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much more difficult task for the majority of the teachers. It was claimed that the process of learning the grammar of one or two complicated languages is an indispensable training for the mind and a disciplining of the intellect hardly attainable otherwise. For Einstein, however, aspiring to learn the laws of the universe, this mechanical learning of languages was particularly irksome, and this kind of education seemed very much akin to the methods of the Prussian army, where a mechanical discipline was achieved by repeated execution of meaningless orders.
    Later, when speaking about his impressions of school, Einstein frequently said: “The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants, and the gymnasium teachers like lieutenants.” The sergeants in the German army of Wilhelm II were notorious for their coarse and often brutal behavior toward the common soldiers, and it was well known that, with the troops completely at their mercy, sadistic instincts developed in them. The lieutenants, on the other hand, being members of the upper class, did not come into direct contact with the men, but they exerted their desire for power in an indirect manner. Thus when Einstein compared his teachers to sergeants and lieutenants, he regarded their tasks to be the inculcation of a certain body of knowledge and the enforcing of mechanical order upon the students. The pupils did not view the teachers as older, more experienced friends who could be of assistance to them in dealing with various problems of life, but rather as superiors whom they feared and tried to predispose favorably to themselves by behaving as submissively as possible.
    There was one teacher in the gymnasium, named Ruess, who really tried to introduce the students to the spirit of ancient culture. He also showed them the influence of these ancient ideas in the classical German poets and in modern German culture. Einstein, with his strong feeling for everything artistic and for all ideas that brought him closer to the hidden harmony of theworld, could hardly have enough of this teacher. He aroused in him a strong interest in the German classical writers, Schiller and Goethe, as well as in Shakspere. The periods devoted to the reading and discussion of
Hermann und Dorothea
, Goethe’s half-romantic, half-sentimental love story written in a period of the greatest political unrest, remained deeply engraved in Einstein’s memory. In the gymnasium the students who had not completed their assignments were punished by being made to stay after school under the supervision of one of the teachers. In view of the tedious and boring character of the ordinary instruction, these extra periods were regarded as a real torture. But when Ruess conducted the extra period, Einstein was happy to be punished.
    The fact that in the midst of all the mechanical drilling he was sometimes able to spend an hour in an artistic atmosphere made a great impression on him. The recollection of this class remained very vivid in his mind, but he never stopped to consider what sort of impression he had made on the teacher. Many years later, when he was already a young professor at Zurich, Einstein passed through Munich and, overcome by his memories of the only man who had really been a teacher to him, decided to pay him a visit. It seemed obvious to him that the teacher would be happy to learn that one of his students had become a professor. But when Einstein arrived at Ruess’s quarters dressed in the careless manner that was characteristic of him then as well as later, Ruess had no recollection of any student named Einstein and could not comprehend what the poorly dressed young man wanted of him. The teacher could only imagine that by claiming to be one of his former pupils the young man thought he could borrow money from him. Apparently it never entered Ruess’s mind that a student could pay him a visit to express a feeling of gratitude for his teaching. It is possible that his