LITMIR.BIZ

       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, 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

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