Of her son Franz, Sophie Boas recalled, “‘The ardently desired boy was born July 9, 1858. He was a weak child. He wouldn’t cry and after the doctor spanked him, he greeted this bad world with energetic cries. And these energetic cries were significant for his life.’” Following Ashkenazi custom, the parents named their first son Franz Uri Boas, after his paternal grandfather, Feibes Uri Boas—with the “F” of Feibes and of Franz symbolizing the continuity of the first name and “Uri” bequeathing the Hebrew name, the meaning of which is “my fire,” “my light,” derived from “God is my light.” Franz grew to dislike his middle name and never used it.1
The year before Franz’s birth, Sophie and Meier Boas had lost their first-born child, Helene (b. June 1852), at age five. A second daughter had been born to them in July 1854; Antonie (or Toni, as she was affectionately called) would be Franz’s beloved older sister.2 In an autobiographical essay that he wrote at age nineteen Boas remarked, “Shortly after I was born my parents took in a little two-year-old girl [named Lina] who stayed in our house for nine years [until 1867] and whom we were accustomed to consider as a sister.” Likely his parents’ grief over the death of Helene was eased by this little girl and by the arrival of baby Franz. Just a few days after Franz’s third birthday, his mother gave birth to a baby boy named Ernst, who died of whooping cough in his first year. Franz wrote, “I have only very dim recollections of him, but through his death a brother was taken from me forever; later, to be sure, I got two more little sisters, [Hedwig (b. 1863) and Anna Margaret (b. 1867)], but I never again have had a brother.”3
Franz Boas assumed all of the expectations that his parents had for their only son. As Cole writes, “Without quite stating or perhaps yet realizing it, Franz was now and forever the only son of Meier and Sophie. He wore a heavy mantle of parental expectation and filial responsibility.” Franz Boas repaid these expectations in his respect for and loyalty to his parents, as expressed in the following birthday wishes to his father, written when he was eleven years old: “I promise to make you happy by always being obedient and that I shall try to become a worthwhile person. I wish you all the best in this world and I am sure you love me as much as I do you.”4
Franz Boas’s paternal ancestors, as Brilling notes, likely came to Westphalia in the last decade of the seventeenth century from the Rhineland and southern Jewish communities. They lived in Werther in the county of Ravensberg, and in Bielefeld, both in the northern part of Rhineland.5 Following the order in 1808 to take a last name, Bendix Feibes Aron Levi, who then resided in Lübbecke, took the name of Boas, while his relatives in Werther took the name of Weinberg. As Brilling remarks, it is not known why Bendix Feibes selected the biblical name of Boas from the Book of Ruth, nor why his relatives in Werther took the name of Weinberg.6 Perhaps the adoption of a new last name seemed a novelty to Jews, maybe even slightly superfluous to the first bearers of the patronymic of Boas and Weinberg. Possibly also the relatives didn’t know the last name that the others had chosen, nor perhaps did they see any need to agree upon their selection.
Bendix Boas became a successful textile merchant in Lübbecke and was well established in the Jewish community where he served as Mohel, one who performed the circumcision as part of the ritual of Brit Milah that, on the eighth day after birth, ushered the baby boy into the covenant of Israel. His sons were among those he ritually circumcised. Bendix Boas allowed the third of his four sons, Meyer (b. 1803), to study medicine in Göttingen and thus to enter “the only academic discipline” to which Jewish students had access in Germany at that time. Meyer Boas was to practice medicine in Büren (1836–51) and then in Paderborn, where he died on March 13, 1881. Brilling writes, “He belonged to the first academic Jews under the Westphalian Jews in his family. He was the great uncle of Professor Franz Boas,” and he appeared as “Dr. Boas (Paderborn),” on the genealogical chart, dated March 1, 1930, compiled by Franz Boas’s maternal first cousin, Richard Kaufmann of Munich.7
Bendix Boas was a merchant specializing in drapery cloth and fabric. He passed on his business acumen to his son, Feibes Uri Boas (1798–1836), one of his seven children, who moved from Lübbecke to Minden to marry Karoline Frank (1802–81). Karoline was the only child of Joseph Meyer, who had “named himself ‘Frank’ in the time of Napoleon after his place of origin, Franken,” or Franconia. In his eighties Franz Boas related the following family story to his son, Ernst, who recorded it as follows: “F. B.’s father’s mother’s father [Joseph Meyer Frank] was born in Sommerach on the Main [in lower Franconia]. At the age of 13 he was given one Thaler and told to make his way in the world. The first night out a teacher stole his Thaler. Some woman took him in. He sailed down the Rhine on a raft and settled in Holland, then in western Westphalia, first in Hausberge, then in Minden.” On his own at the age of thirteen, at which a Jewish male was considered an adult, Joseph Meyer Frank learned hard lessons, encountered meanness and kindness, and managed to find his way in the world. On April 14, 1808, he became a citizen in Minden, when he paid “7 Thaler 19 Groschen,” and signed an oath of loyalty to “His Majesty of Westphalia.” Concomitant with becoming a citizen of Minden and taking the last name of Frank, Joseph Meyer Frank purchased a house in 1808.8
Following Prussian law, through his marriage in 1821 to Karoline Frank, the only child of Joseph Meyer Frank, Feibes Boas was permitted to apply for and was granted “Bürgerrecht [citizenship rights] from the city manager” of Minden on September 12, 1821. Having studied for one semester at the university in Münster, Franz Boas’s paternal grandfather, Feibes Boas, became a textile merchant and opened a store on the Obermarkt. As Lehmann recalled, Karoline’s grandparents “had a textile store, [with] clothes and linen fabrics, but they were also forced to sell porcelain [made by] the Royal Porcelain Factory Berlin . . . , because otherwise as Jews in Minden, Westphalia they could not buy a house, or were not allowed to open a business.”9 Lehmann reflected further, “Grandfather Feibes Boas died very young allegedly as a result of a common cold”; or perhaps, as she remembered from the testimony of Dr. Jahn, the military medical physician, from tuberculosis, since her father, Meyer, was exempt from military service because “his father had tuberculosis.” Karoline Frank Boas was “extraordinarily well educated, she spoke fluent French,” and was said to have served “one time as an interpreter for Jérôme-Napoléon, King of Westphalia.”10
Fifteen years after her marriage, Karoline Boas was a widow with five children. Being the second oldest, Franz’s father, Meier, was just two months shy of his thirteenth birthday. With what must have taken steely courage and composure, Karoline placed an announcement in a newspaper of her husband’s death and of her intention to carry on the family mercantile business of Feibes Boas:
It has pleased the benevolent Creator, in His unfathomable decree, to free last night from this earthly life my beloved husband and tender father of 5 children not yet of age.
