Immortality Read online

  That is precisely die kind of pronouncement nowadays called a "sound bite." Politicians make long speeches in which they keep shamelessly repeating the same thing, knowing diat it makes no difference whether they repeat themselves or not since the general public will never get to learn more than the few words journalists cite from the speeches. In order to facilitate the journalists' work and to manipulate the approach a little, politicians insert into their ever more identical speeches one or two concise, witty phrases that they have never used before, and this in itself is so unexpected and astounding that the phrases immediately become famous. The whole art of politics these days lies not in running the polls (which runs itself by die logic of its

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  own dark and uncontrollable mechanism), but in thinking up "sound bites" by which the politician is seen and understood, measured in opinion polls, and elected or rejected in elections. Goethe is not yet familiar with the term "sound bite," but, as we know, things exist in their essence even before they are materially realized and named. Goethe recognizes that the words Napoleon has just said were an outstanding "sound bite" destined to prove very useful to both of them. He is pleased and takes a step closer to Napoleon's table.

  You can say what you like about the immortality of poets, but military commanders are even more immortal, so it is quite fitting that it is Napoleon who poses questions to Goethe, rather than the other way around. "How old are you?" he asks. "Sixty," Goethe answers. "For that age you look fine," says Napoleon with approbation (he is twenty years younger), and Goethe is flattered. When he was fifty he was terribly fat and had a double chin, and this didn't bother him very much. But as his years increased, the thought of death recurred more and more frequently, and he began to realize that he might enter immortality with a hideous paunch. He therefore decided to lose weight and soon became a slender man, no longer handsome but at least capable of evoking memories of his former good looks.

  "Are you married?" Napoleon asks, full of sincerity. "Yes," answers Goethe with a slight bow. "Any children?" "One son." At that moment a general leans toward Napoleon and announces an important piece of information. Napoleon becomes thoughtful. He pulls his hand out from under his waistcoat, picks up a scrap of meat with his fork, puts it in his mouth (the scene is no longer being photographed), and answers with his mouth full. It's a while before he remembers Goethe. Full of sincerity, he puts the question: "Are you married?" "Yes," answers Goethe with a slight bow. "Any children?" "One son," Goethe answers. "And tell me about Karl August," Napoleon suddenly fires off the name of Goethe's ruler, prince of the Weimar state, and from his tone it is obvious that he doesn't like the man.

  Goethe cannot speak ill of his lord, yet neither can he argue with an immortal, so he merely says with diplomatic evasiveness that Karl August has done a great deal for art and science. This reference to art

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  and science gives the immortal commander an opportunity to stop chewing, get up from the table, stick his arm under his waistcoat, take a few steps toward the poet, and launch into a speech about the theater. At that moment the invisible crowd of photographers comes to life, cameras begin to click, and the commander, who has taken the poet aside for an intimate conversation, has to raise his voice so that everyone in the hall can hear him. He suggests to Goethe that he write a play about the Erfurt conference, which is about to guarantee at last an era of peace and happiness for humanity. "The theater," he says very loudly, "should become the school of the people!" (Already the second beautiful "sound bite" for tomorrow's newspapers.) "And it would be an excellent idea," he adds in a softer voice, "if you dedicated this play to the Emperor Alexander!" (This, indeed, was the man the Erfurt conference was about! This was the man Napoleon needed to win over!) And then he goes on to give Goethschill a short lecture on literature; in the course of it he is interrupted by reports from aides and loses the thread of his thought. In order to find it he repeats twice more, out of context and without conviction, the words "theater—school of the people," and then (yes! finally! he has found the thread!) he mentions Voltaire's The Death of Caesar. According to Napoleon, this is an example of the way a dramatic poet missed an opportunity to become a teacher of the people. He should have shown in this play how that great commander worked for the well-being of humanity and how only the destined short span of his life prevented him from fulfilling his aims. The last words sound melancholy, and the commander looks the poet in the eye: "Behold, a great theme for you!"

  But then he is interrupted again. High-ranking officers enter the hall, Napoleon pulls his arm out from under his waistcoat, sits down at the table, picks up a piece of meat with his fork, and chews, listening to reports. The shades of photographers disappear from the hall. Goethe looks around. He examines the pictures on the walls. Then he approaches the aide who brought him here and asks him whether he is to consider the audience over. The aide nods, a fork delivers a piece of meat to Napoleon's mouth, and Goethe departs.

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  Bettina was the daughter of Maximiliana La Roche, a woman with whom Goethe was in love when he was twenty-three. If we don't count a few chaste kisses, it was a nonphysical kind of love, purely sentimental, and it left no consequences, if only because Maximiliana's mother promptly married her daughter off to the wealthy Italian merchant Brentano. When he saw that the young poet planned to continue flirting with his wife, Brentano threw him out of his house and forbade him ever to appear there again. Maximiliana then gave birth to twelve children (that Italian stud fathered twenty in his lifetime!), and she christened one of them Elisabeth; that was Bettina.

