagined bringing the Freiherr home for a visit, knowing how it would please his mother to entertain a baron.

As soon as he was put through, Arthur rehearsed an explanation of who he was and the circumstances of their first meeting, but the Freiherr interrupted him immediately: “Arthur, of course!” Although there party noises in the background, with someone the singing “The Merry Heathen,” a popular cabaret tune, the Freiherr seemed neither distracted nor impatient. They arranged to meet the following day.

The Freiherr lived in a plain brick residence at the Technical University that made Arthur’s roach-infested flat in an eighteenth-century apartment block seem almost romantic. He took this to be a good sign. In the dimly lit hallway steel doors rattled softly in their jambs. He found the Freiherr’s room and knocked. The Freiherr greeted him with a fraternal clap on the shoulder, and drew him into a room that was furnished with upholstered couches and a mahogany bookcase that extended the length of one wall. An oriental rug covered the floor. In one corner of the room a cello sat on its stand, in another there was a six-inch reflecting telescope fitted with polished brass knobs and setting circles. The room had a smell that, because of his grandmother and the Zohar, Arthur associated with old people and forgotten texts.

The Freiherr was dressed in mud-spattered riding boots and a black belted jacket with insignia that looked like paired lightning bolts. He apologized for his appearance, saying that he had just returned from an equestrian center and had not had time to change. “They make me wear their absurd uniform,” he said, “but I put up with it because it’s the closest place to go riding.” When he noticed the card peeking out from Arthur’s shirt pocket he brought his hand to his forehead in a gesture of mock exasperation. “God, those things. My father absolutely insists that I have them. That’s one of the few I’ve ever given out.” Arthur remarked that he had made the connection between him and his father from the newspaper. The Freiherr laughed. “He’s always trying to get me to read the papers, but I tell him I’m more interested in the news that stays news. I ask him, what will people remember a hundred years from now, the antics of some greaseball politician in the Reichstag, or Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto?” Arthur agreed that Tombaugh’s name would live long after Hitler’s had been forgotten.

Arthur admired the telescope, which had also been a confirmation present. “Not much more than a child’s toy,” said the Freiherr dismissively. “When I take it out now, I come back more frustrated than anything else. I feel like I want to reach into that tube, and pull the stars out with my bare hands. I mean, we’ll never know if those lights are real flesh and bones just by looking, will we?”

Arthur was taken aback by the Freiherr’s vehemence. And what did he mean by flesh and bones? It reminded him again of his crazy grandmother, the Last Marrana. Regaining his composure he asked about the framed woodcut on the wall above the telescope. It showed a corpulent man with a full beard, dressed in thick robes, and seated behind a table on which were displayed sextants, astrolabes, and miniature orreries. Except for a missing piece of his nose that seemed to have been replaced by a metal prosthesis, he bore a certain resemblance to a picture in his grandmother’s study of Isaac ibn Yashush, called “The Blunderer” by his contemporaries in eleventh-century Spain for suggesting that it was not Moses but the shekinah that had inscribed the names of Edomite kings near the end of Genesis who lived long after Moses had died. But it obviously wasn’t the Blunderer, nor Copernicus nor Galileo, whose faces were familiar to Arthur from histories of astronomy. “Kepler?” he asked.

“Close, but no cigar,” said the Freiherr. “It’s the forerunner. Tycho Brahe.”

Tycho. The last great astronomer before the telescope. History had done him the honor of remembering him by his first name, like his younger contemporary, Galileo, though he lacked the same courage of conviction when it came to the theological implications of his research. Unwilling to alienate his royal patron, Freidrich II, he devised a compromise system in which all the planets revolved around the sun, except earth, which remained the unmoved center of the universe. This bastard offspring of Ptolemy and Copernicus never gained wide acceptance.

“An odd choice of mentor for a rocket society,” said Arthur.

“He’s not the Society’s mentor,” said the Freiherr. He reached into a jacket pocket, and removing a silver case embossed with a family crest, offered Arthur a cigarette, which he politely declined. “He’s mine.”

The Freiherr took a long drag and exhaled the smoke in a neat jet toward the ceiling. “One could do much worse with the scant fifty-six years allotted him,” he continued. “He was the first to observe a nova and know what he was looking at. He built Uraniborg, his own private observatory, complete with printing press and paper mill, on an island in the Baltic where he carried out the most advanced scientific research of his day. He constructed automata. And he developed a cosmology that elegantly resolved the competing claims of physics and metaphysics.”

