I have many memories of the Nobel Prize winner Martin Karplus (1930-2024), who died at the end of December. We corresponded often, met several times and always spoke with great esteem, combined with humorous conversations. Our meetings were characterized by cordiality and a deep mutual respect.
Martin Karplus was born into a Viennese Jewish family in 1930, intellectual, successful and not at all religious, as he told me. At the same time, the family had a scientific background. His grandfather was a leading psychiatrist at the University of Vienna, his great-aunt was an ethnologist, his great-uncle Robert von Lieben was the inventor of the radio tube, his brother Robert became a physicist and taught at the University of Berkeley. Shortly after the Anschluss, the family fled to the United States via Switzerland and France. It is nothing short of a miracle that Martin's father managed to send some pieces of furniture - including some from Palais Lieben-Auspitz - to the USA. Karplus also wrote about this in his fascinating autobiography “Spinach on the Ceiling”.
The title also leads to his upbringing. As a small child in Vienna, he did not want to eat spinach and threw a spoonful away, leaving a spinach stain on the ceiling. This is where he picks up in his book with his education, which began with his interest in biology, but he soon switched to theoretical chemistry and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013 together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel for his research into the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems. Although Karplus never received an invitation to return or visit Vienna, the tabloids quickly appropriated the Nobel Prize for Austria. Grotesque when you consider that the expulsion of Jewish scientists had reduced Austria to an academic backwater.
We can therefore count ourselves lucky that people like Martin Karplus traveled to Austria after all and were very generous here. The Nobel Prize winner donated a family-owned rocking chair and the gaming table of his grandfather, Dr. Johann Paul Karplus, neurologist and head physician at the Vienna Polyclinic, to the Jewish Museum Vienna. He enjoyed playing tarot with his friends, including his colleague Dr. Sigmund Freud. Until 1938, the table stood in the Karplus family's apartment in Palais Auspitz-Lieben, a building that now houses Café Landtmann. This console was given high honors in 2017 when I was able to ask the current King of England and his wife Camilla to sign the Jewish Museum's guest book on it. A little anecdote that Martin Karplus was delighted about.
We also talked about his hobbies, photography and the art of cooking (Martin Karplus was a passionate chef who also worked in award-winning restaurants). I am grateful for these encounters with Martin Karplus and his wife Tammy, always accompanied by their dog Bib, who had been given permission by the Mayor of Vienna himself to be in all of Vienna's museums and public institutions. We were also able to smile about this together. At the end of December 2024, Martin Karplus died at the age of 94 at his home in Massachusetts.
The memory of him will always stay with us.