The Wegener family needed a Heimat, a true home, and they needed it badly. Emotion and logic led Richard and Anna without hesitation back to rural Brandenburg—the obvious choice. It was a place they knew and understood, and where they would be known and understood. It took them back to the hamlet of Zechlinerhütte, where Anna had been born. It took them finally to a plain but spacious house with extensive grounds, fronted by Linden trees and facing, through many large windows, a lake. Built of oak logs and chinked with masonry, it had been the manager’s house of a crystal-glass foundry—an undertaking attracted there in the early eighteenth century by the plentiful fuelwood from the surrounding forests, but no now longer able to compete with the industrial-scale economies of burgeoning Berlin. The enterprise eventually failed altogether, leaving the town to eke out a marginal existence concocted of subsistence farming, woodcutting, fishing, and catering to the wants of vacationing urbanites and their seasonal homes.21
The Wegeners purchased the house, the barn, and some adjacent fields for 20,000 marks (about five times Richard’s annual salary). The money was provided by Richard’s brother Paul, who had taken over the family’s uniform factory in Wittstock and was well-to-do, generous, and pleased to have his brother closer to home again. Richard, by the account of one of his own children, “understood nothing of finance” and on his own salary could never have saved enough even for a down payment.22
Once the house and grounds were theirs, the Wegeners set about reconstructing their world with great thoroughness. They scoured the surrounding towns to find the mahogany furniture of Anna’s parents, scattered and sold years before, and they bought it back. They planted fruit trees and laid out an extensive flower garden. Richard had a meadow cut to make a playfield behind the house, up to the edge of the woods. He also began to collect (and to have the boys plant) rare species of trees unknown in the district, to make a sort of botanical garden. This effort interested the local foresters, as the standing timber around Zechlinerhütte was the monotonous result of the monoculture of a few species of commercially valuable evergreens.
Across the road was a sandy lakeshore with a large area to swim in, clear of mud and waterweeds. There was a “bath-cabin” for changing clothes, and near the swimming beach was a dock with a rowboat and, within a few years, a sailboat as well. The lake offered scope for discovery and adventure as part of a chain of small, deep, and narrow lakes known together as the Mecklenburgischen Seen, all connected by navigable stream channels and canals to even larger lakes surrounding: the Zootzensee to the north, the Grosser Zechliner See to the west, and the Rheinsberger See to the south. All of these sat in forests of fir, birch, maple, and the ever-present, fragrant Linden. Here, 80 kilometers (50 miles) closer to the Ostsee (Baltic Sea) than Berlin, the air was fresh and clean and the sense of quiet isolation very pleasant.
This place, die Hütte, as Alfred and the other children called it, was the family home ever after.23 It was their vacation and summer residence until about 1910, and afterward the year-round retirement home of the parents. It had a life-transforming impact on everyone in the family, almost immediately. Each arrival there from Berlin produced another series of transitions, opening their spirits outward. When the Wegeners set out for “die Hütte,” they traveled out of Berlin by train through industrial suburbs with their smoke-belching stacks and furnaces, out into the surrounding farmlands as far as Gransee, 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of Berlin. Alfred heard the “clickety-clack” of the train wheels announcing, “Es geht nach die Hütte, es geht nach die Hütte!” (It goes to the hut! It goes to the hut!). From Gransee the parents proceeded through country lanes with the baggage wagon, while the children (unsupervised, unaccompanied, and undirected!) hiked the final 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Gransee Station to Zechlinerhütte through the Menzer Forest, passing only scattered farms and lakes and the minuscule hamlet of Menz on the way.24
The children loved the succession of stages in the journey and what they represented—to leave the bustling train station in Berlin with a mountain of luggage and provisions, to disembark two hours later at the village already “at the end of the line,” and from there just to walk away out of the town, and keep walking until the road diminished into a sandy cart track with a grassy median and disappeared into the “depths” of the Menzer Forest. This great wooded tract, completely cut over in the eighteenth century to feed the glassworks, had sprung back with the especially dense character of second-growth evergreen forest. It was almost oppressively silent for long stretches, with dry twigs underfoot and deep twilight to both sides of the road—the gently swelling and rolling terrain concealing what lay just over the next rise to each side of the road, but inviting one to leave the track, enter the forest, and see. It was with a sense of relief that the children passed these stretches into meadows and sunlight, and it was with a sense of adventure that they entered the next stretch of wood. Small wonder that the area was known as the Ruppiner Schweiz: it was a sort of miniature Swiss vacationland—cool, green, and refreshing. Theodor Fontane sang its praises in his Wanderung durch die Mark Brandenburg, giving it an air of mystery, especially Menzer Forest and the Stechlin See, the dark and “bottomless” lake it conceals.25
In the summer of 1888, Alfred, then seven years old, was able for the first time to walk the whole distance from the station at Gransee to Zechlinerhütte. He had already learned to swim and to dive with his father’s instruction; Richard was an enthusiastic and powerful swimmer. Alfred had passed the test of leaping from a boat and swimming to shore fully dressed—the rite of passage that allowed him to take the boats out alone.
