ON A SULTRY DAY IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, I dragged my heavy bags the final 800 meters from the train station to the student dorm in Jena. My stomach was growling, my mouth was dry, and my muscles were weary, but my mood was upbeat. After all, this was the first day of my life as an adult.

Jena was a dream come true, a real city with public transportation and multiple establishments of every kind—butchers, bakers, clothing stores, and restaurants. And then, of course, there was the magnificent university with its ten thousand students and four-hundred-year history.

When I finally arrived at Nollendorfer Straße 26, I paused for a moment and looked up in wonderment at the oddly configured three-story hotel, built in the early 1900s, that now served as a college dorm. I checked in at the desk, received my room assignment, and made my way upstairs to the two-hundred-square-foot bare-walled rectangle, with three metal bunks, a worn wooden table, and a roughly constructed armoire that I would share with five other bright young men for the next ten months. When I saw that I was the first to arrive, I claimed what dorm experience had taught me to be the best sleeping location—the upper bunk of the bed furthest from the door.

Famished by now, I devoured the two sandwiches my mother had packed me for the trip and climbed onto my bunk to wait for my roommates to arrive. While eating, I was suddenly overcome with thankfulness for my mother. Even though she had not given me the love I was looking for as a child, she had taken very good care of me and my brother. So I pulled out a pen and a piece of paper and wrote a letter expressing my sincere gratitude and also apologized for any trouble I may have caused her in the past.

When my roommates began to trickle in, I watched with some amusement as they tried to cram their belongings into the overflowing armoire. Most of their belongings stayed in their suitcases, which were stowed beneath the beds. As cramped and sparsely furnished as our living quarters seemed, we soon found out that we were the lucky ones. The rest of the first-year male chemistry students—East Germany’s best and brightest—were housed together in a single large room in a building at the other end of town.

The last of my roommates to arrive was Klaus, a redhead with intense, deep-set eyes. I would soon find out that Klaus was a rarity on campus: a Catholic who made no attempt to hide his faith in God. But he knew better than to try to proselytize his five atheist roommates. Klaus was the only Christian I met during my six years at the university. Whatever remained of a once-vibrant theological faculty had no voice on campus now, and in our philosophy classes we were taught Marxism-Leninism to the exclusion of any other philosophy or religion.

Once classes began, the workload was overwhelming. We had science coming at us from every angle—through lectures, seminars, and labs, along with copious amounts of assigned reading and a seemingly endless series of lab reports to submit. Knowing that the students admitted to the program were drawn from the top 10 percent in the nation, the elite faculty had put together a curriculum that amounted to a full-frontal scientific assault. The demands of this “chemistry boot camp” were so high, in fact, that one quarter of the freshman chemistry majors would resign by the end of the year.

We soon fell into a schedule that had us on the go from 6:00 a.m. till 11:00 p.m. on weekdays, with a mandatory four-hour lab session on Saturday morning. After that, most students who had families close enough to school went home for the rest of the weekend. In my room, only Spencer and I, who both lived long hours away, stayed back on the weekends.

I often hung out with my new friend Günter, who lived in Jena. His family welcomed me with open arms. Günter and I would play chess, shoot the breeze, or listen to records from his eclectic music collection—everything from classical to beat to jazz. On Saturday evenings we would often head to the Rosenkeller student club for beer and dancing—well, mostly for beer. Going in, the hope was always that I might connect with a pretty young lady, but invariably I would walk back to the dorm around midnight, somewhat inebriated, without having met anyone.

One of the first things I did after arriving at the university was seek out the basketball coach. Although my experience consisted of exactly one game in high school, I knew this was a game I should be playing. At six feet three inches, I was one of the tallest people on campus, and I could run and jump with the best of them. Coach Stange put me on the second team for my freshman year, but after holding my own in practice against our six-foot-seven-inch starting center, I earned the respect of my teammates, and by the beginning of the next season, I had worked my way up to the first team.

For the next four years, I enjoyed all the practices, games, and tournaments—and, above all, the camaraderie. This was the very first time I had ever been part of a team that had to work together to be successful. I loved it. We were united in our beefs about the coach, and we won and lost as a cohesive team. Either way, there were always a few beers involved.

The basketball team became a family for me, a family to which I developed more of an attachment than to my real family at home. During my university years, basketball was the most important thing in my life emotionally. I felt cared for and appreciated, even on days when I didn’t play very well. The teamwork and camaraderie were connections I had never experienced before, and I came to appreciate the value of being part of something bigger than myself.

Even as I worked to fit in and find my place with the basketball team, in the classroom I found ways—intentionally or not—to set myself apart. Though I was not necessarily the brightest among this elite group of achievers, I managed to establish a reputation for brilliance through hard work, cleverness, and a bit of serendipity.

During our freshman year, the most important interactive small group session was in our general chemistry class. The instructor, Dr. Walther, was a short man whose distinctive features reminded me of Pinocchio. Dr. Walther was a classic example of the breed of elite academicians who rose to prominence in the GDR: smart, incisive, and oh-so-full of himself. He treated us students as if we were on borrowed time—which many of us were, I suppose. Most of our peers seemed intimidated by the mighty Dr. Walther, but Günter and I saw him more as a challenge, and we wore our own self-confidence on our sleeves.

When Doc, as we called him, advised the class to memorize a key formula of thermodynamics in preparation for an upcoming test, I opened my big mouth and blurted out, “No problem. If you forget the formula, you can always just derive it from scratch.”