I bring to the many friends and acquaintances knowledge of this great loss to me and, with this notice, pledge that I will continue unaltered the business that has operated for several years and ask that the trust they gave to him who is now eternal be kindly transferred to me.11
The family of Sophie Meyer, Franz Boas’s mother, had also been in trade for several generations. Her forebears came from an old Westphalian-Jewish family from Petershagen, located seven miles north of Minden on the Weser River, a bishop principality under whose protection “since 1550 one of the oldest Jewish communities in Westphalia was created.” Thus, the maternal relatives of Franz Boas had resided in the environs of Minden for several hundred years. The Jews of Petershagen were allowed, as stipulated in their letters of protection, to deal in “trade goods of all kinds,” and, more specifically, to trade in livestock, to slaughter and sell the meat, and to run pawn shops.12
Jonas Meyer (1787–1851), married Jette, née Menke (b. 1792), at some point after 1808 and moved to Minden, where their daughter, Sophie, mother of Franz Boas, was born on July 12, 1828.13 Settling in Minden, Sophie’s father, Jonas Meyer, purchased a four-story Westphalian half-timbered structure in 1820. This impressive building served both as a home to what would be his large family and as a location for his “grocery store, beer brewery and grain store.” Lehmann extracted the following description from her mother’s letters: “No doubt, Minden was then a small farm town. The parents had a cow, servants, and maids, and they were for the most part financially well off, although there were supposedly setbacks with the grain business. His wife Henriette, née Menke (called Jette) [1792–1851], came from a small Brunswick town, Gifhorn. She seems to have been a fine woman, gentle and always mediating between father and children.” Jette Meyer gave birth to eleven children, four of whom died during childhood. All of the children were provided with good educations: the boys attended the Gymnasium and the girls, Sophie (1828–1916), Berthe, and Fanny (1834–56), went to the Minden Töchterschule, the secondary school for girls. Lehmann noted, “The parents were devout Jews, kept a kosher house, but didn’t cut themselves off and associated themselves with Christians, too.” Jonas Meyer was “often irascible.” Sophie, who adored her mother, “tried everything in her power to make her hard life bearable.” During her free time at home, Sophie helped her mother care for the large family by knitting socks for the boys and stockings for the girls, for “at that time there were no knitting and weaving machines. All of this work had to be done at home.” Sophie’s mother was busy preparing her daughter’s dowry by having yarn spun and linens woven.14
Sophie’s high school record noted her outstanding achievements. Her teachers wrote that she was a “model student, among the best the school ever had, and [that] her departure left the staff with deep sadness and an earnest wish that her future would be as blessed as it deserved.” Given religious instruction by Rabbi Edler, Sophie “was as a young girl devout and religious, especially during the time when she was confirmed, between 14 and 16 years old.” Sophie was a member of “the Jewish club, ‘Union,’ where they danced, put on plays and cultivated all forms of social life.” 15
Prior to her marriage to Meier Boas, Sophie was drawn into the intellectual and political foment that culminated in the revolutions of 1848. She and her younger sister Fanny participated in the Minden revolutionary circle. Abraham Jacobi, a central figure in the movement, would later play a major role in the development of Franz Boas’s professional life and become his uncle through marriage to his mother’s sister, Fanny. Born to parents with few resources—the district records of 1851 described his father as belonging to the “‘uneducated, ordinary village Jews’”— Jacobi had been a sickly baby, not expected to survive. Jacobi’s mother was determined that her son should escape their meager circumstances and made sure that he received an education. Jacobi’s father was a close friend of Franz Boas’s maternal grandfather, Jonas Meyer. Jacobi journeyed to Minden from the neighboring village of Hartum to attend the Gymnasium and was welcomed into the Meyer home, where he was a close friend of Sophie’s brother, Abraham Meyer, who had been born the same year as Jacobi. In exchange for the family’s hospitality, Jacobi gave lessons to eleven-year-old Jacob and likely also to ten-year-old Fanny.16
Jacobi and the Meyer brothers were fortunate to be able to attend the Minden Gymnasium. Recognized for its excellent faculty, it was the first Protestant secondary school established in Westphalia. Douglas Cole notes, “Under Dr. Siegmund Imanuel, a converted Jew from Hamburg and the school’s director from 1822 until his death . . . , the Gymnasium’s prestige had grown as its curriculum was reformed, its staff strengthened, and a more practical Realgymnasia program added.” Among the teachers were several with progressive political opinions. “The liberal and democratic [ideals] of one of these, Gymnasium teacher Theodor Herzberg,” Cole writes, “found fertile ground in Jacobi and the young student remained in touch with Herzberg and the younger Meyers after he left Minden to study medicine.”17
During his 1849 summer vacation in Minden, Jacobi rejoined the revolutionary group. This democratic Jewish association union consisted of Jewish political dissidents, among whom were Sophie, Fanny, and their youngest brother, Emil. In 1850–51 Jacobi began work with the Communist Bund in Cologne and maintained “an intense correspondence with Sophie and her younger sister.” In one letter Jacobi enlisted Fanny’s help in selling lottery tickets to benefit German revolutionary exiles in Switzerland; he enclosed a list of sympathizers that included Franz Boas’s father, Meier, and his uncle Aron. Sophie and Fanny, at the latter’s instigation, formed their own Kränzchen, or reading circle, “in October 1850 to read and discuss political literature.” In January 1851 Sophie travelled to Stuttgart to meet with a leading Jewish revolutionary, Louis (or Ludwig) Kugelmann, originally from Lemförde, a small town north of Minden, who had been part of the Minden political circle. The following month Jacobi sent Sophie and Fanny a copy of The Communist Manifesto to read and discuss.18
Sophie’s life changed dramatically with the death of her mother, Jette Menke Meyer, on February 5, 1851. As she explained in a letter to Jacobi, dated March 8–12, 1851, she was now called upon to be completely practical. While she acquiesced to her new circumstances, she felt bereft, not only because of her mother’s death but also because of the loss of her intellectual and political connections. She wrote, “‘What I do now, I do gladly; it makes me happy, as is fitting to any girl, to be busy, but it does often make me terribly sad that I must sacrifice so much of my previous intellectual life.’” She had begun her letter with an “‘expression of sympathy for the political exiles,’” and with a positive view on dire political circumstances. “‘The consciousness of our impotence, our inability to do even the smallest thing, would completely defeat us if we did [not] hold up the hope for a better future.’” The next day Sophie wrote about the blind spot that the revolutionaries had for the position of women: “‘Sometime, perhaps after centuries, when all humanity is recognized as human, even the yoke under which women are burdened will be broken. They too will lift themselves up, elevated by circumstances and the times, and rise to the place that is their due.’” She emphasized, “‘Believe me, my friend that then and only then will you all be able to be happy.’” She concluded with a plea for the inclusion of women in the revolutionary movement and with a statement of women’s power: “‘Do not leave us so alone, we too have strength.’”19
Jacobi continued in both his medical studies and in his revolutionary work. In May 1851 he was in Berlin to take the state medical exam and possibly also to help found a branch of the Communist Bund. As he later recalled, “‘The moment I put my foot in Berlin where I had to take my state examinations, I was invited to the city jail by a dozen irresistibly courteous constables. Mistaking me for a star of political magnitude, the authorities had included my name with that of K. Marx . . . and [several] others.’” Jacobi was carrying letters from Sophie and Fanny, so the Minden police carried out a search of the Meyer home in June 1851. Herzig includes the transcript of Jacobi’s trial, in which Jacobi commented on Sophie Meyer’s letter from May 24–25, 1851, “that this . . . four-page-long letter clearly showed that he overtly told his two friends [Sophie and Fanny] all he knew about his Cologne friends.” Compelled to testify in court about their involvement in revolutionary activities, “Sophie and Fanny being just women, their political activities—reading, discussing and distributing ‘revolutionary material,’ Fanny even selling tickets for a lottery to support wounded and refugee revolutionaries—were not being prosecuted any further and in the police records their activities were being played down.” Harmless they might have been, but their Kränzchen “was forbidden and dissolved.”20
