Frankfurt Honors Hans Bethe

Hans Bethe as creator of the Sun. That’s a nod to Bethe’s research on energy production in stars, for which he received the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. The painting, by Bavarian artist Jürgen Jaumann, was commissioned to coincide with an honorary doctorate bestowed on Bethe this summer by the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

Bethe, who turned 98 in July, had foresworn accepting any more honors. He made an exception this time. “I felt delighted,” he said in a statement read by his half brother, who represented Bethe at the ceremony. “Frankfurt is the familiar town of my youth.” Bethe attended school and began his university studies in Frankfurt, and held his first teaching position there. He left Nazi Germany in 1933 after he was dismissed from a professorship because he is half Jewish. In the US, he worked on the Manhattan Project and has been on the faculty of Cornell University since 1935.

Horst Schmidt-Böcking, the retired dean of physics at the Frankfurt university and a driving force behind both the painting and the honorary doctorate, says, “Frankfurt owes Hans Bethe a lot in terms of science. We will fight to make his name well known in this city. This honor was long overdue.”

The portrait hangs in the Frankfurt university’s new physics building. Cornell will be given a second, similar portrait.