UNGER: Herr Magister, you see how you are upsetting our good Pastor. Let us leave these trifles aside. Let us be happy that they have not forbidden us all writings on the circumstances in France, as they have in Austria; that we, in contrast to the Viennese, may still at least read Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Bürger, and Sterne, not to mention the Iliad.
MORITZ: You don’t mean to say that the Iliad is forbidden in Austria!
UNGER: The Iliad has been forbidden in Austria, just as the Aeneid is still forbidden today in Bavaria. — But I did not wish to speak of that. Only of something about which no honest, thinking human being can remain silent, that is, the answer they gave to the petition presented by the Berlin book trade last year: “We will not hear any objections contending that the book trade would suffer. For evil must be controlled, even if it means the book trade goes under.”35
MORITZ: What do you expect? The censors have to live too. I’m telling you, it’s not an easy living. For one pamphlet the poor wretch only makes two cents. I’ve been told, though, that it’s more for poetry. Presumably because rhymed wickedness is harder to detect.
UNGER: Listen, this is not the right approach. You were just speaking, in passing, of your Logic for Children. That is a book that accomplishes ten times more for education and Enlightenment than a hundred censors, be they the most excellent and best intentioned, which I absolutely refuse to believe of them all. And if you could write me a second volume, it would arrive just in time. Quite aside from the fact that it would be the best way to introduce young readers to my new typeset.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Finally, Deputy Headmaster! I have always wanted to tell you that I study your book with my small circle — all children from respectable families. And would you like to know what I most esteem? The incomparable passage in which you acquaint the children with the gods. I had them learn it by heart:
The real world exists in the ideas of human beings, but the world of ideas differs in that, beyond the ideas of human beings, it is simply not there. All stories of witches and ghosts are fairy tales; all of mythology and the doctrine of the gods likewise pertain to this world of ideas, which, since the most ancient times, has populated the world with countless new beings, none of which exist anywhere beyond the boundaries of human imagination. Including: Apollo, Mars, Minerva, Jupiter, and all the gods and goddesses of Olympus.36
PASTOR GRUNELIUS (clearing his throat): I believe it’s time for me to go, my good gentlemen. At seven we have a meeting in the consistory. My respects to all.
Murmurs of leave-taking.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: He won’t have taken that the wrong way, will he, old Grunelius?
UNGER: Whatever are you thinking? He’s the most good-natured man in the world.
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Beautiful and true, what you say here to our little ones about Olympus. Yet there is also another way to free children from superstition and whim, and I know of someone who steers clear of the old gods and heroes even more unabashedly. It is Doctor Kortum from Mülheim.37 And if it were up to me, and I had a Prize for Enlightenment to award, he and no other would have to have it.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: But you cannot possibly be serious. You would present this Jobsiade, which is nothing but one long run of boorishness, as a model to the Enlighteners?
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Because it has what all of you lack, namely, humor. And in the long run, knowledge without humor leads back to obscurantism, dogmatism, and despotism. That’s what is so good about this Kortum, that he also has no respect for the Enlightenment. He groups everything together, gods, heroes and professors, pastors and courtly ladies, lords of the manor and candidates. Just like his friend Death. You know, the one who closes the first book of the Jobsiade:
Inasmuch as friend Death makes not the smallest
Distinction between the lowest and tallest,
But cuts down all both low and high,
With the strictest impartiality.
And, as he ever slyly watches,
The cavalier and the clown he catches,
The beggar and also the great Sultán,
The tailor and also the Tartar Khan.
And with his scythe his rounds he goeth
And honorables and lackeys moweth,
The herdsmaid and the titled dame,
Without distinction of place or name.
He listens to no compromises;
Both crowns and bag-wigs he despises,
Doctor’s hats and the stag’s horns
And whatever else men’s heads adorns.
A thousand things he has command of,
By which he us can make an end of,
And now the dagger, and now the pest,
And now a grape-stone, gives us rest.
Now a law-suit and now a splinter,
Now a bad woman and now a bad winter
Now a noose or other snare,
Of which may Heaven help us beware.
Misshapen Esop his fables tellin’,
And the Grecian beauty, world-famed Helen,
Unhappy Job and King Solomon,
Gave up the ghost and now are gone.
Not one of them found time for fleein’,
Not Nostradamus nor Superintendent Ziehen:
With doctor Faust, dreamer Swedenborg, too,
He made a clean sweep and went through.
Orpheus, the great musician,
Molière, the comedian of the Parisian nation,
And the famous painter Apellés,
Friend Death has swept away all these.
Summa Summarum, the long and the short is,
That in none of the chronicles do we find notice,
That friend Death has ever any one passed
Without coming back for him at last.
And what he has not eaten already
He will not fail to remember when he’s ready:
Alas! dear reader, also thee,
And what is worst of all, even me!38
Well, what do you think of that?
MORITZ: Maybe it’s a bit quirky, but I am strangely moved to see how at the end the man turns back to himself, is at home with himself. That has always been my greatest desire. I know, gentlemen, you cannot understand. But I would like to recount a little memory from my childhood that sometimes haunts me when skies are gray. I was ten years old at the time. When the skies would darken and the horizon would narrow, I felt a kind of dread, as though the whole world was also enclosed under just such a roof as that of the room in which I lived. And when I followed my thoughts out beyond this vaulted ceiling, this world itself seemed too small, and it struck me that it too must be enclosed in another, and so on.39
UNGER: I believe I understand very well what you wish to say. What good is even the most beautiful Enlightenment, if it makes human beings feel uneasy and disquieted, rather than at home with themselves?
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Kortum has also dealt successfully with this. He wrote treatises for the farmers of Hanover on beekeeping or the virtues of the new Lutheran hymnal, or how to treat infectious diseases.40
MORITZ: That is the right approach, and so it should be. For in the entire compass of a kingdom one can only ever really live in just one city and in that whole city, in one house, and in that entire house, just one room. But man is as deceived by place as by time. He believes he is living years, and only lives moments. He thinks he inhabits a country, a city, but he only inhabits that one spot where he stands or lies, the room where he works, the chamber where he sleeps.41
The sound of a gong.