Early Years and Private Life

Abstract

February 28, 1924 was a winter’s day much like any other in the Czechoslovakian town of Landskron. The world was at peace, if somewhat unstably, and as a sign of global inclusiveness, a celebration of sport, the first Winter Olympic games, had just concluded in Chamonix. Norway’s 14 athletes topped the table with a 17-medal haul, although hardly anyone in Landskron noticed—news travelled more slowly in those days. It was also the day on which Franz and Margarethe Schopper welcomed their son Herwig into the world.

February 28, 1924 was a winter’s day much like any other in the Czechoslovakian town of Landskron. The world was at peace, if somewhat unstably, and as a sign of global inclusiveness, a celebration of sport, the first Winter Olympic games, had just concluded in Chamonix. Norway’s 14 athletes topped the table with a 17-medal haul, although hardly anyone in Landskron noticed—news travelled more slowly in those days. It was also the day on which Franz and Margarethe Schopper welcomed their son Herwig into the world.

Fig. 1.1

Herwig’s father Franz in his library at Annahof, taken around 1970 (Herwig Schopper’s personal collection. ©Herwig Schopper, All rights reserved)

In 1924, Europe was still reeling from the Great War, which had seen the old order swept away. Gone was Austria-Hungary, which had dominated central European politics since 1867. Gone was tsarist Russia, replaced by the USSR. Britain’s imperial power would never recover, and a chastened Germany was suffering from the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Largely ostracised by the victors, Germany was barred from competing in those first winter games, although several of the countries that emerged from the ashes of Austria-Hungary were there, including Czechoslovakia.

Austria-Hungary had given way to nation states, with the peoples of the former empire scattered throughout. That’s how Viennese teacher, Franz Schopper, found himself teaching at the Landskron secondary school, or gymnasium, after the war. In Landskron, returning as a prisoner of war from Russia, he met Margarethe Stark, a local woman ten years his junior, and it was not long before they were married.

Landskron was a German-speaking town in the Czechoslovakian region of Bohemia, close to Moravia, and to the Polish and German borders. As Herwig recalled from his youth, information about the world beyond those borders was sparse: “There was no television, there were no mobile phones, very few telephones at all, and practically the only information we got was the local newspaper. Radio was practically unknown and it was very bad. There were some people who could listen to the BBC, but they were the exception. I lived just a few kilometres from the German border but to go to Germany at that time was completely impossible.”

Czechoslovakia’s borders had been carved out by the Great War’s victors who had made Tomáš Masaryk its interim leader. The fate of the fledgling nation was very much in flux, and this would come to have a profound influence on the young Herwig as he grew into adulthood. In 1924, big changes were still well over a decade into the future, however, and Herwig was blessed with a blissful childhood in a semi-rural idyll, where tolerance was the order of the day.

The tone of Czechoslovakian politics throughout Herwig’s childhood was set by Masaryk. The country’s first leader had liberal leanings. He was a man of the world, having lived in the USA and married an American woman. His policies were inclusive and popular, and when Czechoslovakia held its first elections in 1920, he won comfortably to become the country’s first elected president.

Partly as a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia had Polish and Hungarian minorities as well as its German-speaking population. The dominant religion was Catholic, but there was religious tolerance too. “Ninety five percent of the population was Catholic,” said Herwig, “so of course, in school, the religion we were taught was Catholic. There were some Protestants and Jews, but there were no problems linked to religion at all. Since information about what was going on in other countries was practically non-existent we didn’t know what was happening in Germany until 1938, when we became part of Germany.”

Herwig’s parents were not particularly devout, but the church nevertheless played an important role in his childhood. “My father never went to church, he was very liberal and the same was true of my mother,” said Herwig. “My mother used to say that when she went to church, the saints all shook their heads because she went so rarely, but of course it was automatic as a young boy that I had to follow the religious ceremonies that were going on in town. From the gymnasium, I had to go to church every Sunday, but that felt more like a musical celebration than a religious one.” Herwig’s job in church was to operate the bellows that provided pressure for the church organ. His abiding memory from those Sundays is of the theatrical beauty of it all. “I was very impressed by the Catholic mass,” he recalled. “I learned later that Richard Wagner tried to unify speech, music and spectacle in one cultural piece, the Opera, but this had already been achieved in the Catholic mass. I wonder if Wagner learned from that? In Church, I discovered what a real unified cultural event is. I was influenced religiously by the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, but not by my parents, and I must say that it took a certain effort to liberate myself from the influence of the Church, to develop a more liberal attitude.”