He had grown a good deal and had good physical stamina. He and Kurt, who had just turned ten in April, shared most of their days together. Tony, at fifteen, already spent much of her time with her mother or alone. She was completely uninterested in what Kurt and Alfred were doing and preferred to walk by herself, closer to home.26 Willi, at fourteen, was sometimes with Alfred and Kurt, but there is a great divide between ten and fourteen, and Willi, bookish and with his father’s talent for languages, was feeling the gravitational tug of an adult world and was more often with Richard or off on his own.
After a morning cup of cocoa (Richard and Anna treated coffee as if it were a poison), Alfred and Kurt toiled grumpily at their obligatory morning hour of study, even in the heat of the summer, while Willi and father Richard were beginning to read Greek tragedy together. When the younger boys’ endless hour finally dragged itself to an end, they would leave the confines of the house instantly—most often heading to the boats. They loved to row about and made great voyages of discovery in the lakes, drawing maps and taking soundings.27
Alfred and Kurt also did a prodigious amount of hiking and exploring in the woods. They worked at this systematically and within a few years had been everywhere within a 10-kilometer (6-mile) radius of the house. Anna Wegener began to pack lunches so they could go further. They would hike all day, pushing themselves, returning in the evening completely worn out.28 On occasion they also went squirrel hunting. The squirrels were “the enemy,” as they were constantly stealing the walnuts and hazelnuts the boys considered theirs. When they were able to kill one, which happened with some frequency, Anna was obliging and willing to cook the squirrel up for the hunters.29
When not with Kurt, Alfred was off by himself. It mystified his parents that a boy who chafed at an hour’s homework could lie absolutely still in the underbrush by the lakeshore for more than an hour, his ear cocked, listening to a badger moving underground in its den. He showed the same patience when fishing, or watching and collecting insects. He pleaded endlessly and finally successfully for a terrarium to house and display his captured frogs and worms. His parents found this persistence both remarkable and gratifying. In providing this home they had given scope for all the children, but Alfred and Kurt in particular developed unexpected but strong, and ever stronger, sides of their natures—as wanderers and observers in the natural world. But this is too
portentous; they were children, and it was summer, and they had to make the most of their freedom.
A summer outing with the Wegener family and the orphans to an island in the Rheinsberger See, near Zechlinerhütte, in 1889. Alfred is on the extreme left of the photo. From the Wegener family album. Photo courtesy of the Heimatmuseum, Neuruppin.
When September came, they were back in Berlin and back in school before the weather had even turned cool. Back in the suits and ties, buttoned and strapped, at their desks in the stuffy and musty schoolrooms, smelling the chalk dust from the board and the linseed oil in the woodwork, they were already dreaming of the next vacation. This would come at the end of the autumn term, when there was a break at Christmas, and there would be another break at the end of the spring term. During these Kurzferien, the Wegeners took the “pupils” with them to Zechlinerhütte, and these holiday excursions were more epic and memorable—such as the time a hired lake steamer took everyone to an island in the Rheinsberger See, where they built a fire to make the previously forbidden coffee and then ran about and played.
These all-too-brief vacation respites from the grind of examinations, drills, and lessons were themselves full of planned activities; there were long group hikes through the woods and athletic contests on the playfield. After supper in the evening, there was singing on the front verandah, and then all the boys were sent upstairs to sleep on straw that had been spread for bedding in the great loft of die Hütte.30 The mice (there were plenty, winter and summer) used to wake them, and they would try to silence them by throwing their boots, which worked well and was very satisfying; there was no such easy remedy for the mosquitoes. The boys were nonetheless agreed that it was much better to be wakened by mice and bitten by mosquitoes in Zechlinerhütte than to sleep soundly in Berlin.
Cöllnische Gymnasium
Like many young men (and women) who later go on to great artistic and scientific achievements, Alfred Wegener disliked school. Most children have a healthy and biologically based hatred of early rising, tight clothing, hard benches, forced immobility, and repetitive drills. But schooling can be a special agony for physically active children with a desire for an education beyond the covers of books. For students whose talents and imagination lie beyond, school is an obstacle course and a race between talent and boredom, a struggle to survive formal instruction with intuitive skills and gifts intact.
In 1890, at the age of ten, Alfred entered the Cöllnische Gymnasium, conveniently located (apparently its only redeeming feature) a ten-minute walk from home across a bridge over the Spree. It was a square, five-story brick building with high airy windows, a breezeway, and a large courtyard. It took its name from the medieval town on Cölln, the part of Berlin in which it was located, but it had little of the special tradition and distinction of the Grauen Kloster, where Richard Wegener taught. Though the “pupils” in the orphanage, with whom the Wegener boys had all attended primary school, went on to the Grauen Kloster for their secondary education, Alfred, Kurt, and Willi went on to the Cöllnische Gymnasium, a choice determined equally by proximity to home and by a regulation of the Prussian ministry of education (strictly observed) which forbade the attendance of children at schools where their parents were teachers.
