115. Autobiographical Fragment II

I was born on February 25, 1861. I was baptized two days later. It happened in the Croatian-Hungarian border town of Kraljevec, where my father worked as a telegraph operator for the Austrian Southern Railway. At that time, the Southern Railway still had a unified administration in Vienna, and the employees were alternately deployed on the later Hungarian and Austrian lines. My father had only been transferred from a small southern Styrian railway station to Kraljevec shortly before my birth.

My father and mother came from the Horn area in Lower Austria; my mother was born in Horn and my father came from Geras, the seat of a Premonstratensian monastery in Lower Austria. In 1862, my father was transferred from Krajelvec to Mödling near Vienna and in 1863 to Pottschach in Lower Austria.

My two siblings were born in the latter place and I spent my childhood years there until I was eight. The daily passing of the trains, a spinning factory in the immediate vicinity, the Austrian Schneeberg with the other Alpine mountains around it formed the objects of daily experience. In Pottschach there was a Lichtenstein estate with a castle. The accountant's family often visited us. The pastor of the neighboring village of St. Valentin was an almost daily visitor. This man was completely without priestly airs in his profession. He was a man of the world in his own way. His visit to us was the end of his walk, and he was probably more interested in observing the passing and stopping trains than in talking to my parents. The pastor of Pottschach also frequently came to such a train, but he was not taken particularly seriously by his counterpart in St. Valentin. The pastor of St. Valentin was tall, the pastor of Pottschach was short; and I once witnessed the spectacle of the former taking the latter under his arm, picking him up and carrying him like a package for quite a distance.

I soon became familiar with the workings of the railroad. My favorite places to spend time were the waiting room of the small train station and my father's tiny office. I was sent to school at the age of six, but was soon taken out of it because my father had fallen out with the old schoolmaster. After his retirement, I then went to school for a short time with a young teacher in Pottschach. My father taught me most of the lessons.

The whole atmosphere was unsuitable for developing any kind of enthusiastic interest. All the people I saw were interested in the railway and the spinning mill nearby. The “Valentiner Pfarrer” was a sober man with a somewhat cynical tendency in his conversations, often something of a prankster.

The following experience made a deep impression on the boy. My mother's sister had died in a tragic way. The place where she lived was quite far from ours. My parents had no news. I saw it all while sitting in the waiting room at the train station. I made some allusions in front of my father and mother. They just said, “You're a stupid boy.” A few days later, I saw how my father became pensive when he received a letter, and then, without me being present, he spoke to my mother a few days later and she cried for days. I only found out about the tragic event years later.

During this time I only learned reading and arithmetic; I made no progress at all in writing.

When I reached the age of eight, my father was transferred to Neudörfl (L[ajta Sz[en]t Miklös) near Wiener-Neustadt. I now went to school there. The teacher was horrified by my writing. I rounded all the letters, ignored the capitals and wrote all the words unorthographically. But in the teacher's library I discovered a book “Mo£nik's Geometry”. I borrowed it for a while and studied it eagerly. I always listened to the piano lessons, which were given in my teacher's room.

This teacher was an excellent person. He was a good drawer and also gave me drawing lessons, although I really needed thorough writing lessons. The teacher only had an annual salary of 54 guilders, and ate with the head teacher. The latter came to school very rarely, as he took care of the secretarial business of his community. We children thought that our substitute teacher was a “real” teacher; the schoolmaster “doesn't understand anything.”

My parents were not particularly pious people. Even in Pottschach, my father always said that “service to the Lord comes before service to God” and used this as an excuse for never going to church, saying that his work left him no time to pray. Nevertheless, in Neudörfl I became a “church boy” and a favorite of the pastor, who also liked my father very much, even though he never saw him in church.

This pastor was a man of pronounced character. He was Magyar through and through, a die-hard cleric. He could preach so powerfully that all the pews in the small parish church would shake. I owe him an enormous debt because he introduced me to an understanding of the Copernican system as early as the age of nine. He did that with the help of very instructive drawings. He came to our school twice a week. All the children enjoyed his catechism and Bible lessons because of his likeable personality. As a church boy, I served at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, at the afternoon service, at funerals, and at the Feast of Corpus Christi. This service came to an abrupt end one day. Several altar boys, including myself, were late for the service one morning. They were all supposed to get a beating at school. I had an irresistible aversion to such beatings and knew how to avoid them. I always managed to avoid being beaten by evading the task. However, my father was so indignant at the thought that “his son” should have been beaten that he said: “Now you're through with being an altar boy. You're not going anymore.”