When I returned to Berlin from Idvor things looked more inviting, and my landlady remarked that I looked much more cheerful than I did a year before, when I arrived from Scotland. In another year, she suggested jokingly, I might look as cheerful as a real Prussian, particularly if I should succumb to the charms of a Prussian beauty. Remembering the promise that I had given to my mother about marrying an American girl, I said to my landlady: “Never! I have already pledged my word to one who is nearer to my heart than any Prussian beauty could ever be.” “Ach, Herr Pupin, you have changed most wonderfully,” exclaimed the landlady, and then she added in a whisper: “Just think of it! To get a confession on the first day of your return which I could not get before in nearly a year! I understand now why you were always so distant to the young ladies in my pensionat.” But the change of feeling, speeded up by my mother, and noticed by my landlady, was speeded up almost as effectively by another Serb.
A Bosnian Serb with the name of Nikola had a fine cigarette shop on Unter den Linden, the principal avenue of Berlin. It was within a stone’s throw from the Imperial palace, and the highest aristocracy of Berlin patronized it. He was a rough diamond, and would stand no nonsense from any prince or count. If they found fault with his famous Turkish cigarettes he did not hesitate to tell them to buy them somewhere else. But he prospered, he said, because these German aristocrats never resented straight talk from man to man. He laughed at me, when I mentioned to him my suspicions and antipathies; and begged me to pass with him, from time to time, an hour or so in his store, and watch his German customers. I did, and profited much. The Prussian aristocrats had no racial antipathy against a Serb, if their apparently genuine affection for Nikola had any meaning. Nikola never left them in any doubt as to his pride of being a Serb.
Half-way between Nikola’s store and the Imperial palace was an old chop-house, called Habel, dating from the time of Frederick the Great. Frederick’s generals always stopped there for a glass of wine, when they returned from an audience with the king. The custom persisted and was still in existence when I was a student in Berlin. Nikola often invited me to early luncheon at this chop-house, and there we saw the great generals and marshals of the German Empire, sitting around a long and separate table and taking a glass of wine after returning from the Imperial palace, from their daily audience with old Emperor William. It was a wonderful sight; those tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, brainy, and serious-minded Teuton warriors inspired tremendous respect. Nikola assured me that he knew many of them personally, they being his customers, and that as human beings they were as gentle as doves. “Many a time I called them down when they joked about my cigarettes, and they submitted without a murmur. Do you call that arrogance?” asked Nikola, throwing out his chest and trying to look as stern and as imposing as any of the generals present.
Once he took me to an avenue where Moltke used to walk and showed me the great field-marshal, who was then eighty-six years old, but still as straight as an arrow. “Did you ever see a more modest and thoughtful or a more spiritual-looking man anywhere?” asked Nikola, and I confessed that I had not. “Then stop your talk about Prussian pride!” exclaimed Nikola. On another occasion we walked to the park and he showed me Bismarck, riding on horseback, a friend and an adjutant accompanying him. Nikola saluted him and so did I, and Bismarck saluted back graciously. “Does he look like a brute, or like a fool who would try to convert by force all the Slavs into Germans?” asked Nikola, poking fun at my anti-Teutonic suspicions. “No,” said I, “I do not think he does; in fact, I think he looks very much like Helmholtz, except that there is much less spirituality in his face than in that of the great scientist.” “Helmholtz!” exclaimed Nikola, “even he would lose his saintly expression, if he had to carry the load of the whole empire upon his shoulders, the socialists on the top of his load pushing it one way, and the clericals at the bottom pushing it the other way.”
Nikola was born in Bosnia when the Turks ruled supreme, and hence he was not much of a scholar; but he was a careful listener, and always thought through his own head; his judgment was remarkable, I thought. He knew who’s who and what’s what in Berlin better than many a foreign diplomat there. He used to joke about it, saying that his knowledge was expected of him, because he was the next-door neighbor of the great Kaiser. The Serbs of Banat did not seriously dislike the German colonists there, nor did the colonists dislike them, and they delighted in speaking the Serb language. They called each other “komshiya,” neighbor. The Serbs, in general, use this word when they refer to a German in a friendly way. Nikola always referred to the great Kaiser as his “komshiya”; many of his customers knew that and enjoyed it hugely. They returned the compliment and often addressed Nikola with the Serbian word “komshiya.” “Come and see my komshiya,” said he one day to me, and there I stood for the first time in front of the Imperial palace and waited for the old emperor to show himself at the window. He did that almost every day about noontime when the guards marched by on their daily parade. Presenting arms and looking straight at the old emperor, they marched by like a single body animated by a single heart and a single soul, and they spanked the ground with their vigorous goose-step, the rhythmic strokes of which could be heard quite a distance away through the ringing cheers of the enthusiastic crowd. “Do you know what that means?” asked Nikola. I answered “No,” and he said: “It means that every German looks up to his fatherland for orders, and the perfect rhythm of that goose-step means that every German will obey these orders and finish on time any job for the good of the fatherland that may be assigned to him. It is the symbol of German unity.” That was Nikola’s unique interpretation; I never heard anybody else interpret it that way. But Nikola had a lively imagination and he evidently wished me to get a favorable interpretation of everything the Germans did.