“But it was all wrong,” said Arthur. He felt renewed confidence. Perhaps the Freiherr was just a dilettante after all, more Sunny Boy than genius.

“Wrong in a complicated and interesting way,” he shot back. “Arthur, I’m convinced that Tycho deliberately built an error into his system because he understood that the heavens were more than any rational philosophy could comprehend. Do you know what filled his library shelves?” The Freiherr stepped over to the mahogany bookcase and pulled down a leather-bound folio which he opened to the title page. Arthur ran his fingers across its soft, skin-like surface: vellum. In a series of lines that ignored word endings and diminished in size as they ran down the page he read: Artis Cabbalisticae Scriptores Johannes Pistorius Basel 1587. Nearly filling the blank page opposite in florid script was the Latin autograph of Tycho himself. It seemed unfair that any private person could own such ancient and priceless originals.

“How did you come by this?” said Arthur.

The Freiherr tried to mask a proprietary air with his boyish grin. “As much as I would hate my father to hear this, family background affords certain .…advantages. The two upper floors of his estate in Silesia house every heirloom bauble going back to the Black Death. My mother’s people were Danes from Scania, Vikings, really, and Tycho a great-great-great-great-great-great uncle. ‘You have the stars in your blood,’ she tells me whenever my father isn’t around. Here, look at this.”

He turned the page to a fanciful map of the heavens, framed by angels and devils, which depicted the stars as radiant faces expressing the whole range of human emotions. Arthur had seen medieval star maps, but while the names were familiar, the constellations were highly unorthodox, unlike any he had ever seen before. Ever seen before from earth. For he now recalled a map he had once drawn, based on his grandmother’s travels, of how the sky would appear to an observer on Aldebaran. He saw, too, a network of faint lines connecting ten illuminated nodes in diverse constellations which nearly matched Moses de Leon’s scheme of the divine emanations in the Zohar. Arthur felt nauseous and betrayed. Forcing it down, he squeaked out that the page was both curious and beautiful.

“Precisely!” said the Freiherr, poking him in the chest with his finger. “There’s a lesson in my ancestor’s mystical studies that probably no one at the Oberth lecture except you and I could begin to understand. Tycho built Uraniborg, but knew that the goal of science was to exalt the human mind from earthly to heavenly things. That’s why he ended up at the court of Emperor Rudolf. His friends thought him a fool to move to a backwater like Prague, but Tycho was impressed by Rudolf’s dream of establishing a ‘Heavenly Academy’ that would bring together the best of the new and the old learning. He even had some rabbi there.”

Judah ben Bezalel. He wrote the shem tov, the holy name of God, on a scrap of parchment, and inserted it into the mouth of the Golem which would come alive to protect the Jews of Prague when the Emperor could not. As a small boy under his grandmother’s tutelage, Arthur had many times dramatized the exploits of this wonder-rabbi with the help of his toy stuffed animals.

As he brought his panegyric on Tycho to a close, the Freiherr removed an envelope from inside the back cover. “Nor is it just the great men of the past who believed this,” he said, handing the letter to Arthur. It began in stilted German by thanking the Freiherr for a copy of his essay entitled, “Journey to the Moon: Its Astronomical and Metaphysical Aspects.” His correspondent noted that space travel would be more than just another technical challenge, and said that “while I can conceive of a God who cares nothing for scientists, I cannot imagine a scientist who would dare to ignore God. Besides, who really knows what we will find up there?” In closing he wrote, “I envy you your youth.” It was signed “Edwin Hubble.”

To Arthur it seemed like the commission of an emperor. He felt like a fool now for having dropped Hubble’s name in an undergraduate physics class, when here was the Freiherr corresponding with the man. But it also seemed unfair. It never even occurred to Arthur that you could write to famous people.

Arthur took momentary solace in the thought that his contemporaries’ space fantasies were just an escape from the unhappy realities of Weimer Germany, and that Raumschiffahrt might never happen anyway. “Not much worry we’ll be bumping into God with the Kegeldüse,” he said.

The Freiherr fixed Arthur in his sights like a gunner. “This isn’t about you or I, but the survival of the species. Human beings are like migratory birds who devour the fruit of an island until they foul it with their shit and move on,” he said. “Man, too, must escape this tiny cosmic atoll called earth, or die. Count Dracula is a pompous ass, and his Kegeldüse a tinker toy, but we must begin somewhere.”

He spoke with authority. “So you really believe that men will go into space?” said Arthur. As soon as the words were out he felt embarrassed by his own lack of faith. Perhaps his fascination with Raumschiffahrt had always been predicated upon its impossibility.