Jacobi remained in captivity for eighteen months, moved as he was between prisons in Berlin, Cologne, and Bielefeld. While he was incarcerated in Bielefeld’s Sparrenberg Castle, Sophie and Fanny managed to visit him. Finally, he was charged with lèse-majesté, the crime of insult against a sovereign, and sentenced to six additional months in the state prison at Minden. On the eve of his release, a kindly jailer tipped him off: the authorities planned to arrest him again on another charge. So, with the assistance of the jailer, who released him from prison very early in the morning, Jacobi fled Minden. Along with many other “major exiled democratic leaders in most of Europe,” he went to England, first visiting Karl Marx in London and then staying with Friedrich Engels in Manchester.21
Unable to practice medicine in England, Jacobi sailed for America in October 1853. He settled in New York City and lived among German compatriots in the large population of political refugees, many of whom were affectionately called “48ers.” Fanny Meyer, who was engaged to Jacobi, traveled to New York in the company of her brother, Jacob, to marry Jacobi. Tragically, Fanny died in 1856 at the age of twenty-two while delivering their first child, a boy, who survived only one day.22
Franz Boas’s forebears had established themselves in the Prussian city of Minden, Westphalia, on the Weser River. His parents, Meier and Sophie, both from well-to-do merchant families, married in August 1851 and made their first home on Ritterstraße in the upper city. Meier Boas worked in the mercantile business that had been in his family for at least three generations. Mid-ninteeenth-century Minden had a small Jewish population with approximately 200 Jews among the 12,252 inhabitants (85 percent Protestant, 13 percent Catholic, and 2 percent Jewish). The Jewish merchants, specifically those of Minden, had been channeled into the mercantile trade by Prussian legal statutes for well over one hundred years and made a smashing success of it. Among the leaders in the “textile and clothing industry,” as listed in the 1857 business directory for Minden, were ten Jewish firms. Most of the Jews were middle- or upper-class merchants with “a few bankers [and] a sprinkling of artisans and professionals.” Integrated into the “civil society of the city,” Minden Jews still maintained a strong social identification among themselves. While the city had no ghetto, or Judengasse (Jewish lane), and thus the Jews were not forced to live in tight proximity with each other, still they were connected by social, economic, religious, and kinship ties.23
Sophie was married six months after the death of her mother, in August 1851, and her father died two months later. She had stepped aside from her political work but, along with her husband, she maintained the ideals of the 1848 revolutions in her home, passing them onto their children. Toward the end of his life, Franz Boas remarked, “The background of my early thinking is a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force. My father, liberal but not active in public affairs; my mother, idealistic, with a lively interest in public matters, the founder . . . of the kindergarten of my home town.” For Boas these ideals were threaded throughout his life as “equality of opportunity, education, political and intellectual liberty, the rejection of dogma and the search for scientific truth, and identification with humanity and devotion to its progress.”24
Sophie’s work to establish the Fröbel kindergarten in Minden was closely linked to these egalitarian ideals. The method of instruction was based on the educational model developed by Friedrich Fröbel, with a focus on the education of the whole child, the belief in the “innate human goodness and perfectibility” of children, and an active engagement with nature, where the child would learn through playing, as well to plant seeds and care for gardens. The metaphor of the garden was core to the approach of Fröbel, who had created the term “kindergarten” to signify a garden of children or a garden for children, and each Fröbel kindergarten had a long strip of land for the children to cultivate and plant. Sophie remarked on this at the Minden kindergarten, established in 1860 in a space provided by the apothecary Faber: “The good size space, a large room with a large garden, is nicer than in the place where I had a kindergarten before.”25
With one teacher, one assistant, and Sophie’s active participation, the school had enrolled thirty-eight kindergarteners by 1861–62. Among these were Franz, his sister, Toni, and probably some of the Meyer cousins. Franz remembered fondly, “There we were entertained with little games and talks, which at the same time were directed toward awakening our minds, especially our interest in nature by games which imitated animal life, and by keeping our own flower beds which we had to sow, water, and care for.” He added, “I do not know whether my love for nature which I possessed very early and still do possess stems from this or whether it was awakened at home where my mother kept us children busy not only as in kindergarten but also made us observe nature.” Franz’s mother recognized and nurtured her son’s love of and talent for the natural sciences. Boas recalled years later his mother reading to him from “the children’s books by Hermann Wagener which dealt with our immediate environment, the phenomena which met the child in the room, the yard, the woods, and with the animals and plants in the woods.” He continued, “I always very eagerly drank in the content and was as happy as a king with these hours of reading aloud, for I could not read as I was not yet five years old.” Emotionally very close to his father as well, the ten-year old Franz would ask “to take a walk with him, and would say, ‘Let’s talk smart.’”26
Both of Boas’s parents had been raised in observant Jewish households. His maternal and paternal grandparents, Jonas and Jette Meyer and Feibes and Karoline Boas, followed Jewish dietary laws, observed the Sabbath, and adhered closely to religious ritual observances. For Boas’s parents, the hold of Jewish law lessened. Lehmann recalled her mother saying that “her father had tormented his children so much with his piety, that it reversed itself, and all his children [had become] freethinkers.” Meier Boas’s “drift from tradition . . . began during his apprenticeship in Bonn where his faith was shaken when he saw his master, behind closed shop doors, selling on a Saturday. It suffered further erosion when, in a Bonn restaurant, he did not eat kosher and found that ‘heaven did not fall to earth nor did his mother suddenly appear threateningly before him.’” While Boas’s father had put aside strict adherence to dietary laws, nonetheless, years later, when Franz was away from home attending university in Bonn, he wrote his father to thank him for the package of food he had received: “Don’t worry, old man, about my buying anything of the pig since you take such good care of me.” In contradistinction, Boas’s mother had sent him “Pumpernickel und Schinken”—pumpernickel and ham, for the Westphalian dinner he would serve to his friends in Heidelberg.27
While Hedwig Lehmann had stressed that “our parents were free thinkers,” she also emphasized that “the children got religious instruction.” At the age of eighteen, Franz wrote Toni about the freedom of viewpoints in his family and the regret he felt for not having had religious education: “Everyone can go his own way, and one does not hamper a family member’s views.” However, he missed an intensity and honesty of intellectual exchange in their family. “We don’t seek to share our views with each other. One . . . knows little of the other’s opinion and even less how he reached it.” He continued, “Thus, no one of us really knows what views Papa has—religious as well as political. He votes for the National Liberal Party, but that’s all. I’m terribly angry that I’ve never had proper religious education. Everyone should be familiar with that nowadays. I don’t think that it would have changed my views if I had studied it properly. I’d love to take religious classes after my exam, though—preferably Judaic and Christian. But this won’t happen.” Franz concluded, “In this regard, you’ve had it much better since you enjoyed religious education before you got confirmed.”28
In what might seem an incongruous addition to family celebrations, Meier and Sophie Boas introduced the secular celebration of Christmas and other Christian holidays into their home. The children embraced Christmas with utter exuberance. Franz wrote his uncle with details of their celebration: “We spent a beautiful Christmas. We had a tree and fine presents. I got a tool box from Papa and Mama; Masius’s Nature Studies, 1st and 2nd volumes from Uncle Salomon; Far and Near, or Sketches from all parts of the world from Uncle Julius; some transfer pictures from Toni; and patterns for fret work for Toni and me, and something I wanted very much—a geologist’s hammer.” Franz was particularly fond of the books by Hermann Masius because “one can learn Latin, Greek, Italian and other languages from the footnotes.”29
