THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: You’re taking too long, sir. Voices are not used to waiting in the lobby.
DIRECTOR: And I am not here for the purpose of talking with voices. That is the business of the Announcer.
THE ANNOUNCER: Of the Announcer. Just as you say. Who, in turn, is not used to inconveniencing himself with voices.
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: The Enlightenment is not so touchy.
THE ANNOUNCER: Then may I be quite direct? I heard that you wished to set up your headquarters for today in a coffeehouse.
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: At Zimmermann’s on Königstraße.
THE ANNOUNCER: Your enemies — and you are aware you still have some today — will assume that you also originated in a Berlin coffeehouse.
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMEN: The enemies of Enlightenment must just be ill-informed. I originated in the Bastille, when it was stormed in ’89.
THE ANNOUNCER: And what did you bring to the people?
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: Justice and a good bargain.
THE ANNOUNCER: A bargain? You must mean that figuratively.
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: What do you mean?
THE ANNOUNCER: That your friends’ books are plenty expensive. Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years’ War, as I saw in one of Göschen’s catalogs, costs eighteen marks. For Benvenuto Cellini they’re asking twenty-four marks. And the 1790 edition of Goethe’s complete works is listed at fifty-seven marks in the catalogs.5
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: I regret that. But it proves not only that reading classical writers was difficult to afford, but also how much people were prepared to sacrifice for it. A classical edition was an acquisition for a lifetime — indeed a bequest to son and grandson.
THE ANNOUNCER: They sat on the shelves, but were they read? At the end of his life, Goethe, who must have known, said: The larger public has as little judgment as taste. It shows the same interest in the common as in the sublime.6
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: I am not only concerned with the greater public nor only with taste, I am just as concerned with the people and basic knowledge. With the “Advice Manual for Peasants,” which, when it was published in 1788, sold 30,000 copies.7 With Pestalozzi’s chapbooks,8 Eberhard von Rochow’s works for children, in short, books for children and farmers.9 I also wish to discuss this with my friends.
THE ANNOUNCER: So you’re going to the smoking room to meet your friends.
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: As well as my opponents. There will be a pastor there who does not wish me well.
THE ANNOUNCER: But also your friends; and who might they be?
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: The Berlin bookseller, Johann Friedrich Unger, the publisher of Wilhelm Meister and of the new writings of Goethe, of The Maid of Orleans and Schlegel’s Alarcos, not to forget the theology of Karl Philipp Moritz, whom I will also be meeting there.
THE ANNOUNCER: And in what guise, may I ask?
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: In one of a hundred. My voice is the voice of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant or of the scribbler Merckel, the voice of the Jewish doctor, Markus Herz, or that of the platitudinous and blustering Nicolai.10 Soon you’ll hear it afresh, for it is the voice of someone with a brand-new master’s degree.
We hear the prelude to the hymn that follows.
THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: Shhhh! Stop talking! Listen!
We hear a hymn (possibly in several voices):
From Heaven above to earth I come,
To bear good news to every home;
Glad tidings of great joy I bring
Whereof I now will say and sing.
To you, this night, is born a Child
Of Mary, chosen mother mild;
This tender Child of lowly birth,
Shall be the joy of all your earth.
‘Tis Christ our God, who far on high
Had heard your sad and bitter cry;
Himself will your salvation be,
Himself from sin will make you free.
He brings those blessings long ago
Prepared by God for all below;
That in His heavenly kingdom blest
You may with us forever rest.
Glory to God in highest Heaven,
Who unto man His Son hath given,
While angels sing, with pious mirth,
A glad New Year to all the earth.11
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Yes, my dears, these children need only be heard and they immediately impart the Christmas spirit even to so worldly a place as this, into which today — as an exception, as you well know — I have set foot … Well, you can hardly take your eyes off the window, Deputy Headmaster.12
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS (in a low voice): I think, Pastor, we’ll leave him alone for now. I have the impression he wants to be alone… (More loudly.) Here, then, I can tell you. I know why the Deputy Headmaster remains standing by the window.
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: I don’t understand your tone. What are you saying?
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: That concerning these itinerant schoolboys’ choirs there are differing opinions, as you surely know. I can only tell you that I recently saw an educational authority expressing his views concerning these poor schoolboys’ choirs in Campe’s Braunschweig Journal.13 The man urges the abolition of these choirs, and I am convinced he is right. The paltry gains for such children from this free education hardly compensates, he contends, for the moral corruption and running wild that unavoidably results from being dragged to and fro around the courtyards and streets. The charities that have been created for this should simply, he proposes, be used to provide clothes and free education for poor boys. Moreover, there can be no thought of a proper education for poor schoolboys when they spend all the time they should be in school caterwauling in the street.
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: These are matters, venerable sir, concerning which we shall indeed not agree. Furthermore, I will tell you quite openly that it is not at all clear to me what this has to do with Herr Moritz.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: But surely you are acquainted with Anton Reiser?
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Herr Moritz’s novel? To be quite honest, no. It must be a very sad book.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Sad, certainly. In that it relates the story of our beloved Moritz’s childhood.
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: What, this Reiser is he? In that case, I can make sense of a few things.