“There are those among us who will not taste death before men walk on the moon,” said the Freiherr, as if he had already watched the newsreel footage. “I fully expect to be freed from the tyranny of earth’s gravity myself.”

He stepped over to an armoire from which removed an oversized notebook with arabesqued covers. “I’ve already made sketches of the kind of machines that we could build today if we just had the money.” The pages were filled with exploded diagrams of a strange tadpole-shaped vehicle designed for travel outside earth’s atmosphere. The level of detail was staggering: motorized gyroscopes, attitudinal thrusters, a magnesium-based signaling system, anti-glare window coatings of various intensities. It even included a compact septic system that recycled the pilot’s bodily wastes back into potable water. Arthur asked him what the “rock box” was for, and the Freiherr without missing a beat said, “For the pilot to bring back samples of any passing asteroids.” Another drawing showed the Freiherr’s cosmic spermatozoa slicing through a field of six-pointed stars that would have been unfamiliar to anyone—except a student of the Zohar. “And what’s this?” asked Arthur, his heart pounding. “Oh, just something I doodled. I think that’s how the night sky would look to someone orbiting Alpha Centauri.”

The last twist of the knife. Arthur continued to look at pages as the Freiherr turned them, nodding at his explanations, raising an eyebrow occasionally to indicate judicious skepticism. But it was just a lame effort to mask the Tychonian revolution going on inside him. There could be no doubt. Despite the kind words of his former headmaster, this was the genuine article. Arthur had once spent six months working out the appearance of the heavens from our sun’s nearest neighbor, and here the Freiherr had “doodled” it into the margins of his Raumschiffahrt plans. Scientific value aside, the artistry of the Freiherr’s drawings rivaled that of Da Vinci’s notebooks. He wanted to ask him for a page, thinking that when he was old and forgotten, he could sell it to the Louvre for a million marks.

Arthur did not need to look. The leg was off, and it was now only a question of bleeding to death with a minimum of fuss. The satchel he had brought with his own notebooks had become a source of monstrous embarrassment, and he tried to push it out of sight with his foot. As the Freiherr snapped open his case for another cigarette, he told Arthur how much he’d value a man of his intelligence and sensibility in the Raumschiffahrt society. In what Arthur would look back upon as his last ever assertion of personal ego, he demurred: “What you need are helping hands, not helping brains, and I know nothing about engineering.” He also made some noises about how busy he was with school. The Freiherr scowled. “Let’s keep our priorities straight. School is for people who would rather follow rules than make them. You don’t want to end up looking like the Count in twenty years, do you? Besides,” he added roguishly, “there’s too much glory for just one man.”

Since it was a warm day and he now had all the time in the world, Arthur elected to walk home. He passed through the Zoological Garden and wondered if he might be lucky enough to get eaten by an escaped tiger. In the Tiergarten he considered telling a group of picnicking brownshirts that he was sort of one-quarter Jewish so that they might beat him to death.

An hour later found him at his usual table in Wertheim’s Tea Room. He looked up at the fat, happy cherubs on the ceiling. Maybe his father had been right about a career in law or banking. He nibbled stale lady fingers and read Burnt Njal. When he reached the end of a chapter, he thought to pay his bill and leave until he recalled that he no longer had to learn everything about astrophysics in the next three years, so he just kept reading. Medieval Icelanders never moped. For them life was a simple matter of being strong or weak. If strong, lead; if weak, follow. Otherwise, die.

When a waiter finally interrupted his reading to tell him it was closing time, Arthur felt surprisingly jaunty for a young man whose life had just been emptied of purpose. He had begun to consider the putative advantages of discipleship: freedom, obscurity. Let others occupy seats at the head of the table. He would happily take his place in the second cohort, down there with James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Canaean, names nobody remembers and about whom nothing is known. Best of all, he would no longer have to wonder if he were really the One to lead man into space, or if he needed to look out for Another. Another had now found him.

The next time he saw his Rhinelanders Arthur told them with a certain ruthless toughness that he was giving up his own research to join the Freiherr’s Raumschiffahrt team, and that they would be wise to do the same if they ever wanted to penetrate the heavens instead of just dreaming about it.

Daniel Schenker lives with his wife, Amanda, in Lacey's Spring, Alabama. He has published both essays and stories, and is former U. S. fiction editor of Stand magazine. “How Tycho Brahe Led a Marrano Rocketeer to Genius” comes from a work in progress about the moral situation of German scientists who developed the V-2 rocket for Hitler before coming to the United States to build ICBMs and the Saturn V moon rocket.