For after the end of the world

The Kickelhahn near to Ilmenau, from here

What book would you take with you to the desert island? If one is not extremely practical – “The Encyclopedia of Tourists and Survivors!” – then he or she immediately thinks of a Big Book. The Bible. The Odyssey. Laozi. Tolstoy. Hafez. The poems of Attila József. Something one perhaps does not read every day, but which would stay as a canon and a memento from the lost civilization.

Different people can have different Big Books. Contemporary literature, however, often proposes a new candidate. Not even a book, just a poem. A poem by Goethe, the Wanderer’s Nightsong.

In Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (2006) it is the representative of German Classicism, Alexander von Humboldt to penetrate, by sailing upstream the Amazonas, into a world of which we do not know whether it symbolizes the pre- or post-civilization state of humanity, but it certainly lacks any traces of civilization. His four oarsmen Carlos, Gabriel, Mario and Julio – who most probably stand for the idols of Kehlmann, the four great authors of Southern American magic reality – keep treating each other with obscure, bloody and magic stories that contradict every rule of European logic. When Humboldt is also invited to say something, he tells the Wanderer’s Nightsong in a prosaic translation. The awkwardness of the translation indicates well the incompatibility of the two worlds and shows how few can be transmitted from the Winckelmannian “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”, but it also highlights that the text even in this form preserves something from its emblematic nature referring to another, more spacious and sublime world.

Mario asked Humboldt to tell a story, he too.
He does not know any stories, said Humboldt and he straightened his hat which had been turned by the monkey. And he does not even like storytelling. But he can tell the most beautiful German poem in a free Spanish translation. Above the hilltops there is silence, between the trees no wind is felt, birds are silent, too, and you will die soon, don’t worry.
Everyone looked at him.
Ready, said Humboldt.
Pardon, asked Bonpland.
Humboldt reached for the sextant.
Excuse, said Julio. It is not possible that this is everything.
Of course it is no bloody story with wars and transformations, said Humbold with irritation. It has no magic, nobody is changed into a plant, nobody can fly and they do not eat each other.

Tatyana Tolstaya’s anti-utopia Кысь (The Slynx/Kys, 1986) is a survey of humanity living in quasi-paleolithic conditions after the nuclear war, but in fact it is an allegory of the morally and culturally eroded Soviet society. In this world there are no books, and there exist only as many written texts as Fedor Kuzmich, the tyrant of the village hands over to his scribes as his own works for copying and for distributing among the commoners:

А списывает Бенедикт то, что Федор Кузьмич, слава ему, сочинил: сказки, или поучения, а то стихи. Уж такие у Федора Кузьмича, слава ему, стихи ладные выходят, чтоиной раз рука задрожит, глаза затуманятся и будто весь враз ослабеешь и поплывешь куда-то, а не то словно как ком в горле встанет и сглотнуть не можешь… Вот намедни Бенедикт перебелял: Горные вершины Спят во тьме ночной; Тихие долины Полны свежей мглой; Не пылит дорога, Не дрожат листы… Подожди немного, Отдохнешь и ты.

And Benedikt copies out what Fedor Kuzmich, glory to him, wrote: tales, teachings or poems. And the poems of Fedor Kuzmich, glory to him, are so beautiful that sometimes the hand trembles and the eyes are clouded and one feels as if all his body were weakened and were swimming somewhere or as if there were a lump in his throat and could not swallow… The other day Benedikt copied out this: Up there all summits are still. In all the tree-tops you will feel but the dew. The birds in the forest stopped talking. Soon, done with walking, you shall rest, too.

A look from the Kickelhahn. Drawing of Goethe, 1776. The archive pictures are from the Goethezeitportal.

What qualifies this poem so much for featuring as a Denkmal of European high culture in a world deprived of civilization?

The distilled simplicity of the poem, cunningly counterpointed by the asymmetries in the rhythm and rhyme structure, plays a great role in it for sure. As if it were an utmostly refined flower of European poetry. It is no coincidence that everyone tries to translate it (here you are a synoptic table of some of the Hungarian translations of the last fifty years), and nevertheless nobody could produce a translation that would be regarded as perfect.

But it is also sure that our Bildung, the way how this poem is presented to us in the course of our studies as a symbol of our culture, has its part in it as well. I remember how in the early eighties, in an intellectual environment very similar to that of Tolstaya our old-school teacher of literature taught to us this poem and  we recited it in German, in the language of the destroyed middle-class culture and as a bequest of this culture, while no more than two boys in the class understood anything in this language.

Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.

The fact that this poem took on this importance already in the period of Goethe and it has survived like this in the European tradition is due to no small extent to Goethe himself who attributed this same importance to his own poem.

If we have just said that for the Romantic poet only the poem “writ in water” is really everlasting, then this poem fulfills all the necessary criteria. It does not have a proper title: in the first editions of Goethe it followed the Weimar Wanderer’s Nightsong, written four years earlier, under the title Ein Gleiches (“The same”). And it was writ, if not in water, but on decaying plank, the wooden wall of a hunter’s cabin in the Thuringian Forest, on the Kickelhahn above Ilmenau visited by Goethe almost thirty times during his life. And to make the metaphor complete, the handwriting of Goethe was sawed out of the wall at the end of the 19th century. Since then it has been lost.

The Kickelhahn hunter’s cabin today

Goethe wrote this poem on the cabin’s wall on the night from 6 to 7 September 1780, and in 1813 he renewed it. In 1831, shortly before his death he returned here again only to see it once more. His companion, the forest ranger Johann Christian Mahr described this visit in his diary, published shortly afterwards:

Beim Eintritt in das obere Zimmer sagte er: “Ich habe in früherer Zeit in dieser Stube mit meinem Bedienten im Sommer acht Tage gewohnt und damals einen kleinen Vers hier an die Wand geschrieben. Wohl möchte ich diesen Vers nochmals sehen und wenn der Tag darunter bemerkt ist, an welchem es geschehen, so haben Sie die Güte mir solchen aufzuzeichnen.” Sogleich führte ich ihn an das südliche Fenster der Stube, an welchem links mit Bleistift geschrieben steht:

The Kickelhahn cabin

Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Es schweigen die Vöglein im Walde;
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

D. 7. September 1783. Goethe.

Goethe überlas diese wenigen Verse und Thränen flossen über seine Wangen. Ganz langsam zog er sein schneeweißes Taschentuch aus seinem dunkelbraunen Tuchrock, trocknete sich die Thränen und sprach in sanftem, wehmüthigem Ton: “Ja warte nur balde ruhest du auch!”, schwieg eine halbe Minute, sah nochmals durch das Fenster in den düstern Fichtenwald, und wendete sich darauf zu mir, mit den Worten: “Nun wollen wir wieder gehen.”

On entering the upper room he said: “I used to spend here eight days in a summer with my servant and then I wrote a little poem on the wall. I would like to see this poem once more, and if the day on which I wrote it is also noted below, then please be so kind to have a record of it for me.” I immediately led him to the southern window of the room, where this was written with pencil:

Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Es schweigen die Vöglein im Walde;
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

D. 7. September 1783. Goethe.

Goethe read over these few verses and tears flowed down his cheeks. Very slowly he took his snow-white handkerchief from his dark brown cloth coat, he wiped his tears off, and he said in a gentle, mournful tone: “Yes, just wait, soon you will rest, too!” He was silent for half minute, looked through the window at the dark pine forest, and then he turned to me by saying: “Now we can leave.”

A perfectly arranged scene. I would be surprised if it were not yet adapted for the screen. “Since this description of Mahr the poem has been linked to the image of the old man sitting on the Kickelhahn and being absorbed with melancholy and with a presentiment of death in the contemplation of nature turning to night”, writes Wulf Segelbrecht in his monograph about the reception history of the poem. *

Goethe as an old man on the Kickelhahn, with the texts of both Wanderer’s Nightsongs below.
Thüringerwaldverlag Rich. Zieschank, Rudolstadt

Goethe’s cabin and the Kickelhahn look-out tower. Verlag v. W. Zinke, Friedrichroda, 1906

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the sea of fog, c. 1818

Paul Hey, Volksliederkarten: “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”

However, the tradition of this poem as an icon of European culture reaches back not only to Goethe but even much further in time.

The Greek poet Alcman came from Anatolia to Sparta in the seventh century before Christ, during the archaic period of Greek culture. In Sparta he composed choir hymns for the parthenias, the religious associations of young girls. This fragment was left to us from one of his hymns (the English is by Lionel Casson):

Εὕδουσι δʹ ὀρέων κορυφαί τε καὶ φάραγγες πρώονές τε καὶ χαράδραι φῦλά τʹ ἑρπέτʹ ὅσα τρέφει μέλαινα γαῖα θῆρές τʹ ὀρεσκῴοι καὶ γένος μελισσᾶν καὶ κνώδαλʹ ἐν βένθεσσι πορφυρέας ἁλός· εὕδουσι δʹ οἰωνῶν φῦλα τανυπτερύγων.

