My Autobiography: A Fragment

by F. Max Müller

My father’s father, whom I never knew, seems not to have been distinguished in any way. He was, however, a useful tradesman and a respected citizen of Dessau, and, as I see, the founder of the first lending library in that small town. He married a second time, a rich widow, chiefly, as I was told, to enable him to give his son, my father, a liberal education. She grew to be very old, and I well remember her, to me, forbidding and terrifying appearance. She quite belonged to a past generation, and when I saw her again after having been in England, she asked me whether I had seen Napoleon who had been taken prisoner and sent to England, but had lately escaped and resumed his throne in Paris. She evidently mixed up the two Napoleons, and I did not contradict her. To me her conversation was interesting as showing how little the traditions of the people can be relied on, and how easily, by the side of real history, a popular history could grow up. After all, the poems of Charlemagne besieging Jerusalem owed their origin very likely to some similar confusion in the minds of old women. My sister and I were always terrified when we were sent to visit her, for with her dishevelled grey hair, her thin white face, and her piercing eyes, she was to us the old grandmother, or the witch of Grimm’s stories; and the language she used was such that, if we repeated it at home, we were severely reprimanded. She knew very little about my father, but her memory about her first husband and about her own youth and childhood was very clear, though not always edifying. Her stories about ghosts, witches, ogres, nickers, and the whole of that race were certainly enough to frighten a child, and some of them clung to me for a very long time. On my mother’s side my relations were more civilized, and they had but little social intercourse with my grandmother and her relatives. My mother’s father was von Basedow, the President, that is Prime Minister of the Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, a position in which he was succeeded by his eldest son, my uncle. He was the first man in the town; the Duke and he really ruled the Duchy exactly as they pleased. There was no check on them of any kind, and yet no one, as far as I know, ever complained of any tyranny. My grandfather’s father again was the famous reformer of public education in Germany. He (1723-1790) had to brave the conservative and clerical parties throughout the country. His home at Hamburg was burnt in a riot, and it was then that he migrated to Dessau, to become the founder of the Philanthropinum, and at the same time the path-breaker for men such as Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and Froebel (1782-1852). Considering his lifelong struggles, he deserved a better monument at Dessau than he has found there. No doubt he was a passionate and violent man, and his outbreaks are still remembered at Dessau, while his beneficial activity has almost been forgotten. I was often told that I took after my mother’s family, whatever that may mean, and this was certainly the case in outward appearance, though I hope not in temper. My great grandfather, the Pedagogue as he was called, was a friend of Goethe’s, and is mentioned in his poems.

My childhood at home was often very sad. My mother, who was left a widow at twenty-eight with two children, my sister and myself, was heart-broken. The few years of her married life had been most bright and brilliant. My father was a rising poet, and such was his popularity that he was able to indulge his tastes as he liked, whether in travelling or in making his house a pleasant centre of social life. Contemporaries and friends of my father, particularly Baron Simolin, a very intimate friend, who spent the Christmas of 1825 in our house, have written of the bright gaiety, the whole-hearted enjoyment of life that reigned there, and have told how, though his income was to say the least of it small, Wilhelm Müller’s home was the rallying-point for all the cultivated, scientific, and artistic society of Dessau, who felt attracted by the simple and unaffected yet truly genial disposition of the master of the house.

It would be interesting to know how much an author could make at that time by his pen. Publishers seem to have been far more liberal then than they are now. The circumstances were different. The number of writers was of course much smaller, and the sale of really popular books probably much larger. Anyhow, my father, whose salary was minute, seems to have been able to enjoy the few years of his married life in great comfort. The thought of saving money, however, seems never to have entered his poetical mind, and after his unexpected death, due to paralysis of the heart, it was found that hardly any provision had been made for his family. Even the life insurance, which is obligatory on every civil servant, and the pension granted by the Duke, gave my mother but a very small income, fabulously small, when one considers that she had to bring up two children on it. It has been a riddle to me ever since how she was able to do it.

However, it was done, and could only have been done in a small town like Dessau, where education was as good as it was cheap, and where very little was expected by society. We must also take into account the very low prices which then ruled at Dessau with regard to almost all the necessaries of life. I see from the old newspapers that beef sold at about threepence a pound (two groschen), mutton at about twopence. Wine was sold at seven to eight groschen a bottle, a better sort for twelve to fourteen groschen—a groschen being about a penny. People drank mostly beer, and this was sold under Government inspection at two to three groschen per quart. Fish was equally cheap, and such, at the beginning of the century, was the abundance of salmon caught in the Elbe, and even in the Mulde at Dessau, that it was stipulated as in Scotland, that servants should not have salmon more than twice or thrice in the week. The lowest price for salmon was then twopence halfpenny a pound. As a boy I can remember seeing the salmon in large numbers leap over a weir in the very town of Dessau, and though they had travelled for so many miles inland, the fish was very good, though not so good as Severn salmon. Game also was very cheap, and sold for not much more than mutton, nay, at certain times it was given away; it could not be exported. Corn was sold at three shillings per Scheffel, and by corn was chiefly meant rye. No one took wheaten bread, and the bread was therefore called brown bread and black bread. White bread was only taken with coffee, and peasants in the villages would not have touched it, because it was not supposed to make such strong bones as rye-bread. With such prices we can understand that a salary of £300 was considered sufficient for the highest officers of state.

My mother’s relations, who were all high in the public service, my grandfather, as I said, being the Duke’s chief minister, made life more easy and pleasant for us; but for many years my mother never went into society, and our society consisted of members of our own family only. All I remember of my mother at that time was that she took her two children day after day to the beautiful Gottesacker (God’s Acre), where she stood for hours at our father’s grave, and sobbed and cried. It was a beautiful and restful place, covered with old acacia trees. The inscription over the gateway was one of my earliest puzzles. Tod ist nicht Tod, ist nur Veredlung menschlicher Natur (Death is not death, ’tis but the ennobling of man’s nature). On each side there stood a figure, representing the genius of sleep and the genius of death. All this was the work of the old Duke, Leopold Friedrich Franz, who tried to educate his people as he had educated himself, partly by travel, partly by intercourse with the best men he could attract to Dessau.

MY MOTHER

At home the atmosphere was certainly depressing to a boy. I heard and thought more about death than about life, though I knew little of course of what life or death meant. I had but few pleasures, and my chief happiness was to be with my mother. I shared her grief without understanding much about it. She was passionately devoted to her children, and I was passionately fond of her. What there was left of life to her, she gave to us, she lived for us only, and tried very hard not to deprive our childhood of all brightness. She was certainly most beautiful, and quite different from all other ladies at Dessau, not only in the eyes of her son, but as it seemed to me, of everybody. Then she had a most perfect voice, and when I first began music she helped and encouraged me in every possible way. We played à quatre mains, and soon she made me accompany her when she sang. As far as I can recollect, I was never so happy as when I could be with her. She read so much to us that I was quite satisfied, and saw perhaps less of my young friends than I ought. When my mother said she wished to die, and to be with our father, I feel sure that my sister and I were only anxious that she should take us with her, for there were few golden chains that bound us as yet to this life. I see her now, sitting on a winter’s evening near the warm stove, a candle on the table, and a book from which she read to us in her hands, while the spinning-wheel worked by the servant-maid in the corner went on humming all the time. She read Paul Gerhard’s translation of St. Bernard’s:

“Salve caput cruentatum,
Totum spinis coronatum,
Conquassatum, vulneratum,
Arundine verberatum,
Facies sputis illita.”