Extract from a letter written in 1822, ten years after the breach in their relations.
To give perfect expression to thee would probably be the most powerful seal of my love, indeed, being a creation of divine nature, it would prove my affinity to thee. It would be an enigma solved, like unto a long restrained mountain torrent which at last penetrates to the light, enduring the tremendous fall in voluptuous rapture, at a moment of life through which and after which a higher existence begins.
Thou destroyer, who hast taken my free will from me; thou creator, who hast produced within me the sensation of awakening, who hast convulsed me with a thousand electric sparks from the realm of sacred nature! Through thee I learned to love the curling of the tender vine, and the tears of my longing have fallen on its frost-kissed fruits; for thy sake I have kissed the young grass, for thy sake offered my open bosom to the dew; for thy sake I have listened intently when the butterfly and the bee swarmed about me, for I wanted to feel thee in the sacred sphere of thy enjoyments. Oh, thou; toy in disguise with thy beloved—could I help, after I had divined thy secret, becoming intoxicated with love for thee?
Canst thou divine the thrills that shook me when the trees poured down their fragrance and their blossoms upon me? For I thought and felt and firmly believed that it was thy caressing of nature, thy enjoyment of her beauty, that it was her yearning, her surrender to thee, that loosened these blossoms from their trembling boughs and sent them gently whirling into my lap.
BETTINA.
IMMERMANN AND HIS DRAMA "MERLIN"
BY MARTIN SCHÜTZE, PH.D. Associate Professor of German Literature,
University of Chicago
Karl Lebrecht Immermann was born in Magdeburg, in April, 1796. His father, who held a good position in the Civil Service, was a very severe and domineering man; his mother, imaginative and over-indulgent. Karl's childhood and early youth were uneventful. After passing through the regular course of preparatory education in a "Gymnasium," he entered, in 1813, the University of Halle. During his first year there, Germany rose up to throw off the yoke of Napoleon, and the King of Prussia issued a proclamation calling the nation to arms, to which the people responded with unprecedented unanimity and enthusiasm. Schoolboys and bearded men, laborers and professional men, merchants and soldiers, united in one patriotic purpose. The regular army was everywhere supplemented by volunteer organizations. An epoch began which in its enthusiasm, its idealism, the force and richness of its inspiration, and its overwhelming impetus deserved, more than any other in modern history, its title: "The Spring of Nations."
Immermann's sensitive and responsive nature thrilled with the general impulse, and he asked his father to let him join the army, but was told, peremptorily, not to interrupt the first year of his studies. He submitted, and plunged into the study of the literature of the Romanticists, which, in its remoteness from actuality, offered distraction from his disappointment. During this time he fell ill of typhoid fever, from which he did not fully recover until the campaign had victoriously ended in the battle of Leipzig. He joined, however, after Napoleon's escape from Elba, the second campaign, in which he took part in two battles. At the end of the war, having retired as an officer of the reserves, he returned to Halle to finish his study of the law.
He found a new spirit dominant among the students. This spirit, characterized by a strongly democratic desire for national unity, pride of race, and impatience with external and conventional restraints, had a rich network of roots in the immediate past: in the individualism and the humanism of the Storm and Stress Movement and the Classic Era of the eighteenth century; in the subjective idealism of the Romantic school; in the nationalism of Klopstock, Herder, Schiller, and Fichte, and in the self-reliant transcendentalism of Kant's philosophy and Schleiermacher's theology. This spirit had received its political direction principally through the genius of the Baron von Stein, the Prussian statesman, whose aim was the restoration of German national unity. He believed that the political unity of Germany must rest on the soundness of the common people, rather than on the pretensions of the aristocracy whose corruption he held responsible for the decadence of the nation. Following the example of Frederick the Great, he tried to foster the simple virtues of the common man. He was, however, opposed to radicalism, seeing permanent progress only in order, self-discipline, and moderation. His leading idea, which was shared by such men as Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Niebuhr, and others, was that the principal task of the time was to arouse the whole nation to independent political thinking and activity, in order to develop self-confidence, courage, and devotion to a great unselfish ideal. These ideas became a national ideal, an active passion, under the pressure and stress of the Napoleonic usurpation and in the heat and fervor of war and victory.