Fritz Houtermans - Personal

Personal

Houtermans had a great sense of humor. Many have commented on this, and one of his colleagues, Haro von Buttlar, collected stories told by Houtermans and privately published them in a book with more than 40 pages. One story purports to explain the contributions of seven of the twentieth century’s most exceptional scientists, Theodore von Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller, all Hungarians. According to Houtermans, they are Martians, who are afraid that their accents will give them away, so they masquerade as Hungarians, i.e., people unable to speak any language but Hungarian without an accent.

Houtermans was married four times. Charlotte was his first and third wife in four marriages. They had two children, a daughter Giovanna (born in Berlin, 1932) and a son Jan (born in Khar’kov, 1935), and they were divorced the first time in 1943, due to a new law in Germany and enforced wartime separation. In February 1944, Houtermans married Doctor Ilse Bartz, a chemical engineer; they worked together during the war and published a paper. Houtermans and Ilse had three children, Pieter, Elsa, and Cornelia. In August 1953, again with Pauli standing as a witness, Charlotte and Houtermans were again married, but they divorced again in only a few months. In 1955, Houtermans married Lore Müller, sister of his stepbrother, Hans. She brought her four-year old daughter to the marriage, and she and Houtermans had a son, Hendrik, born in 1956.

Houtermans died of lung cancer on 1 March 1966.