Between my young Scotch friend, my mother, Nikola, and my professors in the Physical Institute, I soon forgot the unpleasant memories of the Teutonism in Prague, and Berlin no longer looked to me like a Thraenenthal, a valley of tears, as my old friend Bilharz in Cortlandt Street would have called it. I soon found myself enjoying warm personal friendships of German fellow students and of the professors, and it was a very fortunate thing; it was providential. Nothing but the love of God and the friendship of man can give that spiritual power which one needs in moments of great sorrow. One day in the beginning of winter, of that year, a letter arrived from my sister, telling me that my saintly mother was no longer among the living. I vowed on that day that her blessed memory should be perpetuated as far as an humble mortal like myself could do it. Twenty-seven years later the Serbian Academy of Sciences announced that the income of a foundation in memory of Olympiada Pupin would be expended annually to assist a goodly number of poor schoolboys in Old Serbia and Macedonia.
The vanishing of a life which is an essential part of one’s own life produces a mysterious shift of the direction of one’s mental and spiritual vision. Instead of searching for light which will illuminate the meaning of things in the external physical world, as the vision of young people usually does, it begins to search for light which will illuminate the meaning of what is going on in the internal world, the spiritual world of our soul. The question “What is Light?” was no longer the most important question of my thoughts after my mother’s death. The question “What is Life?” dominated for a long time my thoughts and feelings. I became introspective, and, being a somewhat temperamental person, like most Slavs, I might have lost my way forever in the labyrinth of all sorts of metaphysical structures of my own creation. Providence came to my rescue. Two American students with aspirations in science similar to mine joined the Physical Institute. One of them, a Harvard graduate, the late Arthur Gordon Webster, was the very distinguished professor of physics at Clark University; the other, a Johns Hopkins man, Joseph Sweetman Ames, is now the director of the physical laboratory at Johns Hopkins and a worthy successor to the famous Henry Augustus Rowland. Their truly American enthusiasm and directness prevented me from relapsing into the drowsy indefiniteness, sometimes called idealism, of a temperamental and sentimental Slav. They told me many wonderful tales of the higher endeavor in science at Harvard and at Johns Hopkins. The new Jefferson Physical Laboratory at Harvard was a wonder, according to Webster; and Ames never grew weary of extolling the beauties of Rowland’s wonderful researches in solar spectra, and I never grew weary of listening to them. At times, however, I wondered why these two men had ever come to Helmholtz when they were so well off at home. Ames wondered, too, and he returned to Rowland at the end of the year; but Webster stayed, although in my presence he never admitted unreservedly that the Physical Institute in Berlin was very much better than anything they had at Harvard. Webster’s and Ames’s testimony convinced me that the great movement in the United States for higher endeavor in science was making rapid progress; and I longed to finish up my studies in Berlin and return to the United States. After my mother’s death Europe attracted me much less.
A new physical science was attracting much attention in Germany at that time, the science of physical chemistry. Helmholtz was very much interested in it. I had read his latest papers on the subject and they reminded me of what I had seen in Maxwell’s book on heat about Willard Gibbs of Yale. I soon discovered that the alleged German fathers of the new science were anticipated by Gibbs by at least ten years. Remembering the charge of De Tocqueville that the American democracy had never done anything for abstract science, I made a careful note of my find. It was a clean-cut little discovery, I thought, and Helmholtz admitted it. He suggested even that I might find material in it for a research leading to a doctor dissertation. I embraced the suggestion and started an experimental research, at the same time studying the theories of Gibbs, Helmholtz, and other authorities, mostly German, on physical chemistry. The more one penetrates the depths of any problem the more he yields to the belief that this problem is the most important problem in the world. This happened to me; and the Faraday-Maxwell electromagnetic theory was shelved, temporarily, on account of my interest in physical chemistry, and particularly on account of the prospect of finding there a doctor dissertation, which I finally did.
At the end of the first semester and at Webster’s suggestion he and I, in the spring of 1887, went to Paris for a short visit. We wished to see what physical science was doing at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France, and to compare the academic world of Paris with that of Berlin. We stayed there three weeks and learned quite a number of novel and interesting things. The architectural beauties of Paris as well as its art galleries and museums made a profound impression upon me. As a record of a magnificent old civilization Paris, I thought, was incomparably ahead of Berlin. The spirit of Laplace, La Grange, Fourier, Ampère, Arago, Fresnel, Foucault, and Fizeau was very much alive in the ancient halls of the Sorbonne and of the Collège de France. The background of a former glorious period of physical science in France was much more impressive in Paris than the corresponding background in Berlin. But for every one of the great savants in physical and mathematical sciences, who were active in Paris at the time of my visit, like Poincaré, Hermite, Darboux, Appel, Lippmann,one could name several in Berlin. And there was nobody in Paris who, in my opinion, could measure up to Helmholtz, Kirchhoff, and DuBois Reymond. There was no statesman there of Bismarck’s caliber, and no general like Moltke. I saw no warriors who looked like the magnificent fellows whom Nikola first exhibited to me at the long table in Habel’s. General Boulanger was very much in the limelight. I saw him at a great official reception, and I should have felt very sorry if the destiny of France had been intrusted to him. The physical and chemical laboratories were rather poorly equipped and compared unfavorably with the corresponding laboratories in Berlin. The draped statues in the Place de la Concorde, testifying to France’s grief for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, completed the picture of Paris in my mind, which was anything but cheerful. France, I thought, had not yet recovered completely from her wounds of 1870–1871, and I felt sorry. Two years earlier I had passed through Paris on my way from Pornic to Idvor and had carried away a much more cheerful picture. But at that time my observations, covering barely two days, did not see much; and, besides, I did not know Berlin at that time and could make no comparisons. If Paris reflected the spirit of France and Berlin that of Germany, then France, I thought, was a falcon with broken wings and Germany was a young eagle that had just discovered the wonderful power of its pinions. The wonderful intellectual and physical vigor of the new empire impressed powerfully every foreign student at the University of Berlin when I was a student there. This gave me much food for thought and I searched for explanations.