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parents began to be afraid that he was abnormal. Finally the child did begin to speak, but he was always taciturn and never inclined to enter into the games that nursemaids play with children in order to keep both the children and themselves in good humor. A governess entrusted with Albert’s childhood training even dubbed him
Pater Langweil
(Father Bore). He did not like any strenuous physical exertions such as running and jumping, perhaps for the reason that he considered himself too weak for such activities. From the very beginning he was inclined to separate himself from children of his own age and to engage in daydreaming and meditative musing.
    He disliked particularly playing at being a soldier, which the children of most countries engage in with the greatest delight, and which especially in the Germany of Bismarck and Moltke was imbued with an almost mythical splendor. When the soldiers marched through the streets of Munich accompanied by the roll of drums and the shrill of fifes, a combination, characteristic of the German army, that gives the music an exciting, compelling rhythm and a wild tonal quality, and when the pavements and the windowpanes rattled from the pawing of the horses’ hoofs, the children enthusiastically joined the parade and tried to keep in step with the soldiers. But when little Albert, accompanied by his parents, passed such a parade, he began to cry. In Munich parents would often tell their children: “Some day, when you grow big, you, too, can march in the parade,” and most boys were spurred to greater and more ambitious efforts by this prospect. Albert, however, said to his parents: “When I grow up I don’t want to be one of those poor people.” When the majority saw the rhythm of a happy movement, he observed the coercion imposed upon the soldiers; he saw the parade as a movement of people compelled to be machines.
    At this time Einstein apparently already revealed one of his most characteristic traits: his intractable hatred of any form of coercion arbitrarily imposed by one group of people on another. He detested the idea of the oppressor preventing the oppressed from following their inclinations and developing their natural talents, and turning them into automatons. On the other hand Albert was also conscious of the natural laws of the universe; hefelt that there are great eternal laws of nature. As a child he was able to understand them only in the form of traditional religion, and felt attracted toward it and its ritual precepts, which symbolized a feeling for the laws of the universe. He was offended by the fact that his father always scoffed at religion, and he regarded this derision as resulting from a type of thought that is in a certain sense disharmonious and refuses to submit to the eternal laws of nature. This dual attitude — hatred for the arbitrary laws of man and devotion to the laws of nature — has accompanied Einstein throughout his life and explains many of his actions that have been considered peculiar and inconsistent.
    At that time the German elementary schools were conducted on a denominational basis, the clergy of each religious group controlling its schools. Since Munich was for the most part Catholic, most of the schools were naturally of that denomination. Nominally Einstein’s parents probably adhered to the Jewish religion, but they were not sufficiently interested in a Jewish education to send their children to a Jewish school since there was none near their home and it would have been expensive. His parents may even have felt that by sending their boy to a Catholic school he would come into more intimate contact with non-Jewish children. At any rate, Albert attended the Catholic elementary school, where he was the only Jew in his class.
    Young Albert experienced no unpleasantness because of this situation. There was only a slight feeling of strangeness resulting naturally from the different religious traditions, and this factor was definitely of