The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter I

[ 1 ] For some time now, information and assessments about the course of my life have been interwoven into the public discussions of the anthroposophy I cultivate. And from what has been said in this direction, conclusions have been drawn about the origin of what are regarded as changes in my spiritual development. In contrast, friends have expressed the view that it would be good if I myself wrote something about the course of my life.

[ 2 ] I must confess that this is not my inclination. For it has always been my endeavor to shape what I had to say and what I thought I should do in a way that was demanded by things, not by my own personal interests. It has always been my opinion that the personal gives the most valuable coloring to human activities in many areas. It seems to me, however, that this personal aspect must be revealed through the way one speaks and acts, not by looking at one's own personality. What can result from this reflection is a matter that man has to come to terms with himself.

[ 3 ] And so I can only decide to give the following account because I am obliged to put many a skewed judgment about the connection between my life and the matter I have cultivated in the right light through an objective description, and because the urging of kindly-minded people with regard to these judgments seems justified to me. My parents had their home in Lower Austria. My father was born in Geras, a very small town in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, and my mother in Horn, a town in the same area.

[ 4 ] My father spent his childhood and youth in close connection with the Premonstratensian monastery in Geras. He always looked back on this time of his life with great fondness. He liked to talk about how he had served in the monastery and how he had been taught by the monks. He later became a hunter in the service of the Count of Hoyos. This family had an estate in Horn. That's where my father met my mother. He then left the hunting service and joined the Austrian Southern Railway as a telegraph operator. He was initially employed at a small railroad station in southern Styria. He was then transferred to Kraljevec on the Hungarian-Croatian border. It was during this time that he married my mother. Her maiden name was Blie. She came from an old Horner family. I was born in Kraljevec on February 27, 1861. - That's how my birthplace came to be so far away from the region I come from.

[ 5 ] Both my father and my mother were genuine children of the beautiful Lower Austrian woodland north of the Danube. It is an area where the railroad only arrived late. Geras is still untouched by it today. - My parents loved what they had experienced at home. And when they talked about it, you could instinctively feel how they had not left this homeland with their souls, even though fate had destined them to spend most of their lives far away from it. When my father retired after a busy life, they immediately moved back there - to Horn.

[ 6 ] My father was a thoroughly benevolent man, but with a temperament that could flare up passionately, especially when he was young. Railroad service was his duty; he was not fond of it. When I was still a boy, he had to work for three days and three nights at a time. Then he was relieved for twenty-four hours. So life offered him nothing colorful, only grayness. He liked to follow political events. He took the liveliest interest in them. My mother had to be absorbed in the management of domestic affairs, as there were no fortune goods. Loving care of her children and the small economy filled her days.

[ 7 ] When I was a year and a half old, my father was transferred to Mödling near Vienna. My parents stayed there for six months. Then my father was put in charge of the small southern railway station at Pottschach in Lower Austria, near the Styrian border. I spent the time from my second to my eighth year there. My childhood was surrounded by a wonderful landscape. The view was of the mountains that connect Lower Austria with Styria: The "Schneeberg", Wechsel, the Raxalpe, the Semmering. The Schneeberg, with its bare rock at the top, caught the sun's rays, and what they proclaimed when they shone down from the mountain towards the small railroad station was the first morning greeting on beautiful summer days. The gray ridge of the "Wechsel" formed a serious contrast. The greenery, which smiled friendly from everywhere in this landscape, made the mountains seem to rise out of themselves. The majesty of the peaks could be seen in the distance, and the grace of nature in the immediate surroundings.

[ 8 ] At the small station, however, all interest was focused on the railroad. At that time, the trains only ran at long intervals in this area, but when they did come, a number of people from the village who had time to spare would usually gather at the station to bring some variety into their lives, which otherwise seemed monotonous. The school teacher, the vicar, the accountant of the estate, often the mayor appeared there.

[ 9 ] I believe that it was significant for my life to have spent my childhood in such an environment. Because my interests were strongly drawn into the mechanics of this existence. And I know how these interests always wanted to darken the part of the heart in the child's soul that went towards the graceful and at the same time generous nature into which, in the distance, these railroad trains subject to the mechanism disappeared every time.

