Oberth was born into a
Transylvanian Saxon family in Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt),
Kingdom of Hungary (today
Sibiu in
Romania); and besides his native
German, he was fluent in
Hungarian and
Romanian as well. At the age of 11, Oberth's interest in rocketry was sparked by the novels of
Jules Verne, especially
From the Earth to the Moon and
Around the Moon. He was fond of reading them over and over until they were engraved in his memory. As a result, Oberth constructed his first
model rocket as a school student at the age of 14. In his youthful experiments, he arrived independently at the concept of the
multistage rocket. During this time, however, he lacked the resources to put his ideas into practice. In 1912, Oberth began studying medicine in
Munich,
Germany, but after
World War I broke out, he was drafted into the
Imperial German Army, assigned to an infantry battalion, and sent to the
Eastern Front against
Russia. In 1915, Oberth was moved into a medical unit at a hospital in
Segesvár (German: Schäßburg; Romanian: Sighișoara),
Transylvania, in Austria-Hungary (today Romania). There he found the spare time to conduct a series of experiments concerning
weightlessness, and later resumed his rocketry designs. By 1917, he showed designs of a missile using liquid propellant with a range of to
Hermann von Stein, the
Prussian Minister of War. On 6 July 1918, Oberth married Mathilde Hummel, with whom he had four children. Among Oberth's children, one lost his life as a soldier during
World War II. His daughter, Ilse (born 1924), died on August 28, 1944, in an accidental explosion at the Redl-Zipf V-2 rocket engine test facility and
liquid oxygen plant where she worked as a rocket technician. In 1919, Oberth once again moved to Germany, this time to study physics, initially in Munich and later at the
University of Göttingen. In 1922, Oberth's proposed doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". However, professor
Augustin Maior of the
University of Cluj in Romania offered Oberth the opportunity to defend his original dissertation there in order to receive a doctorate. He did so successfully on 23 May 1923. (
The Rocket into Planetary Space). By 1929, Oberth had expanded this work to a 429-page book titled
Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (
Ways to Spaceflight). Oberth commented later that he made the deliberate choice not to write another doctoral dissertation. He wrote, "I refrained from writing another one, thinking to myself: Never mind, I will prove that I am able to become a greater scientist than some of you, even without the title of Doctor." Oberth criticized the
German system of education, saying "Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward, things are barely discernible." Oberth became in 1927 a member of the
Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) – the "Spaceflight Society" – an amateur rocketry group that had taken great inspiration from his book, and Oberth acted as something of a mentor to the enthusiasts who joined the Society, which included persons such as
Wernher von Braun, Rolf Engel,
Rudolf Nebel or
Paul Ehmayr. Oberth lacked the opportunities to work or to teach at the college or university level, as did many well-educated experts in the physical sciences and engineering in the time period of the 1920s through the 1930s – with the situation becoming much worse during the worldwide
Great Depression that started in 1929. Therefore, from 1924 through 1938, Oberth supported himself and his family by teaching
physics and
mathematics at the
Stephan Ludwig Roth High School in
Mediaș, Romania. == Rocketry and spaceflight ==