Albert and his father rode the train south to Mulhouse in mid-October. As they rolled through the mountains and valleys and out onto the Rhine River plain, Albert hardly had the energy to look out the window. He was leaving behind everything he loved—wandering in the hills, sitting on his special rock, watching the storks return to nest in the church belfry. These and so many other enjoyable things would be replaced with more Latin, more mathematics, more sitting up straight at the table doing homework. The prospect was grim.
As district school inspector, Uncle Louis along with Aunt Sophie lived in an apartment attached to the high school. This meant that Albert would never be far from school—or his teachers, some of whom lived in surrounding apartments. As he lay in bed on his first night in Mulhouse, Albert went over the daily schedule that Aunt Sophie had laid out for him. He was to rise at 6:00 a.m. to wash and dress. Then it was breakfast, followed by chores around the house. Although school started at 8:00 a.m., Albert needed to be out of the apartment by 7:30 a.m. in order to be suitably early to class. He was to return to the apartment for lunch at 11:00 a.m. and use the rest of the lunch hour to practice piano. Then it was back to school at noon for two more hours of lessons. After school, according to his aunt, he was to come straight home and not dillydally in the street with other boys. Once home, Albert was to change his clothes, do more household chores, and be ready for coffee at 4:00 p.m. when Uncle Louis arrived home from work. After coffee Albert was to practice piano for another hour, followed by an hour of homework, which he was to do seated at the kitchen table with Aunt Sophie closely supervising.
The only time Albert had any choice about activities was between homework and dinner. Aunt Sophie told him that during that time he could read a book or one of the three newspapers delivered to the apartment. After dinner came more homework from 8:30 to 10:30, when everyone went to bed and the candles were blown out.
A tear slid down Albert’s cheek. He had no idea how he would keep up with the new schedule. It was so different from his schedule back in Gunsbach. His mother had tried to get him to study, but the three younger children were always distracting her, leaving Albert at peace to daydream. In Mulhouse Albert felt trapped, as though he’d been sentenced to prison for the next nine years. He dreaded waking each morning to begin his grueling routine.
Just as Albert had predicted, his first week at school in Mulhouse went badly. He was behind in Latin and hadn’t yet started Greek, as the other boys had. As a result, he had a lot of extra homework to catch up on. To make matters worse, Aunt Sophie was concerned that Albert play only with the “right” boys. According to her, only two boys in Albert’s class were worthy of mixing with: Eduard Ostier and Pierre Matthieu. Pierre, a pastor’s son, was also attending the gymnasium on a scholarship. Aunt Sophie told Albert that if any other boys invited him to play or study at their homes, he was to politely refuse. And he had no chance to meet other boys outside of school. His aunt didn’t believe in free time to go running around outside. Such activity, she said, could lead a boy into mischief. All Albert could do was look longingly from the apartment to the mountains in the distance, knowing his family was experiencing a different life just a few hills and valleys to the north. It was all he could do to stop himself from running away.
On Sunday, Albert accompanied his uncle and aunt to St. Stephen’s Church, a large, ornate building with a tall spire and five clanging bells in the bell tower. Albert immediately noticed the organ. It was bigger than the pipe organ in Gunsbach. This organ had three manuals and sixty-two stops. And although the organist had his back to the congregation, Albert could tell he played with vigor and flair. When Pastor Wennagel climbed the carved spiral stairs to the pulpit, Albert’s mind drifted to the organist. He wondered how long the man had studied music before winning the coveted position as the organist of a beautiful church like this one.
The morning service at St. Stephen’s was longer than Albert was used to. When it was over, Uncle Louis and Aunt Sophie gathered in the square outside and introduced Albert to their friends and acquaintances.
It was customary following lunch each Sunday for families to take a walk, during which Albert was confronted by the grimness of Mulhouse. The town was a leading center in textile production. The sooty brick walls of cotton mills, weaving sheds, and rows of brick chimneys spewing dark gray smoke dominated the town. Albert took several longing glances over his shoulder at the familiar mountains behind him.
After the walk Albert wondered whether he would ever be happy again. He felt sad being away from his family and felt sorry for himself because his schoolwork was piling up. Even music no longer brought him joy. Aunt Sophie, an accomplished pianist herself, supervised Albert’s music lessons. At home he’d been free to improvise on his grandfather’s old piano. No one minded if he added his own musical notes or changed the tempo. But Aunt Sophie was like a hawk. She sat beside Albert as he played, turning the sheet music and watching for any deviation from it. She insisted Albert spend most of his lessons sight-reading the music instead of playing by ear. Albert learned to hate the sight of his aunt’s piano.
Winter term went by slowly, with each day seeming like the one before. Albert barely noticed the first snow as it fell over the town. It made him sad to think of how he and Louisa used to toboggan down the hill behind their father’s church, or how his mother had hot soup waiting when he returned home from visiting the Fecht River to see how far it had iced over.
When December arrived, Albert expected that later in the month he would take the train back home on his own. He was surprised when instead his father showed up at Uncle Louis’s apartment. His surprise turned to dread when he learned that the principal of the gymnasium had summoned his father for a meeting. Albert could only imagine what that would be about. His grades were at the bottom of his class, and he struggled with Greek and mathematics, two subjects he needed to pass to graduate. When the meeting was over, his father returned to the apartment holding Albert’s report card. “We will not discuss this now,” he said. “When we get home, I shall talk with your mother and decide what to do with you.”
