Produced by David Widger
THE STORY OF MY LIFE FROM CHILDHOOD TO MANHOOD
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
By Georg Ebers
Translated from the German by Mary J. Safford
TO MY SONS.
When I began the incidents of yore,
Still in my soul’s depths treasured, to record,
A voice within said: Soon, life’s journey o’er,
Thy portrait sole remembrance will afford.
And, ere the last hour also strikes for thee,
Search thou the harvest of the vanished years.
Not futile was thy toil, if thou canst see
That for thy sons fruit from one seed appears.
Upon the course of thine own life look back,
Follow thy struggles upwards to the light;
Methinks thy errors will not seem so black,
If they thy loved ones serve to guide aright.
And should they see the star which ‘mid the dark
Illumed thy pathway to thy distant goal,
Thither they’ll turn the prow of their life bark;
Its radiance their course also will control.
Ay, when the ivy on my grave doth grow,
When my dead hand the helm no more obeys,
This book to them the twofold light will show,
To which I ne’er forget to turn my gaze.
One heavenward draws, with rays so mild and clear,
Eyes dim with tears, when the world darkness veils,
Showing ‘mid desert wastes the spring anear,
If, spent with wandering, your courage fails.
Since first your lips could syllable a prayer,
Its mercy you have proved a thousandfold;
I too received it, though unto my share
Fell what I pray life ne’er for you may hold.
The other light, whose power full well you know,
E’en though in words I nor describe nor name,
Alike for me and you its rays aye glow--
Maternal love, by day and night the same.
This light within your youthful hearts has beamed,
Ripening the germs of all things good and fair;
I also fostered them, and joyous dreamed
Of future progress to repay our care.
Thus guarded, unto manhood you have grown;
Still upward, step by step, you steadfast rise
The oldest, healing’s noble art has won;
The second, to his country’s call replies;
The third, his mind to form is toiling still;
And as this book to you I dedicate,
I see the highest wish life could fulfil
In you, my trinity, now incarnate.
To pay it homage meet, my sons I’ll guide
As I revere it, ‘mid the world’s turmoil,
Love for mankind, which putteth self aside,
In love for native land and blessed toil.
GEORG EBERS.
TOTZING ON THE STARNBERGER SEE,
October 1, 1892.
INTRODUCTION.
In this volume, which has all the literary charm and deftness of
character drawing that distinguish his novels, Dr. Ebers has told the
story of his growth from childhood to maturity, when the loss of
his health forced the turbulent student to lead a quieter life, and
inclination led him to begin his Egyptian studies, which resulted, first
of all, in the writing of An Egyptian Princess, then in his travels in
the land of the Pharaohs and the discovery of the Ebers Papyrus (the
treatise on medicine dating from the second century B.C.), and finally
in the series of brilliant historical novels that has borne his name to
the corners of the earth and promises to keep it green forever.
This autobiography carries the reader from 1837, the year of Dr. Ebers’s
birth in Berlin, to 1863, when An Egyptian Princess was finished.
The subsequent events of his life were outwardly calm, as befits the
existence of a great scientist and busy romancer, whose fecund fancy was
based upon a groundwork of minute historical research.
Dr. Ebers attracted the attention of the learned world by his treatise
on Egypt and the Book of Moses, which brought him a professorship at
his university, Gottingen, in 1864, the year following the close of this
autobiography. His marriage to the daughter of a burgomaster of Riga
took place soon afterward. During the long years of their union Mrs.
Ebers was his active helpmate, many of the business details relating to
his works and their American and English editions being transacted by
her.
After his first visit to Egypt, Ebers was called to the University of
Leipsic to fill the chair of Egyptology. He went again to Egypt in
1872, and in the course of his excavations at Thebes unearthed the
Ebers Papyrus already referred to, which established his name among the
leaders of what was then still a new science, whose foundations had been
laid by Champollion in 1821.
Ebers continued to occupy his chair at the Leipsic University, but,
while fulfilling admirably the many duties of a German professorship, he
found time to write several of his novels. Uarda was published in
1876, twelve years after the appearance of An Egyptian Princess, to be
followed in quick succession by Homo Sum, The Sisters, The Emperor,
and all that long line of brilliant pictures of antiquity. He began his
series of tales of the middle ages and the dawn of the modern era in
1881 with The Burgomaster’s Wife. In 1889 the precarious state of his
health forced him to resign his chair at the university.
Notwithstanding his sufferings and the obstacles they placed in his
path, he continued his wonderful intellectual activity until the end.