  Bettina was attracted to Goethe from her earliest youth. For one thing, because in the eyes of all Germany he was striding toward the Temple of Fame, for another because she learned of the love he had once borne for her mother. She began to immerse herself passionately in that distant love, all the more bewitching for its distance (my God, it took place thirteen years before she was born!), and the feeling slowly grew in her that she had some sort of secret right to the great poet, because in the metaphoric sense of the word (and who should take metaphors seriously if not a poet?) she considered herself his daughter.

  It is a well-known fact that men have an unfortunate tendency to avoid paternal duties, to fall delinquent in alimony payments and to ignore their children. They refuse to grasp that a child is the very essence of love. Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings. Even if a man loves a woman without so much as touching her, he must reckon with the possibility that his love may engender an issue

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  and emerge into the world even thirteen years after the last meeting of the lovers. This is more or less what Bettina had been telling herself before she finally gathered enough courage to come to Weimar and call on Goethe. It was in the spring of 1807. She was twenty-two years old (about the same age as Goethe when he courted her mother), but she still felt like a child. That feeling mysteriously protected her, as if childhood were her shield.

  To carry the shield of childhood in front of her: that was her lifelong ruse. A ruse, and yet also someything natural, for already as a child she had become used to playing at being a child. She was always a little in love with her elder brother, the poet Clemens Brentano, and she greatly enjoyed sitting on his lap. Even then (she was fourteen) she knew how to savor the triple ambiguity of being at the same time a child, a sister, and a desirable woman. Is it possible to push a child off one's lap? Not even Goedie would be able to do so.

  In 1807, on the day of their first meeting, she sat herself on his lap, if we can trust her own description: first she sat on the couch, facing Goedie; he talked in a conventionally mournful tone of voice about the Duchess Amelia, who had died a few days earlier. Bettina said that she knew nothing about it. "How is that possible?" Go
edie said with surprise. "Aren't you interested in the life of Weimar?" Bettina said, "I am interested in nothing but you." Goedie smiled and said the following fateful words to the young woman: "You are a charming child." As soon as she heard the word "child," she lost all shyness. She announced that she was uncomfortable on the couch and jumped to her feet. "Sit down where you feel comfortable," said Goethe, and Bettina sat on his lap and hugged him. She felt so good snuggled up against him that soon she fell asleep.

  It's hard to say whether things really happened like that or whether Bettina made it up, but if she did, then so much the better: she is revealing to us how she wants us to see her, and she describes her method of approaching men: in a childlike way she was impudently sincere (declaring that she didn't care about the death of the Duchess and that she was uncomfortable on the couch on which dozens of visitors had been grateful to sit); in a childlike way she jumped on his

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  lap and hugged him; and to top it all off, in a childlike way she fell

  asleep there!

  Nothing is more useful than to adopt the status of a child: a child can do whatever it likes, for it is innocent and inexperienced; it need not observe the rules of social behavior, for it has not yet entered a world ruled by form; it may show its feelings, whether they are appropriate or not. People who refused to see the child in Bettina used to say that she was crackbrained (once, while dancing with joy, she fell and knocked her head against the corner of a table), badly brought up (in society she would sit on the floor rather than in a chair), and, especially, cata-strophically unnatural. On the other hand, those willing to see her as an eternal child were bewitched by her natural spontaneity.

  Goethe was moved by the child. She reminded him of his own youth, and he gave Bettina a beautiful ring as a present. That evening, he noted tersely in his diary: Mamsel Brentano.

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  How many times did they actually meet, those famous lovers Goethe and Bettina? She came to visit him again later that year, in the autumn of 1807, and stayed in Weimar for ten days. Then she didn't see him again until three years later: she came for three days to the Bohemian spa of Teplitz, without realizing that Goethe was also there for a cure in the healing waters. And a year later came that fateful two-week Weimar visit at the end of which Christiane knocked off her glasses.

  And how many times had they actually been alone together, face to face? Three, four times, hardly more. The less they saw of each other, the more they wrote, or more precisely: the more she wrote to him. She wrote him fifty-two lengthy letters, in which she addressed him with the familiar du and spoke of nothing but love. Except for this avalanche of words, however, nothing else actually happened, and we can only ask ourselves why their love story became so famous.

  This is the answer: it became famous because from the very beginning it concerned nothing else but love.

  Goethe soon began to sense that. He got his first disturbing inkling when Bettina revealed that already, long before her first visit to Weimar, she had become close friends with his aged mother, who also lived in Frankfurt. Bettina kept asking questions about her son, and the old lady, pleased and flattered, would spend all day recounting dozens of recollections. Bettina thought that her friendship with his mother would open Goethe's house to her, as well as his heart. That calculation proved not quite correct. His mother's adoring love struck Goethe as somewhat comical (he never even bothered to pay her a visit from Weimar), and he sniffed danger in the alliance of an extravagant girl and a naive mother.