Herwig does not remember living in a single close-knit family unit as a young child, but rather two. Apart from having a ten-year age gap, his parents were also very different people. By the time of Herwig’s first memories, they had amicably divorced, and both had remarried. Neither had any more children, so Herwig was the only child of two families, with all its attendant consequences. “I had four parents and both families loved me very much,” he recalled, “in fact I was completely spoiled.”

For many years, the two families remained in Landskron, Franz choosing to remain in an apartment in the former country estate of Annahof on the edge of the town, where Herwig was born, while Margarethe and her second husband, Adalbert Hartmann, favoured the bustle of the town centre. “I think that was one reason for the divorce,” said Herwig. “My mother did not like the rural environment, but rather the modern environment of the town.”

Fig. 1.2

©Městské Muzeum, All rights reserved)

Herwig’s childhood home, Annahof, at around 1900. Herwig was born in the ground floor room on left (Karel Uhlíř collection, reproduced courtesy of the Městské Muzeum, Lanškroun

Herwig divided his time between the two, and enjoyed the benefits of both. “In the divorce it was decided that I should stay with my mother during the week, and with my father at the weekend. At first, vacations were also with my father,” he explained. “After my fourteenth birthday, this was flipped and I was supposed to stay with my father and spend weekends and vacations with my mother.” It was an arrangement that suited him quite well.

He got to taste the pleasures of both the countryside, where the snowy winters allowed him to learn how to ski, and the town, where he could enjoy amateur theatre and orchestra, and even experience the new-fangled innovation of cinema. Although impressive with its four imposing wings, Annahof belonged to an earlier century. It had no running water, for example, and a restaurant that was located in one wing chilled its beer in the warm summer months with ice hewn from a local lake in winter. “For us youngsters it was always a big event when they brought the ice by horse cart to the estate,” said Herwig. His mother’s new husband, a lawyer, preferred an apartment in the town centre with all mod cons including running water and even a WC.

Fig. 1.3

Herwig skiing in the Adlergebirge (Eagle mountains, or Orlické hory in Czech) near Grulich (Kràliky in Czech) in the 1940s. A poor mountain village at the time, Herwig’s entertainment through the long winter evenings consisted of learning the craft of hand weaving (Herwig Schopper’s personal collection. ©Herwig Schopper, All rights reserved)

Franz’s second wife, Friederike Culik, was a piano teacher. “She loved music very much, and that influenced me greatly,” said Herwig. “She taught me how to play the piano and through her, I too learned to love music.” But the kind of music that the young Herwig grew to enjoy at Annahof was not the kind that would serve him in Landskron. “There was a lay orchestra in the town, and since they didn’t need a pianist, I learned to play the double bass because bassists were very rare,” he said. “So there I was, a little boy running around carrying this big bass instrument with me. The combination of the piano and the bass taught me to appreciate music not only from the point of view of chamber music but from the point of view of orchestra as well, so that was an important aspect of my youth.”

School in Landskron was still organised along the lines of the educational system of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Schopper had qualified as a teacher of German and Latin before the Great War. After serving on the eastern front, spending much of the war as a Russian prisoner, he was assigned a post as a professor at the Landskron gymnasium. “At that time the practice was to go to elementary school for five years,” said Herwig. “After that a decision was taken on whether you would go to the gymnasium or continue what was called popular school, Volksschule.” Only about ten percent of children went to the gymnasium, which gave them the possibility of going on to university, and Herwig was one of them. Not only that, he did so well at elementary school that he was promoted to the gymnasium a year early, at the end of his fourth year. “This had the effect that I joined a class where all my classmates were one year older than me,” he recalled. “That became very important later when the war started.”

Fig. 1.4

The gymnasium at Landskron (now Lanškroun) where Herwig’s father Franz taught, and Herwig went to school (Palickap, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

Herwig’s gymnasium was what was known as a real gymnasium, which had the distinction that it focused on science, an important factor in Herwig’s development. Although Latin remained on the curriculum, ancient Greek made way for maths, physics, chemistry and biology. Two modern languages were also a requirement, Czech and English. “I must say I was very fortunate to have very good teachers,” said Herwig, “especially in mathematics and physics. By the Maturity I’d learned algebra, differentiation and integration, and that helped me very much later.” The Maturity was the name of the school-leaving exam.