His last novel, Arachne, was issued but a short time before his death,
which took place on August 7, 1898, at the Villa Ebers, in Tutzing,
on the Starenberg Lake, near Munich, where most of his later life was
spent. The monument erected to his memory by his own indefatigable
activity consists of sixteen novels, all of them of perennial value
to historical students, as well as of ever-fresh charm to lovers of
fiction, many treatises on his chosen branch of learning, two great
works of reference on Egypt and Palestine, and short stories, fairy
tales, and biographies.
The Story of my Life is characterized by a captivating freshness. Ebers
was born under a lucky star, and the pictures of his early home life,
his restless student days at that romantic old seat of learning,
Gottingen, are bright, vivacious, and full of colour. The biographer,
historian, and educator shows himself in places, especially in the
sketches of the brothers Grimm, and of Froebel, at whose institute,
Keilhau, Ebers received the foundation of his education. His discussion
of Froebel’s method and of that of his predecessor, Pestalozzi, is full
of interest, because written with enthusiasm and understanding. He was
a good German, in the largest sense of the word, and this trait, too,
is brought forward in his reminiscences of the turbulent days of 1848 in
Berlin.
The story of Dr. Ebers’s early life was worth the telling, and he has
told it himself, as no one else could tell it, with all the consummate
skill of his perfected craftsmanship, with all the reverent love of
an admiring son, and with all the happy exuberance of a careless youth
remembered in all its brightness in the years of his maturity. Finally,
the book teaches a beautiful lesson of fortitude in adversity, of
suffering patiently borne and valiantly overcome by a spirit that,
greatly gifted by Nature, exercised its strength until the thin silver
lining illuminated the apparently impenetrable blackness of the cloud
that overhung Georg Moritz Ebers’s useful and successful life.
THE STORY OF MY LIFE.
CONTENTS.
BOOK 1.
I. -GLANCING BACKWARD.
II. -MY EARLIEST CHILDHOOD
III. -ON FESTAL DAYS
IV. -THE JOURNEY TO HOLLAND TO ATTEND THE GOLDEN WEDDING
V. -LENNESTRASSE.--LENNE--EARLY IMPRESSIONS
BOOK 2.
VI. -MY INTRODUCTION TO ART, AND ACQUAINTANCES
VII. -WHAT A BERLIN CHILD ENJOYED ON THE SPREE AND GRANDMOTHER’S
VIII. -THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
IX. -THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH
BOOK3.
X. -AFTER THE NIGHT OF REVOLUTION
XI. -IN KEILHAU
XII -FRIEDRICH FROEBEL’S IDEAL OF EDUCATION
BOOK 4.
XIII. -THE FOUNDERS OF THE KEILHAU INSTITUTE
XIV. -IN THE FOREST AND ON THE MOOR.
XV. -SUMMER PLEASURES AND RAMBLES
XVI. -AUTUMN, WINTER, EASTER, AND DEPARTURE
BOOK 5.
XVII. -THE GYMNASIUM AND THE FIRST PERIOD OF UNIVERSITY LIFE
XVIII. -THE TIME OF EFFERVESCENCE AND MY SCHOOLMATES
XIX. -A ROMANCE WHICH REALLY HAPPENED
XX. -AT THE QUEDLINBURG GYMNASIUM
BOOK 6.
XXI. -AT THE UNIVERSITY
XXII. -THE SHIPWRECK
XXIII. -THE HARDEST TIME IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE
XXIV. -THE APPRENTICESHIP
XXV. -THE SUMMERS OF MY CONVALESCENCE
XXVI. -CONTINUANCE OF CONVALESCENCE AND THE FIRST NOVEL
THE STORY OF MY LIFE.
CHAPTER I. GLANCING BACKWARD.
Though I was born in Berlin, it was also in the country. True, it was
fifty-five years ago; for my birthday was March 1, 1837, and at that
time the house--[No. 4 Thiergartenstrasse]--where I slept and played
during the first years of my childhood possessed, besides a field and
a meadow, an orchard and dense shrubbery, even a hill and a pond. Three
big horses, the property of the owner of our residence, stood in the
stable, and the lowing of a cow, usually an unfamiliar sound to Berlin
children, blended with my earliest recollections.
The Thiergartenstrasse--along which in those days on sunny mornings,
a throng of people on foot, on horseback, and in carriages constantly
moved to and fro--ran past the front of these spacious grounds, whose
rear was bounded by a piece of water then called the “Schafgraben,” and
which, spite of the duckweed that covered it with a dark-green network
of leafage, was used for boating in light skiffs.
Now a strongly built wall of masonry lines the banks of this ditch,
which has been transformed into a deep canal bordered by the handsome
houses of the Konigin Augustastrasse, and along which pass countless
heavily laden barges called by the Berliners “Zillen.”
The land where I played in my childhood has long been occupied by
the Matthaikirche, the pretty street which bears the same name, and a
portion of Konigin Augustastrasse, but the house which we occupied and
its larger neighbour are still surrounded by a fine garden.
