08/02/06

Adolescence (1934-1938)

Childhood erupted into adolescence in 1934 at age ten, when I passed the admissions test "Aufnahmsüfung", a traumatic experience for any ten-year-old, because that single day determines your entire future. I entered the "Realschule Schottenbastei" in downtown Vienna. Austria offered four school options. From elementary school at 10 you could enter "Hauptschule" to age 14 followed by a trade school or apprenticeship. You could enter "Mittelschule" to age 18 in the form of Gymnasium (greek and latin compulsory), Realgymnasium (latin and a modern language), or Realschule (two modern languages) with emphasis on science and math. Realschule Schottenbastei was the magnet school, being located near the Technische Hochschule, for which it prepared its students with a very tough curriculum. The alumni included Nicola Tesla and most other notable scientists and engineers of the era. I went to school on trolley car 40 and walked home twice a week to stop half-way at my piano teacher’s house.

By age ten Walter Vogel and I were firmly committed to a career in engineering, with very strong leanings toward aviation. We swapped books about WW-1 aviators, Baron von Richthoven (Walter’s favorite) and Udet (mine), and the annual science books "Frohes Schaffen" and "Das Neue Universum" which reported all major events in science and technology. I had a subscription to Popular Science as well, and a French science fiction monthly. I got bored with war and mystery thrillers and fascinated with books like Jules Verne, Accounts of the great polar expeditions, Piccard’s stratospheric and submarine expeditions, The Glass Giant of Palomar, "Hinter Pflug und Schraubstock" by Max Eydt, a German engineer who pioneered agricultural technology in Egypt among other things. Uncle Bubi gave me "Brehms Tierleben", a three-volume book on zoology which I cherish to this day. I was particularly fascinated by dragon flies and bats.

School became very challenging compared to US high school standards. My bike trips with Walter continued, and I made one other close friend: Fritz Schmidt. His family owned a chemical company and a house on the Wörthersee in Kärnten near Klagenfurt, where I sometimes spent spring vacations. I also had a sports teacher named Buresch who took me to swimming lessons on his motorcycle twice a week, and also ran private ski and swim camps for ten or twenty kids.

I remember at least one ski vacation on the Gerlosplatte above the spectacular Krimml waterfalls. We hiked up through the woods, with mules carrying our skis and luggage, and stayed in a barn . In 1995 we drove up a new toll road, and found a luxurious ski village where once there had been only cow pastures. The stable that rents mules near the Krimml falls still existed.

Summers in Brüsau and Rakwitz were a striking contrast to Vienna. My friends were barefoot farm kids to whom the facts of life were a matter of everyday experience, matters about which my Vienna friends only exchanged whispered rumors. My main guru and role model was Johann Mlejnek, grandfather’s chauffeur and general handyman, a young master locksmith by trade who had built himself a machine shop in the oversize garage and patiently taught me as if I were his apprentice. I spent every minute in his shop, particularly on rainy days, when Miss Emma didn’t drag me off for the almost daily nature walk and picnic into the woods and hills. I also went on many house calls with grandfather, and accompanied him on his weekly clinics at the two major factory infirmaries, one at the Pam silk spinning and weaving mill, and one at the Löwbeer textile plant which is large enough to have its own miniature railroad and its own ice machine. We always brought home ice in a large copper-lined box which Johann attached to the rear luggage rack on grandfather’s Fiat touring sedan. Since grandfather was also the coroner and meat inspector, I occasionally witnessed some pretty grim farm accidents and animal slaughterings. Grandfather’s was the only car for miles around, and our gasoline was delivered by railroad in 55 gallon drums. Brüsau was a far cry from life in a Vienna suburb.

So was Rakwitz, the Spitz family farm where grandmother had grown up, where we spent one or two weeks with Miss Emma every summer. It was the largest farm around, with 120 dairy cows, two dozen horses, a steam tractor, the first pasteurizing machine, and its own blacksmith shop. There was also the private chapel/school building for the family and hired help. The farm was run by uncle Herman Spitz, his brother, and his two sons who attended agricultural college during winters. There were at least 30 people around the dinner table. The farm is now a winery which produces prize-winning champagne, and the residence house is a restaurant.

My best Brüsau friend was Rudy Juri, who lived in a farmhouse across the backyard of my grandfather’s house and infirmary, the largest house on the town square (now the post office). Rudi lived with his sister Zita and widowed or divorced mother. Being the man of the house Rudi had to slaughter the chickens and ducks. He had a gruesome method. He would stick the chicken’s head through a knothole in the pigpen and let the pigs bite off their heads.

One summer when I was about eight I had diphtheria, which kept me from returning to Vienna with my family. My interminable days in bed were brightened by my grandfather, who introduced me to Schiller’s poems. I was fascinated and spent many days memorizing some of his longest narrative poems. Das Lied von der Glocke, der Taucher, die Kraniche des Ybicus among them. I can still recite parts of them. I was also much impressed by his play about Joan of Arc "Die Jungfrau von Orleans". It contributed significantly to my religious views.

