Memoirs

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Chapter One

How Many

Seconds in a Year?

* * *

1908-1913

What are my earliest memories of childhood? I remember the bridges, the beautiful bridges. My hometown, Budapest, is built around a river. I have lived near the Tiber, the Thames, the Hudson, and the Rio Grande; but no river warms my memory as the Danube does: the river and its beautiful bridges.

    The oldest bridge is the Chain Bridge, a nineteenth-century miracle with two stone lions guarding each end. Eighty years ago, my father told me that when the statues were installed, the city praised their sculptor for creating such beauty. Then a small boy had come along and asked about their funny mouths. In shame, the sculptor committed suicide; he had forgotten to give his yawning lions tongues.

    The inconspicuous, modern Margaret Bridge has a branch leading to an island in the Danube. I played there in the ruins of the cloister where a king's daughter had lived and died. A great Hungarian poet, Endre Ady, wrote a poem about St. Margaret the year before I was born. He describes the young Princess Margaret (who was later canonized) fearfully fleeing her father's coarse and boisterous friends, but dreaming of a kindly troubadour from the West. The last lines of his poem, even in my poor translation, are poignant:

She waited long, in vain. Her knight she never met, Whose kiss was gentle, gentle as his smile. So to Lord Jesus they gave Margaret, Who lived and died a nun on Danube's isle.

    The Danube, flowing to the south, separates the flat modern city of Pest from the ancient city of Buda, where the conquering Magyars built their forts a thousand years ago. Almost every Sunday when we were small, my father took my big sister, Emmi, and me for a walk in the forests in the Buda Mountains. My mother had the beginnings of arthritis, which later crippled her hands and feet, and she did not walk: for pleasure.

    The Temes, a little river, is also bright in my memory; my mother grew up in Lugos, which (far to the southeast of Budapest) lies on the banks of the Temes. My grandparents' home, on the north side of the river in Romanian Lugos, faced the Greek Orthodox church across the town square. I remember that house well; it had a fountain in the yard where we drew our cooking and drinking water. But my favorite memory of that place is of the second-floor balcony; it provided me with a wonderful view of the weekly comings-and-goings at the market held below in the square.

    Each year, my family, accompanied by a nursemaid or governess, left Budapest during July and August. My oldest memory is our vacation to Lake Balaton in 1910. I hear myself repeating two words: igazán, igazán (really, really), and igen, igen (yes, yes). Although two words are a tiny vocabulary for a two-and-a-half-year-old, I remember my feeling of pride and the approval of my parents. Emmi, two years older than I and now the family chronicler, says my parents were worried by my silence. She also says that I mispronounced igazán by accenting the syllables as if it were a German word. My mother spoke German at home, and I suspect that learning to talk in a bilingual home posed real difficulties for me.

    Our family spent the next summers in the mountains; in 1913, we went to Toblach, near Innsbruck in the Austrian Dolomites. While we were there, my parents decided we would take a carriage trip to Drei Zinnen. The trip took a few hours, and several times we had to get out and walk because the horses could not pull the loaded carriage uphill.

    During that same vacation, I had an amazing first experience. My mother's parents came for a visit and hired an automobile. We drove the same road to Drei Zinnen, but this time we covered the distance in thirty minutes, and no one had to get out and walk. That, I suspect, was the beginning of my respect for technology.

    The vacation is also memorable because we had left from one flat but returned to another. My father was a lawyer. Because his office was in our home, we lived near the government buildings, all of which were in the center of town on the east side of the Danube. The apartment waiting for us on returning from our vacation in 1913 was in a brand-new, six-story building that had colored panels on the outside and several grand entryways. The name of the building, the Palatinus, brought visions of palaces to my mind. The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses.

    Although the building was not quite two blocks from our old home, the views from the windows were better than those from our previous home. From one I could make out a little piece of the Buda Mountains across the Danube, including the highest mountain, the Jánoshegy. And from my father's inner office--which was the most splendid room in our home--I could see into the backyard of the fire department across Szalay Street; here, firemen raised and lowered the automatic ladders of a beautiful bright red horseless carriage.