[ 10 ] Into all this played the impression of a personality of great originality: that of the parish priest of St. Valentin, a place that could be reached on foot in about three quarters of an hour from Pottschach. This priest liked to come to my parents' house. He took his walk to us almost every day and always stayed for a long time. He was the type of liberal Catholic priest, tolerant and affable. A robust, broad-shouldered man. He was funny, liked to talk in jokes and loved it when people laughed around him. And they continued to laugh at what he had said long after he had gone. He was a man of practical life; and he also liked to give good practical advice. Such advice has had a lasting effect on my family. The railroad tracks in Pottschach were bordered by acacia trees (Robinia). We once walked along the narrow footpath that ran alongside this row of trees. He said: "Oh, what beautiful acacia blossoms there are." And he quickly swung himself up one of the trees and plucked a large quantity of these blossoms. Then he spread out his very large red handkerchief - he sniffed passionately -, carefully wrapped up the booty and took the "little tinkle" under his arm. Then he said: "It's a good thing you have so many acacias." My father was astonished and replied: "Yes, what use are they to us?" "What," said the priest, "don't you know that you can bake acacia blossoms like elderberry, and that they taste much better because they have a much more delicate aroma." And from that time on, we often had "baked acacia blossoms" on our family table from time to time when we had the opportunity.

[ 11 ] In Pottschach, another daughter and a son were born to my parents. There was no further expansion of the family.

[ 12 ] I had a strange peculiarity as a very small boy. From the time I was able to eat on my own, I had to be watched very carefully. Because I had formed the opinion that a soup plate or a coffee cup was only meant to be used once. And so, every time I was left unattended, I would throw my plate or cup under the table after eating so that it broke into shards. When my mother approached, I would greet her with the exclamation: "Mother, I'm finished already."

[ 13 ] This could not have been destructiveness on my part. Because I treated my toys with meticulous care and kept them in good condition for a long time. Among these toys, I was particularly fascinated by those that I still consider to be particularly good today. They were picture books with moving figures that could be pulled by strings at the bottom. You followed little stories through these pictures, which you gave a part of their life by pulling the strings yourself. I often sat in front of these picture books for hours with my sister. I also learned the basics of reading from them, as if by myself.

[ 14 ] My father made sure that I learned to read and write at an early age. When I reached school age, I was sent to the village school. The school teacher was an old gentleman who found teaching a tiresome occupation. For me, however, being taught by him was also a chore. I didn't believe that I could learn anything from him. Because he often came to our house with his wife and his little son. And this little son was a rascal by my standards at the time. So I got it into my head that if you have such a rascal for a son, you can't learn anything from him. But then something "quite terrible" happened. Once this rascal, who was also at school, had the fun of dipping a wooden chip into all the inkwells in the school and making circles of ink blots around them. The father noticed this. Most of the pupils had already left. I, the teacher's son and a few more boys had stayed behind. The teacher was furious and scolded us terribly. I was convinced he would even have "shouted" if he hadn't been constantly hoarse. Despite his raving, our behavior made him realize who the culprit was. But things turned out differently. The teacher's apartment adjoined the classroom. The "head teacher" had heard the commotion, came in, her eyes wild and waving her arms. It was clear to her that her little son couldn't have shot the thing. She accused me. I ran away. My father was furious when I brought the matter home. And when the teachers came back to us, he terminated their friendship with the greatest clarity and declared: "My boy must not set foot in your school again." And now my father took over the lessons himself. And so I sat next to him in his office for hours on end, writing and reading while he carried out his official duties in between.

[ 15 ] I couldn't really get him interested in what I was supposed to learn through the lessons. I was interested in what my father wrote. I wanted to copy what he did. I learned a lot in the process. I couldn't relate to what he had prepared for me to do for my education. On the other hand, I grew into everything that was a practical life activity in a childlike way. How the railroad service worked and everything connected with it attracted my attention. But it was particularly the natural law that attracted me, especially in its small offshoots. When I wrote, I did it because I had to; I even did it as quickly as possible so that I would soon have filled a page. Because now I could sprinkle what I had written with grit, which my father used. I was fascinated by how quickly the grit dried up with the ink and the mixture of materials it created. I kept trying out the letters with my fingers; which ones were already dry and which ones were not. My curiosity was very great, and as a result I usually got to the letters too early. As a result, my handwriting samples took on a shape that my father didn't like at all. But he was good-natured and only punished me by often calling me an incorrigible "slip-up". - But this was not the only thing that developed from my writing. I was more interested in the shape of the quill than the shape of my letters. When I took my father's paper knife, I could drive it into the slit of the nib and make physical studies of the elasticity of the nib material. I then bent the nib back together again, but the beauty of my writing suffered greatly as a result.