This was an Eden for city children, and my mother had chosen it because
she beheld it in imagination flowing with the true Garden of Paradise
rivers of health and freedom for her little ones.
My father died on the 14th of February, 1837, and on the 1st of March of
the same year I was born, a fortnight after the death of the man in whom
my mother was bereft of both husband and lover. So I am what is termed a
“posthumous” child. This is certainly a sorrowful fate; but though there
were many hours, especially in the later years of my life, in which
I longed for a father, it often seemed to me a noble destiny and one
worthy of the deepest gratitude to have been appointed, from the
first moment of my existence, to one of the happiest tasks, that of
consolation and cheer.
It was to soothe a mother’s heartbreak that I came in the saddest hours
of her life, and, though my locks are now grey, I have not forgotten the
joyful moments in which that dear mother hugged her fatherless little
one, and among other pet names called him her “comfort child.”
She told me also that posthumous children were always Fortune’s
favorites, and in her wise, loving way strove to make me early familiar
with the thought that God always held in his special keeping those
children whose fathers he had taken before their birth. This confidence
accompanied me through all my after life.
As I have said, it was long before I became aware that I lacked
anything, especially any blessing so great as a father’s faithful love
and care; and when life showed to me also a stern face and imposed heavy
burdens, my courage was strengthened by my happy confidence that I was
one of Fortune’s favorites, as others are buoyed up by their firm faith
in their “star.”
When the time at last came that I longed to express the emotions of my
soul in verse, I embodied my mother’s prediction in the lines:
The child who first beholds the light of day
After his father’s eyes are closed for aye,
Fortune will guard from every threatening ill,
For God himself a father’s place will fill.
People often told me that as the youngest, the nestling, I was my
mother’s “spoiled child”; but if anything spoiled me it certainly was
not that. No child ever yet received too many tokens of love from a
sensible mother; and, thank Heaven, the word applied to mine. Fate had
summoned her to be both father and mother to me and my four brothers and
sisters-one little brother, her second child, had died in infancy--and
she proved equal to the task. Everything good which was and is ours we
owe to her, and her influence over us all, and especially over me, who
was afterward permitted to live longest in close relations with her,
was so great and so decisive, that strangers would only half understand
these stories of my childhood unless I gave a fuller description of her.
These details are intended particularly for my children, my brothers and
sisters, and the dear ones connected with our family by ties of blood
and friendship, but I see no reason for not making them also accessible
to wider circles. There has been no lack of requests from friends that
I should write them, and many of those who listen willingly when I tell
romances will doubtless also be glad to learn something concerning the
life of the fabulist, who, however, in these records intends to silence
imagination and adhere rigidly to the motto of his later life, “To be
truthful in love.”
My mother’s likeness as a young woman accompanies these pages, and must
spare me the task of describing her appearance. It was copied from the
life-size portrait completed for the young husband by Schadow just prior
to his appointment as head of the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, and now in
the possession of my brother, Dr. Martin Ebers of Berlin. Unfortunately,
our copy lacks the colouring; and the dress of the original, which shows
the whole figure, confirms the experience of the error committed in
faithfully reproducing the fashion of the day in portraits intended
for future generations. It never fully satisfied me; for it very
inadequately reproduces what was especially precious to us in our mother
and lent her so great a charm--her feminine grace, and the tenderness of
heart so winningly expressed in her soft blue eyes.
No one could help pronouncing her beautiful; but to me she was at once
the fairest and the best of women, and if I make the suffering Stephanus
in Homo Sum say, “For every child his own mother is the best mother,”
mine certainly was to me. My heart rejoiced when I perceived that
every one shared this appreciation. At the time of my birth she was
thirty-five, and, as I have heard from many old acquaintances, in the
full glow of her beauty.
My father had been one of the Berlin gentlemen to whose spirit of
self-sacrifice and taste for art the Konigstadt Theater owed its
prosperity, and was thus brought into intimate relations with Carl von
Holtei, who worked for its stage both as dramatist and actor. When, as
a young professor, I told the grey-haired author in my mother’s name
something which could not fail to afford him pleasure, I received the
most eager assent to my query whether he still remembered her. “How I
thank your admirable mother for inducing you to write!” ran the letter.
“Only I must enter a protest against your first lines, suggesting that
I might have forgotten her. I forget the beautiful, gentle, clever,
steadfast woman who (to quote Shakespeare’s words) ‘came adorned hither
like sweet May,’ and, stricken by the hardest blows so soon after her
entrance into her new life, gloriously endured every trial of fate to
become the fairest bride, the noblest wife, most admirable widow, and
most faithful mother! No, my young unknown friend, I have far too much
with which to reproach myself, have brought from the conflicts of a
changeful life a lacerated heart, but I have never reached the point
where that heart ceased to cherish Fanny Ebers among the most sacred
memories of my chequered career. How often her loved image appears
before me when, in lonely twilight hours, I recall the past!”
