The atmosphere in which I was brought up was decidedly bookish. My father Dr Simon Siegmund Carl Popper, like his two brothers, was a doctor of law of the University of Vienna. He had a large library, and there were books everywhere—with the exception of the dining room, in which there was a Bösendorfer concert grand and many volumes of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. My father, who was the same age as Sigmund Freud—whose works he possessed, and had read on publication—was a barrister and solicitor. About my mother Jenny Popper, née Schiff, I shall say more when I come to speak about music. My father was an accomplished speaker. I heard him plead in court only once, in 1924 or 1925, when I myself was the defendant. The case was, in my opinion, clear-cut.2 I had therefore not asked my father to defend me, and was embarrassed when he insisted. But the utter simplicity, clarity, and sincerity of his speech impressed me greatly.
My father worked hard in his profession. He had been a friend and partner of the last liberal Burgomaster of Vienna, Dr Carl Grübl, and had taken over his law office. This office was part of the large apartment in which we lived, in the very heart of Vienna, opposite the central door of the cathedral (Stephanskirche).2a He worked long hours in this office, but he was really more of a scholar than a lawyer. He was a historian (the historical part of his library was considerable) and was interested especially in the Hellenistic period, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He wrote poetry, and translated Greek and Latin verse into German. (He rarely spoke of these matters. It was by sheer accident that I found one day some light-hearted verse translations of Horace. His special gifts were a light touch and a strong sense of humour.) He was greatly interested in philosophy. I still possess his Plato, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Eduard von Hartmann; J. S. Mill’s collected works, in a German translation edited by Theodor Gomperz (whose Greek Thinkers he valued hightly); most of Kierkegaard’s, Nietzsche’s, and Eucken’s works, and those of Ernst Mach; Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Language and Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (both of which seem to have had some influence on Wittgenstein);3 and translations of most of Darwin’s books. (Pictures of Darwin and of Schopenhauer hung in his study.) There were, of course, the standard authors of German, French, English, Russian, and Scandinavian literature. But one of his main interests was in social problems. He not only possessed the chief works of Marx and Engels, of Lassalle, Karl Kautsky, and Eduard Bernstein, but also those of the critics of Marx: Böhm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Anton Menger, P. A. Kropotkin, and Josef Popper-Lynkeus (apparently a distant relative of mine, since he was born in Kolin, the little town from which my paternal grandfather came). The library had also a pacifist section, with books by Bertha von Suttner, Friedrich Wilhelm Förster, and Norman Angell.
Thus books were part of my life long before I could read them. The first book which made a big and lasting impression on me was read by my mother to my two sisters and to me, shortly before I learned to read. (I was the youngest of three children.) It was a book for children by the great Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, in a beautiful German translation (Wunderbare Reise des kleinen Nils Holgersson mit den Wildgänsen; the English translation is entitled The Wonderful Adventures of Nils). For many, many years I reread this book at least once a year; and in the course of time I probably read everything by Selma Lagerlöf more than once. I do not like her first novel, Gösta Berling, though it is no doubt very remarkable. But every single one of her other books remains, for me, a masterpiece.
Learning to read, and to a lesser degree, to write, are of course the major events in one’s intellectual development. There is nothing to compare with it, since very few people (Helen Keller is the great exception) can remember what it meant for them to learn to speak. I shall be for ever grateful to my first teacher, Emma Goldberger, who taught me the three R’s. They are, I think, the only essentials a child has to be taught; and some children do not even need to be taught in order to learn these. Everything else is atmosphere, and learning through reading and thinking.
Apart from my parents, my first schoolteacher, and Selma Lagerlöf, the greatest influence on my early intellectual development was, I suppose, my lifelong friend Arthur Arndt, a relative of Ernst Moritz von Arndt who had been one of the famous founding fathers of German nationalism in the period of the Napoleonic wars.4 Arthur Arndt was an ardent anti-nationalist. Though of German descent, he was born in Moscow, where he also spent his youth. He was my senior by about twenty years—he was near thirty when first I met him in 1912. He had studied engineering at the University of Riga, and had been one of the student leaders during the abortive Russian revolution of 1905. He was a socialist and at the same time a strong opponent of the Bolsheviks, some of whose leaders he knew personally from 1905. He described them as the Jesuits of socialism, that is, capable of sacrificing innocent men, even of their own persuasion, because great ends justified all means. Arndt was not a convinced Marxist, yet he thought that Marx had been the most important theorist of socialism so far. He found me very willing to listen to socialist ideas; nothing, I felt, could be more important than to end poverty.
Arndt was also deeply interested (much more so than my father was) in the movement which had been started by the pupils of Ernst Mach and of Wilhelm Ostwald, a society whose members called themselves “The Monists”. (There was a connection with the famous American journal, The Monist, to which Mach was contributor.) They were interested in science, epistemology, and in what nowadays would be called the philosophy of science. Among the Monists of Vienna the “half-socialist” Popper-Lynkeus had a considerable following, which included Otto Neurath.
The first book on socialism I read (probably under the influence of my friend Arndt—my father was reluctant to influence me) was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. I must have read it when I was about twelve, and it made a great impression on me. Arndt took me on Sunday excursions, arranged by the Monists, to the Vienna Woods, and on these occasions he explained and discussed Marxism and Darwinism. No doubt most of this was far beyond my grasp. But it was interesting and exciting.
One of these Sunday excursions by the Monists was on June 28, 1914. Towards evening, as we approached the outskirts of Vienna, we heard that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent of Austria, had been assassinated in Sarajevo. A week or so after this my mother took me and my two sisters for our summer holidays to Alt-Aussee, a village not far from Salzburg. And there, on my twelfth birthday, I received a letter from my father in which he said that he was sorry not to be able to come for my birthday, as he had intended, “because, unfortunately, there is war” (“denn es ist leider Krieg”). Since this letter arrived on the day of the actual declaration of war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, it seems that my father realized that it was coming.