‘There were no women,’ Fritz told him. ‘I think perhaps my uncle did not invite any.’
‘No women!’ cried Erasmus. ‘Who then did the washing?’
7
The Freiherr and the French Revolution
WERE things worse at Weissenfels when a letter from the Big Cross arrived, or when the Mother’s elder brother, Captain August von Boltzig, happened to come to the house? Von Boltzig had fought in the same battalion as the Freiherr in the Seven Years’ War, but had come to totally different conclusions. The King of Prussia, whom he admired without reservations, had supported total freedom in religious belief, and the Prussian army was notably fearless and morally upright. Must one then not conclude -
‘I can see what you have in mind to say next,’ said the Freiherr, his voice still just kept in check. ‘You mean that you accept my reasoning,’ said von Boltzig. ‘You admit that there is no connection, or none that can be demonstrated, between religion and right conduct?’
‘I accept that you, August von Boltzig, are a very great fool.’ The Freifrau felt trapped between the two of them, like a powder of thinly-ground meal between the millstones. One of her night fears (she was a poor sleeper) was that her brother and the Uncle Wilhelm might arrive, unannounced, at the same time. What would she be able to do or say, to get decently rid of one of them? Large though the house was, she always found guests a difficulty. The bell rang, you heard the servants crossing the hall, everything was on top of you before you could pray for guidance.
In 1790, by which time the young Fritz had matriculated at the University of Jena, the forces of history itself seemed to take a hand against Auguste. But here her narrowness of mind was an advantage, in that she saw them as no more and no less important than the worn bed-linen, or her brother’s godlessness. Like the damp river-breeze, which made the bones ache, the disturbances in France seemed to her no more than a device to infuriate her husband.
Breakfast at Weissenfels was taken in a frugal style. On the dining room stove, at six o’clock in the morning, there were ranks of earthenware coffee-pots, the coffee being partly made, for economy’s sake, out of burnt carrot powder. On the table stood large thick cups and saucers and a mountain of white rolls. The family, still in their nightclothes, appeared in ones and twos and, like sleepwalkers, helped themselves from the capacious earthenware pots. Some of the coffee they drank, some they sucked in through pieces broken off from the white rolls. Anyone who had finished turned his or her cup upsidedown on the saucer, calling out decisively, ‘Satt!’
As the boys grew older, Auguste did not like them to linger in the dining room. ‘What are you speaking of, young men?’ Erasmus and Karl stood warming themselves, close to the stove. ‘You know that your father does not like …’
‘He will be quite happy with the Girondins,’ said Karl.
‘But Karl, these people may perhaps have new ideas. He does not like new ideas.’
In the January of 1793, Fritz arrived from Jena in the middle of the breakfast, in a blue cloth coat with immense brass buttons, patched across the shoulder-blades, and a round hat. ‘I will change my clothes, and come and sit with you.’
‘Have you brought a newspaper?’ Erasmus asked. Fritz looked at his mother, and hesitated. ‘I think so.’ The Freiherr, on this occasion, was sitting in his place at the head of the table. He said, ‘I think you must know whether you have brought a newspaper or not.’ Fritz handed him a copy, many times folded, of the Jenaer Allgemeine Zeitung. The paper was still cold from the freezing journey, in Fritz’s outside pocket, from Jena.
The Freiherr unfolded it and uncreased it, took out his spectacles and in front of his silent family bent his attention on the closely printed front page. At first he said, ‘I don’t understand what I am reading.’
‘The convention have served a writ of accusation on Louis,’ said Fritz courageously.
‘Yes, I read those words, but they were altogether beyond me. They are going to bring a civil action against the legitimate king of France?’
‘Yes, they accuse him of treason.’
‘They have gone mad.’
The Freiherr sat for a moment, in monumental stillness, among the coffee-cups. Then he said, ‘I shall not touch another newspaper until the French nation returns to its senses again.’
He left the room. ‘Satt! Satt! Satt!’ shouted Erasmus, drumming on his saucer. ‘The revolution is the ultimate event, no interpretation is possible, what is certain is that a republic is the way forward for all humanity.’