Günter, who usually sat next to me, pulled at my arm in horror and whispered, “Are you crazy?” He knew what was coming, but what he didn’t know was that I had spent the night before memorizing the fifteen steps needed to derive the formula.

The expression on Dr. Walther’s face said it all: I’ve got you now, you arrogant twit! With a smirk, he stepped grandly to the side and invited me up to the blackboard.

“Well then, Herr Dittrich, derive away!”

I walked calmly to the front of the room and picked up the chalk. After glancing back at my classmates, I began to write out the formula, step by logical step. When I was done, I underlined the final result with a bit of a flourish and turned around to bask in the glory of my accomplishment. Dr. Walther appeared dumbfounded, and the class could barely contain their joy over the defeat of their tormentor. Günter gave me a big grin and flashed a victory sign just above his desk.

Doc’s respect for my performance was clear when he turned to the class and said, “You have just witnessed the performance of a student who will one day be a real scientist.”

From that point on, I became the go-to guy in class discussions when other students responded with silence to a difficult question. Occasionally, the professor would sigh and ask rhetorically, “Do I have to go to Dittrich again?” Of course, this meant I always had to be prepared. But I learned to focus on the toughest subjects and often didn’t know the answers to more basic questions. Still, this “trap” I had set for myself taught me how to discern what was useful and most important.

Continuing to work hard and get good test results bore fruit at the university. Apparently, my reputation as a whiz kid carried over to other sections of the chemistry program as well, and the professors were always looking for ways to trip me up. Once, during organic chemistry, the lab professor gave me a mystery liquid to analyze. Normally, this would have been some kind of organic liquid such as benzene or an ester. But after three days of futile testing, it finally dawned on me: It was tap water. Now, to prove that I had discovered what the substance was, I had to deliver a derivative, another substance made from the original. When I handed the professor a boiled egg, the Dittrich legend continued to grow.

When it came to lab work, I was a sloppy—and sometimes dangerous—scientist. As one of my professors once remarked, “It seems that Albrecht’s theoretical genius is way ahead of his practical prowess.” That pretty much summed up my performance.

One day I was talking with Günter across the aisle. Rather than turn around on my stool, I sat down on my worktable with my back close to a flaming Bunsen burner. When I felt unexpected warmth, I turned slowly to my neighbor and said matter-of-factly, “I think I’m on fire.”

“You are!” he shouted.

Günter immediately put out the flames with a very liberal dose of water, and other students stepped in and “helped” until I was soaking wet. Then we all had a good laugh.

On one particular day in the lab, the assigned experiment gave me pause. I consulted the scientific literature to make sure I had not misunderstood. No, it was all correct. In order to conduct the experiment, I was required to use mustard gas—a chemical weapon that had been used during World War I. It causes severe burns and blistering to every tissue it touches and often results in a painful death.

As with many difficult lab assignments, I consulted with Günter.

“Listen,” I whispered. “I got this task which seems rather simple, but it involves mustard gas.”

“Are you joking?” Günter responded.

“No, I’m not joking. Take a look.” I showed him the page in the chemical journal where I had found the recipe.

“Don’t do it—this is nuts!” Günter said adamantly.

“But—but if I go to a secondary assignment, the best grade I can get is a B.”

“So you get a B,” Günter responded, “and we all live to play chess on Sunday.”

Clearly he did not understand that a B was unacceptable for Albrecht Dittrich. I thought about it for a moment and created a plan. As I walked toward the exit, I called back to Günter, “I’ll be careful, and on Sunday I’ll beat you at chess.”

After securing the proper permissions from my professor, I went to find the janitor, who would retrieve the mustard gas for me from a basement bunker in one of the buildings. My confidence took another hit when he dragged out a heavy, medium-size gas tank that looked just as scary as its contents—with peeling, light-green paint and some sizable rust spots.

Determined not to back out now, I set up my equipment in the outdoor lab. The configuration was rather simple: a flask on a tripod filled with a solvent and covered with a stopper with two holes, one for the intake of the mustard gas, the other for the gaseous new compound to be piped into another flask that was sitting on a bed of dry ice. The stopper did not fit very well, but getting another stopper from the supply room meant a half-hour delay, so I decided to go ahead with what I had.

I donned my gas mask and turned on the Bunsen burner. Moving over to the tank of mustard gas, I slowly turned the valve until I saw bubbles going through the now boiling liquid.

There was only one problem: the janitor’s very large dog, who was sitting under a tree outside the building. As soon as he saw me with the gas mask on, he got spooked and charged at me, barking violently. With my heart pounding, I hurried away from the lab setup and removed the gas mask. The dog immediately settled down and trotted away.

As I looked around for the janitor, in hopes that he would take his dog away so I could put the gas mask on again, I suddenly saw flames shooting out of the flask with the bubbling solution.

Cursing the faulty stopper, as if it were the fault of that little piece of rubber I had not placed correctly on the flask, I weighed my options: I could either put on the gas mask and risk being attacked by the dog again, or I could leave the mask off and risk mustard gas poisoning.

Choosing the latter option, which somehow seemed the less risky, I took a deep breath, ran over to the tripod, doused the flames, closed the mustard gas valve, and shut down the experiment.

For the next twenty-four hours, I checked my skin, mouth, and eyes for signs of poisoning, but I also had to admit to the professor that my experiment had failed. He gave me another assignment, and I got the dreaded B, but I lived to tell about it. Then, to add insult to injury, Günter trounced me in chess that weekend after telling me in so many words, “I told you so.”