The Cöllnische Gymnasium’s curriculum was, like all truly classical Gymnasien in Prussia, centered on languages and literature, with a pivotal place given to Greek and Latin. Among the modern languages, in addition to German language and literature, there was instruction in French and English, and students also were taught history, religion, geography, and mathematics. This range of subjects notwithstanding, German schoolboys of this era devoted an overwhelming proportion of their study time to Greek and Latin. During the 1880s, this stress on classical antiquity encountered opposition, as it had already at several points throughout the nineteenth century. Educational reformers in Prussia had been frustrated repeatedly in attempts to shorten, alter, or modernize the curriculum. The controversy broke out again in Berlin just as Alfred entered the Gymnasium.
When Crown Prince Wilhelm took the throne in June 1888 to become Kaiser Wilhelm II, the situation changed rapidly. Wilhelm, twenty-nine years old, was impulsive, enthusiastic, intelligent, and sympathetic to everything that Bismarck was not: parliaments, labor unions, social welfare legislation, and modern scientific education—an education suitable for an industrial state that also wished to be a great empire. It was clear from the beginning that he intended to rule as well as reign. In March 1890 he demanded and got Bismarck’s resignation. The next few years were a whirlwind of social reform: restriction of work hours, mandatory Sunday holidays for all workers, industrial courts for wage disputes, factory inspections, reduction of universal military service from three years to two, and many other measures that Bismarck had successfully suppressed for many years.
The new kaiser was especially interested in the question of educational reform. By 1892 he had successfully ordered a reduction in the number of hours devoted to Latin and an overall decrease in the number of hours of study per day. These modest reforms set off a fierce and protracted struggle between modernizing reformers and partisans of traditional classical learning, a struggle that lasted the rest of Alfred Wegener’s secondary school years.31
These changes had some direct impact on Alfred and Kurt, but they had considerable indirect impact as well. That same year, 1892, catastrophe struck the Wegener household. Willi, eighteen years old and his father’s favorite, died of an abdominal infection resulting from a ruptured appendix, a condition diagnosed too late for the new scientific-medical operation that might have saved him. Alfred recalled this as a terrible blow to his parents. Willi had identified closely with Richard’s aspirations, had excelled in Greek, and had recently, under his father’s supervision, begun the study of Hebrew.32 He was clearly destined for the classical course at the university and may have been considering the ministry as well.
It was natural that the grief-stricken Richard would turn his attention and focus his aspirations on his remaining sons, Kurt (fourteen) and Alfred (twelve), much as Anna had turned to the boys after Käte’s death eight years earlier. It was soon apparent, however, that neither Kurt nor Alfred inclined, as Willi had, toward a career in classical studies. Kurt, who was linguistically gifted, stepped obediently into the role of eldest son and was willing to take on additional classical studies with his father. Alfred was adamant that he wished for a career in science, and refused.33 This was the first clear expression of his vocation, or his first clear memory of the same—unless one wants to treat the collections of frogs and beetles and the mapping of the lakes near die Hütte as harbingers of a scientific calling, though these seem common-enough occupations. One may look at the contents of someone’s childhood without being therefore obliged to accept point-for-point correspondence between childhood activities and his adult life. If one were so obliged, one would then predict a career for Alfred not just in science but in Arctic exploration, based on his fondness for winter sports such as ice-skating. He did enjoy winter sports, but so did Kurt, his constant companion. If we follow this path and logic, we must then somehow account for Kurt’s marked preference for fieldwork concentrated in German Samoa, in the midst of the tropical Pacific. It is wiser simply to take Alfred’s word that around the age of twelve he began to think seriously of being a scientist.
Willi’s death pushed the choice between classical and modern studies out into the open in the Wegener household, and Alfred was clearly on the side of the moderns. But there was no question of Alfred or Kurt attending anything less than a full classical Gymnasium course, even though the alternative schools were more freely available in Berlin than anywhere else in the empire. This insistence on classics was not a matter of antiscientific or antitechnical spirit. Richard Wegener was a modern himself, at least by the standards of his profession. As his poetry from this period shows, he understood that there exists a range of interests and talents, and that butter and eggs are different, and that characters m
ay be firmed by different means. He opposed a technically and scientifically based education for boys because he thought it lacked the character-building and morally edifying possibilities of the classics; he was convinced that the sciences had to stay in their own sphere.
True to this demarcation of studies, but acknowledging the seriousness of his sons’ interest in science, he made presents to Alfred and Kurt of an electric motor and a handbook for conducting chemistry experiments. He added to these a book of physics and a good-quality astronomical telescope and left them to teach themselves science.34 This approach was fully in accord with his official and personal commitment to the classical curriculum while provisionally accepting the sciences and other modern studies as avocations to be pursued on their own time, after the homework was completed.35 More gently, it affirmed his conviction to advance the constructive possibilities of Schiller’s Spieltrieb, the spirit of play.
It was fortunate that Richard intervened in this decisive and timely way to help his sons, because the scientific curriculum at the Cöllnische Gymnasium, even though there was nominal instruction in physics and chemistry, was terrible. Kurt said that of the two mathematics teachers at the Gymnasium, one was able to teach, but the other seemed to know less than the pupils, and if a student read the text and did the homework, it was soon clear that he did know more than the teacher. It seems to have been a pedagogical principle there not to push students who showed no interest, so competition was not severe, and discipline was relaxed in comparison with the Wegener home.36
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