‘It is possible to make the world new,’ said Fritz, ‘or rather to restore it to what it once was, for the golden age was certainly once a reality.’
‘And the Bernhard is here, sitting under the table!’ cried the Freifrau, openly weeping. ‘He will have heard every word, and every word he hears he will repeat.’
‘It is not worth listening to, I know it already,’ said the Bernhard, emerging from the tablecloth’s stiff folds. ‘They will cut his head off, you will see.’
‘He does not know what he is saying! The king is the father, the nation is his family.’
‘When the golden age returns there will be no fathers,’ murmured the Bernhard. ‘What is he saying?’ asked poor Auguste.
She was right, however, in believing that with the French Revolution her troubles would be greatly increased. Her husband had not absolutely forbidden the appearance of newspapers in the house, so that she would be able to say to herself, ‘It is only that he wants not to catch sight of them at table, or in his study.’ For some other way had to be devised by which he could satisfy his immense curiosity about the escapades of the French which meant - if she was to tell the truth - nothing to her whatsoever. At the Saline offices, she supposed, and at the club - the Literary and Scientific Athenaeum of Weissenfels - he would hear the topics of the day discussed, but she knew, with the insight of long habit, so much more reliable than love, that whatever had happened would not be real to him - that he would not be able to feel he truly possessed it until he had seen it on the grey pages of a daily newspaper. ‘Another time, dear Fritz, when you give your greatcoat to the servants to be brushed, you could leave your newspaper showing, just a few inches.’
‘Mother, after all these years you don’t know my Father. He has said he will not read the paper, and he will not.’
‘But Fritz, how will he inform himself? The Brethren won’t tell him anything, they don’t speak to him of worldly matters.’
‘Weiss Gott!’ said Fritz. ‘Osmosis, perhaps.’
8
In Jena
THE Freiherr thought it best for his eldest son to be educated in the German manner, at as many universities as possible: Jena for a year, Leipzig for a year, by which time Erasmus would be old enough to join him, then a year at Wittenberg to study law, so that he would be able, if occasion arose, to protect whatever property the family had left through the courts. He was also to begin on theology, and on the constitution of the Electorate of Saxony. Instead of these subjects, Fritz registered for history and philosophy.
As a result he attended on his very first morning in Jena a lecture by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte was speaking of the philosophy of Kant, which, fortunately, he had been able to improve upon greatly. Kant believed in the external world. Even though it is only known to us through our senses and our own experience, still, it is there. This, Fichte was saying, was nothing but an old man’s weakness. We are all free to imagine what the world is like, and since we probably all imagine it differently, there is no reason at all to believe in the fixed reality of things.
Before Fichte’s gooseberry eyes the Students, who had the worst reputation for unruliness in Germany, cowered, transformed into frightened schoolboys. ‘Gentlemen! withdraw into yourselves! Withdraw into your own mind!’ Arrogant and drunken in their free time, they waited, submissive. Each unhooked the little penny inkwell on a spike from behind a lapel of his jacket. Some straightened up, some bowed themselves over, closin
g their eyes. A few trembled with eagerness. ‘Gentlemen, let your thought be the wall.’ All were intent. ‘Have you thought the wall?’ asked Fichte. ‘Now, then, gentlemen, let your thought be that that thought the wall.’
Fichte was the son of a linen-weaver, and in politics a Jacobin. His voice carried without effort. ‘The gentleman in the fourth seat from the left at the back, who has the air of being in discomfort …’
A wretched youth rose to his feet.
‘Herr Professor, that is because the chairs in the lecture-rooms of Jena are made for those with short legs.’
‘My appointment as Professor will not be confirmed until next May. You are permitted to ask one question.’
‘Why …?’
‘Speak up!’
‘Why do we imagine that the wall is as we see it, and not as something other?’
Fichte replied, ‘We create the world not out of our imagination, but out of our sense of duty. We need the world so that we may have the greatest possible number of opportunities to do our duty. That is what justifies philosophy, and German philosophy in particular.’