While, in his younger years, Boas felt he had missed out on religious instruction, in his later years he had a different perspective. Of his parents’ religious ties, Boas wrote in 1938, “My parents had broken through the shackles of dogma. My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom.” He concluded, “Thus I was spared the struggle against religious dogma that besets the lives of so many young people.” Still, while Franz and his sister, Hedwig, stressed how slight the hold of Judaism was on their father, Meier Boas continued to attend the celebration of Jewish holidays in his parents’ home and “kept the Jewish holidays in old tradition and for filial affection to his old pious mother.” He also served as head of the Minden Jewish community and thus maintained contact with both his coreligionists and his heritage.30
As with other German Jews, the Boas family valued religious customs. There was, nonetheless, a countervailing pull toward modernization and toward a merging with the mainstream of German society. This process of “integration into German society,” or Verbürgerlichung, had been underway since the late eighteenth century. “German and Minden Jews,” Cole writes, “were already deeply assimilated into economic life, if less so into German culture and society. To the emerging generation, full emancipation and assimilation did not necessarily mean an end to their Jewishness, but it certainly meant a decline in its significance.” Shulamit Volkov writes of the gradual transition of German Jews from the benighted and legislatively restricted group of the eighteenth century to “full and equal citizens, full Bürger in Germany” in the latter part of the nineteenth century. “The story of Jewish entry into bourgeois society,” Volkov opines, meant becoming part of the Bürgertum. This entailed the adoption of “a culture, widely conceived as a system of norms and values.” For entry into the Bürgertum, Volkov identifies four criteria, all of which came to apply to the Jews of Minden, and explicitly to the Boas family from the late eighteenth century into the nineteenth: to change the community’s occupational structure—that is, to abandon “the traditional role as small trader,” and to move into commerce and industry; to learn and to use the German language; to attain the ideal of learning (Bildung); and to manifest the “bourgeois ethos and pattern of moral behaviour (Sittlichkeit).” Thus, the exchange of Christmas presents marked more than the Boas family’s secular adoption of a mainstream German religious celebration: wrapped in those Christmas presents were the markers of becoming like their German-Christian neighbors—like but not just like them, for the Boas family did not put aside the celebration of Shabbat on Friday evenings around the family table of Franz’s paternal grandmother, nor the children’s religious training with Rabbi Edler. Likely Boas and his family observed the fast of Yom Kippur, the atonement for sins, for Boas wrote to his parents the day following the ending of the fast that “atonement is happily passed.”31
Sophie’s childhood home would become her married residence in 1862. She moved back with her husband, Meier, eight-year-old Toni, and four-year-old Franz. Lehmann recalled her birthplace with fondness: “We lived in the old house of our grandparents, which originally was a genuine Westphalian farmhouse, with a barn [on the first] floor and many lofts and a few small rooms, a yard and an adjacent building for livestock and grain.” The family shared the spacious residence with Sophie’s brother, Abraham Meyer, his wife, Bertha, and their four children. Lehmann remarked, “Because Minden had been a fort until 1871, one could not live outside the gates and the walls. So my mother’s brother Abraham Meyer remodeled the house,” and succeeded in designing two very elegant residences. For the young Franz, his sisters, and his cousins, this home provided places for ready-made fantasy and adventure. The lower part of the house fronted on Market Street, opposite the military Hauptwache; stairs ran up the four stories to the Opferstraße in the upper city. Thus Franz, his three sisters, and the Meyer cousins—Julius (b. 1855), Theodor (b. 1857), Willy (b. July 24, 1858), and Adele (b. ca. 1863)—could run from the lower town to the upper town and pass the ground floor where the family businesses were housed, up through the family residences to the Opferstraße. On the ground floor Abraham Meyer had his mercantile warehouse and his grain store, complete with a small courtyard and the Hinterhaus, the original barn that he used for the storage of grain. Boas’s father, Meier, also had his office and a shop on the lower level. Meier worked in partnership with his brother, Aron, in supplying merchandise for Minden’s rural population until 1865. That year Meier began work with Sophie’s younger brother, Jacob Meyer (1834–1906), who lived in New York and operated “a lace and fine goods import business in Lower Manhattan.” As a representative in Germany for his brother-in-law’s fashionable imports, Meier provided merchandise for “the fashionable world of Minden.” Lehmann recalled, “No one could be happier than my father to get out of running the small-town store where he felt out of place.”32 With this change in his business, Meier Boas made frequent long trips to Belgium, France, and, in 1869 to New York, and he entered more actively into the successful family network of trade in fashionable goods that connected relatives throughout Europe and across the Atlantic.
On their floor of the building, the Boas family had the four front bedrooms: “Two were facing the market, one was pitch dark, it was Toni’s room, and our dining room and children’s room faced our neighbor’s large sloping roof.” The children found it to be “an ideal room”; they could climb out the window onto the flat roof of their uncle’s office to “see the market and our yard” below, and Franz and Willy planted a garden there. As Franz wrote to his aunt in April 1870, “Just think, I have planted a garden on the roof next to the children’s room. I have sown all kinds of flowers and almost all of them have their first little leaves.” The next year he wrote to his sister Toni, “My garden on the roof is in quite good order and your rubber tree grows well.” In her description of the layout of the house, Lehmann recalled that “from the front a long corridor led into the back room past the kitchen. It was a large bedroom where our parents slept with Aenne in her crib and a small room for Franz and me with a built-in bathtub, naturally without running water, and then another very small room, Franz’s private room where he did all of his experiments and schoolwork.” Lehmann remembered that Franz’s room could hardly hold all of the students who came to study with him when math assignments were due. “But,” she added, “he helped everyone,” and continued, “The same residence was for the Meyers with six children, . . . so ten children all grew up together in the house.”33
The cousins were great friends, particularly the boys, Franz and Willy, who were the same age. Willy Meyer had been born just two weeks after Franz and the two were raised as siblings. “Both children,” Lehmann recalled, “got nurses who were peasant girls.” Close in age, the two cousins, Hedwig and Adele, were also fast friends. The built-in bathtub, located in Franz and Hedwig’s room, served as the children’s playful means of communication between the two residences. As Lehmann said, “We discovered that the drain of our bathtub was a wonderful speaking tube over to the Meyers, thus we often sat in the bathtub,” speaking into the drain to the Meyers children on the floor below. With multiple uses, the bathtub was topped with a board and “covered with a cloth and used as a table” during the day. Then there was the quotidian use for the tub: “Early in the morning Matilda, our young maid at that time, came with a big kettle of hot water from the kitchen. Then the battle began: who takes a bath first? There was a partition screen around Franz. He, as the older one who had to leave for school earlier, demanded his right.” The others did not wait quietly; rather, “the pillows were missiles and flew over the screen.”34
Boas’s childhood health problems began when he was four years old and coincided with the family move to Sophie’s childhood home. This large, old structure was complete with a store for the sale of grains and numerous rooms for their storage. Possibly young Franz developed allergies to mold and dust and other environmental antigens, although this diagnosis was not, of course, available to the nineteenth-century medical profession. Julia Liss suggests another explanation, that his ill health derived from familial tensions. “It does not seem unlikely,” she writes, “that his difficulties reflected the conflicts he experienced in thinking about his own future, which played themselves out in the dynamics of his family relationships.” While one can never be certain of their origins, his health challenges did begin when he was four and lasted throughout his teenage years, ending when Boas went to university and his family moved to their newly built residence in Minden.35