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  I imagine he must have experienced mixed feelings when Bettina repeated to him the stories she had heard from the old lady. At first he was, of course, flattered by the interest shown in him by a young woman. Her stories awoke many slumbering memories that pleased him. But soon he also found among them some anecdotes that could not possibly have happened, or that made him seem so ridiculous that they should not have happened. Moreover, coming from Bettina's lips, his childhood and youth took on a certain coloration and meaning that made him uncomfortable. Not because Bettina might wish to use these childhood memories against him, but rather because a person (any person, not just Goethe) finds it distasteful to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation from his own. Goethe thus found himself threatened: the girl, who associated with young intellectuals of the Romantic movement (for whom Goethe hadn't the least sympathy), seemed dangerously ambitious and took it for granted (with an aplomb bordering on shamelessness) that she would be a writer. One day she actually said it outright: she wanted to write a book based on his mother's recollections. A book about him, about Goethe! He recognized at once that behind the expressions of love lurked the menacing aggressiveness of the pen, and that put him on his guard.

  But just because he was constantly on his guard with her, he did everything he could to avoid being unpleasant. He couldn't afford to turn her into an enemy, she was too dangerous; he preferred to keep her under constant, kind control. But he knew at the same time that even kindliness must not be overdone, because the slightest gesture that she could interpret as an expression of loving favor (and she was ready to interpret his every sneeze as a declaration of love) would make her even more daring.

  Once she wrote to him: "Don't burn my letters, don't tear them up; that might hurt you, for the love I express in them is tied to you firmly, truly, vitally. But don't show them to anyone. Keep them hidden, like a secret beauty." First he smiled condescendingly at the self-assurance with which Bettina considered her letters to be like a beauty, but then he was struck by the sentence "But don't show them to anyone." Why did she say that to him? Did he have the slightest desire to show them

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  to anyone? By that imperative don't show! Bettina betrayed her secret desire to show. He could not doubt that the letters he wrote to her from time to time would eventually have other readers as well, and he knew that he was in the position of an accused being warned by the court: anything you say from now on may be used against you.

  He therefore tried to chart a careful middle way between kindliness and restraint: his replies to her ecstatic letters were at the same time friendly and restrained, and for a long time he countered her familiar du with the formal Sie. When they found themselves together in the same town, he was kindly in a fatherly way, invited her to his house, but he tried to make sure they would always be in the presence of other people.

  What, then, was at stake between them?

  In 1809, Bettina wrote to him: "I have a strong will to love you for eternity." Read carefully this apparently banal sentence. More important than the word "love" are the words "eternity" and "will."

  I won't keep you in suspense any longer. What was at stake between them was not love. It was immortality.

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  1810, in the course of those three days when the two of them accidentally found themselves together in Teplitz, she admitted to him that she would soon marry the poet Achim von Arnim. She probably made the announcement with some embarrassment, for she was not sure whether Goethe would take her marriage as a betrayal of the love she had been so ecstatically proclaiming. She didn't know enough about men to guess the quiet joy the news would bring to Goethe.

  Right after Bettina's departure he wrote a letter to Christiane in Weimar, with this cheerful sentence: "Mit Arnim ists wohl gewiss." With Arnim it's quite certain. In the same letter he rejoices that Bettina was on this occasion "really prettier and nicer than before," and we can guess why she seemed so to him: he was sure that the existence of a husband would from now on shield him from the extravagances that had prevented him from appreciating her charms in a relaxed and good-humored frame of mind.

  In order to understand this situation, we mustn't forget one important consideration: from his earliest youth Goethe had been a womanizer, and so by the time he m
et Bettina he had been a womanizer for forty years continuously; during this time there had developed inside him a mechanism of seductive reactions and gestures that could be activated by the slightest impulse. Until now he had kept it in check with Bettina, with enormous difficulty. But when he realized that "with Arnim it's quite certain," he told himself with relief that his caution was no longer necessary.

  She came to his room that evening, once again with the air of a child. She told him some anecdote or other in a delightfully naughty way, and while he remained seated in his armchair she sat down facing him on

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  the floor. Being in a good mood ("with Arnim it's quite certain"!), he leaned toward her and patted her cheek the way we pat a child. At that moment the child fell silent and lifted to him eyes full of womanly longing and insistence. He clasped her hands and lifted her from the floor. Don't forget the scene: he was seated, she stood facing him, and in the window the sun was setting. She was gazing into his eyes, he was gazing into hers; the mechanism of seduction was set in motion and he did not resist it. In a voice somewhat lower than usual, and continuing to gaze into her eyes, he asked her to bare her bosom. She didn't say anything, she didn't do anything; she blushed. He got up from the chair and unbuttoned the front of her dress. She kept gazing into his eyes, and the red of the sunset merged with the blush that ran down her skin to the very pit of her stomach. He placed his hand on her breast: "Has anyone ever touched your breast?" he asked her. "No," she answered. "It seems so strange, when you touch me," and all the time she kept gazing into his eyes. Without removing his hand from her breast, he too kept gazing into her eyes, savoring long and avidly in their depths the shame of a girl whose breast no one had ever touched before.