Late into the windy lamp-lit autumn night Jena’s students met to fichtisieren, to talk about Fichte and his system. They appeared to be driving themselves mad. At two o’clock in the morning Fritz suddenly stood still in the middle of the Unterer Markt, letting the others stagger on in ragged groups without him, and said aloud to the stars, ‘I see the fault in Fichte’s system. There is no place in it for love.’
‘You are outside his house,’ said a passing student, sitting down on the cobblestones. ‘His house is 12a. 12a is where Professor Fichte lives.’
‘He is not a Professor until May,’ said Fritz. ‘We can serenade him until then. We can sing beneath his window, “We know what is wrong with your system … There is no place in it, no place in it for love.”’
There were lodgings of all sorts in Jena. Some of the very poor students were entitled to eat free, as a kind of scholarship. They chose their eating-house, and could have their dinner only there and only up to a certain amount, a frightening sight, since the inn-keepers hurried them on, in order to clear the tables, and they were obliged to cram and splutter, snatching at the chance, like fiends in hell, of the last permitted morsel. But every one of them, no matter how wretched, belonged to a Landsmannschaft, a fellowship of their own region, even if that was only a hometown and numberless acres of potatoes. In the evenings, groups of friends moved from pothouse to smoky pothouse, looking for other friends and then summoning them, in the name of their Landsmannschaft, to avenge some insult or discuss a fine point of Nature-philosophy, or to get drunk, or, if already drunk, then drunker.
Fritz could have lived at Schloben, but it was two hours away. He lodged at first - since she charged him nothing - with his Aunt Johanna Elizabeth. Elizabeth complained that she saw very little of him. ‘I had so much looked forward to having a poet at my table. I myself, when I was a young woman, composed verses.’ But Fritz, that first winter, had to spend an undue amount of time with his history teacher, the celebrated Professor Schiller. ‘Dear Aunt, he is ill, it is his chest, a weakness has set in, all his pupils are taking it in turns to nurse him.’
‘Nephew, you haven’t the slightest idea how to nurse anyone.’
‘He is a very great man.’
‘Well, they are the most difficult to nurse.’
The Professor of Medicine and principal doctor to the University, Hofrat Johann Stark, was called in. He was a follower, like most of his colleagues, of the Brownian system. Dr Brown, of Edinburgh, had cured a number of patients by refusing to let blood, and by recommending exercise, sufficient sex, and fresh air. But he held that to be alive was not a natural state, and to prevent immediate collapse the constitution must be held in perpetual balance by a series of stimuli, either jacking it up with alcohol, or damping it down with opium. Schiller, although himself a believer in Brownismus, would take neither, but propped himself up against the bedstead, calling on his students to get paper and ink and take down notes at his dictation: ‘To what end does man study universal history?’
It was at this time, when Fritz was emptying the sick room chamberpots, and later, watching the Professor at length put a lean foot to the floor, that he was first described in a letter by the critic Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel was writing to his much more successful, elder brother, August Wilhelm, a professor of literature and aesthetics. He was in triumph at having discovered someone of interest whom his brother did not know. ‘Fate has put into my hands a young man, from whom everything may be expected, and he explained himself to me at once with fire - with indescribably much fire. He is thin and well-made, with a beautiful expression when he gets carried away. He talks three times as much, and as fast, as the rest of us. On the very first evening he told me that the golden age would return, and that there was nothing evil in the world. I don’t know if he is still of the same opinion. His name is von Hardenberg.’
9
An Incident in Student Life
‘I shall not forget it,’ said Fritz, thinking of an early morning in May, towards the end of his year in Jena. His Aunt Johanna had died of pneumonia in the bitter spring winds which Professor Schiller had just survived, and Fritz had lodgings in Schustergasse 4 (second staircase up), which he shared with a distant cousin - but where was this cousin when Fritz woke up, having been dragged out of bed half naked?
‘He and some others are in the students’ prison,’ said the visitor, not a friend, hardly an acquaintance. ‘You all went out together yesterday evening -‘
‘Very good, but in that case why am I not in the Black Hole along with them?’
