The Blue Flower Read online

  His mother had always believed that the Bernhard was destined to become a page, if not at the court of the Elector of Saxony, then perhaps with the Count of Mansfeld or the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel. One of Fritz’s duties, before long, would be to drag his little brother round these various courts in the hope of placing him satisfactorily.

  The rafts lay below the bridge, close into the bank, alongside piles of gently heaving, chained pinewood logs, waiting for the next stage in their journey. A watchman was trying a bunch of keys in the door of a hut. ‘Herr Watchman, have you seen a boy running?’

  A boy was supposed to come with his dinner, said the watchman, but he was a rascal and had not come. ‘Look, the towpath is empty.’

  The empty barges laid up for repair were moored at their station on the opposite bank. Fritz pelted over the bridge. Everyone saw him, coat flying. Had the Freiherr no servants to send? The barges wallowed on their mooring ropes, grating against each other, strake against strake. From the quayside Fritz jumped down about four feet or so onto the nearest deck. There was a scurrying, as though of an animal larger than a dog.

  ‘Bernhard!’

  ‘I will never come back,’ Bernhard called.

  The child ran across the deck, and then, afraid to risk the drop onto the next boat, climbed over the gunwale and then stayed there hanging on with both hands, scrabbling with his boots for a foothold. Fritz caught hold of him by the wrists and at the same moment the whole line of barges made one of their unaccountable shifts, heaving grossly towards each other, so that the Bernhard, still hanging, was trapped and squeezed. A pitiful cough and a burst of tears and blood were forced out of him like air out of a balloon.

  ‘How am I going to get you out of here?’ demanded Fritz. ‘What a pest you are, what a pest.’

  ‘Let me go, let me die!’ wheezed the Bernhard.

  ‘We’ll have to work our way along forward, then I can pull you up.’ But the instinct to preserve life seemed for the moment to have deserted the child, Fritz must do it all, dragging and shuffling him along, wildly protesting, between the two gunwales. If they had been on the other bank there would have been passers-by to lend a hand, but then, Fritz thought, they’d think murder was being done. The boats grew narrower, he saw the glimmering water idling beneath them and hauled the child up like a wet sack. His face was not pale, but a brilliant crimson.

  ‘Make an effort, do you want to drown?’

  ‘What would it matter if I did?’ squeaked the Bernhard. ‘You said once that death was not significant, but only a change in condition.’

  ‘Drat you, you’ve no business to understand that,’ Fritz shouted in his ear.

  ‘My Mutze!’

  The child was much attached to his red cap, which was missing. So, too were one of his front teeth and his breeches. He had on only long cotton drawers tied with tape. Like most rescuers, Fritz felt suddenly furious with the loved and saved. ‘Your Mutze has gone, it must be on its way to the Elbe by now.’ Then, ashamed of his anger, he picked the little boy up and put him on his shoulders to carry him home. The Bernhard, aloft, revived a little. ‘Can I wave at the people?’

  Fritz had to make his way to the end of the line of barges, where perpendicular iron steps had been built into one bank and he could climb up without putting down the Bernhard.

  How heavy a child is when it gives up responsibility.

  He couldn’t go straight back to the Kloster Gasse like this. But Sidonie and Asmus between them would be equal to explaining things away during the before-dinner music. Meanwhile, in Weissenfels, he had many places to get dry. After crossing the bridge again he walked only a short way along the Saale and then took two turns to the left and one to the right, where the lights were now shining in Severin’s bookshop.

  There were no customers in the shop. The pale Severin, in his long overall, was examining one of the tattered lists, which booksellers prefer to all other reading, by the light of a candle fitted with a reflector.

  ‘Dear Hardenberg! I did not expect you. Put the little brother, I pray you, on a sheet of newspaper. Here is yesterday’s Leipziger Zeitung.’ He was surprised at nothing.

  ‘The little brother is in disgrace,’ said Fritz, depositing the Bernhard. ‘He ran down onto the barges. How he came to get quite so wet I don’t know.’