The mountains sleep, the valleys and peaks the jutting headlands, the tumbling creeks the black earth’s teeming creatures that crawl the beasts of the forests, the swarms of bees the monsters deep in the purple seas the wide-winged birds, asleep, one and all.

The fragments of Alcman were published in one volume in 1773, producing a great effect in contemporary classical philology. Goethe wrote his Wanderer’s Nightsong seven years later. His poem attests the knowledge of Alcman’s hymn. As in a medallion, it sums up the very first description of a European sunset, inheriting its sacrality and universality and transmitting them until the last sunset of European culture and further.


Goethe – Schubert: Wandrers Nachtlied – Wanderer’s Nightsong D.768 (1823). Barbara Hendricks, soprano; Radu Lupu, piano (1986). This song can be found in several versions on YouTube, but I prefer this one because of the fine play of Radu Lupu.

A look from the Kickelhahn

Humanum est

But Mihály Babits – and after him Wang Wei – was not the only one who, enraptured by the “new world created out of nothing” by János Bolyai, wrote a hymn to the author of the Appendix. The same was done by the philosopher Branislav Petronijević, the Serbian translator of the Appendix, about whom Bertrand Russell wrote in volume 11 of his collected works:

A man who impressed me, not so much by his ability as by his resolute absorption in philosophy even under the most arduous circumstances, was the only Yugoslav philosopher of our time, whose name was Branislav Petroniević. I met him only once, in the year 1917. The only language we both knew was German and so we had to use it, although it caused people in the streets to look at us with suspicion. The Serbs had recently carried out their heroic retreat before the German invaders, and I was anxious to get a first-hand account of this retreat from him, but he only wanted to expound his doctrine that the number of points in space is finite and can be estimated by considerations derived from the theory of numbers. The consequence of this difference in our interests was a somewhat curious conversation. I said, “Were you in the great retreat?” and he replied, “Yes, but you see the way to calculate the number of points in space is…” I said, “Were you on foot?” and he said, “Yes, you see the number must be a prime.” I said, “Did you not try to get a horse?” and he said, “I started on a horse, but I fell off, and it should not be difficult to find out what prime.” In spite of all my efforts, I could get nothing further from him about anything so trivial as the Great War. I admired his capacity for intellectual detachment from the accidents of his corporeal existence, in which I felt that few ancient Stoics could have rivalled him. After the First War he was employed by the Yugoslav Government to bring out a magnificent edition of the eighteenth-century Yugoslav philosopher Boscovic, but what happened to him after that I do not know. (Some philosophical contacts, 1955)

A copy of Petronijević’s 1928 translation of the Appendix was found by us in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This copy was dedicated to the Academy by the translator himself, who also transcribed the most important titlepage informations from Cyrillic to French. His translation – in a way quite unusual in a book on mathematics – starts with a poem of the translator dedicated to the author of the book. Below we include with the English translation also the Latinized transcription of the poem for an easier reading.

Veliko ime, a mali spis, Ostavio si samo Apendiks. Genije mladi, bujan si bio, I Gausa si njime nadmašio. Gaus te istina hvaliti stade, Ali ti priznanje ne odade. Malodušnost je njega voditi spala, I na pismima ga zadržala. Okolina te ceniti nic znala, Ona te ružila, ismevala. Grob ti se zadugo nije znao, Ni znak ga nije obeležav'o. I rođenjem si nesrećan bio, U malom si se narodu pojavio. Do tebe Mađar mali je bio, Velikim ti si ga učinio.

A great name and a small writing: you’ve only left behind the Appendix. You were a young and great genius who surpassed even Gauss himself. Gauss, true, praised you but he gave you no recognition. He was led by jealousy which kept him back in his letters. Your environment could not appreciate you, they despised and did not acknowledge you. Your tomb was long unknown to all, and nobody adorned it with a sign. Your birth was also unlucky: you were born to a small nation. Hungary was small to you: it was you who made it great.

The poem culminates in the ancient philosophical topos of “not the place makes the man, but man makes the place”, which probably was of some consolation also to the Serbian philosopher. It is further illustrated by the stories of Gauss’s jealousy and the unmarked tomb of Bolyai.

