I. Jahresfeier am 30. Mai 2015

Autobiography Stefan Hell
I was born on 23 December 1962 in Arad, a medium-sized, ethnically diverse city
in the western part of Romania, directly on the border to Hungary. In those days,
Hungarian, Romanian, and German were the languages that could be heard on
the Street in a frequent mix, and most locals - including simple folk - spoke two
or three of these languages fluently Ethnie conflicts were unknown, because until
1918 the area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and linguistic and reli-
gious diversity was the normal state of affairs. And after all, it was fun to join in
celebrating the holidays of the others. My parents originated from a place a few
kilometers further north, where they spoke mostly German, or more precisely, a
dialect spoken in south-west Germany in the 18th Century This is where I spent
most of my childhood.
My father worked as an engineer in a managerial position in a Company My
mother was a primary school teacher. Actually - she used to remind me again and
again - she would have liked to study mathematics, but in communist Romania
in the 1950s it wasn’t possible due to her allegedly ‘bourgeois’ background. She
was expelled from school several times, and only later was she able to obtain her
school-leaving certificate with considerable effort. This circumstance, as well as
several other calamities that befell the generation of my grandparents, including
material dispossession and deportation to Soviet labour camps in 1945, eventually
led to the view: ‘No one can take away what you have learned. And you always
carry it with you wherever you go.’ Education was the only asset worth achieving.
For this reason, our house was full of books. My parents acquired anything that
even remotely seemed interesting. And they liked to travel - but that was only pos-
sible within the borders of the country Nevertheless, we were aware of what was
happening outside Romania, as we were well informed from listening to Western
radio stations.
Having a teacher as mother, who understandably did everything in her power
to educate me early, I learned to read at a young age. And because I didn’t particu-
larly like kindergarten, she often took me along to her classes. Things were more
exciting there. I had no siblings, and I spent many hours with books such as an en-
cyclopaedic lexicon from West Germany, which I studied in detail. I was especially
fascinated by things, such as the chain reaction, even though I didn’t quite under-
stand it. And I still vividly recall watching the moon landing on television which
otherwise was full of communist Propaganda. But this made the highlights all the
more interesting: Science fiction thrillers from America that were transmitted on
Sundays in English with Romanian subtitles. That was very exciting, and somehow
the aspiration grew in me that I later wanted to become a scientist.
Our classes were held mostly in German, because Romania maintained basic
education in all the minority languages. We learned French as a foreign language.

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