Robert W. Cahn - Upbringing

Upbringing

Cahn’s father, Martin Cahn, came from a religious, but assimilated, Jewish family which had included successive heads of Jewish communities in small settlements in Baden. He worked as an accountant for the mirror factory of Robert’s maternal grandfather, Hugo Heinemann. Young Robert was raised in a flat in the centre of Fürth, and for three years in a modernist style house on the outskirts. In July 1933, his father’s marriage to Else being on the point of collapse and the children having been persecuted on account of their being Jewish, the family fled to Switzerland from where Robert went with his mother and grandfather to Majorca and Martin to London to establish a new business. Cahn joined his father in London in 1936 and was introduced to the musical soirées and cultural circle of friends his father had developed.

Sent by his father to a school with absolutely no academic pretensions, he was left largely to his own devices, and he took himself out of the school in 1940. Following a brief interlude in London, he escaped the Blitz to Workington, Cumbria where he had two years of excellent teaching at the local technical school and discovered a lifelong passion for mountain walking.

From the moment he left Germany until his naturalisation in 1947, he was a stateless person and this had a major psychological influence on him and fuelled his desire to achieve and integrate in his new homeland. He became fervently proud of his adopted country and, following his naturalisation, of his Britishness, developing a great facility in his adopted English language which stood him in good stead for his later remarkable activity as a scientific editor. Paradoxically his life experience had developed in him wide, very continental, cultural tastes, and extensive international contacts and his travels across Europe resulted in a fluency in four languages.