Yes, Fate early afforded my mother an opportunity to test her character.
The city where shortly before my birth she became a widow was not her
native place. My father had met her in Holland, when he was scarcely
more than a beardless youth. The letter informing his relatives that
he had determined not to give up the girl his heart had chosen was not
regarded seriously in Berlin; but when the lover, with rare pertinacity,
clung to his resolve, they began to feel anxious. The eldest son of one
of the richest families in the city, a youth of nineteen, wished to bind
himself for life--and to a foreigner--a total stranger.
My mother often told us that her father, too, refused to listen to the
young suitor, and how, during that time of conflict, while she was with
her family at Scheveningen, a travelling carriage drawn by four horses
stopped one day before her parents’ unpretending house. From this coach
descended the future mother-in-law. She had come to see the paragon of
whom her son had written so enthusiastically, and to learn whether it
would be possible to yield to the youth’s urgent desire to establish a
household of his own. And she did find it possible; for the girl’s rare
beauty and grace speedily won the heart of the anxious woman who had
really come to separate the lovers. True, they were required to wait a
few years to test the sincerity of their affection. But it withstood the
proof, and the young man, who had been sent to Bordeaux to acquire in
a commercial house the ability to manage his father’s banking business,
did not hesitate an instant when his beautiful fiancee caught the
smallpox and wrote that her smooth face would probably be disfigured by
the malignant disease, but answered that what he loved was not only her
beauty but the purity and goodness of her tender heart.
This had been a severe test, and it was to be rewarded: not the smallest
scar remained to recall the illness. When my father at last made my
mother his wife, the burgomaster of her native city told him that he
gave to his keeping the pearl of Rotterdam. Post-horses took the young
couple in the most magnificent weather to the distant Prussian capital.
It must have been a delightful journey, but when the horses were changed
in Potsdam the bride and groom received news that the latter’s father
was dead.
So my parents entered a house of mourning. My mother at that time had
only the slight mastery of German acquired during hours of industrious
study for her future husband’s sake. She did not possess in all Berlin
a single friend or relative of her own family, yet she soon felt at home
in the capital. She loved my father. Heaven gave her children, and her
rare beauty, her winning charm, and the receptivity of her mind quickly
opened all hearts to her in circles even wider than her husband’s large
family connection. The latter included many households whose guests
numbered every one whose achievements in science or art, or possession
of large wealth, had rendered them prominent in Berlin, and the
“beautiful Hollander,” as my mother was then called, became one of the
most courted women in society.
Holtei had made her acquaintance at this time, and it was a delight
to hear her speak of those gay, brilliant days. How often Baron von
Humboldt, Rauch, or Schleiermacher had escorted her to dinner! Hegel
had kept a blackened coin won from her at whist. Whenever he sat down
to play cards with her he liked to draw it out, and, showing it to his
partner, say, “My thaler, fair lady.”
My mother, admired and petted, had thoroughly enjoyed the happy period
of my father’s lifetime, entertaining as a hospitable hostess or
visiting friends, and she gladly recalled it. But this brilliant life,
filled to overflowing with all sorts of amusements, had been interrupted
just before my birth.
The beloved husband had died, and the great wealth of our family, though
enough remained for comfortable maintenance, had been much diminished.
Such changes of outward circumstances are termed reverses of fortune,
and the phrase is fitting, for by them life gains a new form. Yet real
happiness is more frequently increased than lessened, if only they do
not entail anxiety concerning daily bread. My mother’s position was far
removed from this point; but she possessed qualities which would have
undoubtedly enabled her, even in far more modest circumstances, to
retain her cheerfulness and fight her way bravely with her children
through life.
The widow resolved that her sons should make their way by their own
industry, like her brothers, who had almost all become able officials
in the Dutch colonial service. Besides, the change in her circumstances
brought her into closer relations with persons with whom by inclination
and choice she became even more intimately associated than with the
members of my father’s family--I mean the clique of scholars and
government officials amid whose circle her children grew up, and whom I
shall mention later.
Our relatives, however, even after my father’s death, showed the same
regard for my mother--who on her side was sincerely attached to many of
them--and urged her to accept the hospitality of their homes. I, too,
when a child, still more in later years, owe to the Beer family many a
happy hour. My father’s cousin, Moritz von Oppenfeld, whose wife was
an Ebers, was also warmly attached to us. He lived in a house which he
owned on the Pariser Platz, now occupied by the French embassy, and in
whose spacious apartments and elsewhere his kind heart and tender love
prepared countless pleasures for our young lives.