• 87. Fritz Michaelis to Caroline in Göttingen: Marburg late 1788
[Marburg late 1788]
|172| Thank God you have been returned to us, my dear woman! [1] and that your good health has returned and is now chasing away all the dark phantoms that your ailing body created for you. Do not ask me whether I comprehend it. I know all |173| too well that our soul is a piano on which physical ailments play whatever tune they choose.
Woman, you are like a child on Christmas day; the newest doll is always the most beautiful. [2] For otherwise I cannot comprehend how Therese can allegedly be “incomparably more beautiful” than our good Auguste, who, it seems, has fallen a bit out of fashion with her dear Frau Mama, who nonetheless allows that she is “clever and vivacious” — but pretty? beautiful? — But how? for Therese is now there. [3] Caroline, as far as I am concerned you need to be fairer to Auguste — otherwise you and I will not continue to be friends.
The idea that I might come to Goettingen after all in August is about as likely as a journey to Kamchatka. My lectures will be doubled around that time, at least one of them, and I am giving lectures for 3 consecutive hours during the afternoon, not counting the morning hour.
In general, I can answer your question quite briefly concerning how I live: I am a thing that gives university lecture courses. Thank God I honestly cannot imagine a more pleasant way to spend my time not only amid these professional duties, but gradually also amid what is generally known as entertainment — (though a tête-à-tête with Caroline admittedly constitutes an exception). Every fool is pleased with his own hat, and I no less than others, and it is indeed a piece of considerable good fortune that it pleases me so well. My most ardent inclination has always been to become a professor, and that inclination grew the more opportunity I had to make comparisons with other professions.
I realize that most people are of a quite different opinion in this matter, and I certainly also realize, am not blind to the fact that the life of a professor also has its unpleasant sides. But I have not noticed them yet. Perhaps when I have to preach to the peasants. [4]
|174| So, you basically seem to have an encyclopedic understanding of how you would like my lifestyle to be. In Jung I have found a rapturous enthusiast, true, but also a warm and concerned friend. That makes two that I have here now; just too bad that both are too old for me and think quite differently than I do about most things; and yet one can indeed get pretty far in the world with a bit of mutual tolerance. . . .
Notes
[1] Caroline had returned from Clausthal to Göttingen, presumably in late October or early November 1788 (Rudolf Koch and Fritz Kredel, Deutschland und angrenzende Gebiete [Leipzig 1937]):
[2] Kupfersammlung zu J[ohann] B[ernhard] Basedows Elementarwerke für die Jugend und ihre Freunde: Erste Lieferung in 53 Tafeln. Zweyte Lieferung in 47 Tafeln von L bis XCVI (Leipzig, Dessau, Berlin 1774), plate Vd:
[3] Title vignette to J. F. E. Albrecht, Die Familie Eboli: Dramatisch bearbeitet vom Verfasser der Lauretta Pisana, vol. 4 (Dresden, Leipzig 1792):
[4] Here Marburg in the mid-nineteenth century; note the train across the river just to the right of the church steeple (Aloys Henninger, Marburg und seine Umgebungen [Marburg 1856], plate following p. 28):
Concerning Fritz Michaelis’s reputation in Marburg at the time, see Friedrich Gedike’s first-hand impressions on 28–29 June 1789, in Der Universitäts-Bereiser Friedrich Gedike und sein Bericht an Friedrich Wilhelm II., I. Ergänzungsheft des Archivs für Kulturgeschichte, ed. Richard Fester (Berlin 1905), 40:
Among professors in the medical school, Geheimrath Baldinger is indeed one of the jewels of this university. At the very least, he enjoys considerable celebrity because of his genuinely broad erudition. He is quite extolled as a practical physician. His name attracts many medical students and physicians here. His delivery during lectures is extremely, indeed excessively animated, but they say he often becomes confused and excessively lost in anecdotes and digressions.
The second professor of medicine is Hofrath [Christian Friedrich] Michaelis, a lively, pleasant fellow whose delivery during lectures, at least judging from his cheerful comportment otherwise, must be quite attractive and entertaining, and genuinely is exceedingly extolled. Because of the disunion between him and Baldinger, however, his reputation does quite suffer in other regards.
I was unable to find occasion to make the acquaintance of the other professors of medicine. Back.
Translation © 2011 Doug Stott