[The following is from a Journal article. Believe it is just a translation of something that is in the Bern archives.]
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1975, Vol. 41, pp. 487-490:
lI. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:
PROF. DR. FRANZISKA BAUMGARTEN
FRANZISKA BAUMGARTEN Berne
Summary.---Autobiographical notes from Dr. Baumgarten's files give insights into the thinking and feelings of a first-rate professional psychologist.
I received my first schooling in a private school in which I was treated as the daughter of well-to-do parents, i.e., one dealt with the greatest consideration my laziness. Thus one was astonished and overjoyed at home when, despite everything, I passed the entrance examination for the Gymnasium with flying colors. Yet pride and joy rapidly disappeared when my accomplishments in the Gymnasium were anything but good and I required private tutoring for six years without interruption simply in order to pass each year to the next higher class--and that with great effort. Often in addition to the usually unsatisfactory grades on my report card, there was the crushing remark "Behaviour unsatisfactory," "Thinks of matters unrelated to school." "My child," asked my troubled father, "of what do you actually chink?" Usually he received no answer to his question for i lived in a dream world which lay outside school.
One reason for my unsatisfactory performance in school lay in the fact that I read an exceptional amount. My family belonged to the intelligentsia. For my ninth birthday. I received from my grandfather the collected works of Pestalozzi which I immediately devoured. From my tenth year on I had a subscription to an excellent weekly magazine for children. I was further given a subscription to a lending library. I was allowed to read as much as I liked without being disturbed, for my mother left the education of her children to a governess who, busy with the younger children, scarcely found time for me, the eldest [? her brother was older!], and who was content if I made no demands upon her. Thus l was left to myself, a situation l knew how to utilize in my own way.
My father possessed a comprehensive library which contained not only numerous philosophical works (I still have his editions of Kant and Spinoza today) but also the collected works of a great many important European poets and authors in the original language or in translation. Thus at the age of twelve or thirteen I devoured the entire Heine, Börne, Petöfi, Shakespeare, Smile [?] and Emerson; on the other hand, l read, with only two or three exceptions, no books tor children or young girls and no travelogues, a genre I never liked. I was interested, however, in historical novels. Naturally not one-thousandth of what I read at that time have I retained. However, what I did retain sufficed to make me a "prodigy" in the family and more than once when guests came, I had to answer questions on literature and history.
Impressed by the historical novels, I decided when I was thirteen to write one myself. lt began with the words, "At the time of the Hungarian King Bela IV ..." and attained a scope of three pages before I ran out of material. I have no idea why l chose this king about whom I still know nothing. In any case, after this false start I wrote a phantastic tale which I liked very much but which did not enthuse at all one of my aunts who read it. Still I decided to become a novelist.
At the age of fourteen and a half I wrote an ode patterned after those of the ancient Pindar. The motivation for it was the dancing class which took place every Saturday evening under the direction of a French governess for a selected group of young ladies and gentlemen from the girls' and boys' secondary schools. This was a great event for me. In my poem l characterized each participant humorously and sarcastically; these characterizations were a source of general merriment. My '"work" went from hand to hand, was admired "throughout the city" and I was regarded as the coming great poetess.
Yet my fame faded again as quickly as it had grown for in the following year, one year before the Matura (final comprehensive), I was kept back as the worst in the class. Somehow poetess and poor pupil didn't quite rhyme. To be sure this failure made no great impression on me as a sixteen-year-old. When I had to report ic to my father who was off at a spa--my mother refused to inform him of this disgrace, I wrote briefly, "Dearest Papa, I didn't pass this year. This has a good side for me: I needn't work so hard for school next year. It's good for you too because it will be another year before you have a marriageable daughter and thus you needn't worry about a son-in-law until a year later." Of course, my father had an essentially different idea of the matter. But that bothered me little.
At this point, through one of my schoolmates, forbidden, political-revolutionary literature fell into my hands. My enthusiasm was indescribable. School lessons and daily Iife in general stepped into the background; I lived only with the revolutionary concepts for world betterment. I was especially entranced with all outcries, essays and articles which sharply criticized society and literature and I now decided to become a journalist with the aim of improving political conditions and social institutions. The journalist must be a critic above all else. His mission consists of educating mankind and showing it the right path by delineating the wrong one.