As Boas wrote, “In this year [1862] I became very sick so that the doctor sent us to the country. We went to Clus. As we lived there many weeks I had the opportunity to become acquainted with the woods and, to be sure, I noticed much there owing to a book of Wagner.” His sister Hedwig spoke of this time: “Franz was only four years old when he went with his mother in the forests of Bückeburger-Klus. They gathered flowers; he made his first Herbarium. His parents gave him a book with colored pictures from domestic wild flowers and he found out how to draw a parallel between them. He could not yet write; his mother wrote the names which he told her under the dried flowers. Father and mother were very proud of their little boy.” Klus provided a pastoral woodland setting, just four kilometers east of Minden; Sophie Boas took her son there to recuperate from his severe and unrelenting headaches, for which the doctors of the time had no treatment save for rest and fresh air. They stayed in “a very simple inn,” which had been part of the “an old hunting seat of the Fürsten of Bückeburger.” The next summer, as Boas recalled, “We again lived in Clus and my cousin Willy Meyer lived there for a while. Again as in the previous year I occupied myself entirely with the pursuit of nature and, to be sure, in moderation so that my cousin was also taken in by a love of it. From then on for a still longer time we gathered plants together and chiefly sought to gain a knowledge of natural history.”36
At age six, after they had completed kindergarten, Franz and his cousin Willy Meyer were given private lessons by Herr Permeier. As Boas wrote in his CV, their teacher “prepared us so well that we could be admitted into the fourth class of the Bürgerschule” in Minden, and they remained at this school for the next two years (1865–67). As with most Prussian schools, classes were coeducational.37
Boas remembered being enchanted by Robinson Crusoe. As he recalled, “Owing to this book I got a great longing to see and get acquainted with foreign countries, a longing which has not left me. At that time my desire was always directed towards Africa, chiefly to the tropics, and I still remember very well that I ate as much as possible of certain foods which I did not like in order to accustom myself to deprivations in Africa.” As a young boy of thirteen, Franz had written to Toni of his plans following graduation to travel to the North Pole or the South Pole, as well as to Australia or Africa, “but—but—but, I have to make sure wisely to use the time I’m given for study for without being equipped appropriately what fruits would such a trip bear?” Boas also recalled his fascination with fairy tales: “The stories of Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and similar ones I could read and read a hundred times without getting tired. My favorite was always Sleeping Beauty and the fairy tale of the Seven Ravens.”38
At the end of the school year in 1867, Franz and Willy visited the Minden Gymnasium, as was requisite. Lehmann remarked, “All boys must visit it before they come into the Gymnasium at nine years old.” Franz wrote to his Uncle Jacobi, “At Easter I was accepted in the Gymnasium. It is much nicer here than in the lower school because Latin is giving me much pleasure. . . . Now I will tell you about my German class. At the last dictation I stood first. You can imagine how happy I was.” With a strong focus on languages, the Minden Gymnasium required students in the academic program to take Latin every year, with French added the second year and Greek the third. Students also took courses in German literature, history, geography, science, and mathematics. In Minden, as in other German cities, the neohumanist Gymnasium served as a “comprehensive school in its lower grades and as a well-nigh exclusive university preparatory school in its higher grades.”39
Franz wrote to his father in Latin and in French about his grades, as well as to his uncle, whom he addressed “Avunculus amatus!” He detailed his progress in his first year in Gymnasium in a letter to Uncle Jacobi: “I have been promoted, third in the class, to the Quinta and my report reads: Latin, German, Natural History, Geography—very good; writing—satisfactory; singing—quite good; behavior—very good. Mama and Papa say it is a good report and you can decide for yourself if you also think it good.” In a more playful mode, Franz wrote, “This morning between 8:30 and 10:30 I ran around in the snow and rain for America.” The following year Franz told his uncle again about his report card. All was good or satisfactory, save for deportment, where, it was noted, that he was “sometimes sleepy in school, otherwise good.” With enthusiasm, eleven-year-old Franz was putting his interests to work: “I have for some time been working out a little lecture in natural history whose theme is: What is the origin of the tides; life in the sea; the origin of the earth; fossils and the difference between land and water animals. The hardest is still to be done, namely fossils and the difference between land and water animals.”40
With his move to the Gymnasium, Franz’s focus shifted to physical geography and zoology. As he recalled, “In the winter when we received zoology instruction, I turned entirely from botany and zealously put my entire efforts in zoology.” Fascinated by the skeletal structure of the animals, and much less interested in their external attributes, he acquired the bodies or heads of “geese, ducks and hares.” He added, “The mice and frogs had to wait.” His sister Hedwig remembered vividly how he loved “to gather rats, mice, [and] frogs.” Franz’s mother, ever supportive of his interests, “gave him a pot, where he could boil animals. Then he cut the bones out and composed them again. Sometimes he dissected them too.”41
Lehmann also remembered the beautiful mountains that surrounded Minden: “Every day free of school the boys were going to the Porta Westfalica or climbed up the Wittekindsberg,” a mountain that rises just to the west of the port and overlooks the Weser gorge. She continued, “Franz never went without his botanizing box, a net to collect butterflies, [and] a hammer to discover fossils. Very early he was beginning to collect stones and the stone cabinet plays an important part in our youth.” Franz, his cousin Willy, and his schoolmate and close friend Carl Dröge dug and planted a garden close to Minden, as Boas recalled, “on an unoccupied cliff.” He remarked, “We carried out this plan with great zeal; for a long time, this place formed our point of association, until one time finally we found to our great sorrow that it was destroyed.” He had a herbarium in which he grew mosses, lichen, and other plants. In a thank-you letter for what must have been a Christmas gift, Franz wrote to his uncle and aunt, “The herbaria that you sent us gives me great pleasure. How strange that you, dear uncle, should know that I have so much pleasure and interest in nature study. I had already started a moss and flower herbarium several years ago.”42
While Franz’s boyhood was replete with hobbies and adventures—all linked to his academic interests and to the Bildungsideal (educational ideal) that his mother espoused—he continued to suffer from health challenges. At age ten he had been in Gymnasium for just a short time when he had headaches so bad that he was kept out of school for six months. His sister Hedwig remarked, “He was a nervous child, [and] often had a headache. The doctor advised the parents to go with the boy to Helgoland. So the mother and son went!” Located on the North Sea, Helgoland was then, as it is now, a seaside island resort known for its healthful climate. Under British rule from 1807 to 1890, Helgoland was a tourist resort for upper-class Germans; Sophie and her son stayed there for two months. Franz wrote to his uncle Salomon of the journey: “Papa and Hete accompanied us to the station, and it was touching to see how Hete, weeping, embraced us for the last time, and Papa took a gentle farewell from us.” They traveled by train to Harburg and then by boat to Hamburg; from there they departed on a fourteen-hour trip by boat to Helgoland. Franz remarked on the “dust clouds on the heath” in Lübbeke and “the beautiful harbor” in Hamburg with the ship “masts . . . unspeakably long and dense.” He and his mother stayed overnight in the Alster Hotel, “illuminated with thousands of gas flames,” and they could see the small steamers as they “sailed back and forth” in the harbor. Franz continued, “The next morning when we sailed for Helgoland, it was quite stormy, but I became seasick only at the last moment. . . . The second day when we went to the dunes we found some algae, but on the subsequent days we found much more. We often took sails on the ocean but the company was so boring that I would have preferred to stay home. On the last day we caught a sea anemone, which kept until we reached Hamburg.” Franz said that they “had a happy reunion” at Bückeburg, where they were met by his father and his sisters Hete and Aenne. He concluded, “For today this letter which your loving Franz has written is ended.”43
As Franz recalled, “I loved equally [the sea] in calm and in storm [and] also the wealth of the animals and the plants in the sea.” His sister Hedwig related that her mother and brother “gathered sea-stars, sea hedgehogs, sea-devils, sea grass, [and also] went fishing with the fishermen.” One summer Sophie took both Franz and Toni to Helgoland for health reasons. Lehmann recounted, “At that time Helgoland was British territory, and I remember that the two had great difficulties at customs, because the authorities did not want to believe that a large, very heavy suitcase contained stones. As always Franz had collected fossils; he later gave the beautiful stone collection to the Minden Gymnasium.”44
