Georg Klein was born to an assimilated Jewish family in the Hungarian-speaking part of eastern Czechoslovakia in 1925 and survived the Second World War in Budapest. He moved to Sweden in 1947. For more than three decades he has led the Department of Tumor Biology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and been a member of the Nobel Committee. He continues to do research and publish as one of the most prominent cancer researchers in the world. He has written numerous scientific papers and several book-length philosophical meditations, some of which have appeared in English translation, among them The Atheist and the Holy City (MIT Press, 1993), Pieta (MIT Press, 1992), and Live Now (Prometheus Books, 1997).
The text that follows has been gleaned from various sources not previously translated into English. Selections were chosen with the intention of assembling an autobiographical sketch of one of the more remarkable European figures of the postwar period. ‘Third Visit with Peter Noll’ first appeared in German translation in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner; Klein’s Atheist began as an introduction to Noll’s work, and the essay alluded to near the end of the Noll segment is ‘Sons without Fathers,’ in Pieta. Years after his arrival in Sweden, Klein would realize that the young Swede on the ferry who challenged his idealistic view of the country had become the prominent author and artist Stig Claesson.