  ‘Kinderleicht, kinderleicht,’ said Severin indulgently, but his indulgence was for Fritz. He could not warm to children, since all of them were scribblers in books. He went to the very back of the shop, opened a wooden chest, and took out a large knitted shawl, a peasant thing.

  ‘Take off your shirt, I will wrap you in this,’ he said. ‘Your brother need not return it to me. Why did you cause all this trouble? Did you hope to sail away and leave your father and mother behind you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said the Bernhard scornfully. ‘All the boats on that mooring are under repair. They could not sail, they have no canvas. I did not want to sail, I wanted to drown.’

  ‘That I don’t believe,’ replied Severin, ‘and I should have preferred you not to say it.’

  ‘He loves water,’ said Fritz, impelled to defend his own.

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘And, indeed, so do I,’ Fritz cried. ‘Water is the most wonderful element of all. Even to touch it is a pleasure.’

  Perhaps Severin did not find it a pleasure to have quite so much water on the floor of his bookshop. He was a man of forty-five, ‘old’ Severin to Fritz, a person of great good sense, unperturbed by life’s contingencies. He had been poor and unsuccessful, had kept himself going by working very hard, at low wages, for the proprietor of the bookshop, and then, when the proprietor had died, had married his widow and come into the whole property. Of course the whole of Weissenfels knew this and approved of it. It was their idea of wisdom exactly.

  Poetry, however, meant a great deal to Severin - almost as much as his lists. He would have liked to see his young friend Hardenberg continue as a poet without the necessity of working as a salt mine inspector.

  For the rest of his journey home the Bernhard continued to complain about the loss of his red Mutze. It was the only thing he had possessed which indicated his revolutionary sympathies.

  ‘I don’t know how you got hold of it,’ Fritz told him. ‘And if Father had ever caught sight of it he would in any case have told the servants to throw it on the rubbish heap. Let all this be a lesson to you to keep yourself from poking about among the visitors’ possessions.’

  ‘In a republic there would be no possessions,’ said the Bernhard.

  5

  The History of Freiherr Heinrich

  Von Hardenberg

  FREIHERR von Hardenberg was born in 1738, and while he was still a boy came into the properties of Oberwiederstadt on the River Wipper in the county of Mansfeld, and the manor and farm of Schloben-bei-Jena. During the Seven Years’ War he served, as a loyal subject, in the Hanoverian Legion. After the Peace of Paris he gave up his commission. And he married, but in 1769 there was an epidemic of smallpox in the towns along the Wipper, and his young wife died. The Freiherr nursed the infected and the dying, and those whose families could not afford a grave were buried in the grounds of Oberwiederstadt which, having once been a convent, still had some consecrated earth. He had undergone a profound religious conversion - but I have not! said Erasmus, as soon as he was old enough to ask about the rows of green mounds so close to the house. ‘I have not - does he ever think of that?’

  On each grave was a plain headstone, carved with the words: He, or she, was born on—, and on—returned home. This was the inscription preferred by the Moravians. The Freiherr now worshipped with the Moravian Brethren, for whom every soul is either dead, awakened, or converted. A human soul is converted as soon as it realises that it is in danger, and what that danger is, and hears itself cry aloud, He is my Lord.

  A little over a year after his wife’s death the Freiherr married his young cousin Bernadine von Boltzig. ‘Bernadine, what an abs
urd name! Have you no other?’ Yes, her second name was Auguste. ‘Well, I shall call you Auguste henceforward.’ In his gentler moments, she was Gustel. Auguste, though timorous, proved fertile. After twelve months the first daughter, Charlotte, was born, and a year later, Fritz. ‘When the time comes for their education,’ the Freiherr said, ‘both shall be sent to the Brethren at Neudietendorf.’

  Neudietendorf, between Erfurt and Gotha, was a colony of the Herrnhut. The Herrnhut was the centre where fifty years earlier the Moravians, refugees from persecution, had been allowed to settle down in peace. To the Moravians, a child is born into an ordered world into which he must fit. Education is concerned with the status of the child in the kingdom of God.

