Elisabeth Heisenberg (Schumacher)

http://ww2gravestone.com/people/heisenberg-werner/

The Wisdom of E. F. Schumacher, Page 4

" . . . The paternal grandfather of Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (or Fritz as his family and friends called him) had once been the German Ambassador in Bogota, Columbia and later the German Consul in New York.

Fritz’s father, Hermann, thus spent part of his youth abroad before returning to Germany. After completing his education, he taught at several universities, including Columbia University, where he spent a year as an exchange professor.

" . . . When he was already over forty, he married a much younger woman, Edith Zitelmann. Before he had left for Asia, she had already given birth to twins, a boy and a girl named after their parents, and Fritz would be born only about a year later in 1911. By then Fritz’s father was back at Bonn University, where he was a distinguished economics professor. In his relations with his wife and children, Hermann was authoritarian and dogmatic. Less so was Hermann’s brother, Fritz, after whom young Fritz had been named. This uncle whom his nephew admired was an expert on the great German writer Goethe (1749-1832) . . . "

The Wisdom of E. F. Schumacher, Page 7

“ . . . Fritz was especially upset with all the German intellectuals whom he believed had sacrificed their quest for truth in order to appease the Nazis. One individual he did not place in that category was his future brother-in-law, Werner Heisenberg, who had won the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics and in 1937 married Fritz’s younger sister Elisabeth.

“ . . . The previous year Elisabeth had been one of the bridesmaids at Fritz’s own wedding to Anna Maria Petersen (Muschi to her friends). She was a fun-loving, warm, spontaneous, and compassionate woman, much shorter than the tall, thin Fritz. She also differed from him in being “utterly unintellectual.”20 Her father was a prominent Hamburg businessman who owned an import/export company, and her large and friendly family was a beehive of activity.

"My Dear Li: Correspondence. 1937-1946" by Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg, edited by Anna Maria Hirsch-Heisenberg and translated from the German by Irene Eisenberg, Yale University Press

Thomas Powers: "The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb", New York Review of Books, December 22, 2016