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In this letter can be seen a woman who, though she was driven, had a strong tendency toward depression. This
would come into play more as the years wore on.
It is also evident, from this letter and from the events following it, that while she had problems, she was
also very driven, as she did end up finishing her degree at the university. She defended her dissertation on
December 22, 1900; her defense was very highly attended, and the crowd was comprised mostly of women. The
two students who were questioning her did not allow her gender to keep them from being as thorough as
possible, but despite that, she proved a worthy opponent, and later that day was awarded a doctorate from the
dean of the philosophical faculty.
7
She and Haber were married in 1901, but that was not the first time they‟d considered matrimony. Ten
years previously, they had become engaged, but both sets of parents objected. According to the customs of the
time, marriage could not occur until the man was successful and established, and also when there would be no
monetary dependence on the parents. Though they continued to see one another for a short amount of time, the
engagement was broken.
8
However, Haber mentioned in a letter written in 1901 that he had spent the last decade
trying to forget about Clara, and that he had not succeeded.
9
This second time through, Clara was more cautious,
writing in a letter eight years later:
It was always my approach to life that it‟s only worth living if one develops one‟s abilities to their
fullest and experiences all that human life has to offer, to the extent that one can. And so I decided to
get married – among other reasons – because I felt that otherwise a page of the book of my life, and
a chord in my soul, would lie fallow and untouched.
10
This was possibly not the best reason to agree to Haber‟s proposal and marry him, but the first years of the
marriage were happy all the same. Clara attended seminars at the Institute, showed an interest in Haber‟s work,
and even gave lectures on “Chemistry and Physics in the Household”.
11
Their son Hermann was born in 1902. When Hermann was ten weeks old, however, Haber was offered
the chance to tour science facilities in the United States as a representative of the German Electrochemical
Society. Whether Haber struggled with the decision to leave will never be known; it‟s likely, however, given the
atmosphere and morals of the time, that it barely took thought. Either way, Haber left for the United States, and
Clara went to stay with her father in Breslau.
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It is possible that this was a turning point in their marriage. As he told his second wife, Charlotte Nathan,
after Haber returned from the trip, he and Clara slept in separate rooms until her death.
12
This was only one
problem with their relationship; often Haber would stay in
the Institute for hours, missing dinner completely, and
this would make his wife very unhappy. He also showed up at home at eleven or twelve at night, friends in tow,
and demanded to know why there was no food on the table. He had always been absentminded – during a trip he
and Clara took in 1901 he forgot her on a train platform and boarded the train without her
13
. Many of these little
things
compounded, however, began to turn into one very large thing which could no longer be ignored.
That was not the main issue, though. Clara Immerwahr had been a bright young student, very driven, and
completely devoted to perfection in her work. Clara Haber was just as driven, just as perfectionist, but no longer
having science, she turned to housework. Everything had to be just so, and any deviation from that would not be
borne. On the other hand, Haber was very particular about his household, and of the two personalities, his was
stronger. As Clara wrote to her academic adviser in 1909:
[T]he uplift that [marriage] gave me lasted only a very short time, and even if I must blame some
part of the inadequacies on circumstances and on the special disposition of my temperament, still the
major part is the oppressive demands Fritz for his part makes in the house and on the marriage,
beside which any temperament that does not push even more inconsiderately for its own interests
will simply be destroyed. And that is the case with me. (…) Everyone should be allowed to go his
own way, but in my opinion even a genius is justified in permitting himself specially cultivated
“crotchets” and a sovereign contempt for every rule of normal behavior – even the most everyday
ones – only if he is alone on a desert island.
14
In her own words, Haber was destroying her.
The family moved to Berlin in 1911, but this did not help; on the contrary, it made matters worse. Clara
withdrew into herself. People who knew her then said she became a “gray mouse, inconspicuous and nice.”
[She] dressed in rough woolen clothes and always had an apron on …. She had no feeling for what
would please a man …. The child Hermann, was cared for and pampered in such a way that we
made jokes about it …. When Fritz Haber was asked one evening where she was after a trip on a
steamer on which rain had wet them through, he answered, “She is at home worrying about which