Einstein, the searcher

by Alexander Moszkowski

His father, who had a sunny, optimistic temperament, and was inclined towards a somewhat aimless existence, at this time moved the seat of the family from Ulm to Munich. They here lived in a modest house in an idyllic situation and surrounded by a garden. The pure joy of Nature entered into the heart of the boy, a feeling that is usually foreign to the youthful inhabitants of cities of dead stone. Nature whispered song to him, and at the coming of the spring-tide infused his being with joy, to which he resigned himself in happy contemplation. A religious undercurrent of feeling made itself manifest in him, and it was strengthened by the elementary stimulus of the scented air, of buds and bushes, to which was added the educational influence of home and school. This was not because ritualistic habits reigned in the family. But it had so happened that he learned simultaneously the teachings of the Jewish as well as the Catholic Church; and he had extracted from them that which was common and conducive to a strengthening of faith, and not what conflicted.

Youthful impetuosity, which in boys of a similar age usually expresses itself in rash enterprises and loose tricks, did not appear in him. His spirit was adjusted to contemplation, and an inborn fatalism, diffused with a super-sensuous element appertaining to dreams, restrained him from responding to external impulses. He reacted slowly and hesitatingly, and he interpreted what his senses offered him and all the little experiences of early days in terms of a reverence reflected from within. Words did not easily rise from his lips, and measured by the ordinary scale of rapidity of learning and readiness in answering questions, he would scarcely have been judged to possess unusual gifts. As an infant he had started to talk so late that his parents had been in some alarm about the possibility of an abnormality in their child. At the age of eight or nine years he presented the picture of a shy, hesitating, unsociable boy, who passed on his way alone, dreaming to himself, and going to and from school without feeling the need of a comrade. He was nicknamed "Biedermaier," because he was looked on as having a pathological love for truth and justice. What at that time seemed to be pathological, to-day appears as a deeply rooted and irrepressible natural instinct. Whoever has got to know Einstein as a man and as a scientist knows that this failing of his boyhood was but the forerunner of a very healthy outlook.

Signs of his love for music showed themselves very early. He thought out little songs in praise of God, and used to sing them to himself in the pious seclusion that he preserved even with respect to his parents. Music, Nature, and God became intermingled in him in a complex of feeling, a moral unity, the traces of which never vanished, although later the religious factor became extended to a general ethical outlook on the world. At first he clung to a faith free from all doubt, as had been infused into him by the private Jewish instruction at home and the Catholic instruction at school. He read his Bible without feeling the need of examining it critically; he accepted it as a simple moral teaching and found himself little inclined to confirm it by rational arguments inasmuch as his reading extended very little beyond its circle.

Painful inner conflicts were not wanting. Jewish children formed a small minority in the school, and it was here that the boy Albert felt the first ripples of the anti-semitic wave that, sweeping on from without, was threatening to overwhelm master and pupil alike. For the first time he felt himself oppressed by something that was not in harmony with his simple temperament. His modesty made him a prey to injustice, and in defending himself his originally gentle and restrained nature gained a certain independence and individuality.

If one may speak of achievements at all in a preparatory school, those of Albert were of the average modest level. He was careful as a pupil, generally satisfied requirements, but in no way betrayed special talents: indeed, so much the less, as he showed himself to be possessed of a very uncertain memory for words. The methodic plan of the elementary school that he attended to his tenth year was, however, not other than the usual scheme mapped out by drill-masters; it made up for what was lacking in an understanding of the pupils by applying drastic strictness. The beautiful sentence of Jean Paul: "Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be banished," finds no echo in Einstein's school memories, of which he has often spoken to me without a shadow of regret for a lost paradise. He told me with bitter sarcasm that his teachers had the character of sergeants—those later in the gymnasium (secondary school) were of the nature of lieutenants. Both terms are used in the pre-armistice sense, and his words were directed against the self-opinionated tone and customs of these garrison-schools of earlier days.

The next stage of his development was a course of study at the Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich, which placed him in the second class. In Einstein's retrospect of these days more friendly recollections present themselves, connected, however, only with particular persons, and not breathing praise in general; on the contrary, from his account, it is clear that although he conceived affection for individual teachers, he felt the tone of the institute as a whole to be rough. As we know, many things have been changed in these schools since then, following on a revulsion from the convict atmosphere that used to characterize them, and which meant suffering enough for the pupils. The result was that the schoolboy Einstein developed a contempt for human institutions and assigned little value to the subjects of study which he was obliged to absorb in schematic form without the application of his own mental energy. This gloomy picture is relieved at points by the presence of several teachers, above all, one called Ruëss, who took pains in exposing the beauty of classical antiquity to the fourteen-year-old boy. We learn elsewhere that Einstein at present admits the humanistic ideal for the school of the future only under very restricted limitations. But when he thinks of this teacher and his influence, a warm appreciation of classical study vibrates in his words, occasionally rising, indeed, to an unbounded enthusiasm for the treasures of Greek history and literature. His instruction was not restricted to the acquisition of a perspective of the antique. Under the direction of the same teacher, he was introduced into the poetic world of his native country, and learned the magic of Goethe in his "Hermann and Dorothea"; this poem, as he confesses, was explained to him in a really model manner. Thus there were some oases in the desert of schematic teaching: they served as refreshing halts for the spirit of the eager young searcher after knowledge.