  Neudietendorf, like the Herrnhut, was a place of tranquillity. Wind instruments, instead of bells, summoned the children to their classes. It was also a place of total obedience, for the meek are the inheritors. They must always go about in threes, so that the third might tell the Prediger what the other two had found to talk about. On the other hand, no teacher might give a punishment while he was still angry, since an unjust punishment is never forgotten.

  The children swept the floors, tended the animals and made the hay, but they were never allowed to strive against each other, or take part in competitive games. They received thirty hours a week of education and religious instruction. All must be in bed by sunset, and remain silent until they got up at five the next morning. After any communal task had been completed - say, whitewashing the henhouses - the long trestle tables were brought out for a ‘love-feast’, when all sat down together, hymns were sung and a small glass of homemade liqueur was handed to everyone, even the youngest. The boarding fees were eight thaler for a girl, ten thaler for a boy (who ate more, and needed a Latin and a Hebrew grammar).

  Charlotte von Hardenberg, the eldest, who took after her mother, did very well at the House of Maidens. She married early, and had gone to live in Lausitz. Fritz had been born a dreamy, seemingly backward little boy. After a serious illness when he was nine years old, he became intelligent and in the same year was despatched to Neudietendorf. ‘But in what has he fallen short?’ demanded the Freiherr, when only a few months later he was requested by the Prediger, on behalf of the Elders, to take his son away. The Prediger, who was very unwilling to condemn any child absolutely, explained that Fritz perpetually asked questions, but was unwilling to receive answers. Let us take - said the Prediger - the ‘children’s catechism’. In the course of this the instructor asks, ‘What are you?’

  A I am a human being.

  Q Do you feel it when I take hold of you?

  A I feel it well.

  Q What is this, is it not flesh?

  A Yes, that is flesh.

  Q All this flesh which you have is called the body.

  What is it called?

  A The body.

  Q How do you know when people have died?

  A They cannot speak, they cannot move anymore.

  Q Do you know why not?

  A I do not know why not.

  ‘Could he not answer these questions?’ cried the Freiherr.

  ‘It may be that he could, but the answers he gave in fact were not correct. A child of not quite ten years old, he insists that the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul.’

  ‘But this is only one instance -‘

  ‘I could give many others.’

  ‘He has not yet learned -‘

  ‘He is dreaming away his opportunities. He will never become an acceptable member of Neudietendorf.’

  The Freiherr asked whether not even one sign of moral grace had been detected in his son. The Prediger avoided a reply.

  The mother, poor Auguste, who soon became sickly (although she outlived all but one of her eleven children) and seemed always to be looking for someone to whom to apologise, begged to be allowed to teach Fritz herself. But what could she have taught him? A little music perhaps. A tutor was hired from Leipzig.

  6

  Uncle Wilhelm

  WHILE they were living at Oberwiederstadt, the Hardenbergs did not invite their neighbours, and did not accept their invitations, knowing that this might lead to worldliness. There was also the question of limited means. The Seven Years’ War was expensive - Friedrich II was obliged to open a state lottery to pay for it - and for some of his loyal landholders, quite ruinous. In 1780 four of the smaller Hardenberg properties had to be sold, and at another one, Mockritz, there was an auction of the entire contents. Now it stood there without crockery, without curtains, without livestock. As far as the low horizon the fields lay uncultivated. At Oberwiederstadt itself, you saw through the narrow ancient windows row after row of empty dovecotes, and a Gutshof too vast to be filled, or even half-filled, which had once been the convent chapel. The main building was pitiable, with missing tiles, patched, weather-beaten, stained with water which had run for years from the loosened guttering. The pasture was dry over the old plague tombstones. The fields were starved. The cattle stood feeding at the bottom of the ditches, where it was damp and a little grass grew.

  Smaller and much more agreeable was Schloben-bei-Jena, to which the family sometimes made an expedition. At Schloben, with its mill-stream and mossy oaks, ‘the heart,’ Auguste said tentatively, ‘can find peace’. But Schloben was in almost as much difficulty as the other properties. There is nothing peaceful, the Freiherr told her, about a refusal to extend credit.

