Early Life
Wilhelm Solf was born into a wealthy and liberal family in Berlin. He attended secondary schools in Anklam in western Pomerania and in Mannheim. He took up the study of Oriental languages, in particular Sanskrit at universities in Berlin, Göttingen and Halle, earning a doctorate in philology in the winter of 1885. Under the supervision of the well-known Indologist Richard Pischel, he wrote an elementary grammar of Sanskrit.
He then found a position at the library of the University of Kiel. While residing there he was drafted into the Imperial Navy to serve his military obligation. However, he was deemed medically unfit for military service and discharged.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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