Autobiography Stefan Hell

In retrospect, I believe I was very Fortunate that many of my teachers at the time
were in their late twenties or thirties. And they were uncommonly motivated to
inspire their pupils. I still remember how my chemistry teacher explained the basic
principles of atomic structure in a compelling way, and how amazed I was to learn
that most of the atomic mass resided in the much smaller nucleus.
After grade eight, at the age of fourteen, I was able to obtain one of the few
places at the Nikolaus Lenau Lyceum in Timisoara, one of the best secondary
schools in the country. There you could specialise in mathematics and physics, and
it was there that I was first propelled towards physics, as I had won a local compe-
tition and realised that physics was fun. On the other hand, daily life was difficult,
and I associate my time in the school dormitory in Timisoara with going to bed
with a grumbling stomach. It was, after all, communist Romania, and Ceausescu
was in the process of expanding his dictatorship. The regime in Bucharest - unlike
the people on the Street - was growing increasingly nationalistic and bizarre. The
flood of Propaganda let the feeling grow that it,s not good to live under a dictator-
ship - especially with a minority background. And it was easy to conclude the latter
from my last name. And another feeling took root in me: things that are publicly
asserted and constantly repeated aren’t necessarily true. Quite the contrary: I be-
came sceptical about accepted opinions.
Coupled with having no prospect of improvement, all this meant that most of
the people who could even remotely claim a German or Jewish background tried
to leave the country. But that was far from easy.
When a classmate emigrated with her family, I convinced my parents that they
too should apply for an exit visa. After two years of uncertainty and inconven-
ience, we were allowed to depart for West Germany with a few belongings in April
1978. I was fifteen. We had no close relatives in Germany, and we settled in Lud-
wigshafen, an industrial city west of the river Rhine, that is, far away from the iron
curtain. And I also found Ludwigshafen to be good, because I had seen on the map
that the university town of Heidelberg was just a few kilometers away, and that
struck me as a goal worth pursuing.
I was thrilled about the opportunities in the West, though this was also accom-
panied by my parents’ struggle to settle in Germany. In Ludwigshafen I attended
a secondary school, and soon realised that I was far ahead of my classmates in the
Sciences. I also had a fantastic physics teacher who gave me great encouragement.
Then again, my English was limited to what I had picked up from non-dubbed
American and British films in Romania. Finally, I learned that I could graduate
from secondary school with only French as foreign language, and I took advantage
of a rule that allowed me to graduate one year earlier than usual. I did that and be-
gan to study physics at the University of Heidelberg in 1981.
Studying physics was the next great liberation, because the material to study
was not dependent on Zeitgeist or politics. At the same time, the atmosphere in Hei-

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