A Man in Love

by Martin Walser

  So it was to be a play by Iffland, he thought. From the doorway, Stadelmann reported the successful incineration of everything Bohemian. Goethe stood up, went over to him, shook his hand, and said, “In the future, you can sell my hair wherever and whenever you like.”

  Stadelmann said, “It was only when people begged me for it, sir. Girls and such.”

  Stadelmann was back outside and Goethe sat there, feeling like a field marshal during a battle. Mounted couriers come galloping up, reporting this and that. He must decide what has to be done and give the orders. He was no field marshal, however. If he had been one, he would have been the kind who believes that soldiers must see themselves what works and what doesn’t. He had hesitated too long and then in his haste done everything wrong, incinerating the things from Marienbad in the Webicht Forest!

  He ordered a cease-fire with himself. Since receiving the New Year’s Eve note, he could fulfill his duty to be present without impatience and irritability. He let Chancellor von Müller decide who should be granted an audience for how long, and how they should be received. He had more heartfelt banter with Adele Schopenhauer and Julie and Linchen von Egloffstein than ever before, calling Adele his favorite, which she passed on, so he had to intoxicate Julie even more. With his men, he was a patient companion. In addition to secretarial and copy work, John had a standing special assignment to observe the weather and put his observations down in writing. He was instructed to draw all possible inferences from the thermometer, the barometer, and cloud formations. John reported an imminent spell of warm weather unusual for this time of year. Nothing would remain of the little snow that had fallen so far. He regretted having to say so, since he knew the Privy Councilor enjoyed hard winter weather. Goethe kept his enthusiasm under control. He called for Stadelmann and at once showed himself to be in the cheeriest of moods “because, Stadelmann dear fellow, we may need to dash over to Dresden. What do we have the fastest chaise in the country and the best coachman in the world for anyway, Stadelmann?”

  “I’m glad, sir,” said Stadelmann.

  They were making little daily excursions into the countryside now. But Dresden! Years ago Madame de Staël had sent him a seductively urgent invitation to visit her in Dresden. There hadn’t been quite enough attractive power. The lady was magnificent, venerable, and also sufficiently bright, but she was too ambitious for him. He’d felt drawn to her whenever he encountered her. Only a woman can know you the way she knew him. She had provided him with the formula for his kind of masculinity: Il vous faut de la séduction. He was the conquered, not the conqueror, and Ulrike was the first one who had refused to conquer him. Nevertheless, that’s why he would go to Dresden. W-A-T-F.

  On December 28, he had the horses hitched up for another excursion. These days, he found himself unable to work. He was ashamed of himself. But it was no use. More vehemently than ever, he pushed aside anything that threatened to hinder him. He refused to have second thoughts. No matter what that meant! What concern was it of his! This everlasting evaluation! Life doesn’t want a grade, it wants to be lived.

  Then on Wednesday, December 28, the following happened: As always when they drove into town, they crossed the Marktplatz, keeping to the right of the square and turning into the Schlossgasse to reach the Kegel Bridge and cross the Ilm. On this December 28, he saw a coach on the other side of the river, stopped in front of the posthouse next to the Erbprinz Hotel. Fresh horses were just being hitched up and four persons were standing in front of the Erbprinz, obviously in conversation with the postmaster. Even shortsighted as he was, he could see by the shape of the coach that these were no ordinary mail-coach passengers. The four were of different heights and all wearing fur coats, open because it was not particularly cold. Kerchiefs instead of thick fur caps. The mood he was in since the lavender blue note led him to believe that these four persons he was looking at were the Levetzows. Just as one knows the names of separate peaks that belong together under a single name, he thought he could recognize in the differences in height the Holy Family (as he had occasionally called them, purely in fun). Stadelmann was ordered to turn immediately at the next corner into the Kollegiengasse and drive quickly through the Seifengasse back to the Frauenplan and into the courtyard. He told Stadelmann he was about to give him the most important command he had ever received: to drive as near as he could to the four travelers to see if he recognized them, but not to let them recognize him.

  Then he ran back and forth along his six-room course, faster than he meant to. Had he worn spectacles like other shortsighted people, he would have seen whether or not it was them. Field Marshal, you ought to be shot. And it’s been just a week or even less since he had been so satisfied with his revision of the passage about spectacles in the Journeyman Years. This was his punishment! He had Wilhelm, the enemy of spectacles, say, “Whoever looks through spectacles thinks himself smarter than he is.” Spectacles have a bad effect, ethically. I see more than I should. Oh Wilhelm, Wilhelm! Goethe drummed his fists against his breast, not hard, but fast. The battle was not yet lost. If it is the Levetzows, they will not drive through Weimar without paying him a visit. Or are they already late? Is someone already waiting for them in Dresden? Quiet! Not a sound out of you now. He poured himself a glass of port wine and drank it off in one swallow. And then another glass. And a third. His breathing returned to what it should be. All he could do was blunder about and think Dresden—New Year’s Eve—Ulrike—New Year’s Eve—Dresden. His heart banged in his breast like a prisoner who sees himself unjustly imprisoned bangs against the door of his cell. His heart would beat itself bloody. He felt mistreated. He had been surprised that Ulrike had even sent that note. Yes, there was the formula N-C-O-L-W-N, but then the formal invitation. It wasn’t Ulrike’s style. It was her mother’s. She wanted him as a trophy at her and Klebelsberg’s ball. To add some class. He didn’t care. The main thing was to see Ulrike …

  Stadelmann returned, his serious face the very picture of joy. “Yes, sir, yes! It’s them. They didn’t see me, but it’s them. All four of ’em.”

