by Walter David Neumann
I was born in Caerphilly, Wales, UK, on January 1, 1946. I was the fourth of five children: Irene (b. 1938), Peter (b. 1940), Barbara (b. 1943), me (b. 1946), and Daniel (b. 1951). My parents, Bernhard Hermann Neumann (b. 1909) and Hanna Neumann (b. 1914, née Hanna von Caemmerer), both group-theorists, were born in Berlin. My father went to the UK in 1933 because of the problems he faced as a Jew. My mother, not Jewish but very anti-Nazi, stayed in Germany until just before the war began. She had met my father in 1933 in a working group at the university and they became engaged in 1934. Since marriages between Jews and non-Jews were against the law, their engagement was dangerous, and they had friends who helped them to contact each other by letters. They married in Cardiff in 1938. Some time later, my father was interned as an enemy alien but then released into the British army. My mother was then in Oxford and later Caerphilly near Cardiff, and, after the war was over, they moved to Hull. So until 1958 I lived in Hull. We all learned music. I think we all learned some piano and recorder. Peter also played violin and I started learning violin then too.
Hull
My first school, primary school, was in Bricknell Avenue, Hull. The school had a field and my father joked that the field was rolled up after school was done and unrolled again when school started. The field had a small mound and we would fight to be on the top. I was often on top.
In Autumn 1957 to Summer 1958 I started at Kingston High School, Hull. I don’t remember much about that except that we would throw mud-balls at each other in the field before classes started, and that I played on the chess team, and that I got good grades.
Our house was 75 Westbourne Avenue. The Avenues, Westbourne, Park and Victoria, are very well known in Hull. For example, our house was near Dorothy L. Sayers’ house in Westbourne Avenue (though that was before we were there). We had friends in Victoria Avenue where we climbed trees in the garden and played games in the alleys behind the houses (there were alleys between each of the Avenues). They were Mark Tully and his sister (whose name I forget) and another girl.
My father had a position in Manchester from 1948–61, so he was in Manchester when classes were open, and on weekends he would take the train, or occasionally bike over the Pennines (a hundred-mile ride), to come back to Hull.
I learned to ride a bike in the alleys: my father ran behind me keeping me up. After several days of doing that he let go, and near the end of the alley I found he was far behind and I was biking on my own.
Our family did a lot of biking on weekends as well as on holidays, and we often stayed overnight in youth hostels. We usually collected mushrooms — including giant puffballs — along the way to eat in the evening. My parents and Barbara and I (and, once, a math friend of my parents) would bike every summer from Hull to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. My parents would stay at St. Andrews for a week-long group-theory conference while Barbara and I then biked farther into Scotland, sometimes getting milk still warm straight from a farm on a hill that we knew, before we returned to St. Andrews and back to Hull.
My father liked to joke, and one of his favorites was how we liked to go riding on well boiled icicles, a spoonerism.
Manchester
In the Fall of 1958 I started at the “Cheadle Hulme School for the Orphans of Warehousemen and Clerks” (now just “Cheadle Hulme School”). I was there until 1961. Every school day I biked the 9 or 10 miles each way. There was often dense fog, a couple of times so foggy that I was faster than the cars. After the first year there my parents allowed me to have coffee before school, and suddenly the steep hill up to Cheadle Hulme felt much less steep.
In the first year one of our subjects was woodwork. There was one boy whom the woodwork teacher took pleasure in spanking with a wooden board, while we were forced to watch. None of us had the courage to say anything about it. The teacher was fired later, probably the next year, but I have always regretted I hadn’t had the courage to tell other teachers what was going on.
Later I was allowed to work alone in the chemistry office. Nitrogen triiodide, when damp, is OK but when it dries it explodes if as much as a feather touches it. I made it using iodine with aqueous ammonia. I was in Miss Meehan’s class and I had a little of the stuff on my desk, and Miss Meehan happened to touch it, exploding it. I am sure it stung, and I was sure I’d be kicked out of school, but after staring at me for a few seconds, she went on with the class.
I biked a few times into Wales with a friend of mine, and at least once I biked from Manchester to London and back to visit my grandparents in London (I had often been sent to stay with them for a few days).
New York
We lived in a house in New Rochelle for the year. I took the train to Manhattan from there, and ate my breakfast on the train; it was bread and my favorite cheese, a very smelly one, and people would try to sit away from me. I often had lunch in Washington Square Park, just next to NYU, and an older male made friends with me. I was naive: it took me quite some time to realize that he was gay and was trying to make a pass at me.
My parents had learned to drive shortly before that trip, and driving with them was a bit frightening. In the fall they drove us up north to see the views and I was amazed by the fall colors of the trees. In the UK the colors are nothing like it.
I had a borrowed violin and I went once a week for practice, walking across Manhattan’s Central Park. Someone warned me that it was dangerous in those days to cross Central Park, then joked that I was probably safe, because people would assume that my violin case was a gun case. (Later, when I came back to Bonn after some time in Regensburg, I discovered that someone had stolen my violin, as well as books and other things. I was devastated and gave up the violin and just stayed with the recorder.)
Freiburg
I’d bike every Saturday to Günterstal for tea, where my Tante Carola lived, and sometimes made the long bike ride up to Waldkirch, where my grandmother lived.