Another teacher that Herwig remembers fondly is his English teacher, a Jewish woman who had spent time in England before teaching in Landskron. “At that time, the tradition when learning English was not to speak it because there was no opportunity to practice: nobody spoke English, there were no foreigners around, so one learned English in order to read Shakespeare,” said Herwig. “Fortunately, this teacher, having been in England, also taught us to speak English. That saved me later. In fact it was essential for me after the war.”

The academic home life that Herwig had with his father helped to stimulate his interest in science, or more specifically in engineering. Other professors from the school were regular guests at Annahof, and thrilling home experiments were a regular occurrence. “When my chemistry and physics teacher visited us,” recalled Herwig, “he helped to stimulate my interest in physics in a way that would be unimaginable today. For instance, he once brought to our home a bottle of mercury and I remember he put the mercury on the kitchen table and I could play with it with my fingers, bringing together bigger and bigger bubbles. It would be impossible today to have children play around with mercury like that, but it doesn’t seem to have done me any harm.” Over time, Herwig formulated a plan to combine his interest in technical subjects with his desire to travel: he would become an engineer on a ship.

His later change of heart had nothing to do with the school, and everything to do with his maternal grandfather, Franz Stark, who had been a university professor in Trieste during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When he retired, Professor Stark and his wife set up a small hotel on the Adriatic coast at Laurana, today Lovran, near to Abbazia, today Opatija, a town that had been a favourite holiday destination of Empress Elisabeth, known as Sissi, and remained a fashionable destination for those fortunate enough to have the means to travel. Without this family connection, Herwig would not have been able to dream of Adriatic vacations, let alone mix with exotic hotel guests such as professors of physics from the far corners of the former empire. It was through such encounters that Herwig cultivated an interest in fundamental science: the notion that with just a few basic principles, all the wonders of nature can, in principle, be understood (see this chapter, In his own words).

In many ways, Herwig led a charmed life as a child. He was much loved by his two families, had a good education, opportunities to develop as a musician and the great fortune to be able to travel. He was raised under a liberally minded administration in a new country just beginning to find its place in the world. But against this idyllic backdrop, there were seismic changes underway in the wider world, and just across the border a newly assertive Germany was flexing its muscles.

Seismic Political Changes

In 1924, the year Herwig was born, Adolf Hitler was jailed following the Munich putsch of the previous year, although he would serve only a fraction of his sentence. Lenin’s death had led to Joseph Stalin becoming leader of the Soviet Union. Italy had returned a fascist government to power, and in the USA, J. Edgar Hoover became head of the FBI. It was also the year that another dominant empire passed into history, as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the caliphate and the modern secular state of Turkey was born. By the time Herwig was in the gymnasium, Hitler had become a dominant force in German politics, exploiting the fear of otherness and capitalising on the fact that the German army had never surrendered at the end of the Great War. Weak politicians, he claimed, were the reason for the Armistice and the resulting punitive Treaty of Versailles. Hitler’s heady brew of populism found fertile ground in Weimar Germany, and was matched by equivocation on the part of the victors of 1914–1918.

By 1935, the winds of change were picking up speed. When ill health forced Masaryk to retire from public life that year, his successor took a more strongly nationalistic approach to Czechoslovakia’s minorities. By 1938, a proactive policy had been adopted to incorporate the various minorities into the young country. Landskron began its transition to Lanškroun. Some Czech families moved into town, and a Czech-language school was opened. Across the border in Germany, things were moving in a very different direction, and on 30 September 1938 at a conference in Munich, France, Great Britain and Italy yielded to German demands to cede the Sudetenland, a border region with a large German-speaking population to Germany. This included Landskron, which became German overnight. “Daladier and Chamberlain made me a German citizen,” Herwig recalled, “but that didn’t have much influence on my education, the gymnasium went on like before.”