[ 16 ] This was also the time when I, with my sense of knowledge of natural processes, was placed in the middle between seeing through a connection and the "limits of knowledge". There was a mill about three minutes away from my parents' house. The millers were my siblings' godparents. We were very popular at the mill. I often disappeared there. Because I "studied" the mill with enthusiasm. That's when I got into the "inner workings of nature". But a spinning factory was even closer. The raw materials for this arrived at the train station; the finished products left. I was there to see everything that disappeared into the factory and everything that emerged from it. It was strictly forbidden to look "inside". It never happened. There were the "limits of knowledge". And I would have loved to cross these boundaries. Because almost every day, the director of the factory came to my father on business matters. And this director was a problem for me as a boy, who covered the secret of the "inside" of the factory as if it were a miracle. He was covered with white flakes on many parts of his body; he had eyes that had acquired a certain immobility from the machinery. He spoke harshly, as if in a mechanized language. "How is this man connected with what those walls enclose?" This insoluble problem stood before my soul. But I didn't ask anyone about the secret. For it was my boyish opinion that it was of no use to ask about something that one could not see. So I lived between the friendly mill and the unfriendly spinning mill.

[ 17 ] Once there was something quite "shocking" at the train station. A train with freight was rushing towards us. My father looked towards it. A rear carriage was on fire. The train crew hadn't noticed. The train came right up to our station on fire. Everything that happened there made a deep impression on me. A highly flammable substance had caused a fire in one of the carriages. For a long time, I wondered how this could happen. What my surroundings told me about it was, as in similar matters, not satisfactory to me. I was full of questions and had to carry them around with me unanswered. That's how I became eight years old.

[ 18 ] When I was eight years old, my family moved to Neudörfl, a small Hungarian village. It lies directly on the border with Lower Austria. This border is formed by the Laytha River. The train station that my father had to get to was at one end of the village. It took half an hour to walk to the border river. After another half an hour you came to Wiener-Neustadt.

[ 19 ] The Alpine mountains that I had seen nearby in Pottschach were now only visible in the distance. But they still stood reminiscently in the background when you looked at the smaller mountains that were within a short distance of my family's new home. Moderate elevations with beautiful woodland bordered one view; the other could wander over flat land covered with fields and forest into Hungary. Of the mountains, I was particularly fond of the unlimited one, which could be climbed in three quarters of an hour. It had a chapel on its summit, in which there was an image of St. Rosalia. This chapel was the end point of a walk that I often took with my parents and siblings at first and later enjoyed doing on my own. Such walks were also particularly enjoyable because you could return at the appropriate time of year with an abundance of nature's gifts. Blackberries, raspberries and strawberries could be found in the woods. It was often a source of great satisfaction to spend an hour and a half picking them to add a nice addition to the family evening meal, which otherwise consisted of just a sandwich or a piece of bread with cheese for everyone.

[ 20 ] There were other pleasurable things to come from roaming these woods, which were communal property. The people of the village collected their wood from there. The poorer ones collected it personally, the wealthier ones had it collected by servants. You got to know them all, these mostly jovial people. Because they always had time to chat when "Steiner-Rudolf" joined them. "Well, Steiner-Rudolf, you want to have a bit of a chat again," was how it started, and then they talked about all sorts of things. The people paid no attention to the fact that they had a child in front of them. Because they were still children in their souls, even though they were already sixty years old. And so, from these stories, I actually knew almost everything that was going on inside the houses of this village.

[ 21 ] A half hour's walk from Neudörfl is Sauerbrunn with its spring of iron and carbonated water. The way there goes along the railroad line and partly through beautiful forests. When there were school vacations, I went there early in the morning every day, loaded down with a "Blutzer". That's a water container made of clay. Mine held about three to four liters. You could fill it at the spring for free. At lunchtime, the family could then enjoy the tasty sparkling water.

[ 22 ] Towards Wiener Neustadt and further towards Styria, the mountains descend into the plain. The Laytha River meanders through them. There was a Redemptorist monastery on the mountainside. I often met the monks on my walks. I remember how much I would have liked to have been approached by them. But they never did. And so all I ever took away from the encounter was a vague but solemn impression that stayed with me for a long time. It was in my ninth year that the idea took root in me: there must be important things in connection with the tasks of these monks that I had to get to know. Again, I was full of questions that I had to carry around with me unanswered. Yes, these questions about all sorts of things made me quite lonely as a boy.