    Our new home, in which I spent most of my youth, looked directly at the back of the Supreme Court building. Next to the Supreme Court stood the Parliament building; a large, lovely park, Parliament Park, where my sister and I were often taken to play, separated the two buildings. The motto carved into the lintel of the main entry to the court proclaimed: Justicia Regnorum Fundamentum (justice is the foundation of government).

    Today, I realize that justice was not a common experience for most Hungarians in those days. Hungary was an agricultural nation, just beginning to industrialize. Between 1873--when the twin cities of Buda and Pest were unified--and 1913, the population of Budapest tripled to one million. My parents were among the hundreds of thousands who moved to the first city of the nation during those years. As part of a small middle class of professional people, they enjoyed a comfortable life. Most Hungarians were agricultural workers, employed only part of the year and living in harsh poverty.

    My father was a liberal who believed in democracy and in the need to improve the well-being of all the people, but he was not politically active. By disposition, he was moderate, reserved, and quiet. Instead of talking about a specific political party's program, he tried to explain the principles of good government; sometimes he used a few dozen Hungarian words, occasionally just a few words in Latin.

    The Austro-Hungarian empire was part of a political world teetering between the old and the new, and wars were common. The first conflict I remember, albeit vaguely, took place in the Balkans in 1912, when Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro rose against Turkey. I plainly remember our family's concern. In those days, Hungarian men were eligible for conscription until they were forty-two years old. If Hungary had entered the war, my father would have been drafted in his last year of eligibility; but Hungary stayed out, and my father stayed at home.

    One of my most distinct memories of my first five years is of an event that occurred not long before we moved into our new home. One morning, my father gave me a little mirror and showed me how to reflect a sunbeam onto the ceiling. I was fascinated; I played with the mirror and sunbeams for hours. At dinner, the doorbell rang, and my father left the table. When he returned, he took the mirror away from me: It seems that I had happened more than once to direct a sunbeam onto the bald head of a Supreme Court justice.

    Both my parents were kind, but even though they laughed about my "crime," I was almost overwhelmed by my guilt. As a small child, I had an almost chronic bad conscience. I do not believe it was justified, but I worried most of the time that some absurdity or another was an offense.

    My mother was a worrier, and I may have worried in imitation of her. But some fears were uniquely my own. I had such a terrible fear of the dark as a child that I am sometimes amazed, even today, that I no longer have it. Until I was at least seven, my parents always left a light on for me at night.

    My early memories of my mother are intertwined with Beethoven's sonatas. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, but she was a fine pianist. I believe she had hoped to play professionally before she met my father, but she lacked the self-assurance that performing for large audiences requires. She was reserved about playing for anyone other than family members.

    My love of music grew from listening to my mother play. My love of the mountains may have been inspired by my father's enjoyment of them. My interest in mathematics was self-generated. From earliest childhood, in a barely remembered way, I have had an unrelenting desire to understand. Soon after our summer vacation in 1912, when I was about four and a half years old, I began consistently spending time thinking about numbers.

    When I was put to bed, I entertained myself with a secret game. I knew that a minute had sixty seconds, and I charged myself to discover how many seconds there were in an hour, a day, or a year. The fact that my answers were different each time I tried only added to the excitement.

    Why would a child enjoy such a peculiar pastime? No one suggested the game to me, and I didn't talk about my activity until I was middle-aged. I might have begun it as a rebellion against bedtime or to help myself cope with my fear of the dark. Or it may be that numbers were attractive to me because they were one area where mistakes could be corrected. Or I may have chosen to think about numbers because words had been confusing when I began to talk. Perhaps I liked numbers because, after all, an hour really does have 3,600 seconds. But no matter what the cause, my first desire, as far back as I can remember, was to find patterns and regularities in the world. As a consequence, I learned to calculate in my head at an improbably early age.