The story of the unmarked tomb is true. When János Bolyai died in 1860, he was accompanied to the cemetery by only four people, including his servant Julianna Szőcs. In 1894 it was her to show the tomb, which by that time became unrecognizable, to architect Ferenc Schmidt who had rediscovered the work of Bolyai and made it an integral part of international scholarship. This was followed in 1911 by the solemn reburial of the two Bolyais, father and son, which was also remembered by two of the greatest poets of the age, Endre Ady and Mihály Babits whose poem was just translated by us.

But what about this story with Gauss?

A rare portrait of Gauss on the terrace of the Göttingen observatory, with the “heliometer” invented by him. Lithography of Eduard Ritmüller, after 1814 (the year when this heliometer was produced)

Farkas Bolyai – the father of János – and Carl Friedrich Gauss were fellow students and very close friends in Göttingen. After Farkas returned to Transylvania in 1799, they continued to change letters, but by the time these got less frequent. Farkas wrote to Gauss for the last time in 1816. In a warm and intimate tone he asked Gauss, at that time already “the prince of mathematicians”, to accept his son János as a pupil, and to even accomodate him in his own house (which was not unusual in the period). However, he was indiscreet enough – or perhaps he overestimated the strength of their friendship of twenty years ago – to finish his letter like this:

In view of this plan, please tell me frankly whether: 1. you have a daughter who could be dangerous to him (and vice versa), for it is natural that young people have to fight this battle, and we can thank to our reason only to a minor extent if we do not wake from our Elysian dreams as an invalid hit by a cannon ball. – 2. Are you healthy, and not poor? Satisfied, and not grumbling? And mainly: is your wife an exception among women? Is she not more inconstant than the weather-cock? Not more incalculable than the changes of the barometer?

Gauss never replied to this letter.

Sixteen years later, after the publication of the Appendix in 1832, Farkas Bolyai wrote once again to Gauss, sending him the work of his son. To this letter Gauss replied immediately:

And now something more on the work of your son. If I began by saying that I must not praise it, you will be certainly shocked at the first moment. But I cannot do differently, for if I praise him, I praise myself. In fact, the whole content of the work, the way your son is following and the results he got are almost completely identical to my considerations in the last 30-35 years.

Nevertheless, in a letter written some days earlier to Gerling, professor of mathematics at the Marburg university, Gauss did not keep himself back:

In these days I received from Hungary a small opus on non-Euclidean geometry. I have found in it all my ideas and results exposed with great elegance… I regard this young geometer, Bolyai, a first-class genius.

However, to János Bolyai only got through so much that Gauss – although he had not published anything on the subject – vindicated to himself the priority of this discovery and that he did not want to support with his authority the international recognition of the Appendix. The refusal ruined him. Four weeks after Gauss’ letter he asked permission for three years of absence for the purpose of scholarly research, but he never reached the level of the Appendix any more. He died as a bitter, ill-tempered, misanthropic odd person.

Today we already know – as Gauss also recognized it in his letter to Gerling – that Gauss’ hypotheses were far less developed than the derivations of the Appendix, and that Bolyai in fact created a “new world” in geometry. However, this fact has still not really spread in the educated public opinion. Daniel Kehlmann in the fictive biography of Gauss, the Measuring the world of 2005 about which we have recently written, gives this meditation into the mouth of Gauss:

Just recently a Russian mathematician has sent him a treatise in which he exposed the hypothesis that the Euclidean geometry is not the true one, and that parallels do meet. Since when he replied that these ideas were not new to him, he has been considered a swaggerer in Russia. The idea that someone else could publish what he had known since a long time, caused him an unusual stabbing pain.

The Russian mathematician is most probably Nikolai Lobachevsky, who obtained similar results to Bolyai’s in more or less the same period. However, Gauss never corresponded with Lobachevsky. Kehlmann here has confused this latter with Bolyai. The Measuring the world, which in 2006 was the second best selling book of the world and will obviously determine the image of Gauss for several years, covers again with the mist of forgetfulness the name of Bolyai. The poem of Petronijević is now more timely than ever.

Marginal scribbles of János Bolyai on the draft of his application for absence submitted to Archduke Johann in 1832

Parallels

If one is afraid of something, then it is the wisest to measure it.

Daniel Kehlmann: Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World), Rowohlt: 2005.