Fig. 1.5

Lanškroun town hall, seen here in the 1980s, has changed little since Herwig lived in the town as a boy (Herwig Schopper’s personal collection. ©Herwig Schopper, All rights reserved)

1938 was just the beginning of major changes in Herwig’s life. It was the year that his mother moved to the town of Zwittau, today Svitavy, some 20 km away. That does not sound like much, but with the transport infrastructure of the day, it presented a major obstacle. “The rural roads were mostly just gravel, so to go to a neighbouring town even twenty or thirty kilometres away was an adventure,” said Herwig. “It could take a whole day because the transport was horse-drawn carts, or you had to walk. There were a few taxis but they were very expensive and they were used only in very special circumstances, for instance if you got sick or had an accident and had to go to the nearest hospital. Only a few of the larger towns had asphalt roads and a bus service.”

The following year, 1939, the unthinkable happened. The war to end all wars clearly proved not to have done so as the lights once more went out across the continent, and Europe again found itself in conflict. The consequence for Herwig was almost surreal. Having skipped a year of elementary school, he was a year younger than his classmates, all of whom were old enough to be conscripted by the Autumn of 1941, leaving the 17-year-old Herwig in a class of one. “My classmates were given an emergency Maturity qualification, they didn’t have to go through the Maturity examinations,” said Herwig. “They disappeared but I stayed and strangely enough, the whole teaching of that class continued with me as the only pupil.” Things would get stranger still when it came to Herwig’s Maturity examinations in February 1942. “Since my father was a teacher at my school, they were careful to make sure that I did not get any preferential treatment, so someone high up in the school hierarchy came from another town to be present in my Maturity examination.” Herwig passed with distinction, guaranteeing himself access to university when such a thing became possible again. “I passed my examination in February’42, and one week later I was called to the Reichsarbeitsdienst—the Reich’s compulsory labour service.”

In His Own Words

The Wonders of Physics

“An important point that was essential in my life concerns one of my mother’s parents, who was a university professor in the old Austria before the First World War. He was a professor at the University of Trieste in Italy. When he retired after the war he bought a villa in a place which is today called Lovran, at the time it was Laurana, which is close to Abbazia, which was, in the old Austria, one of the favourite vacation places for Austrian aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

Abbazia is now called Opatija, and it is still a popular resort. In the old Austria, it was famous because the Austrian Queen Sissi—Elisabeth—vacationed there several times. My grandmother, who came from Landskron, was a devoted mother and she also liked to cook for people, so she convinced my grandfather to open a hotel. They bought a villa at Laurana and converted it into a flourishing hotel where I spent my summer vacations.

Many people from Vienna, Budapest and other cities from the old Empire came to that hotel, and I met two in particular. One was a professor at the University of Budapest, Tibor Neugebauer, and the other was a professor called Plotnikov from the University of Belgrade. They were both physicists. Before the war it was very hard for people to go on vacation to that kind of place, only very rich or very well-situated people could do it. Very few people in Landskron could afford to take a vacation in Italy, but thanks to that grandfather in Trieste and his hotel in Abbazia, I spent most of my summer vacations, whether I was formally with my father or with my mother, on the Adriatic coast.

I remember that I was three years old when I spent my first vacation there. From the beginning I was always interested in science—well science was not so well known—so I was interested in engineering really. At first, I wanted to become an engineer but I also liked to travel, so I wanted to become an engineer on a ship. That was my dream when I was a youngster, but I had no idea at that time what physics was.

During these vacations in Laurana, where I met these two gentlemen sitting by the sea, I learned about physics. After swimming in the Adriatic, I would listen to them—their conversation was all in German because they came from the old Austria. One day they would be talking about how butterflies can fly, the next evening they would be looking at the sky and discussing why the stars are burning, where they get their energy from and things like that. I was so impressed that these gentlemen, these physicists, could discuss such completely different phenomena with such authority. One day they discussed how the wind produces waves in the sea and so on. I was so impressed that they could discuss completely different phenomena based on just a few basic principles. I didn’t yet understand those principles, but I did understand that this was the basis of physics.

That was the first time I came into contact with physics, and it made me change my mind about becoming an engineer. I decided to become a physicist, so that was an important milestone in my life. Thanks to my grandfather in Trieste, I could spend my vacations in Italy, and there I met the first physicists of my life, before that, I didn’t know what a physicist was.

