Inspiration, then Sweat, Tears, and Blood
Michelle Snyder
Michelle Snyder: Dr. Enzmann, aside from natural interest and curiosity, what and who interested, motivated, and finally impelled your interest in starships?
Dr. Enzmann: It’s easy to recall the gloriously colored Boston Sunday Advertiser illustrations of cylinders landing on the moon and the short imaginative stories with them. In Germany, the movie Frau im Mon, the fantastic stories in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, and especially Max Planck, come to mind. I played with his two granddaughters, daughters of his twins. We heard him talk about the power locked in atoms; it all came back to me when Hiroshima then Nagasaki were blasted. I knew immediately that mankind possessed the power that will carry any descendants to the stars.
On a second visit with Max Planck as my mother fled from madhouse Europe and my paternal relative’s malfeasant ill will toward my mother, I played and listened. Father (being extracted from Europe by threats of “come or we leave without you”) talked at length with Dr. Planck. Here I gained knowledge of Knut Gödel, who was briefly my father’s classmate. I gained a feeling from the senseless waste of talent by Nazi Excesses. Imagine Planck’s son was executed by the Nazis.
In America, inspiration and motivation by Ula, Teller, Bethe, Ted Taylor, Jalbert, Jerry Bull, Murphy (of ABFreed Artillery Range), Robert Bussard, and Verner von Braun, along with his team at Huntsville, Alabama, were essentially it!
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