[ 23 ] The two castles of Pitten and Frohsdorf were visible on the foothills of the Alps. At that time, Count Chambord, who wanted to become King of France as Henry the Fifth at the beginning of the seventies, lived in the latter. The impressions I received from the piece of life associated with Frohsdorf Castle were powerful. The count and his entourage often departed from the Neudörfl train station. Everything about these people attracted my attention. One man in the count's entourage made a particularly deep impression. He only had one ear. The other was cut away. The hair above it was braided. It was at this sight that I first learned what a duel was. Because the man had lost one ear in one of them.

[ 24 ] A piece of social life was also revealed to me in connection with Frohsdorf. The assistant teacher of Neudörfl, in whose private room I was often allowed to watch his work, made countless begging requests to Count Chambord on behalf of the poorer inhabitants of the village and the surrounding area. Each such request received one guilder in support, from which the teacher was always allowed to keep six kreuzer for his efforts. He needed this income. Because his office brought him fifty-eight guilders a year. He also had morning coffee and lunch with the "schoolmaster". He then gave "extra lessons" to about ten children, including me. They paid one guilder a month for this.

[ 25 ] I owe a lot to this assistant teacher. Not that I got much out of his schooling. I was not much different than in Pottschach. Immediately after moving to Neudörfl, I was sent to the school there. It consisted of one classroom in which five classes, boys and girls, were taught at the same time. While the boys, who sat in my row of benches, had to copy the story of King Arpad, the very young ones stood at a blackboard on which the i and u were written in chalk. It was absolutely impossible to do anything other than let the soul brood dully and do the copying with the hands almost mechanically. The assistant teacher had to do almost all the teaching alone. The "schoolmaster" rarely came to school. He was also the village notary; and it was said that he had so much to do in this office that he could never hold school.

[ 26 ] And despite all this, I learned to read relatively early on. This allowed the assistant teacher to intervene in my life in a way that set the course for me. Soon after joining the Neudörfl school, I discovered a geometry book in his room. I was on such good terms with this teacher that I could easily use the book for a while. I took to it with enthusiasm. For weeks my soul was filled with the congruence, the similarity of triangles, quadrilaterals, polygons; I puzzled my mind with the question of where the parallels actually intersect; the Pythagorean theorem enchanted me.

[ 27 ] The fact that one could live mentally in the formation of purely inner forms, without impressions from the outer senses, gave me the greatest satisfaction. I found comfort in this for the mood that had arisen from the unanswered questions. To be able to grasp something purely in my mind brought me inner happiness. I know that I first got to know happiness through geometry.

[ 28 ] In my relationship to geometry, I must see the first sprouting of a view that gradually developed in me It already lived more or less unconsciously in me during childhood and took on a certain, fully conscious form around the age of twenty.

[ 29 ] I said to myself: the objects and processes that the senses perceive are in space. But just as this space is outside the human being, there is a kind of soul space inside, which is the scene of spiritual entities and processes. In the thoughts I could not see anything like pictures that man makes of things, but revelations of a spiritual world in this soul-space. Geometry appeared to me as knowledge that is apparently generated by man himself, but which nevertheless has a meaning quite independent of him. As a child, of course, I did not tell myself clearly, but I felt that, like geometry, one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within oneself.

[ 30 ] For the reality of the spiritual world was as certain to me as that of the sensual world. But I needed some kind of justification for this assumption. I wanted to be able to say to myself that the experience of the spiritual world is no more an illusion than that of the sensory world. With geometry I said to myself that here one may know something that only the soul itself experiences through its own power; in this feeling I found the justification to speak of the spiritual world, which I experienced, in the same way as of the sensual world. And I spoke of it in this way. I had two ideas which, although undefined, had already played a major role in my mental life before I was eight years old. I distinguished between things and entities "that one sees" and those "that one does not see".

[ 31 ] I am telling these things truthfully, although people who are looking for reasons to think anthroposophy is fantastic will perhaps draw the conclusion that I was already fantastically inclined as a child; no wonder then that a fantastic world view was able to develop in me.

[ 32 ] But precisely because I know how little I later pursued my personal inclinations in the description of a spiritual world, but only the inner necessity of the matter, I myself can look back quite objectively on the childishly clumsy way in which I justified to myself through geometry that I had to speak of a world "that one does not see".

[ 33 ] I must also say this: I liked living in this world because I would have felt the sensory world around me like a spiritual darkness if it had not received light from this side.

[ 34 ] The assistant teacher in Neudörfl, with his geometry book, provided me with the justification of the spiritual world that I needed at that time.

