There is a version of this story that should be famous. Four women physicists, Jewish, living in Nazi Germany, building careers in a field that had already spent decades trying to push them out, and then watching the entire country turn against them in a matter of years. Their escapes from Germany read like something constructed for a thriller. Their scientific contributions changed the field. Most people have never heard their names.
Olivia Campbell heard them and decided that was not acceptable.
The Four Women at the Centre
Sisters in Science follows Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen, four physicists whose careers were built in Weimar Germany and dismantled by the Nazi regime. Each faced two distinct forms of institutional hostility, one for being women, the other for being Jewish, and each navigated those forces in different ways and with different degrees of help from the people around them. Their stories are parallel at points, intersecting at others, and ultimately diverging as they scatter across continents trying to find somewhere that will let them keep working.
Lise Meitner is the most well known of the four, and Campbell handles her story with particular care. Meitner’s contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission, the science that made the atomic bomb possible, was handed entirely to her male colleague Otto Hahn when the Nobel Prize was awarded. That specific act of erasure sits at the centre of the book not as an isolated injustice but as the most vivid example of a pattern that ran through every single one of these women’s careers.
What Campbell Does Well
The research behind this book is extraordinary and Campbell wears it lightly, which is the right choice. The archival letters, the institutional records, the accounts of the elaborate networks of physicists and diplomats who worked to get these women out of Germany, all of it is present without the book ever feeling like a document dump. Campbell keeps the human beings visible throughout. You know what they feared, what they refused to compromise on, what they missed about the lives they were leaving behind.
The escape sequences in particular are written with real urgency. Meitner’s train journey out of Germany, taken with a passport that was no longer valid, is as tense as anything in narrative nonfiction I have read. Campbell knows how to calibrate pacing and she uses it to full effect in those chapters, letting you feel the specific terror of moving through a hostile state while trying to appear calm.
There is also something deeply moving in how Campbell traces the network of women who helped each other, writing letters of recommendation, pulling strings at American universities, pooling connections across borders to get each other out. That sisterhood is not sentimental in the way the title might suggest. It is practical, strategic, sometimes desperate. These women saved each other because no one else was going to.
The Science Itself
One of the most honest things I can say about this book is that the science is the hardest part of it, and I mean that in a specific way. Campbell explains Meitner’s work on nuclear fission with enough clarity that a general reader can grasp its significance. The contributions of the other three women, working in spectroscopy, optics, and astrophysics, are harder to make accessible and Campbell acknowledges this limitation in how much she attempts. You come away understanding that their work mattered profoundly. You come away with a less complete picture of exactly how and why than you might want.[latimes]
This is not really a criticism of Campbell so much as an observation about the challenge of the material. Explaining cutting edge physics to a lay audience without a glossary or diagrams is genuinely difficult and the book does its best. But there were sections where I felt the scientific significance being asserted rather than demonstrated, and I wanted to follow the ideas further than the text was able to take me.
Where the Structure Gets Complicated
Group biography is always a balancing act and Campbell does not fully escape its tensions. Four narrative arcs running in parallel means the book occasionally loses momentum as it pivots between women mid-chapter. Three of the four names begin with the letter H, which sounds like a small complaint but in practice creates genuine confusion during the denser historical sections when you are trying to keep track of who is where and which institution just turned whom away.
The middle section of the book, covering the years of bureaucratic effort to secure university positions abroad, is the most demanding stretch. The urgency of the escape sequences gives way to a series of letters written, positions offered, positions withdrawn, visas applied for and delayed. The drama is real but the pacing flattens. Campbell gets through it, but it requires patience.
Why It Still Matters
Sisters in Science is not content to be a historical recovery project, though it earns that description. Campbell draws a line from what happened to these women in the 1930s and 40s to the structural patterns still present in academia and scientific institutions today. The under-citation of women’s work, the attribution of collaborative discoveries to the most senior male name, the informal networks that open doors for some people and stay invisible to others. None of these things disappeared when the war ended.[youtube]
There is a particular kind of grief in reading about brilliance that was actively suppressed and credit that was actively taken. Campbell does not smooth that grief over with easy consolations. These women built extraordinary careers under impossible conditions and most of them are still missing from the standard histories of physics. The book you are holding is one attempt to correct that. It does the job.
Rating: ★★★★ 4 / 5 stars
For readers drawn to: The Radium Girls by Kate Moore, Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, anyone who has ever looked at a history book and noticed whose names are missing from it.