(As I only had the German original at hand, the quotations below were translated to English by me. The “official” English translation of Carol Brown Janeway is obviously much more recommendable!)

The first impression is that of shuddering amazement, like at the sight of the prepared wonders of a cabinet de curiosités. However, instead of exotic animals the author prepared here two exotic persons with the greatest care, Gauss, the mathematician and Humboldt, the scientist-explorer. Their figures are so autistic and inhuman that we cannot but watch them in amazement as they break ahead as straight as an arrow toward their objective, the measuring of the world.

Even the genre is well chosen to impress us, the hagiography of child prodigy, in which the scientist, just like the magician protagonist of the previous novel of Kehlmann, The Beerholm illusion, does miracles in row without any effort, in a glance pulling out of the nothing new laws, planets and continents.


And then the stories. The big story unfolds itself through several small, laconic stories, each with its own structure, rhythm and depth, as if the Hassidic stories of Buber had been stringed up into a novel.

And these stories hold together into an unpredictable, magic world. Where accidental is necessary, things form invisible connections, and the ones belonging together must meet again and again in the most unexpected places. Where a jungle of palm trees and lians grow in a neglected garden of Northern Germany. Where the dead send messages to the living, the rivers flow uphill, and in the middle of the jungle a lonely Saxon traveler pops up who, having informed the discoverers about the exact population of his native village back in Germany and about the height of the church tower measured in feet, disappears again. The wonders sometimes swell up to the point of breaking the texture of the action, and when we later find our way back again, none of the actors remember how they had got rid of the trouble. In this world the most realistic figures are those four oarsmen on the Amazonas who incessantly treat each other with marvellous stories about speaking fishes and winged dwarfish dogs, and in whose figures Kehlmann surely erected a worthy monument to the great masters of Southern American magic realism, so dear to his heart.

Mario asked Humboldt to tell a story, he too.
He does not know any stories, said Humboldt and he straightened his hat which had been turned by the monkey. And he does not even like storytelling. But he can tell the most beautiful German poem in a free Spanish translation. Above the hilltops there is silence, between the trees no wind is felt, birds are silent, too, and you will die soon, don’t worry.
Everyone looked at him.
Ready, said Humboldt.
Pardon, asked Bonpland.
Humboldt reached for the sextant.
Excuse, said Julio. It is not possible that this is everything.
Of course it is no bloody story with wars and transformations, said Humbold with irritation. It has no magic, nobody is changed into a plant, nobody can fly and they do not eat each other.

During the day the hours merged; the Sun glowed fiery above the river, it was a pain to look at it. The mosquitos were attacking from every side, even the oarsmen were too tired to speak. A metal disk followed them for a while, flying before them and then behind them again, silently gliding on the sky, disappearing and then appearing again, for some minutes coming so close that Humboldt could discern with the telescope on its bright surface the distorted mirror image of the river, the boat and himself. Then the disk dashed away and it did not return any more.

It is no wonder that in such a world Gauss and Humboldt are so obsessed to find order that they sacrifice every human connection for it. The real life is going on around them, and its actors often turn to them with love, but only very rarely a little bit of this love gets through into their closed world: a dog, a prostitute, an old tre. And moreover, even when the malcontent Gauss meets God himself, he lets the chance go, because this scene does not fit to the order imagined by him. God, if he exists at all, should exist above the laws moving the world, not inside this chaotic world, as an old count in a neglected German garden.

But in such a world they cannot find order. The more they investigate it, the more they have to realize that laws fail, space becomes bent, time slows down, the sum of the angles of star triangles is more than a hundred and eighty degrees, and parallels meet in the infinite.


And then the structure. Nowadays we adore good structures. Recently it was enough to begin a novel like “In a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not want to remember, there lived a gentleman,” and then the stories followed each other from the birth of the hero until his death. We also love the strings of stories, perhaps this is what we love the most. But it is required that they do not follow each other in the form of linear narrative. And Kehlmann, just like the magician of The Beerholm Illusion, meets this Postmodern claim with precisely elaborated, exhaustively practiced and always succesful formulas. The story begins at the end, when Humboldt and Gauss meet each other at the 1828 Berlin conference, for the first and for the last time. Only then their parallel lives begin. From chapter to chapter we watch the one and then the other being born, growing up, studying, reaching their first results. They get to know about each other, monitor each other’s way, they are slowly nearing to each other. At the end we get to the beginning. Humboldt and Gauss meet each other at the 1828 Berlin conference. And yet they do not meet. Because if until then everything was about their similarities, this occasion brings forth their differences.