We must go back one or two years to note a weighty experience, which occurred when he made his first acquaintance with elementary mathematics; this subject presented itself to him with the intensity of a revelation. It did not happen in the ordinary course of school-work, but was due to a sort of wizard-like inquiring inner spirit that plied him with questions and that gave him inward thrills of joy when he found a sharp-witted solution. From the very beginning Albert proved himself to be a good solver of problems, even before he achieved an arithmetical virtuosity, and before he knew the technique of equations. He helped himself by means of little tricks, experimented roundabout inventions, and was happily excited when they led to the goal. One day he asked his uncle, Jacob Einstein, an engineer who lived in Munich, a certain question. He had heard the word "algebra" and surmised that his uncle would be able to explain the term to him. Uncle Jacob answered: "Algebra is the calculus of indolence. If you do not know a certain quantity, you call it x and treat it as if you do know it, then you put down the relationship given, and determine this x later." That was quite sufficient. The boy received a book containing algebraic problems that he solved all alone in accordance with this not exhaustive but expedient direction. On another occasion Uncle Jacob told him the enunciation of Pythagoras' theorem without giving him a proof. His nephew understood the relationship involved, and felt that it had to be founded on some reasoning. Again he set about all alone to furnish what was wanting. This was, however, not a case for the "calculus of indolence" with an x that was to be determined. Here it was a question of developing a facility for geometric argument, such as very few possess at such an early stage of development. The boy plunged himself for three weeks into the task of solving the theorem, using all his power of thought. He came to consider similarity of triangles (by dropping a perpendicular from one vertex of the right-angled triangle on to the hypotenuse), and was thus led to a proof for which he had so ardently longed! And although it concerned only a very old well-known theorem, he experienced the first joy of the discoverer. The proof that he had found proved that the ingenuity of the worrying young mind was awakening.

A new world was opened for him when he made the acquaintance of A. Bernstein's comprehensive popular books on scientific subjects. This work is looked on nowadays as being somewhat antiquated and, in the eyes of many a professional scientist, has sunk to the level of a pseudo-scientific "shocker"; even when Einstein as a boy made explorations in it, there were signs of rust and decay in the work, for it originated in the fifties of the previous century and, in point of subject-matter, had long been transcended. Yet it could be read then—and even now—as a story containing thousands of interspersed physical, astronomical, and chemical wonders, and for the boy Einstein it came to be a true book of Nature, which presented to his mind, greedy for knowledge, as much as it did to his imagination.

Other vistas were opened up to him by Büchner's Kraft und Stoff (Force and Substance), a book the cheapness of which he could not yet discern, but which called up wonder in him without rousing his criticism. In addition, his attention was chiefly occupied by a handbook of elementary planimetry, containing an abundance of geometrical exercises, which he fearlessly attacked and within a very short time solved almost in their entirety. His delight grew when he ventured into the difficulties of analytical geometry and infinitesimal calculus quite apart from the curriculum of his school-work. Lübsen's textbook had fallen into his hands, and these directions sufficed for his audacious spirit. Whereas many of his school companions were still standing undecidedly before the pools of theorems of congruence and repeating decimals, he was already disporting himself freely in the ocean of infinitesimals. His work did not remain concealed, and gained appreciation. His mathematical teacher declared that the fifteen-year-old boy was ripe for university study.

Yet he was not to find a way into the open by matriculating very early, but through an event that unexpectedly threw him into new surroundings of life. In 1894 his parents transferred their abode to Italy. The chronicler has nothing to report of pangs of separation in Albert when he left Bavarian soil. He was glad to get away from the drill academy, Luitpold, and, as an inhabitant of Milan, he enjoyed the change in his existence, and was not encumbered by attacks of home-sickness. All in all, he had felt himself in an unhappy position under school compulsion in Munich, in spite of the mathematical delights he had provided for himself, and in spite of the rapturous moments that musical revelations had created for him since his twelfth year. Defiance and distrust against outside influences had remained active in him as forces that did not allow the happy disposition proper to his age to assert itself. But now the fetters had fallen and the pent-up joy of life burst forth as if through opened sluices. The sun and landscape of the South, Italian manners of life, art freely displayed in the market-place and on the street, realized for him dream-pictures that had appeared to him earlier during the hours of oppression. Whatever he saw, felt, and experienced lay outside the ordinary course of his life, awakened his sense for natural and human things, and set his spirit free from all bonds. There was no question of his going to school in the first six months. He enjoyed complete freedom, occupied himself with literature, and undertook extended excursions. Starting from Pavia, he wandered all alone over the Apennine to Genoa. Whilst he was being intoxicated with the sublime Alpine landscape, he came into contact with the lower stratum of the people, who aroused his deepest sympathy. The tour took him over a short stretch of the Italian Riviera, the beauties of which, as depicted by Böcklin, do not seem to have revealed themselves to him. At that time he was probably subject to a feeling of upward striving such as possessed Zarathustra.