This sounded serious and cast a shadow over Albert’s return home to his family for Christmas. Even the Christmas trappings—the tree in the living room decorated with candles and paper fans, the presents from various aunts and uncles spilling out underneath the tree, and the smell of the delicious meat pie his mother always prepared for special meals—couldn’t dispel the cloud of gloom over Albert as he sensed that something bad was about to happen.
The day after Christmas, the older children—Louisa, Albert, and Adele—were called into their father’s study and told to write thank-you letters for the presents they had received. As always, Albert found this a challenging chore. He marveled at the way Louisa could think of something different and interesting to write in each letter.
But worse news was to come. That night Albert’s father called him back into his study. “I think you know why I was asked to speak to the principal,” he began. Albert hung his head. “It appears you’ve made no effort to improve your schoolwork, so much so that the principal suggests we withdraw you from the gymnasium and allow your scholarship to be used by some boy who wants to improve himself.”
Albert stared down at the rug on the study floor. Part of him was hopeful. Perhaps his time at the gymnasium was over. He could rejoin his sisters and brother and return to live in Gunsbach and make the walk to the realschule and back each day. How wonderful it would be to be back in nature.
“Many people are making sacrifices for you to go to the best school possible, and this is how you thank them,” Albert’s father continued, waving the report card at his son.
Albert swallowed hard. He thought of all the times Uncle Louis had patiently explained his mathematics homework to him or how Aunt Sophie had tested him on Latin declensions. Albert knew how much raising a son who was a scholar meant to his father. His Schweitzer ancestors had been teachers, pastors, and organists for as long as they had been keeping records. Albert, as the oldest son, had big shoes to fill. As much as he didn’t want to fill them, Albert agreed to return to Mulhouse after Christmas and concentrate harder on his studies.
Chapter 5
Improvement
Following Christmas, Albert dutifully returned to his Aunt Sophie and Uncle Louis’s apartment in Mulhouse. As the train rolled along, he tried to talk himself into working harder at school, but he didn’t know how to do it. School subjects didn’t interest Albert, and even piano lessons were drudgery under Aunt Sophie’s stern direction. As he observed the countryside through the train window, Albert wished he could be free to wander in nature, free to sit on his favorite rock and think about things that interested him, free to compose the kind of music he liked to play on the piano. But none of that was possible. Albert stepped off the train at Mulhouse with a sense of dread.
On January 14, 1886, Albert turned eleven. A week later he returned to classes. Before Albert set out for school, Uncle Louis gave him a lecture on how it was time to grow up and take his responsibilities seriously. Back in class, as Albert tried hard to stay focused, he began noticing small changes. He started seeing connections between French and Latin. And when he studied botany, he remembered the shapes of flowers in the woods and how the flowers grew. Music remained a chore, yet Albert dared to dream that one day he would become an organist.
Each time Albert returned to Gunsbach during school vacations, he noticed his family seemed a little poorer than during his previous visit. His father’s health was failing, and there was less wood to burn in the fireplace to keep the drafty old manse warm. His mother now seldom used butter in her cooking and darned socks that had already been mended. As he observed his family’s deteriorating financial situation, Albert was grateful that his aunt and uncle provided him free room and board in Mulhouse. This spurred him to work harder at school, and his grades slowly improved.
Many books filled the bookshelves in Uncle Louis and Aunt Sophie’s apartment. To his own astonishment, soon after his thirteenth birthday in 1888, Albert began reading through each book, one after the other. He also loved to read the three newspapers delivered each morning.
As 1888 progressed, Albert noticed some interesting headlines and stories in the newspapers. He watched as the “Year of the Three Kaisers” played out in the papers. On March 9, 1888, Wilhelm I died after a twenty-seven-year reign as king of Prussia and emperor of Germany. He was succeeded by his fifty-six-year-old son, Frederick III, whose wife Victoria was the eldest child of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria. Frederick suffered from throat cancer, which left him unable to talk and forced him to write down all his instructions. Then in June 1888, after ruling ninety-nine days, Fredrick III died, and his twenty-nine-year-old son, Wilhelm II, ascended to the role of emperor or kaiser.
Albert found himself engrossed in other current events, wondering how they might change his life. He read in one newspaper about the first-ever road trip in a motor wagon. Bertha Benz, wife of Karl Benz, drove sixty-six miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim in twelve hours. Albert was amazed. He had been hoping to save enough money to buy a bicycle. Now he wondered if he would one day have to share the road with gasoline-powered horseless carriages.
Reading the newspaper became one of Albert’s favorite pastimes. One day in autumn as he read the Strasbourg Post, he became aware that his aunt was watching him closely. One story Albert read in the Post was about a man dubbed Jack the Ripper. The article described how he murdered lone women on the streets of London, England, terrorizing the city in the process. At dinner, Aunt Sophie brought up the topic of what Albert was reading in the newspapers by saying, “Albert, I really don’t think I can have you reading the newspapers anymore. You only read the sensational stories. I think you could make better use of your time reading classic novels.”