Plans, blasted Gauss. Chatter, plans, intrigues. Verbosity with ten princes and hundred academies until one can finally set up a barometer somewhere. This is no science.
Oh, shouted Humboldt, then what is science?
Gauss had a suck at his pipe. A man alone at his desk. Paper in front of him, eventually a telescope, and the clear sky in front of the window. If this man does not give up before understanding it. This is perhaps science.
And if this man takes up travelling?
Gauss shrugged his shoulder. Whatever is hidden in the distance, in holes, volcanos or mines, is accidental and is not important. The world cannot be understood better in this way.

They only get really close to each other when they do not see each other any more. From the distance they continue each other’s trains of thoughts, reply to each other’s questions, dream each other’s dreams. Perhaps they would really meet in the infinite.

All the other figures of the novel also run on parallel courses. Humboldt and his brother, the scientist and the philologist, childhood rivals, fire and water. Bonpland and Humboldt, the two fellow travelers, the Frenchman and the German. Humboldt and his Spanish classmate Andreas del Rio, who saves his life at the school of mining, and whose life is broken by him with a cold rational report. Cold-headed Gauss and his hated warm-hearted son Eugen who only at the end of the novel, having detached himself from his father and started the way of Humboldt can begin to think with the intellect of his father. All of them make sometimes great efforts to meet the other, but this can hardly happen. As if the parallel courses were stronger than them.


His father, whenever said a word, was complaining or giving commands. A German, he often said, never sits bowed. Once Gauss asked: Is this all? Is this enough to be a German? His father was thinking so long that he could hardly believe it. Then he nodded.

The Zar slung the over Humboldt’s shoulder, cries of vivat and bravo arose, and Humboldt made efforts not to stand bowed.

This novel is also about what it means to be German. Much more than it would look at the first glance. Not only because it is about two giants of German spirit. For, in fact, it is not so much about them.

Daniel Kehlmann speaks about this aspect at the request of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung like this:

Humboldt is the representative of Weimar Classicism, the only Weimar Classicist who was really sent out as a representative of Weimar Classicism, and who went with this spirit to Macondo. At the time when I wrote this novel I was strongly under the influence of Southern American literature, and in the same time I felt that as a German author I cannot avail of several emotional and artistic opportunities of these authors. One feels of having come from another culture and although he can play with the possibilities of this one, but only in a different way. Then I suddenly felt that Humboldt is my key, who entered this world, but entered it as a German.

This novel is a satyrical and playful account with what it means to be a German. And obviously also with what we can call without any irony the German high culture. To me this is one of the main themes of the novel. As Andreas Maier formulated so beautifully in the introduction to the audio book: “the high German Geistesgeschichte, a unique form of incapability of living.” However, in the wide reception of the novel this theme spectacularly got lost.

Seen from our side, from outside and to the east from Germany, it seems that the most German problem of the novel is the one which is in the same time the most human. Like probably in every novel about national character, if it is a good novel. And this problem which we face again and again when staying among Germans and when reading German literature, is nothing else than the above central question of the novel: Can one open himself to the other without having to give up himself? Can the parallels meet each other?

The Garden

He thought about the Last Judgement. He did not believe that something like this could ever happen. The accused can set up a defence, some questions might be quite embarrassing to God. Insects, filth, pain. Everything is so imperfect. Even space and time are so slappily created. He thought that if he had to come before tribunal, he would raise some issues.

Some decades pass, and Gauss as a geometer stays for the night in an unknown old provincial castle in Northern Germany. The following morning he has to meet the owner, in order to ask his permission for cutting down some trees on the estate which obstruct the work of land-surveying.

He felt relieved as he found a lattice gate which opened to the garden.

The garden was created with amazing care: palm trees, orchids, orange trees, bizarre-shaped cactuses and all kinds of plants, such as Gauss has not even seen on pictures. Gravel creaked under his shoes, a lian swept the cap off his head. Some sweetish smell was spreading, flawed fruits were laying on the earth. The vegetation became denser and the road narrower, he had to duck his head as he walked along. What a waste! He could only hope he would at least not meet unknown insects. He creeped through between two palm trunks, but his overcoat got caught and he almost stumbled against a thorn-bush. And then he found himself on a meadow. The count, still negligee, with tousled hair and barefoot, was sitting there in an armchair and having a tea.

