Genetics, Vol. 156, 1-6, September 2000, Copyright © 2000
Johann Mendel's Field of Dreams
Jan Kleina
a Max-Planck-Institut für Biologie, Abteilung Immungenetik, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany
Corresponding author:
Jan Klein, Abt. Immungenetik, Corrensstrasse 42, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany., jan.klein{at}tuebingen.mpg.de (E-mail)
Is not the past all shadow?
LORD BYRON (The Dream)
CHILDHOOD is the most impressionable of all the stations in one's life. It molds a person's character, spins dreams, and leaves everlasting memories. Long after he had left Hyn
ice in northern Moravia, where he was born in 1822, Abbot Mendel had the ceiling of the chapter hall in the Augustinian monastery in Brno decorated with scenes and motifs that reminded him of his native village (1).1 He visited Hynice as often as his duties allowed him and supported improvements in the village, for example, by contributing to the purchase of fire-fighting equipment and to the construction of a fire station (2), an act for which the grateful fire fighters made him an honorary member of their brigade. He kept in touch with Hynice right up to the last days of his life. As late as April 4, 1883, a few months before his death, he wrote to his nephews requesting them to bring fruit-tree shoots from his father's orchard so that he could graft them onto trees in the monastery garden. The scents, hues, and tastes of his childhood must have remained deeply ingrained in the fabric of his memory.
A person curious about Mendel—who was so far ahead of his time that his contribution to science is, from our perspective, a bolt from the blue—would probably be interested in the formative years of Mendel's life. Alas, there is nothing to be found here. No single event from Mendel's childhood, no anecdote or incident, has ever been recorded. Even the date of his birth is uncertain: in the parish record it is given as July 20, 1822, but Mendel himself consistently celebrated his birthday on July 22. All one can do under such circumstances is to visit the genius loci, his home village, and let its stimuli fire up one's imagination.
The house in which Johann Mendel spent the first decade of his life still stands (3) and has largely retained its character from the time Anton Mendel, Johann's father, tore down the original wooden structure and built a brick, slate-roofed farmstead in its place. Inside the house, in the two adjoining ground floor rooms that now house a small memorial exhibit, several objects and relics help to evoke the domestic atmosphere of the Mendel household. The pattern of spots created on the floor by the sun's rays2 filtering through the window (4) must have fascinated and mystified a toddler crawling around the room. The chair (5) was undoubtedly not only used by the two siblings, Johann and his older sister Veronika, for sitting upright and mannerly at the dinner table, but also for horsing around. (The number of ways in which children, not exactly abounding with toys, can put a household object, such as a chair, to use in their games is truly amazing!) The locked chest, prettily decorated with flowers (6), must have been a regular source of curiosity: what secrets might it have contained? The inscription on the tiled part of the wall (7) must have been among the first sentences that Johann, learning to read, syllabled: Dein—Wil—le—ge—sche—he, Dein Wille geschehe (thy will be done). And the tiled stove with flue (8) was probably the centerpiece around which the whole family, and visiting neighbors, assembled on winter evenings.
Outside the house, only little remains to intimate the splendor of Anton Mendel's garden, which stretched from the house to the main road and down to the brook Vrá
enka. The walnut tree in front of the main entrance (9) is too young to have shed nuts for Johann to collect. But perhaps another tree stood there at one time, in the shade of which Johann may have dreamed manchen liebchen Traum, as in the song composed by his countryman, Franz Schubert. Under the windows of the living room, Frau Mendel, a gardener's daughter, may have tended a flower bed of daffodils, peonies, dahlias, and asters and cultivated a vegetable garden with peas, beans, radishes, and onions. But, of course, no trace of it remains. The apples, pears, cherries, and plums borne by the fruit trees in the garden must have been particularly delicious if the abbot still longed for them so many years later. The stump of a tree that remains (10) is grafted so clumsily that Anton Mendel, a skillful horticulturist, could surely not have been responsible for it. Gone also are the beehives that must have fascinated Johann with the ceaseless comings and goings and the complex social life of their inhabitants. The Mendel family well (11) has fallen into disuse and the fences into disrepair. If the Abort (outhouse; 12) is indeed the family's original one, it could not have stood at its present site.
Behind the garden, stretch out the fields (10) on which Anton Mendel was obliged to toil with his own pair of horses three days a week for the landlord in the Habsburg feudal system. Beyond the fields are the forested hills (10), the site of Anton's fateful accident. While he was carrying out work for the landlord, a falling tree crushed Anton's chest, rendering him an invalid for life. The accident had serious consequences for Johann, who was by this time a student at the Gymnasium in Opava. It denied him the meager support he was receiving from his parents and forced him to interrupt his studies. All this, however, still lay a few years in the future.
The garden, the fields, and the brook were Johann's playfields. The brook winding along the road (13), in particular, must have been his favorite retreat. Here there were fish and crayfish to catch, small mammals to observe, bird nests to spy out in the bushes, and a great variety of plants to enjoy and to wonder what their names might be. Only years later would he learn that the yellow, star-shaped flowers are the Gagea lutea (14) or that the pink racemes of spurred flowers are Corydalis cava.
