Eric Kandel - Early Years

Early Years

Kandel was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria, in a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family. His mother, Charlotte (Zimels), was born in 1897 in Kolomyya, Pokuttya (modern Ukraine), and came from a well-educated middle-class family. At that time Kolomyya was in Eastern Poland. His father was born in 1898 into a poor family in Olesko, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary). At the beginning of World War I, his parents moved to Vienna where they met and married in 1923, shortly after Hermann Kandel, Eric's father, had established a toy store. They were a thoroughly assimilated and acculturated family, who had to leave Austria after the country had been annexed by Germany in March 1938. Aryanization (Arisierung) started; attacks on Jews escalated; Jewish property was confiscated. Eventually, when Eric was 9, he and his brother Ludwig, 14, boarded the "Gerolstein" at Antwerp in Belgium and joined their uncle in Brooklyn on May 11, 1939. Later his parents succeeded in moving to the US.

When Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, it was claimed in Vienna that he was an "Austrian" Nobel, something he found "typically Viennese: very opportunistic, very disingenuous, somewhat hypocritical." He also said it was "...certainly not an Austrian Nobel, it was a Jewish-American Nobel." After that, he got a call from then Austrian president Thomas Klestil asking him, "How can we make things right?" Kandel said that first, Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring should be renamed; Karl Lueger was an anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Second, he wanted the Jewish intellectual community to be brought back to Vienna, with scholarships for Jewish students and researchers. He also proposed to have a symposium on the response of Austria to National Socialism. Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city.

After arriving in the United States, and settling in Brooklyn, Kandel was tutored by his grandfather in Judaic studies, and was accepted at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, graduating in 1944. He attended Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, a Public high school.

Kandel's initial intellectual interests lay in the area of history. (History and Literature was his undergraduate major at Harvard University.) He wrote an honors dissertation on "The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger." While at Harvard, a place dominated by the work of B. F. Skinner, Kandel became interested in learning and memory. It should be noted, however, that while Skinner championed a strict separation of psychology, as its own level of discourse, from biological considerations such as neurology, Kandel's work is essentially centered on an explication of the relationships between psychology and neurology.

The world of neuroscience was first opened up to Kandel through his interactions with a college girlfriend, Anna Kris, whose parents were psychoanalysts. Sigmund Freud, a pioneer in revealing the importance of unconscious neural processes, was at the root of Kandel's interest in the biology of motivation and unconscious and conscious memory.