Appealing, said Gauss.

It was much more beautiful before, said the count. Nowadays the garden staff is expensive and the French soldiers quartered here also destroyed a lot. He only recently came back. He was in Switzerland as an emigrant, but now the circumstances have changed temporarily. Sir geometer does not want to sit down?

Gauss looked around. There was only one chair, and the count was sitting on it. Not necessarily, he said vaguely.

Well, said the count. Then they can start to negotiate.

It’s mere formailty, said Gauss said. In order to have a free look at the measure point of Scharnhorst, he should cut down three trees in the countly forest and pull down a shed which apparently has been empty for years.

Scharnhorst? There is no person who can see that far!

Oh yes there is, said Gauss, as far as light beams are used. He developed a tool which is able to send flashing signals to an unimaginable distance. By this for the first time the connection between the Earth and the Moon became possible.

The Earth and the Moon, echoed the count.

Gaus nodded smiling. He exactly knew what was now happening inside the skull of the old blockhead.

As far as the trees and the shed are concerned, said the count, they were estimated wrongly. The shed is indispensable. The trees are valuable.

Gauss sighed. He would have liked to sit down. How many of these conversations he had to conduct already! Of course, he said wearily, but let us not go too far. He knows well what is worth those few trees and the hut. In these times the state should not be burdened excessively.

Patriotism, said the count. Interesting. Especially if he is called upon by someone who recently was a French official

Gauss stared at him.

The count sipped into his tea and asked him not to misunderstand him. He does not blame anyone. Times were difficult and everyone behaved as opportunities allowed.

Napoleon, said Gauss, refrained from the bombardment of Göttingen because of him!

The count nodded. He did not appear surprised. Not everyone was so lucky to enjoy the respect of the Corsican.

And almost none had such merits, said Gauss.

The count looked contemplatively into his cup. In any case, sir geometer is not as inexperienced with regard to business as he pretends to be.

Gauss asked how he should understand this.

Sir geometer will presumably pay him with the means of payment accepted in the whole country, won’t he?

Of course, said Gauss.

Then, however, the question arises whether the state reimburses sir geometer for his expenses in gold. For if it is indeed so, then he can realize a pretty exchange profit. One does not have to be a mathematician to notice it.

Gauss turned red.

At least not the so-called prince of mathematicians, said the count, who would certainly not fail to notice it.

Gauss folded his hands behind his back and gazed at the orchids grown on the palm trunks. There is nothing illegal in it, he said.

No doubt, the count said. He is certain that sir geometer looked after it. By the way, he admires very much the work of geometers. It is a strange job to wander back and forth with instruments.

Only if it is practiced in Germany. Whoever does the same in the Cordilleras, is celebrated as a discoverer.

The count shook his head. It must be difficult even so, especially if one has family at home. Sir geometer has a family, doesn’he? Is his wife a brave woman?

Gauss did not answer. The sun appeared too bright to him, the plants annoyed him. He asked whether they could speak about the purchase of the trees. He has to go, his time is limitd.

It cannot be that limited, said the count. If one is the author of the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, then, in effect, he should not hurry any more.

Gauss looked with shock at the count.

Just do not be so modest, said the count. In all his life he did not read read anything more remarkable than the chapter on the division of the circle. He found some ideas which were illuminative even to him.

Gauss laughed.

Really, really, said the count, he was speaking seriously.

It is surprising, said Gauss, to meet someone here who is interested in such things.

He should rather say knonwledge, the count said. His interest is rather limited. But he always considered it important to enlarge his knowledge even beyond the limits of his interest. And if they are already here: he heard that sir geometer wanted to tell him something.

Pardon?

An old history. Grievances. Annoyances. And moreover a complaint as well.

Gauss rubbed his forehead. It began to be warm. He had no idea what this man was speaking about.

Surely not?

Gauss looked at him without understanding.

If not, then not, said the count. As for the trees, he gives them free of charge.

And the shed?

It also.

But why, asked Gauss, and he got scared of himself. What a silly mistake!

Should always everything be justified? Out of love towards the state, as it can be expected of a citizen of it. Out of appreciation towards sir geometer.

Gaus thanked by bowing. Now he has to leave, his good-for-nothing son is waiting for him, he has to cover the whole distance to Kalbsloh.

The count returned the greeting with a quivering gesture of his narrow hand.