[ 35 ] I also owe him a lot in other ways. He brought the artistic element to me. He played the violin and piano. And he drew a lot. Both drew me strongly to him. I was with him as much as I could be. He especially loved drawing; and he made me draw with charcoal pencils from the age of nine. I had to copy pictures in this way under his guidance. For example, I sat for a long time copying a portrait of Count Széchényi.

[ 36 ] Seldom in Neudörfl, but often in the neighboring town of Sauerbrunn, I could hear the profound impression of Hungarian gypsy music.

[ 37 ] This all played into a childhood spent in the immediate vicinity of the church and the cemetery. The Neudörfl train station is just a few steps away from the church, and between the two is the cemetery.

[ 38 ] If you walked along the cemetery and then a short distance further, you came to the actual village. This consisted of two rows of houses. One began with the school, the other with the vicarage. A small stream flowed between the two rows of houses, and on its sides were stately walnut trees. The relationship to these nut trees formed a hierarchy among the children of the school. When the nuts began to ripen, the boys and girls would throw stones at the trees and thus acquire a winter supply of nuts. In autumn, no one talked about much other than the size of their haul of nuts. Whoever had taken the most was the most respected. And then it went downwards step by step - right down to me, the last one, who as a "stranger in the village" had no right to participate in this hierarchy.

[ 39 ] At the vicarage, at right angles to the main rows of houses in the village, where the "big farmers" lived, was a row of about twenty houses owned by the "middle" villagers. Adjacent to the gardens belonging to the station was a group of thatched houses, owned by the "smallholders". These were my family's immediate neighbors. The paths from the village led to the fields and vineyards owned by the villagers. I attended the grape harvest every year at the Kleinhäusler's and once a village wedding.

[ 40 ] In addition to the assistant teacher, I loved the priest among the people who were involved in running the school. He regularly came to the school twice a week to give religious education lessons and also often came to inspect the school. The image of this man is deeply imprinted in my soul and he kept reappearing in my memory throughout my life. Of all the people I got to know up to my tenth or eleventh year, he was by far the most important. He was an energetic Hungarian patriot. He took a lively interest in the Magyarization of the Hungarian territory, which was underway at the time. He wrote essays in Hungarian based on this sentiment, which I got to know through the fact that the assistant teacher had to copy them into plain language, and despite my youth, he always discussed the content with me. But the priest was also an energetic worker for the church. This was once brought home to me quite forcefully in a sermon.

[ 41 ] There was also a masonic lodge in Neudörfl. It was shrouded in secrecy from the villagers, who surrounded it with the most incredible legends. The leading role in this masonic lodge was held by the director of a flint factory at the end of the village. Apart from him, the only other personalities involved in the immediate vicinity were another factory director and a clothes dealer. Otherwise, the importance of the lodge could only be recognized by the fact that from time to time strange guests came "from afar", who seemed highly uncanny to the villagers. The clothes dealer was a strange personality. He always walked with his head down, as if lost in thought. He was known as the "simulator", and because of his peculiarity, people had neither the opportunity nor the need to approach him. The masonic lodge belonged to his house.

[ 42 ] I was unable to establish a relationship with this lodge. For after the whole way in which the people around me behaved in this respect, I had to give up asking questions there too; and then the very tasteless speeches that the owner of the ignition factory made about the church had a repulsive effect on me.

[ 43 ] One Sunday the pastor preached a sermon in his energetic manner, in which he discussed the importance of true morality for human life and then spoke of the enemies of truth in images taken from the Lodge. He then culminated his speech with the sentence: "Beloved Christians, notice who is an enemy of this truth, for example a Freemason and a Jew." For the villagers, this authoritatively identified the factory owner and the clothes merchant. I particularly liked the vigor with which this was spoken.

[ 44 ] I also owe a great deal to this pastor for my later spiritual orientation, especially because of his strong impression. He once came to school, gathered the "more mature" pupils, among whom he counted me, in the small teachers' lounge, unfolded a drawing he had made and used it to explain the Copernican world system to us. He spoke very clearly about the earth's movement around the sun, about the rotation of the axis, the inclined position of the earth's axis and about summer and winter, as well as about the earth's zones. I was completely taken in by the subject, traced it for days on end, then received special instruction from the priest on solar and lunar eclipses and focused all my curiosity on this subject. I was about ten years old at the time and could not yet write correctly orthographically and grammatically.

