The schools were well endowed and could attract the best teachers from other schools. This was the kind of school your uncle Erich attended and completed uneventfully in summer 1912. He intended to follow in my footsteps, and go the mining school at Freiberg. He was not especially talented, but outdid the brightest around him by extraordinary diligence, [286], stubborn endurance, and absolute conscienciousness. So Erich came to Hamburg. He had broken his bridges behind him. As a child he had successfully learned to play the cello, but wanted nothing to do with it. Before he left home he took apart his cello and hid the parts in various places in the house, hoping to be rid of it. Then he came to me and everything was supposed to change. I tried to talk him out of going to Freiberg. Only thanks to my love and aptitude for the odd subject of Mineralogy had I found shelter in science. Otherwise I have no idea what I would have done with my engineer diploma, so what did he want with Freiberg. Eventually I persuaded him to go into business [kaufmann verden]. The look of the royal merchants in Hamburg had really impressed him. I would have had no objection to Erich studying further if he had shown any special interest, or inclination, or aptitude, [287] but without any of those it would have been nonsense to become a mining engineer, with no rights in Russia, and no prospects in Germany.

So Erich began his business track. There was a chance of getting a job with M. M. Warburg, but the goods [waren] trade appealed to him more than the banking trade, so he started and apprenticeship with the firm of Schoenfeld and Wolfers on the Rodingsmarkt, with 100 mark the first training year, 200 the second, and 900 the third. The senior partner of the firm, Eduard Wolfers, was an old friend of my father and helped Erich however he could. The firm had a history of hiring apprentices, training them quickly, and giving them responsible work during their first year if they were suited for it - there was no way to get cheaper workers. The firm purchased silk fabrics from China and Japan, along with other textiles, and sold them all over Europe and Russia. Trained apprentices could be travelling buyers or sellers, the usual career path for a Hamburg merchant. Erich soon was reluctant to work, [msp 288] did not like either the work or Hamburg, claimed that the single swan on the Libau swan pond was more beautiful than the hundreds on the Alster. He got used to it soon, but apparently never forgave me for tearing him out of the academic career he had set his sights on. On his first visit to Sakom he was asked to play the cello. Sakom found him very suited for the instrument, and offered to get him instruction at no cost. Letters went to Libau, the cello pieces were searched for and sent to Hamburg, and instruction started.

We were both living in crowded quarters at the Ratzmann family, but it did not go well, since they had grown children in the house, and space was tight. So we persuaded Miss Charlotte Mess (msp 261) to give up the pension she was running in Kiel and to move to Hamburg. We rented an [msp 289] apartment at Grundalle 80, and move in with Miss Mess, where we settled ourselves comfortably and had it as good as at home, since Miss Mess mothered us. In the morning we left for work together, met around 5 after work to eat at Miss Mess, then Erich practiced cello for 3 hours that went by with all of us in the pension hearing and seeing it if he did not have a lesson. under the guidance of Sakom, in just two years Erich was the best cello dilettante in Hamburg, played in many concerts, and was a popular guest for house music; soon he had more invitations than I did. That is how the year 1913 went by.

In the meantime I experienced the death of a Freiberg fellow student, Hoffmeister. He had finished Freiberg in 1909 and had gone to the Belgian Congo with professor Stutzer ( [Lagerstattender nicht erze] )  on a geological research trip. While there he caught sleeping sickness and returned to Hamburg to the tropical disease institute to be cured [290]. The specific remedy Bayer-205 had not yet been discovered. Actually, the sleeping sickness patients in the tropic disease hospital at that time were really guinea pigs [versuchskaninchen] and after a longer or shorter period of illness they all succumbed. However, during the course of the disease, that sometimes lasted 2 years, there would be some months where the patient would feel almost totally healthy. During these periods Hoffmeister worked in the mineralogical institute and made a trip to Petersburg to visit his parents and siblings. During the remissions he lived at miss Mess. He died in the tropic disease hospital. He was a very dear person, and we all mourned him greatly.

Hamburg did not have a university; the lower house [burger-schaft] did not approve one, and in the meantime the upper house [senat] built a similar institution that called itself  "General Lecture and Colonial Institute" from which Hamburg University sprang forth. [291] Thus there were no fixed admission requirements. Anyone who wanted to study or work there was admitted, so the audience was very colorful. Aside from Hoffmeister several younger and older Folkschool teachers, and some middle school women teachers [mittelschullehrerinnen], a daughter of Eduard Woehrmann, an old South Africa settler-fighter, Melchior, who told many stories of the Herero battles, who we nick-named "Piek van der Westerhus" after the main character of his poetically tinged reports. Also there was a Bremen merchant Otto Labahn, who would later play a large role in my life, but for the time being diligently pursued determinative mineralogy and owned a tantalum mine in English South Africa, and students spending their vacations in the institute being tutored.