In Laurana I had another experience that is an important element for most young people—my first great love. I met an Italian girl, Nedda Ferri, she was about my age and we fell deeply in love even though she did not speak any German and my Italian was rather rudimentary. Every year we would long for the summer vacation to come around, and we spent every possible moment together. Our parents on both sides seemed very happy about this situation. According to the moral rules of the time, we respected all proper limits in a way that seems hardly believable in present times. Since we were separated for most of the year, we exchanged many letters and I learned not only to speak Italian, but also to write it. For her part, Nedda learned German and many years later became a German language school teacher at Meran in the South Tyrol. Our meetings, albeit very short, continued until I became a soldier. But they could have changed my whole life as I will recount later. Eventually we lost contact, as did so many during the war. We met again about 50 years later, and remained friends until she passed away in 2012.”

Private Life

“Although my parents divorced, they did so amicably, and both gave me all the love and care a young boy needs. It also seems that they bequeathed me good genes. I have lived for almost a century without ever being seriously ill. In all my long career, I have never missed a single day of work due to illness, and the only days I had to spend in hospital were due to skiing accidents. My lifestyle probably played a part too. I’ve never eaten or drunk to excess. I’ve never smoked, not because of a strong character, but just because I disliked the stinging in my nose and eyes. And I always liked sport. At school I played football, and then took up tennis and skiing. When we could afford it, we built a swimming pool that I still use to this day to keep myself as fit as possible. My children learned to swim at almost the same time as they learned to walk.

Another important element in my life has been my love for music, in particular playing the piano. I learned when I was young, mainly taught by my father’s second wife, but I had to interrupt my playing for many years during and after the war. On occasion, I enjoyed performing chamber music, accompanying a violinist or quartets. I never approached a professional level, but I liked very much to use recordings that featured an orchestra playing a concerto with the piano removed, so I could play the part myself. In this way, I played many of the Mozart concertos and sometimes even dared to attempt some Beethoven, or even Chopin, although I have to confess that I used a computer program to slow down the speed without changing the pitch. My only public performance was at a little meeting at CERN when I was asked to play for staff members who had 25 years of service.

My private life was multifaceted, having had effectively two pairs of parents, being a soldier in the war, a displaced person and a prisoner of war, and having to find my own way afterwards alone. On a few occasions fate took the lead in determining the course of my life, as I’ve mentioned in earlier chapters. I learned early on that it is an illusion to believe that our lives are exclusively determined by our planning and our actions. Luck plays an important part.

I owe much of the happiness of my personal life, and also my professional career, to a very long and happy marriage to Ingeborg Schopper (b. Stieler), which lasted 60 years; an increasingly rare period for couples to be married these days. Of course, our marriage had some ups and downs but my wife and later my children, Doris and Andreas, were always accommodating when my career took us to new places around the world—different countries, languages and schools. I have been very lucky in this respect, and I value how important it is to have a family with whom to exchange affection, dedication and love. If I have one regret, it is that I could not devote more time to them.

To my great sadness, my wife passed away more than a decade ago and although my children take great care of me, I have also the good luck to find a partner, Ingrid Krähe, with whom I share many values and beliefs and who brightens my life today.

My professional career was marked by a lot of variety. I never stayed longer than about eight years in any one place. Instead, I moved through a changing social and professional environment, which gave me the opportunity to get to know different actors in society rather intimately, from soldiers and students to world leaders. I regularly joined new scientific environments, in which I had to build a reputation from scratch, whatever I might have done before. This meant gaining recognition by a new group of peers, which was sometimes rather difficult.

Curiosity has been central to my life, at least consciously, ever since I eavesdropped on the conversations of physicists on the beach in Abazzia as a child at my grandparents’ hotel. As I developed into a working scientist, I began my career trying to understand what is behind the laws of nature that govern all natural sciences. These efforts induced me to look beyond the sciences to the motivations that drive the actions of people, and to comprehend the ideas that shape economics, politics and history.”

Fig. 1.6

(reproduced courtesy of the Městské Muzeum, Lanškroun. ©Městské Muzeum, All rights reserved)

As one of Lanškroun’s more famous sons, Herwig was honoured with his likeness being featured in the town’s nativity scene, developed between 2000 and 2011. The scene is now on display in the Městské Muzeum, Lanškroun