While Sophie and Franz were relishing the sea and its bounty on their trips to Helgoland, Meier Boas was at home in Minden, full of worry. He wrote his wife, “I hope that our Franz has completely recovered. Yesterday I spoke with the doctor and told him about our child. He recommended to me once again that we should not at the present time fatigue him. . . . He should go outside to play. . . . Now you will do all of this. We want the children truly to be cared for.” He recalled that while he was in Hamburg with Franz they went together “to the zoological garden and the aquarium, [but] that was well before the main concern” with his health. Even when Franz was in good health this was enough for him for one day. He continued with his advice: “Do not point out to him that which excites him. At any rate, each evening, take a walk to St. Pauli but don’t go to the theater.”45
With constant bouts of illness and concerns about keeping up with his schoolwork, Franz continued in Gymnasium. In 1871, when he was in the Obertertia—equivalent to the ninth grade—Franz became so ill that “all learning for a long time had to be entirely stopped,” and he was “immediately sent to the country.” This set him back in his school years, particularly in “Greek grammar and in the use of Latin which one gains in the Tertia.”46 At the same time, his sister Toni became very ill. She had moved to Jena in 1870 to spend the year with the Weichardt family in a pension for young girls. For seventeen-year-old Toni, this time away from home was intended to be what “every girl of a well-to-do family [did] for one year.” A serious and accomplished musician, she was studying piano and, in addition, learning English from Lisbeth Weichardt. Cole writes that Toni also received “private instruction in Latin and drawing” and that “Toni was happy at the Weichardts’, but by the end of October she began to suffer from what was diagnosed as rheumatism in her left hand and wrist. She wrote that Mama was not to worry, that the camellia baths and wristlet had already improved her condition and that she was back to the piano. But the ailment worsened, with the inflammation affecting her hip.” Franz remembered this time: “My eldest sister had become sick there while she was in a pension, and since the doctors would not permit her to be taken to Minden, my mother spent her time partly with us and partly with my sick sister.” On these absences from home, Sophie would leave the household in the care of Bertha Lütge, who would add short notes about the children—Franz, age twelve; Hete, seven; and Aenne, three—in the letters written by family members in order to reassure the mother about the health of her children who had remained in Minden.47
With Meier’s work necessitating travel, the strain on the entire family was palpable. Sentimental and emotional about his family, Franz’s grades began to slip. His ranking went from third in his class to sixth, a change that for his parents and for himself was of great concern. Nonetheless, he was promoted to Obertertia following the Easter break. Cole recounts, “Scarcely had the new class begun after the Whitsun holidays when he was struck by a recurrence of severe headaches.” Franz wrote Toni, “‘My headaches came back yesterday during Greek Extemporary so I have to leave school.’” Cole continues, “He was sent to the Porta countryside, but the next month, with both Toni and Franz in need of their mother’s care, Sophie took all the children to Jena.”48
Lehmann reflected, “Our mother went with us children to Jena, to Prof. Siebert’s Sanitarium, where Toni now lived.” Franz recalled, “Because of my illness we all had to go to Jena, . . . neither of us children could do without our mother’s care.” The family stayed in Jena for one year. Franz empathized deeply with his sister. He wrote his aunt, “Poor Toni, I am so sorry for her. She has been in bed over a quarter of a year and there is still no change.” Franz benefited from the “continuous stay in the fresh air.” He wrote, “I became healthier and by October [1871] I was again able to take regular school lessons.” Franz’s mother and father had grown concerned that he was falling behind in his education, so they enrolled him in the Zenkersches Institut, a private school for boys run by Professor Gustav Zenker. In Jena there was no choice other than the Zenkersches Institut, since there was no public gymnasium. Boas recalled that he learned nothing in this school, because he was enrolled for only two months and the class was not as advanced as the one he had been attending in Minden. During this period Franz’s real education occurred in the botanical garden at the University of Jena, where he made the acquaintance of the botanist Dr. Johann Dietrich, private scholar and curator of the university herbarium in the botanical garden, who took a great liking to “this clever boy.”49
Dr. Dietrich taught Franz about “the rudiments of physiology and anatomy of plants” and instructed him on the use of the microscope to study the structure of plants. With Dietrich’s authorization, thirteen-year-old Franz was admitted to the museum and to the Jena botanical garden, where he was able to explore the greenhouses and to study the geographical distribution of plants. Franz remembered this time: “In the beautiful botanical garden in Jena I got to know many exotic types and at my frequent visits in the garden one of the guides took a fancy to me and showed me all the rarities of the garden. . . . At the same time by taking many excursions with my younger sisters. . . . I got to know the surrounding country well.” Six years later Franz recalled this period of his life: “Because of these lessons I acquired such a preference for botany that it almost stifled all my other hobbies.” He continued, “This instruction had very great value for me because it became clear to me that true science does not consist in describing single plants but in the knowledge of their structure and lives and in the comparison of all classes of plants with one another.”50
Franz’s parents removed him from the Zenker Institute and made arrangements for his return to Minden. From a child’s perspective, Franz thought this was due to his parents’ concern about his lack of progress in school. As Cole relates, the parents were indeed concerned, but not solely because Franz wasn’t progressing: “Though her letter that raised the need to remove Franz from Zenker’s institute has not survived, Meier’s resigned reply suggests that it touched upon the question of Franz’s Jewishness.” Meier had written Sophie from Minden, “By the way, the Zenker affair does not exhibit the bad character that you think. Such coarseness sadly happens everywhere and from this regrettably our children cannot be protected. They must scrape through as their parents have.” As Meier further reflected on the arrangement for his son, he came to agree with Sophie that their son should be taken out of the Zenker Institute: “The more I think about this, I believe that Franz should be in school here in the fall, he should go to Finsterbusch. . . . I don’t want the child to be with unfriendly people.” Since Meier wouldn’t “be going on any long trips,” he would be in the position to “watch out against his physical stress and to care for his intellect.” Additionally, as he pointed out, they had relatives in Minden to help with settling Franz in at the Finsterbusch residence. Meier remarked on the difference in quality between the private institutes and the public Gymnasia: “It appears that there prevails an entirely different character in the Gymnasium than in these private institutions.”51
Not at all happy about the possibility of taking a room with Finsterbusch, Franz returned to Minden. He had no desire to lodge at the Minden Töchterschule, the girls’ high school, where Ludwig Finsterbusch, who had served as director from 1866–73, had rooms to let. As he wrote his mother, “I don’t want to be with Finsterbusch. I would get homesick there more than ever for Jena and for you. For . . . one sits in a boarding house like a prisoner, and if you were to insist, you—as certain as two times two is four—would receive a letter in the first eight days in which I wrote that I couldn’t bear it there any longer. I wouldn’t be able to socialize with any boy. No one would come there, and I wouldn’t be able to go to anyone.” He pleaded to be allowed to stay at the Meyer house, and his cousin Willy also wrote a letter to his aunt Sophie, asking her to allow Franz to stay with him. At first it appeared that Franz would get his wish: there would be no room available for him until two soldiers had vacated their rooms in mid-March. However, a young woman lodger gave up one of her rooms. Meier wrote Sophie, “So Finsterb[usch] is possible, our wish has come to pass.” Since Franz had been staying with his father alone, Meier confessed, “I must admit, it is a bit scary to me also to have the child with me alone.” Franz’s father was sending “over his bed this morning. It is not necessary that all of his things be taken there. He can fetch what he uses from our house.” And he observed again that “naturally all the family members look after him.”52