My first brush with death happened around this time, age 10 or 11. Brüsau had just built a wonderful swimming pool where we spent a great deal of time. I invented a snorkel, which consisted of a rubber hose from the fountain in grandfather;s greenhouse fish pond, with a float attached to one end. I jumped into the ten foot deep end of the pool with one end of the hose in my mouth and dove to the bottom, only to find that I couldn’t breathe for two reasons. The rubber hose collapsed, and I couldn’t have expanded my lungs against a pressure of about 0.3 atmospheres even if the hose hadn’t collapsed. I would have drowned if a very alert teen-aged boy hadn’t noticed my plight and pulled me up by my hose.

When I was about 11 I had trouble with algebra in the Realschule and had to take a make-up exam in fall. Father hired Rudy’s older sister Zita Juri, a pretty and charming math student at Prague university, to tutor me every afternoon. It was a turning point in my life. She made mathematics such a beautiful and enjoyable subject that I have loved it intensely ever since, quite aside from its value as a powerful tool. Without Zita, I would probably never have become a physicist or engineer, and I certainly would never have achieved top grades and a faculty career at MIT. Zita led a pitiful life taking care of her demanding (unmarried) mother, and died of Alzheimer’s in her sixties. I visited her once in Germany in the seventies, but never had a chance to repay her for what she had done for me.

Elektrolux provided another career impulse at about the same time A few years earlier when I must have been about five, father had bought one of the first vacuum cleaners, a Swedish Elektrolux. My brother Eric was afraid of the noise and named it "piff". I discovered that it speeded up when I held my hand over the hose, but nobody could explain why. "Maybe it tries harder", suggested somebody. Now father bought another Elektrolux product: the first household refrigerator. It ran on gas. Unable to answer my question of how a hot flame could produce cold, father brought me a booklet called "Kältetechnik", which was way over my head. I eventually found out from my physics teacher at the Realschule, a Herr Doktor Böhm. He later invited a visiting lecturer who amazed us with liquid air experiments. I was so fascinated that I tried to make my own liquid air with a steel pump from among father’s surgical tools, without success. I didn’t know about critical temperature, above which a gas won’t liquefy no matter how high the pressure. But thermodynamics has remained a lifelong interest. The first course I taught at MIT turned out to be thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and liquid helium was my doctoral thesis subject.

I also experimented with electricity. We had 220 volt dc house current, and I found that I could make arc lamps using the carbon rods from flashlight batteries as the electrodes. Amazing I survived. I bought copper sulphate in a country hardware store and copper-plated all the keys in our house. And I made batteries from ammonium chloride and various metal-pairs. My uncle Victor Goldschmidt who had an electric motor factory brought me small motors and magnet wire, and I started making electromagnets. I also built crystal-rectifier radios with help from my cousin Paul Jellenik, a radio ham. With help f;rom Johann in Brüsau I restored an old brass flintlock pistol, and used it as a flare gun by filling the barrel with fulmanate (from capgun cartridges) and aluminum powder paint pigment from a hardware store. It was at this point, age eleven or twelve, that I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

My religious convictions also solidified at about this time, shaped by the religious climate in which I grew up. In 1867 Emperor Franz Joseph gave the Austro-Hungarian Empire a new constitution which granted equal citizenship to all minorities, and thereby emancipated jews from the ghettos. Vienna jews, particularly the intellectuals and artists, never denied their jewish ancestry but considered themselves primarily Austrians and rejected the notion of a jewish "race", which made them unpopular among the orthodox Jewish community of Eastern Europe which chose to segregate itself. Emperor Franz Joseph was determined to make Vienna a cultural center worthy of the Habsburg Empire. He founded the , Hofoper, (Royal Opera), now the Staatsoper and a multitude of concert halls, theaters and museums and other cultural institutions, making Vienna the cultural center of the World. Franz Joseph was adamantly opposed to anti-semitism and welcomed jews, other minorities and women into the cultural mainstream. My parents belonged to the two or three generations of emancipated jews which included the poet Heine, the composer Gustav Mahler, the conductor Bruno Walter, the violinist Arnold Rosé, pianist Artur Schnabel, the bankers Rothschild, the physician Billroth, Sigmund Freud, Victor Weisskopf, Hugo von Hoffmannstal, and other famous intellectuals and artists. My father’s mentor was Professor Ernst Pick, founder of endocrinology, the science of glands and hormones. My elementary and high school friends didn’t care who believed what. Although there were anti-semites, they were a small minority. Religion simply hadn’t become the divisive force it had become elsewhere and was to become in Austria after the Anschluss (invasion). Ironically, a young artist named Adolf Schickelgruber lived in Vienna at the time seeking admission to the "Kunstakademie (Academy of Arts), from which he was twice rejected. He got even.