Johann's playfields were, however, also places of hard work; at that time, every pair of hands counted on a farm, even those of a child. The list of his duties and responsibilities around the house that undoubtedly had always been long, grew, and became diversified with age: sweep the yard; take the ducks down to the brook and keep an eye on them; feed the rabbits and the hens; chop the wood; fetch water from the well for the kitchen and the stables; clean the stables and the barn; take the goat to the pasture [as children do to this very day (15), but with one difference—they now carry portable radios with them]; rake over the hay on the meadow; take care of Theresia, the younger sister; hoe the vegetable garden; in the field ... the list was inexhaustible. Every time he thought he had five minutes to pursue his own interests, he would hear either his mother or his father calling him, which invariably meant that the next task awaited him. Only on Sunday afternoons did he find himself relatively free. Sunday mornings were reserved for church attendance. Frau Mendel probably attended the early morning service, giving herself time to prepare the family lunch, but Johann, Veronika, and their father always dressed up to attend High Mass at Vráné, a half-hour walk from their house. Although Hynice had a small chapel (16), regular services were held only in the spacious baroque church at Vráné (17). There (18), Johann would listen to sermons delivered by the vicar, his future teacher and the man who would soon determine his fate, Father Johann Schreiber. The vicarage at Vráné (19) also housed the registers in which Johann Mendel's birth was recorded, perhaps erroneously, and the cemetery around the church was the site where his ancestors lay and where one day his parents, and later also his kin, would find their final rest (20).
When Johann reached school age, his leisure time was reduced even further. The day's workload did not become any lighter—it was simply compressed into a shorter time interval. Often his path after school led him directly to the field where he would toil until nightfall; when he finally arrived home and had finished his daily chores and done his homework, it was already bedtime. To reach the Hynice public school (21), Johann had only to cross the brook and walk a hundred meters or so up the hill. It was a single-class school, which meant that pupils of different ages and at different stages in their education, often numbering up to 80 heads, were all taught in one room. The teacher of such a large, heterogeneous group had to have the skills of an orchestra conductor to keep the various other groups busy while he worked with one of them. The village teacher, Thomas Makitta, and the vicar, Johann Schreiber, apparently possessed this skill. Schreiber taught religion and natural history, Makitta the rest. To include natural history in the school's curriculum was highly unusual, and the disapproving authorities put an end to this Unfug (nonsense), as one of the officials called it.
Both Makitta and Schreiber recognized Johann Mendel's talent—they distinguished the future soloist in the cacophony of instruments. Had Mendel's skill not stood out so conspicuously above the tenor of the crowd or had his teachers been oblivious to it, the history of genetics would have been written quite differently. Perhaps one of the three rediscoverers of Mendel would now be the founder of this discipline, although it is doubtful that without access to Mendel's publication he would have come to the conclusions that Mendel reached with such admirable clarity and elegance.
Both Mendel's teachers argued with his parents that his talent would be wasted if they did not allow him to study, regardless of the sacrifice it involved. Frau Mendel was easily persuaded by the prospect of her son becoming a priest and thus escaping the drudgery of the Robot, of working for the landlords. Anton Mendel resisted the idea initially, for he was expecting Johann to take over the farm one day, but eventually he gave in, too. And so, after a one-year trial period at the Piarist school in Lipník in the late summer of 1834, the 12-year-old Johann loaded his meager belongings, consisting of a few articles of clothing and large food provisions, onto a horse-drawn cart and set out on the day-long journey to Opava. The route took him past the ponds near Poho
(22), which he probably knew from his wanderings, past the picturesque castle in Fulnek, through the dense, dark forests of Vítkovská vrchovina, the scene of many robber and highwayman stories, past the Hradec castle, where a few years earlier Ludwig van Beethoven had refused to play the piano for the officers of the occupying French army, and on to the Silesian capital. The sight of the imposing building, the Opava Gymnasium (23) that now bears his name, must have both impressed and terrified him. Childhood in his field of dreams was over. Six long years of hardship and deprivation lay before him...
 | FOOTNOTES |
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1 Johann was the name given to Mendel at his birth; the name Gregor he assumed on becoming a monk, a member of the Augustinian Order. The present commentary covers the "Johann" period of Mendel's life. In the text, the numbers in parentheses refer to those printed in the lower left corner of the accompanying pictures. 
2 The house is currently up for sale by its present owners. The Hynice community does not have the funds to purchase it and to turn it into Mendel's museum. It would, however, be in a position to act as curator if the building did pass into its possession. The price is certainly not high if measured against the standards of many other places and one can only hope that a foundation can be persuaded to purchase the house and donate it to the community before the few remaining mementos of young Mendel are lost forever.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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I thank Dr. A. Matalová of the Mendelianum, Brno, Czech Republic, for a tour through Mendel's life; Ing. Antonin Klein for navigation and company; Dr. Werner E. Mayer for computerization of the photographs; and Jane Kraushaar and Lynne Yakes for editorial assistance. The final photograph (24) shows Mendel's glasses, which are on display at the Mendelianum.
| LITERATURE CITED |
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 LITERATURE CITED
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ILTIS, H., 1924 Gregor Johann Mendel: Leben, Werk und Wirkung. Verlag von Julius Springer, Berlin.
MATALOVÁ, A., 1983 Mendel's confession in the ceiling paintings in the former Augustinian prelacy. Folia Mendeliana 18:273-277.
OREL, V., 1996 Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist. Translated by S. Finn. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