Meier wrote Sophie, “The young one will accustom himself hopefully very well at Finst[erbusch].” He told his wife about the plans for Franz to be with the family: “This [Shabbat] evening Franz will go with me to Grandmother [Karoline] to eat and in the morning and all Sunday he will be with the Meyers.” He detailed his arrangements to take Franz to piano lessons, to English lessons, and to Rabbi Edler for the “one-hour weekly lessons.” Regarding their major worry, Meier remarked, “How extensive is his lagging behind, I do not yet know, his extemporaries will show this.”53 Meier’s worries about his son were eased by a dream that he related to Sophie: “When one sits so alone, and an unveiled dream comes, one slips happily over the gloomy past and the way is lit to the future towards one’s glorious wishes. I saw our student son visiting the university. Yes, yes, in Bonn or else Heidelberg or else another lovely spot.” Meier wrote Sophie about his return to Minden from a business trip, “I am happy to be arriving in Minden [to be with] Franz. . . . Franz is with the Meyers until I come to the house to pick him up. His and the children’s pleasure in seeing each other again was extraordinary.”54
As a result of all the school that he had missed, Franz was behind the other students, particularly in Greek and to some extent in mathematics. He reflected on this lonely and uncomfortable time: “I never felt really at home at Mr. Finsterbusch’s house. I was worried about my sister who was then very sick and I longed to be at home. All my work availed me of nothing, since our teacher had forgotten that I had missed the whole class and he required the same of me as of the other students, and if I did not know as much, he explained it as laziness.” He wrote a very sweet and sad letter to his sister Hete, who was in Jena with their mother, and his other sisters, Aenne and Toni: “First of all you must excuse my writing in pencil, but I have no ink. It is not right that you cry so often. Right now I am in a mood in which I should like to cry all the time. I am always alone here, no one visits me and when I do go home it is always for only a few minutes.” This difficult period ended with a wonderful memory. In April 1872, Franz recalled, “After a quarter of a year my parents came back to Minden with my sister and very happily I went home.” While this time was “almost the hardest period of my life,” memories of it had nearly vanished when Franz wrote his recollections at the age of nineteen.55
Able to return to the Gymnasium in 1873, Franz was in the Obersekunda, equivalent to the eleventh grade. Because of the “great gaps” in his education, he was held back. He wrote, “As I was once again not well this winter my parents decided in spite of my strong opposition to leave me another year in the Secunda since they feared that I was not measured to the demands which the Prima would put on my working strength.” In a more nuanced reflection on the decision, Franz’s father wrote to his sister Toni that he was “a very undeveloped boy,” and that both Meier and the teacher had doubts about moving Franz up.56 When it was finally determined that Franz would stay “one more year in Secunda”—meaning that he would have spent a total of three years at that level—he wrote Toni that he despaired of having “to plough through all that boring stuff one more time.” In all, Franz had missed close to two years in Gymnasium due to illness, “half year each in Quinta and Secunda and over three-quarters of a year in the Obertertia.”57
In April 1875 Franz was promoted to Prima for the last two years of study in Gymnasium. In October 1876, when he entered his final year, the Oberprima, at the Minden Gymnasium, he wrote, “‘Now the good time ends and the work begins.’” He abandoned all his “side studies” and focused entirely on “assimilating everything that was offered to us in school.” Franz was preparing for the dreaded Abitur examination that stood “‘like the Alps’” before him and would mark the end of secondary education. Franz and his four other classmates, called Abiturklasse, had to take the Abitur to qualify for admission to university.58 He wrote his sister Toni, “As the exam pushes me, I just hope I will be able to survive it and will come through.” Under intense pressure, Franz sought some relief and understanding through writing long, detailed letters to Toni about his studies and his thoughts. He agonized over his father’s desire that he study medicine. “You have chosen the ideal life profession,” he wrote, “which you quietly follow, while I have the solid inner conviction that medicine certainly is not the right field for me and that I will never excel at it.” He continued, “My main interests do not find nourishment in it, so I will always remain as a physician hungering, hungering for knowledge, hungering for understanding. And I’m sure if I followed my studies, I . . . could still do something good in my profession.” Franz continued, “I trust in my strength. . . . I can now really cry out with . . . Hutten: ‘Ich hab’s gewagt!’ ‘I have dared it!’ And a bold game I tried.” In response, Toni cautioned Franz against assuming too much self-assurance. Franz replied,
You think namely because of the content of my previous letter, I would have too much self-confidence. I can’t deny that I have faith in myself, but I haven’t had that always. Only recently have I. And you know why? Because for me, self-confidence and hope are the same. . . . Because if my strength doesn’t get me another profession, I have to go through my life as a doctor, and for that I’m simply not made, albeit you don’t want to hear that. And that’s why I trust in my strength, and I want to work until I have attained that purpose. . . . I just want to work until I have achieved something.59
The weeklong examination schedule was grueling: “The five candidates began the process on Saturday, January 20, 1877, with a Latin dictation. More Latin followed on Monday. Tuesday was taken up with religion so Franz had the day off. Then, day by day, came French, mathematics, German and history, and Greek.” All five passed but none with enough distinction to avoid the oral examination that was scheduled for the morning of February 12. Franz was required to “explain Archimedes’s principles and other axioms. Greek came after lunch . . . and finally history. Franz had to recite Lycurgus’ legal contributions and compare it with the laws of the Roman decemvirs [ten men] and Moses, then present a narrative of the Vandal invasions and the Crusades, and recapitulate the phases of the French Revolution.” At 5:30 in the evening, all five students were told that they had passed. As Cole recounts, “Franz ran straight home. ‘How I ran down the stairs or up them, I don’t know, but faster than ever before.’ His father, arms outstretched, awaited him. The noise brought the Meyers up from below, but Franz was dispatched to tell Grandmother Boas and Aunt Emilie (Aron’s widow), while Meier hurried to telegraph the good news to Toni.” As Franz wrote, “‘I will never forget Darwin’s birthday, the day of our examination.’” The students in the lower class, the Unterprima, hosted a raucous celebratory party for the successful five. As Franz wrote Theodor Meyer, the students drank and celebrated from “8 in the evening to 3 in the morning . . . and we all had a great time.” The next day they were hung-over and had to take a walk to work it off.60
Franz was delirious to have passed his examinations. Müller-Wille observes, “His grades were quite mixed, the average fairly low.” With the scale going from 1, which was the highest, to 6, with 5 and 6 being a failure, Boas received the following: “German, satisfactory or 3; Latin, 3; Greek, 3; French, 3; History, good or 2; Geography, 2; Mathematics, excellent or 1; Physics, 2; Physical Education, quite good, about 2.” Müller-Wille concludes, “The grades clearly show why he was specifically interested in Mathematics, he knew his strength which bore out later in his career.” Also remarking on his grades, Cole notes that Boas’s handwriting was judged to be “‘ugly and untrained.’”61
Sophie wrote Abraham Jacobi about the intense relief and joy that came with the successful end to Franz’s Abitur: “At last the great worry is off our shoulders. The boy has passed his examination very well.” She continued, “I never feared that he would not pass, but four weeks ago he had a severe throat infection that ran him down so terribly that I feared his body would not stand the strain. Thank heaven he held out but he looks like a walking corpse.” The townspeople shared in their joy: “We are being congratulated from all sides. You know how in a small town everyone knows everyone’s business.”62
