After a year in Lithuania, the family moved to Berlin where they remained until 1929. Their stay in Berlin coincided with the terrible inflation of the early twenties and the beginnings of Nazism in the latter half of the decade. After two of his business attempts failed, and with growing Nazi strength boding ill for Jewish émigrés, Prigogine's father took the family to Brussels, Belgium, where Prigogine, then twelve, was enrolled in the Latin-Greek section of the Athénée d'Ixelles, a secondary school with a strict classical curriculum.
At this stage in his life, Prigogine was interested not in science but in history, archeology, art, and music; his mother claimed he could understand musical notes before he could understand words. Taught to play the piano by his mother, he even considered a career as a concert pianist, later regretting that he did not have as much time to devote to his music as he would have liked. He also read widely in the classics and philosophy during his teen years, and was particularly impressed by Henri Bergson's L'évolution créatrice and the Bergsonian view of the nature of time.
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