For the next nine years, he studied classical literature. The Gymnasiums placed a heavy emphasis on Greek and Latin. This classical education aimed to produce not only educated scholars but also useful contributors to German culture, combining rationality with high cultural scholarship.
At the conclusion of his Gymnasium studies, he received his ‘leaving certificate’, or Abiturzeugnis, which entitled him to admission to university for his professional training. He chose Berlin University because of its scientific credentials, where he was tutored by the great theoretical physicists of the time, Planck and Born.
Having published a paper in a professional journal, which he was required to do to gain his doctorate, his next step to realising his goal of becoming a teaching professor was to attain a further degree called the Habilitation. This initially involved obtaining a temporary assistantship in an institute of his chosen field.
The paper he published for his doctorate, entitled ‘Do atoms have sex?’ which was initially published in a locally distributed science journal, was picked up by Popular Science Monthly and reprinted in its entirety.
With a circulation of over one hundred thousand copies, it was read and discussed by every eminent scientist on the planet, including the Director of the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for Physics in Schöneberg, who sent him a telegram stating:
‘I was intrigued by your article in Popular Science Monthly — stop — It would be an honour to discuss your theories further — stop — please contact me at your earliest convenience — stop — Albert Einstein — stop’
The excitement of receiving his first telegram was surpassed only by the fact that the celebrated Director of one of the most respected institutes in Germany wanted to discuss his thesis with him.
Within a day of their meeting, he had received an offer for an internship, which required him to teach a minimum of one seminar, with the rest of his time devoted to research. After six years, it would lead him to a major publication that he could submit for his Habilitation.
More importantly for him, however, was that he would be getting paid — admittedly not a huge amount, but enough to be able to live on and send some money home to help his parents, who had been so supportive.
Regrettably, he didn’t get a chance to tell his mother the good news. Not wanting to worry him whilst he was taking his exams, his father hadn’t informed him that she had fallen ill and, despite the doctor’s best efforts, she died two weeks later from typhoid. The effect on him was devastating. His tic, which he had managed to keep more or less under control, returned with a vengeance.
On turning up at the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for his first day, nobody recognised the disheveled, embarrassingly shy individual as the confident and enthusiastic person he’d been only days before.
For the next six years he literally kept his head down and concentrated on his chosen field of research — ‘Nuclear fusion as a source of stellar radiation’ — surfacing only occasionally to deliver the lectures that were stipulated in his contract. Over that period, he made very few friends, self-conscious that he was unable to control the blinks and twitches that made him stand out as a freak. Since his mother’s death, he and his father had grown apart. He secretly despised him for not speaking out when his mother was ill. He had reconciled the fact that he probably wouldn’t have been able to save her, but the choice of being there or not, when she needed him the most, had been taken away from him. He understood that his father had done it for what he thought were the right reasons at the time, which only added to the guilt he felt for his absence.
His life changed drastically the day he published his Habitation thesis. If his doctorate thesis had made the science community’s tongues wag, this one had them thrashing back and forth. It didn’t harm his credibility, either, that his tutor was none other than the Nobel Prize-winning physics laureate responsible for defining the laws of relativity. Using his mentor’s rather simplistic equation E=mc2, he was able to demonstrate that the Sun’s energy is derived from a thermonuclear reaction of hydrogen fusion into helium.
His article was published across the globe, not just in the scientific press but also in the popular newspapers, although somewhat ‘dumbed down’ for its readers. He was an overnight sensation, despite having taken six years to get there. Job offers came flooding in. From an early age, all he ever wanted to do was teach. The kindness of his tutors at school had had a deep impact on his psyche. But now, opportunities were opening up in areas he had never considered before, both at home and abroad.
The year was 1933 and a charismatic orator by the name of Adolf Hitler had just been appointed as chancellor to the ruling National Socialist German Workers Party. He was gaining popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism. Einstein could see the writing on the wall; born to Jewish parents, his time as a respected theoretical physicist was ebbing away. He chose to emigrate to America but, before he left, he begged his young protégé to go with him. He had secured a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. As tempting as it was, the newly-qualified professor wasn’t yet ready to give up on his beloved country; instead, he accepted a position at the German nuclear energy project in Leipzig, where he worked his way up to become Herr Direktor.
During the war, he was transferred to a top secret facility in Norway, where he developed his theoretical postulations of nuclear fission into a practical application. It was a device so lethal that it was capable of turning the tide in favour of Germany, overnight.
But he was a man of conscience. He had seen the atrocities that his compatriots were capable of. Some of his closest friends had been incarcerated for no other reason than their parents followed a certain doctrine. Many of his learned colleagues had been forced into exile rather than renounce their religious beliefs. He had been on his way home from work when he’d witnessed the rampaging mobs smashing the shop windows of anyone suspected of being Jewish, dragging the owners out into the street and beating them to a bloodied pulp, whilst the authorities looked on without intervening. It sickened him to his core; he could no longer say that he was proud to be a German.
His conscience would not allow him to contemplate the heinous acts that could be carried out if he gave the principles of how to make an atomic bomb to the Nazis. But it wasn’t just a matter of telling his masters that he didn’t know how to make one; they would just coerce another scientist, and another, and another until finally they achieved their objective. No, he had to convince them that it could be done, but would take far more resources than was currently available and let them decide that it wouldn’t be worth it. It was a gamble. They could still decide to pursue the project to its ultimate conclusion but, with rumours that the German forces were being stretched to capacity, especially on the Eastern Front, he didn’t think they would.
So, on that fateful day in September 1942, he did the right thing and changed the world forever. In front of some of the most powerful men of the Third Reich, he put on his best poker face and played his hand. And they fell for the bluff, hook, line and sinker. The project was abandoned within weeks as being too costly. Facilities were closed down and resources re-directed to more conventional weapons. He was re-assigned to the Reich Air Ministry and stationed at Peenemünde Airfield on the Baltic Coast, where he worked on the V-1 flying bomb until the end of the war.