Mingled with the struggle to prepare for the Abitur, there had been another challenge for Franz: the battle between what the father wanted for the son, and what the son wanted for himself. Lehmann summarized this conflict succinctly: “My father wanted nothing so much as for his son to be a doctor, but Franz’s heart at that time was set on becoming a mathematician.” In the thick of the conflict, Franz wrote to Toni, “I don’t think that I’m very much up to medicine. . . . Toni, please, don’t talk with anyone of what I am writing.” He added, “You may talk with Uncle Jacobi . . . only.” The struggle was prolonged and intense, and Franz attempted a respectful resignation to his father’s wishes. In the concluding passage to his twenty-page statement for his curriculum vitae, he framed the dilemma, “Recently the question has become more and more pressing what I want to become. From youth on my favorite desire was to be able to study natural science and when I learned mathematics and physics, both these sciences were what appealed to me most.” With words that scarcely veiled the tension between father and son, Franz wrote, “But I cannot carry out these desires, since my father believes that it would be no sort of study for earning my daily bread.” With resignation, Franz conceded that “for that reason I have decided, if without preference, on applying myself to the subject lying next to my interests, medicine.” In the next sentence, he pulled back to “the chief reason why I have no desire for medicine is that my favorite sciences are the comparative, and medicine has little to do with them.” With tenacity of spirit, Franz determined “to hold open the possibility of later perhaps being able to transfer to another subject I will as far as it is possible study mathematics along with [medicine]. If I can still apply myself to another study, it must happen in the next two years, for until then I chiefly listen to general natural science lectures.” As Müller-Wille explained in a personal communication, “It was compulsory to end the CV strictly with an explanation of what one wished to study, what profession one hoped to attain, i.e. the Berufsziel [professional goal].” Thus, Boas concluded, “so I hope with my whole heart that this desire which determines my whole life will still be fulfilled for me.”63
There was intense pressure on Meier Boas to change his mind—from his wife, his son, from Jacobi, and, finally, from representatives of the Minden Gymnasium. The director of the Gymnasium, the science teacher, and the members of the school board visited Meier and Sophie to pressure Meier into allowing his son to pursue the study of science and mathematics at university. The representatives from the Gymnasium conveyed to Franz’s father their view that “it would be wrong not to let the boy study what he wanted.” Franz’s science teacher, Professor Dr. Julius Florens Banning, a well-known and published botanist, was among this group. As the instructor of “all the science classes,” Banning would have been particularly loath to lose a student to medicine in whom he saw such promise. He had recognized Franz’s gifts, had assigned him “extra work,” and had gone “botanizing with him.” Director of the Minden Gymnasium from 1861–85, Dr. Otto Gandtner—who subsequently became the curator of Bonn University and a member of the Leopoldina Academy—had read Franz’s curriculum vitae “with exceptional interest and satisfaction.” He clearly had heard Franz’s plea in the concluding paragraph to be allowed to pursue his interest in science. Müller-Wille notes in a personal communication the “extraordinary range and renown of his teachers (several with doctorates), some of whom enticed him to push forward.64
Sophie conveyed the conversation to Jacobi. Franz had been given “a great mathematical problem for his first task for the examination.” Sophie exuded pride: “His work was so successful that the director and the teacher maintain that he has a genius for mathematics, that his knowledge by far exceeds that of the usual graduate, and that he should become a docent,” that would involve taking a professional teaching position at a university. While Meier “saw no future for his son in the profession,” he compromised and agreed to allow Franz to begin the study of mathematics and sciences at university and would “not stand in his way when he learns later that the study of medicine does not satisfy him.”65
Both mother and son exalted at the successful resolution of this crisis. Sophie Boas wrote her daughter Toni, “Best of all, Papa won’t bar his way any longer if he doesn’t want to stay with medicine. It even seems to me as if he’s struggling with himself as to give [Franz] instant approval to follow his heart in his studies.” Repeating his refrain, “Ich hab’s gewagt!,” Franz wrote Toni that, like Ulrich von Hutten, “I have dared it!” For Franz it was the daring of standing up to his father and saying “that I want to study mathematics and science.” Franz continued,
I have already talked to Papa a few days ago when he came back, . . . but he told me we must wait for the letter from Jacobi, and today it came. He wrote that they must leave the decision to me, and Papa said, I should decide, he didn’t want to stand in my way. I didn’t think too much of the whole responsibility resting on my shoulders, and I said, I want to study mathematics and science. So now the whole future is in my hands and let us hope that I’ll succeed. I dared! Now I will study first mathematics, chemistry and physics and I will go to Heidelberg, we will see each other hopefully in four weeks from now.66
With perspicacity Franz Boas had articulated at age nineteen in his curriculum vitae challenges and perspectives that he would carry forward to his scholarly work as a young man and later to his professional work as an anthropologist. He recalled his time in Klus, when, as a young child of four, his mother read to him from the nature books of Hermann Wagner. While he loved these books and relished the world of flora and fauna their words and illustrations opened to him, he reflected on a challenge for his young mind: “Still all these books had the disadvantage of teaching me to pay attention to details only, while they awoke no understanding at all for nature in general. This may also have been due to the fact that I was too young then to be able to have an eye for more than details, an ability which in any case I lacked for a long time.” Franz had created the “herbarium of various kinds of moss.” Held in the moist soil and within the glass frames of the herbarium was the beginning of a comparative approach: “Perhaps, however, it shows also that I possessed the inclination to compare isolated things with each other.” When he was twelve years old, Franz had occasion to learn the complexities of botany from Dr. Dietrich of the University of Jena. Of this experience Franz wrote, “This instruction had very great value for me because it became clear to me that true science does not consist in describing single plants but in the knowledge of their structure and lives and in the comparison of all classes of plants with one another.” Thus, the comparative approach to science that would become so important for the Boasian stamp on anthropology began for him in the lush botanical gardens of Jena when he was twelve.67
As a young boy and a teenager, Franz Boas’s education combined the classical schooling of the Gymnasium with the wonderful serendipity of his pursuit of his own interests, whether in Helgoland, Klus, or Jena, or on days free from school in Minden. The greater part of his serendipitous and creative education occurred during his bouts of headaches as a child and the requisite medical absences from school. Of course, in his adventures he was often led by the hand by his mother, who had laid the foundation for his love of nature in the Fröbel Kindergarten that she had helped to establish in Minden and who had willingly even given him a pot to boil animal carcasses for dissection. Along with the pursuit of adventures and hobbies, Franz also endured emotionally trying times. With resilience and fortitude, he pulled through what he referred to as “almost the hardest period of my life” with only faint memories of the challenges. His ability as a young man to let trauma recede to a faint memory and to remember fully the happiness he experienced would serve him well in the difficult years to come. At nineteen Franz Boas had clarity of vision for his future. “In three years,” as he wrote Toni, “I will become a doctor; a year after, the state exam; and I will habilitate as a Privatdozent, so I now think.” He pondered, “Will it be so, what do you think?”68
Years before, Franz had written Toni about his desires for his future work, “I want to become an African traveler and explore all its unknown countries. I feel completely drawn to it. I want to get to know the people and their customs and habits, even those already-known peoples, the Galla, Banda, Kaffir, Hottentots; its flora and fauna and the countries’ geologic conditions.” He worried about the choice of profession, as it would be connected with his course of study: “If I study botany I’m forced to become a teacher—something I wouldn’t enjoy. It’s actually not right to say that since I don’t know anything about being a teacher. But if I, indeed, were a teacher then I’d have to kill all my lovely time with the dumb schoolboys and would not rise above others.” Then Franz added, “It’d be different if one could become a professor or something like that right away.” In his letters as a young schoolboy, Franz returned repeatedly to what he did not want to become: “I don’t feel like becoming a doctor, and a businessman—that wouldn’t gratify me at all.” He concluded, “I think, I’d always feel unhappy if I weren’t to do something exceptional.”69