    A child cannot know how his days and nights will determine his years--how they may make him fit or not fit into his world. Perhaps intellectual independence is a hereditary trait; perhaps it is a universal characteristic of the young that only a few carry intact into adulthood. Whether intellectual independence leads to success, to misfortune, or to both is unclear; but finding the consistency of numbers is the first memory I have of feeling secure.

Chapter Two

Learning About War,

Revolution, and Peace

* * *

1914-1919

In June 1914, news from Sarajevo produced a tension that I have never forgotten: The crown prince and his wife had been murdered. My family was in the dining room of our apartment, the grown-ups with their newspapers, and someone read aloud: "In spite of the tragedy, there will be no war." I was properly worried about war and the likelihood of father's being drafted.

    "Why will there be no war?" I asked. "Because there is no reason that there should be war." "But if there is no reason, why does the newspaper say that there will be no war?" I remember my confusion to this day. Until then, my questions had always earned me my mother's immediate attention and an explanation. On this occasion, not only did my questions go unanswered, I was even told to be quiet!

    Today, I believe I know the answer. In 1914, Franz Joseph was eighty-four. He had begun his rule in 1848, as part of the resolution of the Hungarian revolt, at the age of eighteen. About two decades later, in the hope of increasing popular support, Emperor Franz Joseph granted considerable autonomy to Hungary and added the title "King of Hungary" to his name. During the following years, Austro-Hungary expanded south into Bosnia-Herzegovina, which then, as now, was a region of intense ethnic pride and nationalistic conflict.

    Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the menace of terrorism spread through the western world; the terrorists of the nineteenth century--called anarchists--wanted to bring an end to all government. Like their twentieth-century counterparts, they committed acts of violence to provoke countermeasures that would, in turn, bring down the existing order. Anarchists murdered presidents, prime ministers, and members of royal families. (Today, terrorists are more democratic.)

    During my childhood walks, I noticed a statue of Queen Elizabeth, Franz Joseph's wife, beside the Danube. Queen Elizabeth was a beautiful lady. I was curious about her and was told that the Hungarian people loved her and that she had had died at the hands of an assassin. While she was on a holiday in Geneva, she had wanted to take a public boat ride on the lake, accompanied only by a lady-in-waiting. Heavily veiled, she had just boarded the boat when an anarchist approached her, lifted her veil to be sure of her identity, and stabbed her to death with an awl.

    Franz Joseph was sixty-eight years old and had ruled for fifty years when he lost his wife to a senseless assassination. Now, at eighty-four, he lost his nephew, the successor to the throne, to similar political violence in Sarajevo. Franz Joseph asked that the investigation of the archduke's death be conducted by the Austrian police rather than the regional police of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs, who were involved in the assassination plot, protested Austrian intervention in their local affairs; they claimed that it was an Austrian plot to gain a more comprehensive annexation. A stalemate was quickly reached. France and Russia backed Serbia. The Germans backed Austro-Hungary.

    A few weeks later, the fate of Austro-Hungary was sealed: Franz Joseph signed the documents that started World War I. He reportedly said at the time, "I have considered everything; I have weighed everything." He responded, as the anarchists had hoped he would, like an emotional old man. The assassin was eventually caught and sent to prison, where he died; but the deep disturbances that would plague the twentieth century had been set in motion.

    During the first days of July 1914, we set out for our customary family vacation, this time to Velden, which was beside a pretty lake, but with a promise that we would go Toblach a month later. However, Emmi and I came down with measles at the end of July. We were still miserably sick when the declaration of war came. At the time, measles felt worse than war, but the declaration made our parents decide to return home as soon as could be managed. By then, trains full of soldiers were roiling.

    In the days that followed, the soldiers, followed by their cannons, marched down Vaci Street, a few blocks from our home. By that time, I was not asking why. I was caught up by the war fever; I was certain that we would win. My father hung a map on his office wall and stuck flags on it to show the location of the battle lines on the eastern front. The dynamic geography of those mobile frontiers marked the beginning of my interest in the larger world.