I went skiing in Freiburg on weekends when there was snow. There was a bus to the Freiburg ski resort and they provided food. It was cheaper to take the bus and ski for the weekend than to stay at the apartment and eat there.
Adelaide
The first summer I was asked to teach a young boy on a large sheep ranch north of Adelaide. I was teaching him Latin among other things. I ate in the kitchen for breakfast and lunch, but in the evening I’d be in the dining room with the family and had to have jacket, shirt and tie — and conversation. In the afternoon we sometimes shot galahs which came in great flocks to eat the seeds. They would fly up when we shot and come down in flocks again in less than a minute. I had never had a gun before but I was a much better shooter than the boy. In fact he was not very good at anything, which was lucky for him. I found out later from someone in Canberra that they had had an older son on the sheep ranch who was sent to Oxford under a lot of pressure; he therefore drowned himself in the river Thames.
At the University they gave us rooms in North Adelaide — we were two to a room — and we would walk or bike down to the University. Then the next two years I shared a house with a friend on the south end of North Adelaide. A couple of times we walked up to the top of Mount Lofty and back.
I was allowed to use the University computer on weekends. One of the faculty asked me to use the computer to help him with his work (he paid me in beer). In the third year I was asked to teach a class of adults (at least two or three years older than I was). I think they were a bit taken aback, but they got used to it and I did well.
I returned to Europe via the ocean from Australia with my B.A. Hons degree in an odd way. First I sailed from Australia to New Zealand, then back to Australia, and from there via India (where we stopped for shopping half a day; I bought a shirt) and then onwards to Italy. From there I took trains to get to Bonn, Germany.
Bonn
(I still have that license, since in Germany they last for ever and I used to put it in my wallet whenever I was in Germany. By now it is hardly readable, though I actually used it in Paris about fifteen years ago, when my money and cards were stolen and I needed to rent a car.)
Later I moved to a room in Friesdorf (I think it was in the Elsaserstrasse, near to the tram back to Bonn). The husband of the house was horrible, a real Nazi who hated colored people, but the wife later came into my room to apologize, almost in tears, saying that she had not known how bad Nazism had been, and that she didn’t mind that a girl of color came to visit me. I think the girl wanted to marry me, but I wasn’t ready to get married.
One of the professors, I have forgotten his name, was going to the USA and sold me his car, a Ford Taunus. About two years later I had a room in a house in the village of Villiprott, and I would drive to and from the University by car. After working late one day I fell half-a-asleep while driving around a bend. I swerved and the car rolled over and landed right-side up in a ditch with its front window off. I walked down the road until I found a policeman, who drove me to my apartment and told me which car-lot my damaged Taunus would be towed to.
The next day I took a taxi to the car-lot, and while I was looking, someone asked me if I’d like his car, also a Ford Taunus, for a small price, since he was just about to go into the army. His was in much better shape than mine, so I accepted. A day or two later I sold my damaged car for the same price, so I had gained by being sleepy!
In Germany after World War II coffee was always pale. I once asked in an Italian restaurant in Bonn if I could buy dark-roast beans from them, and they said they bought theirs from Zuntz Coffee (which was a wholesale company in Bonn and later also in Berlin). So I bought from the wholesale Zuntz Coffee a wonderful dark coffee at “Grünen Weg 78”. It happened to be less than five minutes from my shared office in Beringstrasse, close to the Botanical Garden of Bonn. The so-called “A. Zuntz sel. Wwe” (short for “selige witwe”) started in 1837 in Bonn and it became for a while the greatest coffee-roaster in Germany. (A common joke is that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.) In World War II much of the coffee-roaster building had been destroyed, and sometime between 1970 and 1980 Zuntz Coffee disappeared and the building I knew was replaced by a clothing shop.
More about Bonn
I received my PhD with Professor Friedrich Hirzebruch in 1969. I had a lot of friends from the start. I met Silke Suter and her friend Dietrich in 1966. Don Zagier, a brilliant mathematician and a very good friend of ours, later married Silke.
Matthias Kreck, who was the son of a theologian, did mathematics, and he studied theology from 1972 to 1976. He is also an excellent cellist, and we sometimes played together.
Other friends were Gordon Wasserman from America, who later stayed in Germany; Czes and Anne Kosniowski from the UK, who came for about half a year to Bonn (we visited them at least twice later in Newcastle, where they raised chickens in their garden); Peter and Susanna Klein, who divorced after a while (Peter died early); Erich Ossa, who later went to the University of Cologne with “Doctor Erich Ossa” on his front door, complaining that this made things more expensive, but he kept the “Doctor” anyway (he also later wrote a paper with Matthias Kreck, Ulrich Karras and me); Karl-Heinz Knapp, who collected wine and stored it in a specially insulated wine cellar (he stored mine there for me too, since he wanted it as full as possible); Hanspeter Kraft who came to Bonn in 1970 to 1979 with a break in Regensburg for two years; and John Scherk (Canadian) who did a foolish thing with his car. To see what would happen he decided to drive along a slope next to the road, which flipped his car over. He was fine, but his friend in the car was hurt.
During my time in Bonn, I drove at least twice to Munich where my cousin Hanna von Caemmerer was studying law at the time, and once or twice she visited me. She also met me at the IAS in 1971. She worked later in Karlsruhe as a judge and is now retired. I still often visit her when I am in Germany.