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There was compulsory religious education in high school, Austria being a catholic state. I attended jewish class for a couple of years but became increasingly uncomfortable with the rigid and divisive dogma, and the arrogant self-segregation the "chosen people" still practice to this day. When I had my first serious talk about religion with my father, he told me that religion was important to many people, and that I should never ridicule anybody’s faith. As to my own belief, I should study all of the religions and make up my own mind. He was proud to be jewish, but he never attended a synagog in his life. He wrote the required permission note anytime I wanted to change to another religion class in school. And so it came to pass that I switched back and forth between jewish, protestant and catholic classes.

Came the time around age twelve when the rabbi who taught the jewish class insisted that we all attend Saturday school at the temple to prepare for barmizwah. One day he saw me arrive on my bike, and next class he did the best he could to humiliate me in front of my classmates for being such a shameless sinner as to ride my bike to the temple on the sabbath. It would have been a very long walk, and I simply didn’t believe that God would consider riding my bike a sin. I faced him down by pointing out that bikes didn’t even exist when Moses brought down the ten commandments from Mount Sinai, and asked whence came his authority to call me a sinner. My classmates were much amused, but the rabbi was not. I was in for a more private scolding in his office, on which occasion I questioned some other points of dogma. I didn’t accept the "chosen people" doctrine , because I considered many of my christian friends just as "chosen" as some of my jewish friends. I told the rabbi that the arrogant jewish dogma drives a wedge between people and generates anti-semitism.

The next few months I attended catholic class, but soon the priest and I came to a parting of our ways. I condemned the church for burning Joan of Arc, and I rejected the doctrine of divine justice on the grounds that a just and omnipotent god would never have allowed Beethoven to become deaf, and if God was neither just nor omnipotent, what was he? By the time I attended protestant class I had become cynical enough to consider all clergymen as shameless impostors. What I came to resent most of all is the dogma of original sin, which proclaims that all of us are sinners, hell-bent unless we grovel for salvation. From my farm friends in Brüsau I learned enough to know that there is nothing sinful about reproductive activities. Adam and Eve had behaved just like all the animals. Two thousand years of Christianity have failed mostly because telling people they are sinners, is making them behave like sinners.

I had a very strong conscience, shaped largely by Miss Emma, which condemned hunting, fishing and all other forms of pleasure-killing, and I considered my own conscience to be the true voice of god. In my search for an acceptable faith I came upon the brother Grimm’s scholarly book about the teachings of Buddha (the same Grimms who published the fairy tales ). "Regard me only as a signpost" said Buddha; "I am trying to be of help, but you must find your own way to the truth". I have been trying to do just that ever since.

Father was amused when I reported my conclusion to him, and showed me a poem by Heine, in which a king had a rabbi and a priest debate the relative virtues of their religions before an audience of wise men and his daughter. The king asks his princess for her opinion, and she replies "Vater, es tut mir dünken dass sie alle beide stinken!" "Father, I think that the two of them both stink!" I think Heine expressed the opinion of the Freemasons, and probably was one himself.

After we settled in downtown Philadelphia, my father enrolled us in the Ethical Society and I attended their Sunday meetings on Rittenhouse Square. I found several like-minded friends in their youth group and among the young Quakers we often exchanged visits with. My best friend was a black college student named Thomas Leroy Haley. I was shocked to find Tom’s black friends to be considerably less tolerant of our friendship than my white friends. Tom was openly ridiculed as a "white nigger ‘ whenever we had lunch together in a black neighborhood drug store.

I also joined a boy scout troop composed mostly of catholic boys from the local parochial school, and I was appalled by their total lack of conscience. They would steal from each other, steal kerosene lanterns from highway barriers or just break them for fun, kill every living creature in sight from harmless snakes to toads to salamanders, throw rocks at traffic lights, and the response was always "I’ll have something to confess to the priest on Sunday". It further confirmed my conviction that most people are basically evil, and that two millenia of Christianity have failed to improve them. I am not convinced that the human species deserves to survive. Years later, after the war, I discovered (and actually met) Bertrand Russell, and I found that his essay "Why I am Not a Christian" eloquently expresses my own religious convictions.

The winds of war started to blow in 1936 when I was twelve, and Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and brutally pursued emperor Heili Selassi . My parents were learning Italian from a lady who had fled Italy. She visited once a week, and I was old enough to attend some of her lessons, in which politics was discussed. I heard all about the League of Nations and the International Court in The Hague, and how all of the members quarreled and couldn’t agree on how to deal with Mussolini. I am convinced that if Mussolini hadn’t gotten away with his war crimes, Hitler would not have started WW-2 nine months later. The episode left me with a deep resentment of misguided peace activists who yielded to Hitler for the sake of "peace in our time". I am referring to Chamberlain and his famous Nuremberg treaty with Hitler. All of Hitler’s victims resented this deeply, feeling they had been betrayed. The holocaust ended my adolescence abruptly.

(Continue to Holocaust)