  As a member of the nobility, most ways of earning money were forbidden to the Freiherr, but he had the right to enter the service of his Prince. In 1784 (as soon as the existing Director had died) he was appointed Director of the Salt Mines of the Electorate of Saxony at Durrenberg, Kosen and Artern, at a salary of 650 thaler and certain concessions of firewood. The Central Saline Offices were at Weissenfels, and in 1786 the Freiherr bought the house in the Kloster Gasse. It was not like Schloben, but Auguste wept with relief, praying that her tears were not those of ingratitude, at leaving the chilly solitude and terribly out-of-date household arrangements of Oberwiederstadt. Weissenfels had two thousand inhabitants - two thousand living souls - brickyards, a prison, a poor-house, the old former palace, a pig-market, the river’s traffic and the great clouds reflected in the shining reach, a bridge, a hospital, a Thursday market, drying-meadows and many, many shops, perhaps thirty. Although the Freifrau had no spending allowance of her own and had never been into a shop, indeed rarely left the house except on Sundays, she received a faltering glow, like an uncertain hour of winter sunshine, from the idea of there being so many things and so many people quite close at hand.

  It was at Weissenfels that the Bernhard was born, in the bitter February of 1788. Fritz by then was nearly seventeen, and was not at Weissenfels on this occasion, but at his Uncle Wilhelm’s, in Lucklum in the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel. The boy had outgrown his tutor, who had to sit up late into the night reading mathematics and physiology in order to catch up with him. ‘But this is not wonderful, after all,’ the uncle wrote. ‘Tutors are a poor-spirited class of men, and all this Herrnhuterei is nothing but hymn-singing and housework, quite unsuitable for a von Hardenberg. Send Fritz, for a time at least, to live in my household. He is fifteen or sixteen, I don’t know which, and must learn to understand wine, which he can’t do at Weissenfels, where the grapes are only fit to make brandy and vinegar, and to find out what grown men talk about when they are in decent company.’ The Freiherr was, as always, infuriated by his brother’s remarks and still more by their tone. Wilhelm was ten years older than himself, and appeared to have been sent into the world primarily to irritate him. He was a person of great distinction - ‘in his own eyes’ the Freiherr added - Governor of the Saxon division of the German Order of Knighthood (Lucklum branch). Round his neck, on very many occasions, he wore the flashy Maltese cross of the order, which was also embroidered, in plush and braid, on his greatcoat. The Hardenberg children knew him as the ‘Big Cross’, and His Mightiness. He had never married, and was graciously hos
pitable not only to his fellow landowners but to musicians, politicians, and philosophers - those who should be seen round the table of a great man, to offer their opinions and to agree with his own.

  After a stay of only a few months, Fritz was returned to his father at Weissenfels, taking with him a letter from his uncle.

  Lucklum, October 1787

  I am glad that Fritz has recovered himself and got back on to the straight path, from which I certainly shall never try to remove him again. My way of life here is pitched too high for his young head. He was much too spoiled, and saw too many strange new people, and it could not be helped if a great many things were said at my table which were not helpful or salutary for him to know …

  The Freiherr wrote to his brother to thank him for his hospitality, and to regret that he could not thank him more. The white waistcoat, breeches and broad-cloth coat which had been made for Fritz by his uncle’s tailor, apparently because those he had brought with him were not considered smart enough for the dinner-table, would now be sent to the Moravian Brethren for distribution to charity. There would be no occasion for him to wear them in Weissenfels, where they lived simply.

  ‘Best of Fritzes, you were lucky,’ said fourteen-year-old Erasmus.

  ‘I am not sure about that,’ said Fritz. ‘Luck has its rules, if you can understand them, and then it is scarcely luck.’

  ‘Yes, but every evening at dinner, to sit there while these important people amused themselves by giving you too much to drink, to have your glass filled up again and again with fine wines, I don’t know what … What did they talk about?’

  ‘Nature-philosophy, galvanism, animal magnetism and freemasonry,’ said Fritz.

  ‘I don’t believe it. You drink wine to forget things like that. And then at night, when the pretty women come creaking on tiptoe up the stairs to find the young innocent, and tap at your door, TRIUMPH!’