‘You have a better sense of direction than they have, and you were not arrested. But now you must come with me, you’re needed.’
Fritz opened his eyes wide. ‘You are Diethelm. You are a medical student.’
‘No, my name is Dietmahler. Get up, put on your shirt and jacket.’
‘I have seen you in Professor Fichte’s lectures,’ said Fritz, grasping the water-jug. ‘And you wrote a song: it begins “In Distant Lands the Maiden …”’
‘I am fond of music. Come, we have not much time.’
Jena being in a bare hollow, at the foot of a cliff, you can only get out of it by walking steadily uphill. It was still only four o’clock in the morning, but as they tramped up in the direction of Galgenberg they could feel the whole stagnant little town beginning to steam in its early summer heat. The sky was not quite light, but seemed to be thinning and lifting into a cloudless pallor. Fritz had begun to understand. There must have been a quarrel last night, or at least a dispute, about which he remembered nothing. If a duel was to be fought, which in itself was a prison offence, you needed a doctor, or since no respectable doctor could be asked to attend, then a medical student.
‘Am I the referee?’ Fritz asked.
‘Yes.’
The referee in a Jena duel had to decide the impossible. The students’ sword, the Schlager, was triangular, but rounded towards the point, so that only a deep three-cornered wound was allowed to score.
‘Who has challenged who?’ he asked.
‘Joseph Beck. He sent me a note to say he must fight, who or why he did not say. Only the time and place.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Your rooms were the nearest.’
‘I am glad he has so true a friend.’
They were now above the mist level, where the dew was beginning to dry, and turned through a gate into a field which had been cleared of young turnips. Two students were hard at it, with flapping shirt-tails, attacking each other without grace or skill on the hardened, broken, yellowish ground.
‘They started without us,’ said Dietmahler. ‘Run!’
As they crossed the field one of the duellists cut and ran for it to a gate in the other direction. His opponent left standing, dropped his Schlager, then fell himself, with his right hand masked in blood, perhaps cut off.
‘No
, only two fingers,’ said Dietmahler, urgently bending down to the earth, where weeds and coarse grass were already beginning to sprout. He picked up the fingers, red and wet as if skinned, one of them the top joint only, one with a gold ring.
‘Put them in your mouth,’ said Dietmahler. ‘If they are kept warm I can perhaps sew them back on our return.’
Fritz was not likely to forget the sensation of the one and a half fingers and the heavy ring, smooth and hard while they were yielding, in his mouth.
‘All Nature is one,’ he told himself.
At the same time (his own common sense told him to do this, without instructions from Dietmahler) he gripped the blubbering and spouting Joseph Beck under the right elbow, to hold up his forearm and keep the veins at the back of the hand empty. Meanwhile the whole sky, from one hilltop horizon to the other, was filled with light, and the larks began to go up. In the next meadow hares had stolen out to feed.
‘As long as his thumb is saved, his hand may still be of use to him,’ Dietmahler remarked. Fritz, with no way of swallowing his own saliva, mixed with earth and blood, thought, ‘This is all of interest to him as a doctor. But, as a philosopher, it doesn’t help me.’
They returned to Jena in a woodcutter’s cart which was providentially going downhill. Even the woodcutter, who normally paid no attention to anything that did not concern him directly, was impressed by the cries and groans of poor Beck. ‘The gentleman is perhaps a singer?’
‘Drive straight to the Anatomy Theatre,’ Dietmahler told him. ‘If it is open, I may be able to find needles and gut.’
It was too early to buy either schnaps or opium, though Dietmahler, who was also a disciple of Brownismus, was impatient to pour quantities of both down his patient.
10
A Question of Money
IN the Michaelmas of 1791 Fritz began the second stage of his university education, at Leipzig. He was nineteen, and Leipzig, with fifty thousand inhabitants, was the largest town he had ever lived in. He found it impossible to manage on the allowance that could be spared for him.
The Blue Flower Page 3