  “Thank you, Stadelmann,” said the Field Marshal, “dismissed,” and saluted him. Stadelmann clicked his heels together, turned, and marched out. Goethe had to drink another glass of port. And another. He could hardly stand it. At the end of two hours he had emptied two bottles of port. He could barely walk, but he could sit. And think. Now he was happy that he was the Field Marshal. There had been cowardice, cowardice in the face of friends. The Levetzows had stolen away. They didn’t expect him until December 31. In order to increase their prestige. But today was too early. Today they had … doesn’t matter what they had to do today. But it had nothing to do with him. Nothing more. Ever again. Now he was glad he had tried to surrender to the feeling that had begun to take shape in him in recent days: shame. Now there was no longer any doubt about this feeling. He was ashamed of himself with a vehemence that left nothing else inside him. Now at last, after this latest experience, he was quite sure of his shame. It told him, You have left that behind. His hero’s prejudice against spectacles—he no longer cursed it. If you had worn spectacles, you would have recognized the family. They would have had to come to you and that’s exactly what they did not want to do. Somewhere (he no longer knew where) he had written, “An animal knows no instruments, it simply perceives what nature makes possible for us.” And just think of all it makes possible. Now he could supplement it with, And prevents the impossible. The impossible had been prevented. Was that an ease just now? An ease he had not yet felt? Its name was lovelessness. Yes. Never known, never experienced. But there was no other way to spell this feeling. He was free. No doubt about it, he was loveless. Lovelessness, tangible, a spaciousness as never before, even if it is an emptiness, a non-feeling that surpassed all feeling. He is released, free, this is what freedom is, to be loveless. Loveless, joyless, lifeless, painless. No one will ever be able to torture him again. Not even himself. All living creatures are released. The very first commandment which M
oses, exhausted from climbing Mount Sinai, failed to hear (a lapse pregnant with tragedy for all time), he—having arrived at his own Sinai and also exhausted, but not in the least hard of hearing, no, keen-eared as never before—he has heard and understood: Thou shalt not love.

  He got into bed. No more thoughts he had to unsuccessfully defend himself against. He felt only himself. Nothing beyond himself. As if he filled up the world. The whole world was him. Bursting with ease. A divine weight. The weight of lightness. At last. His lost equilibrium? Was that it? He thought so. Fell asleep. Slept without interruption far into the following day.

  When he awoke, he had his member in his hand, and it was stiff. He knew whom he had dreamed of. W-A-T-F.

  The Final Word

  FRAU MARIE SCHÄFER, who served the unmarried noblewoman Ulrike von Levetzow as lady’s maid for sixteen years, reports the following about the events of November 12, 1899:

  When Ulrike von Levetzow went to bed the previous evening, her face was bathed in a cold sweat, and in a premonition that her end was near, she bade me fetch a little packet of letters whose contents were known to no one and to burn them on a silver platter. The ashes were to be sealed in a silver capsule and it was her wish that after her death, this priceless memento be placed in her coffin. This was done. At four o’clock in the morning, she awoke with a cough and at six o’clock she passed away peacefully.

  According to the written testimony of her grandniece, they were letters from Goethe.

  Notes

  14 “I have no wish to be another Tieck”: Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), Romantic poet and novelist.

  15 It dredged up memories of Sesenheim: The Alsatian town near Strasbourg where the young Goethe fell in love with Friedericke Brion, daughter of the local pastor.

  15 And Charlotte Buff, the great sentimentalist: The betrothed woman with whom Goethe fell in love while studying law in Wetzlar, north of Frankfurt. She became the model for Lotte in his first novel The Sufferings of Young Werther.

  15 And Christiane, the great emotion: Christiane Vulpius became Goethe’s common-law wife in 1788.

  15 And then Marianne, who wanted: Marianne Willemer, the young wife of an old friend of Goethe’s, was the muse for the love poems in his cycle The West-Eastern Divan.

  42 He thought of Zelter’s setting of the poem: Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), master bricklayer and self-taught composer. One of Goethe’s closest friends.

  45 A god gave you the power to say how much you suffer: A variation of a line from Goethe’s play Torquato Tasso, Act V, scene 5: “And if a man’s struck dumb by misery, / A god gave me power to say how much I suffer.”

  54 “My name is Lili, but I don’t have a park.”: As a young man, Goethe courted Anna Elisabeth “Lili” Schönemann (1758–1817), daughter of a Frankfurt banker. “Lili’s Park” is one of the poems he wrote for her.

  60 “You kiss brilliantly, dear sir.”: Charlotte von Stein (1742–1827), lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Weimar and wife of the duke’s head equerry.

  134 Schiller (your favorite), Herder, Winckelmann: Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), poet, playwright, historian, and one of Goethe’s closest friends and collaborators. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), philosopher, theologian, and literary critic; Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), art historian and archeologist.

  144 “And sitting at the feet … for the rest of his life.”: Goethe, Poetry and Truth, Book 13, quoting Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloïse, to characterize his relation to Lotte Buff.

  150 “The human being … the name of wet-nurse to his habits.”: Schiller, Wallenstein’s Death, Act I, scene 4: Aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht, und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme.

  153 but because of Madame Szymanowska: Maria Szymanowska (1789–1831), Polish composer and one of the first virtuoso pianists of the nineteenth century.

  160 Except for Herr von Humboldt, please: Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), Prussian philosopher, diplomat, linguist, and the founder of Humboldt University in Berlin.

  162 “Sweet life! … must I leave you?”: Goethe, Egmont, Act V.