The Blue Flower

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 (#ulink_0ef67112-2122-5325-94c0-a9b10aff93e5)

In Jena (#ulink_0ef67112-2122-5325-94c0-a9b10aff93e5)

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, closing 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 Schlöben, 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 (#ulink_e37fcbd2-3367-55e0-a165-d92169ca6f9f)

An Incident in Student Life (#ulink_e37fcbd2-3367-55e0-a165-d92169ca6f9f)

‘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 –’