    I remember that early in the war, those fabulous German warriors von Hindenburg and Ludendorff wiped out the Russian troops in East Prussia. But the Russians soon recovered and deployed their forces against a weaker opponent--the Austro-Hungarian army. I remember the gloomy news in the fall of 1914. Lemberg (now Lvov), a city a hundred miles from the border of Hungary, had fallen. I had no doubt that we would take it back; Hungarians were, to my mind, brave and successful warriors. But we did not defeat the Russians. The Germans did.

    The next spring, my father took Emmi and me on a long walk in the mountains of Buda. On the slopes of the triple-peaked Hármashatárhegy, we came upon some trenches. My father explained that they had been dug as a defense against the Russians. Suddenly, the war looked very different. On the map in my father's office, I had seen the Russians crossing the Carpathian mountains in the east. The trenches we saw in the mountains that day were west of the Danube. If our soldiers had had to fight there, our house and the homes of alt my friends would already have been captured.

    My desire to know more about war grew. At home, we had an illustrated history of Napoleon's campaigns. I remember learning that the huge army that had marched into Russia had left in a terrible retreat. The soldiers bled, they froze, they starved. Only a few returned. On Sundays in winter, my father took Emmi and me to the main park in Budapest, which had a zoo and an art gallery. I remember seeing paintings of battles: wounded men and horses intermingled in agony. They held me in horrified fascination.

    My father had clerks working in his office in our home, young men fulfilling a four-year-long internship before opening their own practices. One of them, Joseph Bard (who knew and later married the American reporter Dorothy Thompson), came back from the war with terrible stories. I was bothered by his seeming lack of patriotism and by the doubts he cast on the effectiveness of our armies.

    A special teacher, a British subject, whom my mother hired for a short time to give Emmi and me English lessons, challenged my patriotism even further. The tutor was furious about the war and blamed Kaiser Wilhelm for starting it. His comments about the kaiser, who I knew had often rescued Hungary, upset me. So when the tutor used a somewhat objectionable word for fool in connection with the kaiser, I returned the favor by using the same word in connection with the British. Much to my amazement, my parents were not at all upset by his behavior--only about mine.

    However, about the middle of the war, I realized that the Austro-Hungarian armies always seemed to lose. First, we invaded Serbia, but had to retreat. We fought the Romanians when they invaded Transylvania, but the Germans had to come to our rescue. We fought the Italians, and we were beaten again. When the Germans defeated the Russians in 1914, I had thought that the war was as good as won; I was surprised, then, to realize a few years later that we were going to lose.

    By the summer of 1918, everyone was desperately eager to have an end to the war. I remember two riddles popular during the final months of the war. The first described countries:

What is the difference between England, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary? In England, everything is permitted except for a few things that are forbidden. In Prussia, everything is forbidden except for a few things that are permitted. In Austro-Hungary, everything that is forbidden is permitted.

The second riddle circulated about two weeks before the surrender.

How is the war going? In Berlin, the situation is serious but not desperate. In Vienna, it is desperate but not serious. [That was the atmosphere in Budapest as well.]

Just before war ended in 1918, an independent republican government was formed under Mihály Károlyi, who, I believe, was a Social Democrat, politically to the left. People walked the streets wearing tiny chrysanthemums in their buttonholes, and soldiers marched with flowers in their gun barrels. The blossoms were the symbol of a largely peaceful revolution, the Revolution of Autumn Roses. Franz Joseph's successor, Emperor Charles, finally acceded to popular demands for a new cabinet. The event marked the beginning of an independent Hungarian republic.

    During the fall of 1918, I began my second year of gymnasium studies. The only good thing about school, as far as I was concerned, was the mathematics class. A few years earlier, I learned that what I had been doing in my nighttime game should be done on paper and should be correct. I practiced both on paper and at night, so I had become a good and fast calculator, a type of childhood distinction that has completely disappeared with the advent of hand calculators.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Memoirs by Edward Teller with Judith L. Shoolery. Copyright © 2001 by Edward Teller. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.