The Blue Flower Read Online Free PDF

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 Schloben, 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 afollower, 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 in a letter by the critic Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel was writing to his much more successful, elder brother, August Wilhelm, a professor of literature and aesthetics. He was in triumph at having discovered someone of interest whom his brother did not know. ‘Fate has put into my hands a young man, from whom everything may be expected, and he explained himself to me at once with fire - with indescribably much fire. He is thin and well-made, with a beautiful expression when he gets carried