It was a miracle that, despite these revolutionary ideas which claimed me entirely, I made such great progress in the Gymnasium that I might have merited the Silver Medal based on my grades. However, in the teachers' meeting which decided upon such awards so many complaints were raised about my behaviour--I did not have the proper respect for my teachers, was always involved in stupid pranks and certainly nothing would come of me--that this honor was given not to me but to an obedient little lamb.
Even before passing the Matura, I had definitely decided that I wanted to study in order to become a writer and to prepare myself for the ideological battle l intended to wage. Buc my father had to move his residence out of the city to an isolated, lonely forest region for two years in order to liquidate his business--a glassworks no longer in operation. immediately after my examination we went there and I now had much time to read and write since l was freed from school. First I wrote a drama. This literary genre seemed to me far more suitable for the proclamation of ideas of reform than the novel or essay. The theater director to whom I sent my work--it dealt with the battle against parental power- -told me it was impossible to confront an audience with such a sharp judgment of family ties. But he praised the play and advised me to write more. This was advice I gladly worked into my program for the future.
In the place i: which we now lived it was difficult to obtain reading material in the quantity and of the quality I required. An acquaintance of our family took pity upon me and sent me some twenty old volumes of a popular natural science periodical from the second half of the 19th Century. Those, too, I devoured. Thus I became acquainted with all the derails of the dispute between Darwinism and Lamarckism and I came across many philosophical dissertations which awakened in me the impression that philosophy was capable of solving all great problems. Thus I decided to study philosophy in addition to literature. Yer while reading articles in the natural sciences and philosophy which interested me greatly, I thought one day, "Why do men occupy them- selves with nature and its phenomena; why do they philosophize about such abstract things as space, time and the absolute--why is there not a science which deals with feelings, strivings, with desire, indecisiveness, hopes and disappointments, hate and anger?" And I wanted co call such a science into being immediately. Only two years later when I entered the university to study literature and philosophy. did I learn that this science already existed, i.e,, psychology. a fact which surprised me greatly. As I was listening to the first lecture on psychology and the professor was speaking about the sense of equilibrium and the labyrinth organ, I became so enthusiastic about the fact that there was something in my sensibilities about which I had known nothing that I immediately decided, "I shall be a psychologist." And when this first hour was over, I saw my path through life clearly before me.
One other time an initial lecture had such an effect on me: when I took course from Professor Hugo Münsterberg. He was at that time an exchange professor in Berlin for a year; his name as a psychologist had been unknown to me up to that time. A medical doctor had, by pure coincidence, called my attention to his lecture. Alter this hour I knew immediately, "I shall become an industrial psychologist." With his "Introduction co Industrial Psychology," Münsterberg had touched a deeply rooted part of my being. for factories and machines constituted the greatest impression of my childhood. I grew up in an industrial city and wherever we lived, our house was always surrounded by factories. They came right up to the street and one could look through the windows into the interior rooms. I can still see myself, scarcely ten years old, as I pressed my nose fiat against the panes to look into the machine rooms. The tempo and rhythm of the machines and the constant activity in the factory rooms I enjoyed especially. For me all the factory workers were surrounded by an aura: I saw in them people who had the privilege of working with these impressive, technical miracles- -the machines--and of mastering them; I was permeated by respect for these people. Thus when I became acquainted with Marxist literature, I felt all the more deeply the injustice which one inflicted upon these "higher beings" through overwork and low pay. Münsterberg showed me the way in which I could concern myself with the workers as a psychologist without being politically active.
Novelist, journalist, philosopher, critic, psychologist, industrial psychologist- -those were the individual stages on my path to maturity. Only apparently did I leave each of them again in sequence, the last profession excepted, and yet they formed the links of the chain of my activity. It seems as though my path has been straight if one judges it by what I have published. Yet beside this visible occupation there runs yet another way, not yet visible for a number of reasons, on which the decisions of my developmental years will be realized as soon as the age in which they may be realized has dawned.