[ 45 ] The proximity of the church and the cemetery around it was of profound significance for my boyhood. Everything that happened in the village school developed in connection with it. This was not only due to the social and state conditions prevailing in the area at the time, but above all to the fact that the parish priest was an important personality. The assistant teacher was also the church organist, custodian of the vestments and other church equipment; he provided the parish priest with all the assistance he needed in the care of the cult. We schoolboys had to serve as altar servers and choir members at masses, funerals and funeral services. The solemnity of the Latin language and the cult was an element in which my boyish soul loved to live. Because I participated intensively in this church service until my tenth year, I was often in the company of the priest whom I held in such high esteem.

[ 46 ] In my parental home, I found no encouragement in my relationship with the church. My father took no part in it. He was a "free spirit" back then. He never went to church, with which I had grown so close; and yet he too was devoted to it during his boyhood and youth. That only changed for him again when he moved back to Horn, his home region, as an old man in retirement. Then he became a "pious man" again. But I had long since lost all connection with my parents' home.

[ 47 ] From my boyhood in Neudörfl, I have a strong impression of how the contemplation of the cult in connection with the musical celebration of sacrifice raises the mysteries of existence before the mind in a strongly suggestive way. The Bible and catechism lessons given by the priest were far less effective within the world of my soul than what he did as a practitioner of the cult in mediating between the sensual and the supersensible world. From the very beginning, all this was not a mere form to me, but a profound experience. This was all the more the case as I was a stranger in my parents' home. My mind did not leave the life I had taken up with the cult, even in what I experienced in my domestic surroundings. I lived without a share in these surroundings. I saw it; but I thought, pondered and actually felt with that other world all the time. At the same time, however, I can say that I was not a dreamer, but found my way into all practical life activities as a matter of course.

[ 48 ] My father's politicking also formed a complete contrast to this world of mine. He was replaced by another civil servant on duty. He lived at another railroad station, which he also supplied. He only arrived in Neudörfl every two or three days. In the idle evening hours, he and my father talked politics. It happened at the table that stood next to the station under two mighty, beautiful lime trees. The whole family and the foreign official were gathered there. My mother was knitting or crocheting; my siblings were playing around; I often sat at the table and listened to the incessant politicking of the two men. However, my participation never related to the content of what they were saying, but to the form the conversation took. They were always at odds; when one said "yes", the other replied "no". But all of this always took place under the sign of vehemence, even passion, but also under the sign of good-naturedness, which was a basic trait in my father's nature.

[ 49 ] A doctor from Wiener-Neustadt sometimes appeared in the small circle that often gathered there, which was often attended by local "notables". He treated many sick people in the village, where there was no doctor at the time. He made the journey from Wiener-Neustadt to Neudörfl on foot and then, after seeing his patients, came to the station to wait for the train on which he was returning. This man was considered an oddball in my parents' house and by most of the people who knew him. He didn't like talking about his medical profession, but he liked talking about German literature all the more. I first heard him talk about Lessing, Goethe and Schiller. There was never any talk of this in my parents' house. They knew nothing about it. There was nothing about it in the village school either. Everything there was focused on Hungarian history. Pastors and assistant teachers had no interest in the greats of German literature. And so it was that the doctor from Vienna-Neustädt brought a whole new world into my circle of vision. He liked to spend time with me, often took me aside after a short rest under the lime trees, walked up and down the station square with me and talked, not in a lecturing but enthusiastic way, about German literature. He developed all kinds of ideas about what is beautiful and what is ugly.

[ 50 ] This is another image that has remained in my memory throughout my life: the tall, slender doctor, with his boldly striding gait, always with the umbrella in his right hand, which he held so that it swung next to his upper body, on one side, and me, a ten-year-old boy, on the other, completely devoted to what the man was saying.

[ 51 ] In addition to all this, I was very interested in the railroad facilities. At the station telegraph, I first learned the laws of electricity from observation. I also learned to telegraph as a boy.

[ 52 ] In terms of language, I grew out of the German dialect spoken in eastern Lower Austria. This was essentially the dialect that was still common in the areas of Hungary bordering Lower Austria at the time. My relationship to reading was very different from my relationship to writing. In my boyhood I read beyond the words; my soul went directly to views, concepts and ideas, so that I had nothing from reading for the development of the sense of orthographic and grammatical writing. In writing, on the other hand, I had the urge to capture the exact word images in sounds as I usually heard them as dialect words. As a result, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I was able to write the written language, whereas reading it was very easy for me right from the start.

[ 53 ] Under such influences, I grew up to the age at which my father had to decide whether to send me to grammar school or secondary school in Wiener Neustadt. From then on, I heard a lot of talk with others about my future destiny in between politics. My father was given this or that advice; I knew even then: he likes to listen to what others say, but he acts according to his own firmly felt will.