So we came into 1914, splashing around in world history without anticipating anything awful. [ 292]  In the summer of 1914 your uncle Erich an I went to Kiel to enjoy the colorful festival of "Kiel week." We left Hamburg on the early morning of Sunday, 28 June, and returned in the evening. One could bustle about the Kiel firth all day, and get ones fill of sailing activity. The entire German fleet was assembled in Kiel, and many foreign yachts were participating in races. There also was a whole row of English warships, whose dark gray paint contrasted uncomfortably with the light fog gray of the German ships. We rode on Firth steamers around the whole firth, in the wonderful sunny weather, and there is hardly a more lively sight than hundreds of ships decorated in full flag regalia. As we rode around we noticed movement in the flags. All wars-hips lowered their stern flags to half mast. Then a flag with horizontal red and white stripes was raised on their fore masts. [293] Erich and I, coming from Libau, were familiar with sailing flags, even though we had not seen this flag in our home port. It was the Austrian flag, and what could its combination with mourning mean? It could only be the death of Kaiser Franz Joseph. He was already old, and had gone through a lot; may he rest in peace.

The pleasant mood in Kiel collapsed. All festivities were called off, the foreign ships did not need to weigh  anchor, and cast off from their buoys and slipped through the Kaiser Wilhelm canal, and Erich and I returned to Hamburg. We came to the rail station, and in spite of our 3rd class tickets, the conductor put us in 1st class compartments of an extra train; we had no idea why. We arrived in Hamburg at night, and there were extra telegrams that Franz Ferdinand, the crown prince of Austria-Hungary [294] and his wife had been victims of a plot [attentat]. Now we were greatly saddened that the old Kaiser Franz still had to experience this tragedy. Some people spoke of danger of war, but these voices quieted soon. It was such a nice summer, and what did the average person of the time (or of today) know of what played out behind the wings of world politics. Since then my interest in, and reading about, world politics has increased so that there rarely is an event that I am not prepared for.

So, it was July 1914, I had received the equipment with which I wanted to uncover nature's ways of making diamonds. Professor Gurich was on a research trip in South Africa; I received a request to go to southern Norway, [ 295] and examine some feldspar veins around Stavanger for a Mr. Spandow, who made canned sardines, and wanted to export the minerals for porcelain glazing. I left Hamburg for Stavanger on 11 July, and spent two weeks in Flekkfjord, Egersund and Hittero collecting two crates of feldspar chunks. When I went back along the Danish coast we met the "Hohenzollern" with part of the German war fleet. The Kaiser was bound for the north land on his annual trip. The weather was so beautiful, and in us, the unsuspecting human children, there was no trace of a thought that we were living in the last days of a world epoch, that everything, everything, would change. The ancient empires would be shattered; tradition, well being, security, life itself, would become shaky concepts and that the whole earth would for decades be plunged into blood and tears.

Your uncle Erich yelled "war, war," but for me it did not look good. Austria had [296] given Serbia an ultimatum, Germany sided with Austria; Russia, France and England took the Serbian side, and the first world war began. Uncle Erich and I were cut off from home. We were Russians, therefore enemy aliens. Our home town. Libau was attacked by German warships on the first day. But our sympathies were totally on the German side. As a foreigner I enjoyed more rights in Germany than as a Russian at home. In czarist Russia I could never have the position that I occupied in Hamburg in spite of being a foreigner. I also shared the feeling of the Russian intelligentsia that only a defeat of Russia could bring people there a life worthy of human beings. Still, I would have stayed with my work, and would not have dreamed of entering the army, but is such times one can only be driven by events, and ones own will is turned off. [297] Hamburg was a German federal state, and had its own laws. Hamburg required all its employees to be Hamburg citizens and residents. The latter was easy to fulfill, the former difficult, because any Russian wanting to become a citizen of a foreign country had to obtain a release from the Russian union [staatsverband]. This was very hard to get, demanding years of red tape [schreibereien]. So, when I became a Hamburg civil servant, the process of releasing me from Russia was initiated, a bureaucratic measure that I did not think about further.

When the war broke out I was told that the Russian release was no longer needed, and that my becoming a citizen would now proceed automatically. I continued working in the Mineralogical institute. My boss, professor Gurich, was imprisoned by the English in South Africa. The younger co-workers were either drafted into the army [298] or volunteered in order to have a choice of service. Since I knew that after becoming a citizen I would have to serve, I also reported as a volunteer to the 45th field-artillery regiment, which was stationed in Bahrenfeld, near Hamburg-Altona. Twice daily Erich and I had to report to the police. Otherwise we were not burdened in any way. Soon we were able to establish contact with home via Sweden, and found everything well there. So we carried on with our usual work. I became a citizen on 25 May 1915, becoming a Hamburger, and thus a German. On 1 June I went into the recruit cannon battery of the 45th field artillery regiment as a [kriegsmutwilliger], which is what the volunteers were called.
 
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