Niels Bohr was fond of quoting ‘an old Danish proverb’ to the effect that ‘prediction is always difficult, especially of the future’. Schrödinger later described his decision to return to Austria in 1936 as a miscalculation of the political situation that was ‘an unprecedented stupidity’, but it would not have seemed so at the time. He was not satisfied with the quality of life in either Britain or America, and old friends like Fritz Kohlrausch in Graz and Hans Thirring in Vienna were urging him to return to his native land. Hans even offered to relinquish his Vienna post if Erwin preferred that one.

Nevertheless, Erwin knew that in going to Graz, he was stepping into a cesspool of Nazi activity. The university was a center for the Styrian Nazi party, whose leader was Armand Dadieu, professor of physical chemistry. More than half the students were active Nazis and they dominated the campus. The principal Graz newspaper, Der Tagespost, followed the Nazi line and the provincial Heimwehr was controlled by the party.

The Austrian situation

During the fifteen years that Schrödinger had lived abroad, the history of Austria had been marked by political strife between two major forces, the Christian Socialists or ‘blacks’ and the Social Democrats or ‘reds’. Antisemitism in Austria, with its Catholic culture, was more prevalent but less extreme than in Germany. The clerical party was traditionally antisemitic; for example, in 1933, its chairman, with the good German name of Czermak, announced that ‘the religious German must decisively reject baptism as an “entrance ticket” for Jews’. There were about 190 000 Jews in Austria, with 176 000 in Vienna (9% of population of city) where they were prominent in learned professions, the press, music and the arts. As in Germany, the universities were citadels of antisemitism and it was difficult for even distinguished Jewish scholars to obtain professorships.

In 1932, the clericals selected Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor.