A Russian princess in Nazi Berlin

Seventy years ago today, a young dispossessed Russian princess, Marie Vassiltchikov, arrived in Berlin looking for work, and a new start to her life. But Germany was at war, and the job she found would see her on the periphery of a plot to murder Hitler, and then escape to Vienna. Through all the turmoil of those days, she would keep a diary. Much later, this would be published to great acclaim as ‘one of the most extraordinary war diaries ever written’.

Vassiltchikov was born in 1917 in Saint Petersburg, the fourth of five children. Her father was the Fourth Duma, Prince Hilarion Vassiltchikov and her mother the former Princess Lidiya Vyazemskaya. Following the Bolshevik October Revolution in 1919, the family fled Russia by joining members of the Romanov family evacuated by the British fleet. Vassiltchikov lived as a refugee, initially in the French Third Republic, then Weimar Republic Germany, and then Lithuania where her father’s family had owned property before the revolution. She worked for a while at the British legation, and remained in Lithuania until just before the start of World War II.

In early 1940, Vassiltchikov and her sister travelled to Berlin where, as stateless persons and qualified linguists, they were able to obtain work permits. After brief employment with the Broadcasting Service, Vassiltchikov transferred to the Auswärtiges Amt (AA), the German Foreign Ministry’s Information Office, where she worked as an assistant to Dr. Adam von Trott zu Solz, a key member of the anti-Nazi faction. Indeed, von Trott was one of the group who plotted to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. Following the attempt, Vassiltchikov and others went to Gestapo headquarters to plead for his life, bringing bring food and other packages until they were warned by a guard not to return.

After von Trott’s execution, Vassiltchikov fled to Vienna, where she worked as a nurse. At the end of the war, it is said she was found by the US army digging for food outside a concentration camp. After the war, she worked as an interpreter for US Army. She married Captain Peter Harnden in 1946, and they settled in Paris, where they had four children, and where Harnden opened an architectural firm. After Harnden’s death, Vassiltchikov moved to London where she died in 1978. Further information can be found at Wikipedia.

A great deal is known about Vassiltchikov’s life in Berlin as, from just before her arrival in the city until the end of the war, she kept a diary. Later in life she started editing these diaries, but it was her brother George H. Vassiltchikov who completed the process, leading to pubilcation in 1985 by Chatto & Windus of The Berlin Diaries 1940-1945 (reprinted by Pimlico in 1999). The book received excellent reviews, not least from John Le Carré: ‘Quite simply, one of the most extraordinary war diaries ever written. Innocent and knowing at once, it portrays the death of Old Europe through the eyes of a beautiful young aristocrat whose world itself is dying with the events that she describes.’ Some pages can be previewed at Googlebooks and Amazon, and a review can be read at The New York Times. (It is worth noting also that the Imperial War Museum website has an oral history audio recording by George Vassiltchikov.)

Here are the first half dozen entries to be found in The Berlin Diaries 1940-1945.

1 January 1940
‘Olga Puckler, Tatiana and I spent the New Year quietly at Schloss Friedland. We lit the Christmas tree and tried to read the future by dropping melted wax and lead into a bowl of water. We expect Mamma and Georgie to appear any minute from Lithuania. They have announced their arrival repeatedly. At midnight all the village bells began to ring. We hung out of the windows listening - the first New Year of this new World War.’

3 January 1940
‘We departed for Berlin with eleven pieces of luggage, including a gramophone. We left at 5 a.m. It was still pitch dark. The estate manager drove us to Oppeln. Olga Pückler has lent us enough money to live for three weeks; by that time we must have found jobs. Tatiana has written to Jake Beam, one of the boys at the American Embassy she met last spring; our work at the British Legation in Kaunas may be of some help to us there.

The train was packed and we stood in the corridor. Luckily, two soldiers had helped with the luggage, as otherwise we would never have been able to squeeze in. We arrived in Berlin three hours late. As soon as we reached the flat the Pucklers have kindly allowed us to stay in temporarily, Tatiana started telephoning friends; it made us feel less lost. The flat, in the Lietzenburgerstrasse, a street running parallel to the Kurfurstendamm, is very large, but Olga has asked us to do without outside help on account of the many valuable contents, so we are only using one bedroom, a bathroom and the kitchen. The rest is shrouded in sheets.’

4 January 1940
‘We spent most of the day blacking out the windows, as no one has been here since the war started last September.’

6 January 1940
‘After dressing, we ventured out into the darkness and luckily found a taxi on the Kurfurstendamm which took us to a ball at the Chilean Embassy off the Tiergarten. Our host, Morla, was Chilean Ambassador in Madrid when the Civil War broke out. Although their own government favoured the Republicans, they gave shelter to more than 3,000 persons, who would otherwise have been shot and who hid out in the Chilean Embassy for three years, sleeping on the floors, the stairs, wherever there was space; and notwithstanding great pressure from the Republican Government, the Morlas refused to hand over a single person. This is all the more admirable considering that the Duke of Alba’s brother, a descendant of the Stuarts, who had sought refuge at the British Embassy, was politely turned away and subsequently arrested and shot.

The ball was lovely, quite like in pre-war days At first I feared I would not know many people, but soon I realised that I knew quite a few from last winter. [Missie had visited Tatiana in Berlin in the winter of 1938-1939.] Among those we met for the first time were the Welczeck girls, both very beautiful and terribly well dressed. Their father was the last German Ambassador in Paris. Their brother Hansi and his lovely bride Sigi von Laffert were also there, and many other friends, including Ronnie Clary, a very handsome boy, just out of Louvain University, who speaks perfect English - which was rather a relief, as my German is not quite up to the mark yet. Most of the young men present are at Krampnitz, an officers’ tank training school just outside of Berlin. Later, Rosita Serrano [a popular Chilean chanteuse] sang, addressing little Eddie Wrede, aged nineteen, as ‘Bel Ami’, which flattered him enormously. We had not danced for ages and returned home at 5 a.m., all piled in the car of Cartier, a Belgian diplomat, who is a friend of the Welczecks.’

7 January 1940
‘We are still searching painfully for jobs. We have decided not to ask any friends to help, but to turn directly to business acquaintances.’

8 January 1940
‘This afternoon, at the American Embassy, we had an appointment with the Consul. He was quite friendly and at once gave us a test, which rather unnerved us, as we were not mentally prepared for it. Two typewriters were trotted out, also shorthand pads, and he dictated something at such speed and with such an accent that we could not understand all he said; worse, our two versions of the letter he dictated turned out not to be identical. He told us he would ring us up soon as there were vacancies. We cannot wait long, however, and if something else turns up meanwhile, we will have to accept. Unfortunately, as most international business is at a standstill, there are no firms here in need of French- or English-speaking secretaries.’

This absurd diary

‘I am always depressed and left with [a] sense of worthlessness at the beautifully applied energy of these people [his German friends], the exactness of documentation, completeness of equipment ... and authenticity of vocation. In comparison I am utterly alone (no group even of my own kind) and without purpose alone and pathologically indolent and limp and opinionless and consternated. The little trouble I give myself, this absurd diary with its lists of pictures, serves no purpose, is only the act of an obsessional neurotic. Counting pennies would do as well.’ This is Samuel Beckett, literary giant of the 20th century, who died 30 years ago today. The extract comes from a diary he kept while on a six month sojourn in Germany. But, clearly, he wasn’t much enamoured with the idea of keeping a diary, and, as far is known, he would never do so again.

Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. His father was a quantity surveyor, and he had one older brother; the family was Anglo-Irish protestant. He went to Earlsfort House School in Dublin, then to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, before studying languages at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1923. He excelled at cricket and even played games at county level. He was elected a Scholar (the most prestigious undergraduate award) in 1926. After teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, he moved abroad to teach English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, from late 1928 to 1930. Notably, while there, he was introduced to the renowned Irish author James Joyce, and is said to have assisted in his research for what became Finnegan’s Wake. Beckett’s first published work was a critical essay on Joyce, yet the two are said to have fallen out when Beckett rejected the advances of Joyce’s daughter.

Beckett returned to Ireland in 1930 to take up a post as lecturer in French at Trinity College, but resigned a year or so later, wanting to travel. For several years, he moved around between London, France, Germany and Italy, before eventually deciding in 1937 to settle in Paris. Soon after, he embarked on an affair with Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, to whom he would eventually get married, in 1961. This period saw him publish More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) a collection of stories, and the novel Belacqua Shuah (1938).

As a citizen of a country that was neutral in World War II, he was able to remain in Paris even after the occupation by the Germans. He joined an underground resistance group in 1941, but when, the following year, members of the group were arrested, he and Suzanne went into hiding, he working as an agricultural labourer. The end of the war found him volunteering for the Irish Red Cross in France, and being assigned as an interpreter in a military hospital, before returning to Paris in 1945. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his resistance work. During the next few years, he continuted to write more intensively, producing several stories and novels that, thanks to Suzanne’s efforts, found a publisher - from 1951 onward. But it was the success of his play, Waiting for Godot, first produced at a small Paris theatre in 1953, that brought Beckett international fame.

Beckett continued to be domiciled in Paris, but spent much of his time writing at a small house not far from Paris in the countryside. He shunned all publicity, and refused interviews. When, in 1969, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he declined to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. He continued writing and publishing up to his death on 22 December 1989 (some six months after his wife’s). Wikipedia gives this assessment: ‘Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett’s work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He opened up the possibility of theatre and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of time and place in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. Václav Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Jon Fosse have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett’s example. He has had a wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and after.’ Further information is also available from Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Samuel Beckett Society or The Poetry Foundation.

Beckett has never been known as a diarist, and yet, in the mid-1930s, he did keep diary notebooks during an extended visit to Germany. These were not known to exist until Edward Beckett found them in a trunk after his uncle’s death. He made them available to James Knowlson for his 1996 biography Damned to Fame - The Life of Samuel Beckett (Bloomsbury). In Chapter 10 - Germany: The Unknown Diaries 1936-7 - Knowlson uses the diaries as a source book, yet fails to offer any analysis of them, or the idea of Beckett as diarist. Subsequently, Mark Nixon, who was Knowlson’s successor as Director of the Beckett International Foundation (University of Reading) where the diaries are held, published a book-length analysis of the diaries (based on his PhD thesis): Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936-1937 (Bloomsbury, 2005). Both this and the biography can be previewed at Googlebooks. However, to this day the diaries themselves remain unpublished. The following extracts from Beckett’s diary are all as found in Knowlson’s biography (stripped, though, of Knowlson’s commentary and context).

18 October 1936
‘Even to listen is an effort, and to speak ausgeschlossen [impossible]. Anyway the chatter is a solid block, not a chink, interruption proof. Curse this everlasting limpness and melancholy. How absurd, the struggle to learn to be silent in another language! I am altogether absurd and inconsequential. The struggle to be master of another silence! Like a deaf man investing his substance in Schallplatten [gramophone records], or a blind man with a Leica.’

26 November 1936
‘Transparent figures before landscapes, street, town reproduced in Sauerlandt not there. Wonderful red Frauenkopf, skull earth sea and sky, I think of Monadologie [of Leibniz] and my Vulture. Would not occur to me to call this painting abstract. A metaphysical concrete. Nor Nature convention, but its source, fountain of Erscheinung [Appearance]. Fully a posteriori painting. Object not exploited to illustrate an idea, as in say Leger or Baumeister, but primary. The communication exhausted by the optical experience that is its motive and content. Anything further is by the way. Thus Leibniz, monadologie, Vulture, are by the way. Extraordinary stillness. His concern with Renaissance tradition.’

9 December 1936
‘in fear and trembling, lest I should break a leg, be attacked by vermin, lose the key, [toiling up] a succession of crazy ladders in the gloom, 365 steps to the gallery (for which I have 2nd key) 70 m. above ground. Tiny platform; 1½ from base of wall to railing. I cower against former, and scarcely dare look at view. Force myself to make the circle round with quick sickening glances at the ground.’ 

12 January 1937
‘Bright and cold. First view of terraces faced with glass frames for vines disconcerting, but soon accepted. Trimmed yews very effective. Terrace perhaps too steep and heavy for the palace, which disappears at the foot of every flight. Palace exquisite, and big summer house, faultlessly proportioned, the shallow green cupola resting like a flower on the yellow front, and the caryatids laughing under the lightness of their load. Not in the least Versailles or Watteauesque, but truly an architecture without care.’

15 January 1937
‘I am not interested in a ‘unification’ of the historical chaos any more than I am in the ‘clarification’ of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know. Meier says the background is more important than the foreground, the causes than the effects, the causes than their representatives and opponents. I say the background and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery and venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them. Rationalism is the last form of animism. Whereas the pure incoherence of times and men and places is at least amusing.’

2 February 1937
‘[Willi Grohmann s]ays it is more interesting to stay than to go, even if it were possible to go. They can’t control thoughts. Length of regime impossible to estimate, depends mostly on economic outshot. If it breaks down it is fitting for him and his kind to be on the spot, to go under or become active again. Already a fraternity of intellectuals, where freedom to grumble is less than the labourer’s, because the labourer’s grumble is not dangerous.’

2 February 1937 [Knowlson calls this extract a remarkable mixture of fierce self-criticism and intense self-pity’.]
‘I am always depressed and left with [a] sense of worthlessness at the beautifully applied energy of these people [his German friends], the exactness of documentation, completeness of equipment ... and authenticity of vocation. In comparison I am utterly alone (no group even of my own kind) and without purpose alone and pathologically indolent and limp and opinionless and consternated. The little trouble I give myself, this absurd diary with its lists of pictures, serves no purpose, is only the act of an obsessional neurotic. Counting pennies would do as well. An ‘open-mindedness’ that is mindlessness, the sphincter of the mind limply for ever open, the mind past the power of closing itself to everything but its own content, or rather its own treatment of a content.

I have never thought for myself. I have switched off the incipient thought in terror for so long that I couldn’t think now for half-a-minute if my life (!) depended on it.’

2 March 1937
‘Full of excuses and explanations. Mixture of insufferably hideous and pitiable. Every second phrase a lie, every third a try on and every sixth a grovel and all ? !! Good. Only has coat with him. Says no need to try on the trousers, though of course they are ready! The stuff came only this morning. Suddenly occurs to me that the stuff never came at all, perhaps never was ordered, and that what he has used is inferior. Telepathically he starts to praise the stuff, woof, weight, etc. His next own suit will be of no other. He had meant to bring the sample so that I could compare, but etc ... It is so flagrant as to be diverting. It is diverting to be thought to be done. One is done but not in the eye. The difference between being done and done in the eye is in first case one knows and in second not. He thinks he is doing me in the eye, whereas he is only doing me. That is the diverting position, that I would not spoil with the least show of discernment.’

Reprehensible social views

‘One can acknowledge that there are Jews of the highest respectability, and yet regard it as a misfortune that there are so many Jews in Germany, and that they have complete equality of political rights with citizens of Aryan descent.’ This is the great German mathematician and philosopher, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, born 170 years ago today, writing in a diary he kept for a month in the last year of his life. Although his academic work was largely ignored during his life time, it became better known in the 20th century, and his ideas and books are now considered to have made a seminal contribution to the development of the philosophy of language and mathematics and of modern logic. However, according to its translator, the diary fragment, which was not published until the 1990s, showed him to have ‘reprehensible social views’.

Frege was born on 8 November 1848 in Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. His father founded a girls’ high school, and when he died his mother took it over. Friedrich profited from a good schooling himself, and went on to study maths and physics, mentored by the mathematician Ernst Carl Abbe, at the University of Jena, matriculating in 1869. He moved to continue his postgraduate studies at the University of Göttingen, receiving a PhD in 1873 for a thesis on the geometrical representations of imaginary forms in a plane. Thereafter he returned to the University of Jena as a lecturer, and Abbe helped him progress to a post as associate professor. He was appointed a full professor in 1896.

Frege lectured in all branches of mathematics and also on his own logical system, though many of his publications were philosophical in character - On Sense and Reference, for example, and The Thought. He is credited by many as the father of ‘analytic philosophy’; his work on logic and language underpinned the rise of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy. Some of his books - such as Begriffsschrift and Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik - are today considered seminal texts. He married Margarete Lieseberg in 1887, and the couple adopted one son.

In 1907, Frege was awarded the prestigious title of Hofrat; and during the early 1910s he was visited several times by Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, his work was largely ignored during his lifetime, and only became more widely known when given attention by the British  philosopher Bertrand Russell and the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano. In 1918, Frege retired to Bad Kleinen in the north of Germany (near Wismar), and he died in 1925. For further information see Wikipedia, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Encyclopedia.com.

In 1973, the British philosopher Michael Dummett published Frege: Philosophy of Language which was soon accepted as a definitive work on Frege’s philosophy. Dummett’s preface drew attention to a diary that Frege had kept in the last year of his life, and which proved something of a shocking find. (In fact, the original diary no longer exists, and it is a transcript, prepared by Frege’s son in the late 1930s, that can be found in the Frege Archives at the Institut fur mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung at Munster University.)

‘There is some irony for me,’ Drummet says, ‘in the fact that the man about whose philosophical views I have devoted, over years, a great deal of time to thinking, was, at least at the end of his life, a virulent racist, specifically an anti-semite. This fact is revealed by a fragment of a diary which survives among Frege’s Nachlass [collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence], but which was not published with the rest by Professor Hans Hermes in Freges nachgelassene Schriften. The diary shows Frege to have been a man of extreme right-wing opinions, bitterly opposed to the parliamentary system, democrats, liberals, Catholics, the French and, above all, Jews, who he thought ought to be deprived of political rights and, preferably, expelled from Germany. When I first read that diary, many years ago, I was deeply shocked, because I had revered Frege as an absolutely rational man, if, perhaps, not a very likeable one. I regret that the editors of Frege’s Nachlass chose to suppress that particular item. From it I learned something about human beings which I should be sorry not to know; perhaps something about Europe also.’

It would be another 20 years, in 1996, before the diary was translated into English by Richard L. Mendelsohn and published in Inquiry (Volume 36 of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy) as, Diary: Written by Professor Dr Gottlob Frege in the Time from 10 March to 9 April 1924. This is available to read online at the Taylor & Francis website for a fee, or, currently, it can be read for free at the Yumpu website. A discussion of Frege and his diary can also be found in When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics by Neven Sesardic - see Googlebooks.

According to Mendelssohn’s preface in Inquiry, the views expressed by Frege in the diary were shared by many in his day: ‘What the diary shows more clearly than ever is how much Frege was a creature of his time, and how much more closely than we had previously been able to discern he was involved in and influenced by the philosophical activities of his time. There is, I know, a rather sharp difference between an individual’s philosophical views and his political views, and this is especially true when the philosophical views are so far removed from anything practical, as is the case with Frege.  The reprehensible social views expressed in the diary shake neither the truth nor the inventiveness of his philosophical achievements. But they do make it more difficult to read his texts with the same ease and sympathy - and admiration. I find myself deeply confused and troubled by the diary, and compelled to work to disseminate it as widely as possible.’

Here are several extracts from Mendelsohn’s translation of the Frege diary fragment.

24 March 1924
‘From our earliest education onwards we are so accustomed to using the word ‘number’ and the number-words that we do not consider our use to require justification. To the mathematicians it appears beneath their dignity to concern themselves with such childish matters. But we find the most diverse and contradictory statements about number and numbers among them. Indeed, after prolonged occupation with these questions, we come to suspect that our way of using language is misleading, that number-words are not proper names of objects at all and words like ‘number’, ‘square number’, and the rest are not concept-words; and that consequently a sentence like ‘Four is a square number’ simply does not express that an object is subsumed under a concept, and so just cannot be regarded like the sentence ‘Sirius is a fixed star’. But how then is it to be regarded?’

2 April 1924
‘Already before the war, the view that the economic condition of the poor employees could and had to be improved at the expense of the employers infected a wide circle of the German people, far beyond the boundaries of Social Democracy, like a contagious disease, and this infection of the German people continues up to the present. Until it recedes, one cannot hope for a real recovery of the German people. Only by improving the economic condition of the whole nation can the economic condition of the poor social stratum be permanently improved. How can that happen? The debts and other obligations of the Reich are, if at all possible, not to be increased. Against this, a Reich treasure is to be accumulated.20 This project must be held to tenaciously.’

22 April 1924
‘When I was a child, my native town Wismar had a position in Mecklenburg similar to that which later Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen had in the Reich. That is to say, it enjoyed great internal independence. There was a law at that time that Jews were permitted to stay overnight in Wismar only in the time of certain annual fairs. Then, they would first be rung in by the bell and then rung out. I suppose that this decree was old. The old inhabitants of Wismar must have had experiences with the Jews that had led them to this legislation.

It must have been very much the Jewish way of doing business together with the Jewish national character that is tied closely to this way of doing business. One had also probably seen that little was achieved through laws which forbade such business practices. So it came that I could not have bad experiences with Jews. This was changed only in 1866 with the establishment of the North German Confederation. There came universal suffrage, also for Jews. There came the freedom of movement, also for Jews, presents from France. We make it so easy for the French to bless us with gifts. If one had only turned to noble and patriotic Germans, and instead of persecuting them in the time of the reaction, used their help in producing decrees and institutions arising from the German spirit and heart! The French had treated us nastily enough indeed before 1813, and nevertheless we have this blind admiration for all things French. We reckoned the French so far in front of us that we believed we could hardly catch up with them with seven-league boots. Was there yet perhaps also a seed in us from which something German could have been developed? I have only in the last years really learned to comprehend antisemitism. If one wants to make laws against the Jews, one must be able to specify a distinguishing mark [Kennzeichen] by which one can recognize a Jew for certain. I have always seen this as a problem.’

30 April 1924
‘One can acknowledge that there are Jews of the highest respectability, and yet regard it as a misfortune that there are so many Jews in Germany, and that they have complete equality of political rights with citizens of Aryan descent; but how little is achieved by the wish that the Jews in Germany should lose their political rights or better yet vanish from Germany. If one wanted laws passed to remedy these evils, the first question to be answered would be: How can one distinguish Jews from non-Jews for certain? That may have been relatively easy sixty years ago. Now, it appears to me to be quite difficult. Perhaps one must be satisfied with fighting the ways of thinking [Gesinnung] which show up in the activities of the Jews and are so harmful, and to punish exactly these activities with the loss of civil rights and to make the achievement of civil rights more difficult.’

Diary twist to Möbius strip

August Möbius, an important German mathematician, died 150 years ago today. Most students who have studied maths will recognise his name, largely because, at some stage in their education, they will have come across a Möbius strip - a twisted ring of paper that can be cut, as if by magic, into another ring twice as large. Historians know that Möbius discovered this ‘strip’ as early as 1858, 150 years ago, only because of an entry in his diary.

Möbius’s mother was descended from Martin Luther and his father, who died when Möbius was only three, was a dancing teacher. He studied mathematics, astronomy and physics at Leipzig University, then more astronomy at Göttingen with Johann Friedrich Gauss, and more maths in Halle under Johann Pfaff. By 1816, he was back in Leipzig having been appointed chair of astronomy and higher mechanics. He didn’t achieve a full professorship until 1844, but at the same time was also involved in building and running the Leipzig Observatory. He died on 26 September 1868. Further information can be found at MacTutor’s History of Mathematics archive, hosted by the University of St Andrews in Scotland, or Wikipedia.

Although Möbius published works on astronomy, his most important contributions came in the field of mathematics. His publications, not always original, were thought to be effective and clear, MacTutor says. His biographer Richard Baltzer wrote about him as follows: ‘The inspirations for his research he found mostly in the rich well of his own original mind. His intuition, the problems he set himself, and the solutions that he found, all exhibit something extraordinarily ingenious, something original in an uncontrived way. He worked without hurrying, quietly on his own. His work remained almost locked away until everything had been put into its proper place. Without rushing, without pomposity and without arrogance, he waited until the fruits of his mind matured. Only after such a wait did he publish his perfected works . . .’

One of the areas studied by Möbius was the polyhedron, and how to define it. Even today, 150 years later, this remains an area of study. Wikipedia says a polyhedron (plural polyhedra or polyhedrons) is often defined as a geometric object with flat faces and straight edges, but that this definition is ‘not very precise, and to a modern mathematician is quite unsatisfactory’. In a book dedicated entirely to polyhedra (imaginatively called Polyhedra!), its author Peter R Cromwell discusses Möbius’s contribution to the subject. In 1865, Cromwell says, Möbius answered the question ‘What is a polyhedron?’ in a paper, ‘the same one in which he described his famous one-sided strip.’

In a footnote, however, Cromwell adds the following: ‘From entries in his diary, we know that he had discovered the ‘Mobius strip’ as early as 1858. J. B. Listing [another German mathematician who wrote an important treatise on topology] also discovered it independently around the same time.’ For much more on the Möbius strip see Wikipedia’s extensive article.

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 26 September 2008.

Einstein’s wonderful day

‘One of the finest days of my life. Radiant skies. Toledo like a fairy tale. An enthusiastic old man, who had supposedly written something of import about (Goy) El Greco, guides us. [. . .] Small garden with vistas near synagogue. Magnificent painting by El Greco in small church (burial of a nobleman) is among the profoundest images I have ever seen. Wonderful day.’ This is from the private travel diary of one the world’s most famous scientists, Albert Einstein. Although not accustomed to keeping a diary, he started doing so, in his 40s, when travelling. Of six extant diaries, two have been published - and are freely available online as part of The Digital Einstein Papers. However, Princeton University Press has just published a more comprehensive edition of the diary Einstein kept on a tour to the Far East, Palestine and Spain. Never intended for publication, the diary reveals Einstein unguardedly expressing joy, as in the above extract, but also a degree of racism that has been much discussed by reviewers of the new book.

Einstein was born in 1879 in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire (now in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg). Within a few months, the family had moved to Munich where his father and uncle founded a company manufacturing electrical equipment. Though Jewish by birth, he attended a Catholic school for several years before enrolling in the secondary school, Luitpold Gymnasium. When his father was forced to sell his business, the family moved to Italy, and Einstein continued his education in Switzerland, where he trained as a maths and physics teacher. In 1901, he became a Swiss citizen, and, unable to get a teaching job, joined the Swiss Patent Office. He married Mileva Marić, a fellow student, in 1903 and they had two sons. (However, in 1987, it was discovered that Marić had also given birth earlier to Einstein’s illegitimate daughter but that the baby had either died or been given up for adoption.)

In 1905, Einstein completed his doctor’s degree; he also published several groundbreaking papers, not least one on special relativity including what would become the famous equation E=mc². International recognition followed swiftly, with an associate professorship at the University of Zurich, and a full professorship at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. In 1914, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin (a post he retained until 1932). After several years of separation, he divorced Marić, and married his cousin Elsa Löwenthal. (For an insight into their life together see Harry Kessler’s diaries - Dined with the Einsteins.) In 1922, Einstein was awarded, after some delay, the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics ‘for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect’.

From the 1920s, Einstein was working towards a unified field theory which, apart from gravitation, was also to include electrodynamics. Although he never succeeded in this grand task, he continued to provide lasting contributions to statistical mechanics, special relativity, quantum mechanics, physical cosmology among other branches of maths and physics. He received many honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from European and American universities, as well as fellowships or memberships of leading scientific academies. He travelled widely, meeting other scientists, and giving lectures. Sailing back to Europe from a trip to the US in 1933, he learned of new German laws barring Jews from holding academic positions, and decided he could not return to Berlin. Other countries, particularly Britain, sought to give him residency. However, he chose to take up American citizenship, and a position at the newly-founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to which he remained affiliated for the rest of his life.

Einstein was an active Zionist. He helped establish the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened in 1925, and was among its first governors. Much later, in 1952, he was invited to take up the ceremonial post of President of Israel, though he turned this down. He was also an outspoken advocate for the idea of a world government, and he was a pacifist. However, on the eve of World War II, he famously sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to Germany’s potential to develop an atomic bomb and urging the US to begin research into similar techniques. Later, he campaigned to warn of the danger of nuclear arms. Wikipedia says he published more than 300 scientific papers and more than 150 non-scientific works in his lifetime. He died in 1955. Further information is also available at Princeton University Press, the Nobel Prize website, Biography.com, Encyclopaedia Britannica. There are also many biographies available at Internet Archive and Googlebooks.

There is no evidence that Einstein was a diarist by habit but, in the 1920s, he started to keep diaries when travelling. There are six diaries extant from five trips, the first written during his 1922-1923 journey to the Far East, Palestine and Spain, a second written in South America in 1925, and the other four written during three consecutive winter trips to the USA between late 1930 and early 1933. The first two of the six have been published in volumes 13 and 14 respectively of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, produced by the Einstein Papers Project, and published by Princeton University Press.

The Einstein Papers Project was established in 1986 by Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ‘to assemble, preserve, translate, and publish papers selected from the literary estate of Albert Einstein’ (based in Pasadena, California, at the California Institute of Technology). The volumes are published in the original German, but also in English translation. The Collected Works series has only reached the mid-1920s, and so, presumably, it will be some years before the USA diaries are published. All the hardback volumes are also being made freely available online through The Digital Einstein Papers, hosted by Princeton University Press. Thus, both the first two diaries can be found online, buried deep within the volumes (Far East, Palestine and Spain, and South America).

Although the first travel diary has already been published in print and online, Princeton University Press has now published a far more comprehensive edition - The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine & Spain 1922-1923, as edited by Ze’ev Rosenkranz, senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project. According to the publisher: ‘Quirky, succinct, and at times irreverent the entries record Einstein’s musings on science, philosophy, art, and politics, as well as his immediate impressions and broader thoughts on such events as his inaugural lecture at the future site of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a garden party hosted by the Japanese Empress, an audience with the King of Spain, and meetings with other prominent colleagues and statesmen.’

The handsomely-produced book (which can be previewed at Googlebooks) includes photographic images of every page of Einstein’s diary, extensive notes and references, and a long informative introduction by Rosenkranz. He explains, for example, how this diary and other papers were saved from the Germans: on hearing that Einstein could not return to Berlin in January 1933, his son-in-law removed the diary and other papers from Einstein’s office for safe-keeping in the French embassy, and for subsequent transfer by diplomatic pouch to Paris. He discusses why Einstein might have started to keep travel diaries at this point in time, and he argues that the diaries were never written with a view to publication (but, probably, for family members). He also analyses - and tries to explain - several entries in the diary in which Einstein expresses racist opinions. These particular entries, offering an unexpectedly darker side to Einstein's personality, have been widely reported in the press (see the BBC and the Mail Online - but also The New York Times).

Here are several extracts from the diary, courtesy of Princeton University Press. (NB: for simplicity, the annotations that appear in the original have been omitted.)

21 November 1922
‘Chrysanthemum festival at the imperial palace garden. Great difficulty in procuring a fitting frock coat along with top hat. The former from unknown donor via Mr. Barwald, who brought it personally; the latter from Mr. Yamamoto; far too small, so I had to carry it around in my hand the whole afternoon. We were with the foreign diplomats, who were arranged in a semicircle. Picked up and accompanied by the German embassy. Jap[anese] empress stepped around the inside of the semicircle and spoke a few words with husbands and wives from the embassies, with me a few kind words in French. Then refreshments in the garden at tables, where I was introduced to infinitely many people. Garden marvelous, artificial hills, water, picturesque autumn foliage. Chrysanthemums in booths properly lined up like soldiers. The hanging chrysanthemums are the most beautiful. In the evening, cozy evening at the Berliners’ charming japanese home. He, an intelligent political economist, she, a gracious, intelligent woman, true native of Berlin. Lazing about under such conditions is more tiring than working, but the Inagakis help us with touching solicitude.’

29 November 1922
‘While in shirtsleeves received a card from pastor Steinichen announcing his visit to keep me informed about Frau Schulze’s case. Changed and got dressed quickly, partly in his presence. Then the English physician Gordon-Munroe, who was attending Frau Schulze. Verified that wife’s psychosis is due to husband’s maltreatment (employee at the German Embassy). 10:30, tea ceremony in a fine Japanese home. Exactly prescribed ceremony for a meal to celebrate friendship. Glimpse into the contemplative cultural life of the Japanese. The man has written four thick volumes on the ceremony, which he proudly showed us. Then, reception by 10,000 students at Waseda University, founded by Okuma (?) in the spirit of democracy, with addresses. Lunch at hotel. Then lecture. Viewing of the institute. Interesting communication about electric-arc line-shift. At 6:30 reception by pedagogical societies. During farewells, greeting by female seminar participants outside. Sweet, cheerful scene of throngs in semi-darkness. Too much love and spoiling for one mortal. Arrival home dead tired.’

6 March 1923
‘Excursion to Toledo concealed through many lies. One of the finest days of my life. Radiant skies. Toledo like a fairy tale. An enthusiastic old man, who had supposedly written something of import about (Goy) El Greco, guides us. Streets and market place, views onto the city, the Tagus with stone bridges, stone-covered hills, charming plain, cathedral, synagogue, sunset on the homeward trip with glowing colors. Small garden with vistas near synagogue. Magnificent painting by El Greco in small church (burial of a nobleman) is among the profoundest images I have ever seen. Wonderful day.’

The three extracts immediately above are excerpted from THE TRAVEL DIARIES OF ALBERT EINSTEIN: The Far East, Palestine, & Spain 1922-1923 ed. by Ze’ev Rosenkranz. Editorial apparatus and diary translation copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press. Travel diary, additional texts, and endpaper images copyright © 2018 by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Carefully in oils

‘I have painted the portrait of a Duke in oils. I have made a very fine and careful portrait in oils of the Treasurer Lorenz Sterk; it was worth 25 fl. I presented it to him and in return he gave me 20 fl. and Susanna 1 fl. trinkgeld. Likewise painted the portrait of Jobst my host very finely and carefully in oils. He has now given me his for his. And his wife have I done again and made her portrait in oils.’ This is from a one-off diary kept by the great German artist Albrecht Dürer - who died all of 460 years ago today - while travelling to the Netherlands to meet Charles V, the new ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. The diary, first published in English in the late 19th century, has been likened to a ledger in which he ‘noted his expenses down to the last farthing’. More interestingly, perhaps, he also noted down income from the sale and barter of his own art works.

Dürer was born in 1471 into large family in Nuremburg. His father was a goldsmith, but his godfather, Anton Koberger, was a printer and publisher, eventually becoming the most successful publisher in Germany, owning 24 printing presses. His most famous publication was the Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493 in German and Latin editions, containing 1,800 woodcut illustrations, some of which young Albrecht might have worked on. He learned the basics of goldsmithing and drawing from his father, and showed such a precocious talent in drawing that he was apprenticed to the printmaker Michael Wolgemut from the age of 15.

From 1489, Dürer spent five years travelling around Germany, Switzerland and Italy, a journeyman, working and meeting other artists. In 1494, he married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a wealthy jeweller and musical instrument maker, and, settled in Nuremberg (although he visited Italy again in 1505-1507). He opened his own workshop to produce high quality prints, and was eventually elected a member of the Nuremberg Greater Council. He produced his famous Apocalypse series of woodcuts in 1498. During the next two decades, he produced further series such as Life of the Virgin, Great Passion and Little Passion. From around 1512, Emperor Maximilian I, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, became his most important patron, and, later, the source of a pension.

In 1520-21, after Maxmillian’s death, Dürer travelled with his wife to the Netherlands to see Macmillan’s successor, Charles V, petitioning him to continue with the pension. In the latter years of his life, Dürer developed ideas of art theory and mathematics, published several books, Treatise of Measurement for example, and produced some monumental works such as the Four Apostles. He died on 6 April 1528. Further information can be found at the Albrecht Dürer website,
Wikipedia, NNDB, MacTutor, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

For about one year, while travelling, for the last time in his life, to the Netherlands, Dürer kept a diary. This was first published in an English translation as part of the Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer by William Martin Conway (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1889). The book - which is freely available at Internet Archive - has 30 chapters, 300 pages, with the diary taking up one chapter and around 30 pages.

The diary chapter starts with this introduction: ‘On the 12th of July 1520 a party of travellers, consisting of Albrecht Dürer, his wife, and her maid-servant, started away from Nürnberg along the Erlangen road. The maid’s name was Susanna and it was probably she who three years later married her master’s former apprentice, Georg Penz the socialist. Dürer carried two little books with him, the contents of both of which have descended to us either in whole or in part. In one of these books he jotted down items of expenditure and occasional miscellaneous records and impressions. The original volume has been lost, but an old copy of it remains in the Bamberg Library. The other was a sketch-book, and many of its leaves may still be seen in the public and private art-collections of Europe. The memorandum book, with its curious mixture of diary and accounts, is one of the most interesting volumes of the kind that have been preserved. It has interested many generations of students and is destined to interest many more. The following is a translation of it.’

And the chapter ends with this postscript: ‘It must be admitted that Dürer was not a man of very contented disposition. But for the ill-health it brought him his Netherlands journey had been most successful. It was doubtless enjoyable. He accomplished the main object for which he set out. His Pension was confirmed by the new Emperor. He added greatly to his fame. He saw the world. He was received everywhere with honour. The town-council of Antwerp, like that of Venice years before, tried to retain him permanently with them. They offered him a salary of 300 Philipsgulden a year with a house and freedom from taxation. But the love of home was strong in him and so he returned to spend his last years in the city of his birth. Henceforward he lived out an honoured, if somewhat premature, old age amongst his own people. His earthly journeys were at an end. There remained for him only the short passage to the tomb where his bones still rest, outside the gates of Nürnberg.’

Nearly 100 years later, in 1971, a handsome edition of the diary was published by Lund Humphries in the UK and the New York Graphic Society in the US: Albrecht Dürer: Diary of his Journey to the Netherlands 1520-1521 Accompanied by the silverpoint sketchbook and paintings and drawings made during his journey. In an introduction, J-A Goris and G Marlier provide the following description and commentary:

‘The Diary which Dürer compiled during the twelve months of his absence from Nuremberg is neither a simple narrative of his impressions on the journey nor a detailed description of the sights he witnessed. It is, in effect, a very precise ledger in which the artist noted his expenses down to the last farthing: his travelling expenses, the cost of board and lodging, the various purchases he made, the money he lost at gambling or spent at the cabarets and spas. And with the same care he recorded everything that could properly be considered as gains, that is to say the sums derived from the sale of his own paintings, drawings and engravings, in that order of importance as far as his receipts are concerned. Sometimes the artist would barter his works, exchanging a set of his engravings for some objet d’art or other object. Dürer also kept a detailed account of the various gifts he made or received. [. . .]

Besides the purely financial data, Dürer could not avoid making a number of observations on what he had seen in the Netherlands. Thus, he describes at some length the great procession he witnessed in Antwerp; or again, the treasures brought from Mexico that he saw exhibited at the Palace in Brussels. Further on, he relates in somewhat pompous fashion the serious risks he took in Zeeland; and shortly before his return he suddenly interrupts his book-keeping to improvise a pathetic lament on the tragedy of Luther and Christianity. The Diary of his journey also tells us in a very direct way much about Durer’s character.’

And here are several extracts, as found in the 1889 edition of Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer.

12-15 July 1520
’On Thursday after Kilian’s, I, Albrecht Dürer, at my own charges and costs, took myself and my wife (and maid Susanna) away to the Netherlands. And the same day, after passing through Erlangen, we put up for the night at Baiersdorf and spent there 3 pounds less 6 pfennigs.

Next day, Friday, we came to Forchheim and there I paid 22 pf. for the convoy.

Thence I journeyed to Bamberg where I presented the Bishop (Georg III. Schenk von Limburg) with a Madonna painting, a Life of our Lady, an Apocalypse, and a florin’s worth of engravings. He invited me as his guest, gave me a Toll-pass and three letters of introduction and paid my bill at the Inn, where I had spent about a florin.

I paid 6 florins in gold to the boatman who took me from Bamberg to Frankfurt.

Master Lukas Benedict and Hans the painter sent me wine.

4 pf. for bread and 13 pf. as leaving gifts.

Then I travelled from Bamberg to Eltman and I showed my pass and they let me go toll-free. Thence we passed by Zeil. I spent in the meantime 21 pf. Next I came to Hassfurt and presented my pass and they let me go toll-free.

I paid 1 fl. into the Bishop of Bamberg’s Chancery.

Next I came to Theres to the (Benedictine) monastery, and I showed my pass and they also let me go on. Then we journeyed to Unter-Euerheim where I stayed the night and spent 1 pf.

From thence we travelled to Mainberg and I presented my pass and they let me go toll-free.

We came next to Schweinfurt, where Doctor (Jorg) Rebart invited me, and he gave us wine in the boat. They let me also pass toll-free. A roast fowl 10 pf.; 18 pf. in the kitchen and for the child.

Then we travelled to Volkach and I showed my pass and journeyed on, and we came to Schwarzach and there we stopped the night and I spent 22 pf.’

19 August 1520
‘On the Sunday after our dear Lady’s Assumption I saw the great 19 Aug. Procession from the Church of our Lady at Antwerp, when the whole town of every craft and rank was assembled, each dressed in his best according to his rank. And all ranks and guilds had their signs, by which they might be known. In the intervals great costly pole-candles were borne, and their long old Frankish trumpets of silver. There were also in the German fashion many pipers and drummers. All the instruments were loudly and noisily blown and beaten.

I saw the Procession pass along the street, the people being arranged in rows, each man some distance from his neighbour, but the rows close one behind another. There were the Goldsmiths, the Painters, the Masons, the Broderers, the Sculptors, the Joiners, the Carpenters, the Sailors, the Fishermen, the Butchers, the Leatherers, the Clothmakers, the Bakers, the Tailors, the Cordwainers -indeed workmen of all kinds, and many craftsmen and dealers who work for their livelihood. Likewise the shopkeepers and merchants and their assistants of all kinds were there. After these came the shooters with guns, bows, and crossbows and the horsemen and foot-soldiers also. Then followed the watch of the Lords Magistrates. Then came a fine troop all in red, nobly and splendidly clad. Before them however went all the religious Orders and the members of some Foundations very devoutly, all in their different robes.

A very large company of widows also took part in this procession. They support themselves with their own hands and observe a special rule. They were all dressed from head to foot in white linen garments, made expressly for the occasion, very sorrowful to see. Among them I saw some very stately persons. Last of all came the Chapter of our Lady’s Church with all their clergy, scholars, and treasurers. Twenty persons bore the image of the Virgin Mary with the Lord Jesus, adorned in the costliest manner, to the honour of the Lord God.

In this Procession very many delightful things were shown, most splendidly got up. Waggons were drawn along with masques upon ships and other structures. Behind them came the company of the Prophets in their order and scenes from the New Testament, such as the Annunciation, the Three Holy Kings riding on great camels and on other rare beasts, very well arranged; also how our Lady fled to Egypt - very devout - and many other things, which for shortness I omit. At the end came a great Dragon which St Margaret and her maidens led by a girdle; she was especially beautiful, behind her came St George with his squire, a very goodly knight in armour. In this host also rode boys and maidens most finely and splendidly dressed in the costumes of many lands, representing various Saints. From beginning to end the Procession lasted more than two hours before it was gone past our house. And so many things were there that I could never write them all in a book, so I let it well alone.’

23 October 1520
‘On the 23rd day of October, King Karl was crowned at Aachen. There I saw all manner of lordly splendour, more magnificent than anything that those who live in our parts have seen - all, as it has been described. I gave Mathes 2 fl. worth of art-wares, and I gave Stephan (Etienne Luillier), one of Lady Margaret’s chamberlains, 3 prints. I bought a cedarwood rosary for 1 fl. 10 white pf. I gave 1 st. to little Hans in the stable, and 1 st. to the child in the house. I lost 2½ st. at play; spent 2 st.; paid the barber 2 st. I have again changed 1 fl. I gave away 7 white pf. in the house at leaving and travelled from Aachen to Jfibers and thence to —. I paid 4 st. for two eyeglasses; played away 2 st. in an embossed silver king (ein Silbem gestempften König). I bought 2 ox-horns for 8 white pf.’

12 May 1521
‘On Sunday after our Lord’s Ascension-day Master Dietrich, the Antwerp glasspainter, invited me and asked many others to meet me; and amongst them especially Alexander the goldsmith, a rich, stately man, and we had a costly feast and they did me great honour. I made the portrait in charcoal of Master Marx, the goldsmith who lives at Bruges. I bought a broad cap for 36 st. I paid Paul Geiger 1 fl. to take my little box to Nürnberg and 4 st. for the letter. I took the portrait of Ambrosius Hochstetter in charcoal and dined with him. I have also eaten with Tomasin at least six times. I bought some wooden dishes and platters for 3 st. I paid the apothecary 12 st. I gave away two copies of the Life of our Lady - the one to the foreign surgeon, the other to Marx’s house-servant. I also paid the Doctor 8 st. I paid 4 st. for cleaning an old cap, lost 4 st. at play. I paid 2 fl. for a new cap, and have exchanged the first cap, because it was clumsy, and added 6 st. more for another.

I have painted the portrait of a Duke in oils. I have made a very fine and careful portrait in oils of the Treasurer Lorenz Sterk; it was worth 25 fl. I presented it to him and in return he gave me 20 fl. and Susanna 1 fl. trinkgeld. Likewise painted the portrait of Jobst my host very finely and carefully in oils. He has now given me his for his. And his wife have I done again and made her portrait in oils.’

The Diary Junction

Lieber’s Life and Letters

‘Yesterday and the day before, serious riots against the negroes. This evening they assembled to defend themselves. I went to see them. They were an uncommonly fine set of people, well formed and well dressed. There were white men there ready to assist them; the soldiers out. The mayor told them to be quiet, but if they were nevertheless attacked, to fight like good fellows. . .’ This is from the diary of Francis Lieber, born in Prussia 220 years ago today. He emigrated to Boston, and, in time, lay the foundations for academic political science in America, and its application to public life. Despite spending many years in the South, he was strongly opposed to slavery; he was also an ardent supporter of the Unionists, and during the Civil War was consulted frequently on legal issues.

Franz (later Francis) Lieber was born into a large family on 18 March 1798 in Berlin, then the capital of Prussia. In 1815, he interrupted his studies to volunteer for the Prussian army. He fought in the battles of Ligny and Waterloo, but was seriously wounded in the assault on Namur, and nearly died. After the war, he resumed his studies in Berlin. But he was an active member of the liberal student movement, which opposed the monarchy, which led to him being imprisoned and then barred from studying at a Prussian university. Instead, he crossed the border to Saxe-Weimar and enrolled at the University of Jena, where he obtained a degree in 1820. He moved to Dresden to take up further studies, but was drawn to fight, briefly, in the Greek War of Independence. He then spent one year in Rome tutoring the son of the Prussian ambassador, historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and writing about his experiences in Greece.

On the promise of a pardon, Lieber returned to Germany, yet he was soon imprisoned again. Subsequently, in 1825, he travelled to England, where he remained for two years, tutoring and writing for German periodicals. But, failing to secure an academic position, he crossed the Atlantic, armed with letters of introduction from Niebuhr, and settled in Boston where, initially, he ran a pioneering gymnasium and swimming school. In 1829, he married Matilda Oppenheimer (one of his former pupils in London, and the daughter of a German-born businessman). They had three boys.

By this time, Lieber had taken on the huge task of editing the 13-volume Encyclopaedia Americana, published between 1829 and 1833. For a while, he acted as a research assistant for Alexis de Tocqueville who was on a French mission to investigate the US penal system (see also Perfect order that prevails); and he published various pamphlets and essays, as well as translations from French and German. In 1835, he finally secured an academic position when South Carolina College offered him a new chair in history and political economy. He remained there for over 20 years, producing some of his best known works: Manual of Political Ethics (1838-1839), Legal and Political Hermeneutics (1839) and Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853). Having been pardoned by Frederick William IV of Prussia, he undertook two journeys back to Europe, including Berlin, in the 1840s.

In the mid-1850s, Lieber fought to be chosen to replace the outgoing president of South Carolina College, even though his personal views (opposing slavery and anti-secession) were unpopular in the South. His bid was unsuccessful, so he resigned and moved to New York City. There he soon secured an appointment as professor of history and political science at Columbia College, where, among other things, he lectured on constitutional law. In the run-up to the Civil War, he founded the Loyal Publication Society which issued tracts for the Unionist cause. During the war, he was frequently consulted by the War Department in Washington DC on legal issues, and he authored important legal works such as Guerilla Parties, Considered with Reference to the Law and Usages of War and Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field.

After the war, Lieber continued writing on political issues, urging, fro example, free trade and civil liberties. He served in the War Department, helping organise captured Confederate archives, and from mid-1869, he acted as a diplomatic negotiator between the US and Mexico. The Civil War had been personally tragic for Lieber as two of his sons fought for the Unionists, and one, who was killed, for the Confederates. Lieber himself died in 1872. Steven Alan Samson provides this assessment of the man in the journal Humanitas (Volume IX, No. 2, 1996) as found on the National Humanities Institute website: ‘Unaccountably neglected for over a century, Francis Lieber, one of the first university-trained German scholars to migrate to America, served as a bridge between the intellectual and political cultures of Germany, England, and America. While cultivating an astonishing range of activities and interests, Lieber helped lay the foundation of academic political science in America and promoted its practical application to public affairs. His theory of institutional liberty, which attributes the rise of civil liberty to the development of an increasingly integrated complex of self-governing institutions, may be his most original contribution to the political science literature.’ Further information is also available online at Wikipedia, History of Economic Thought, Library of Congress, or The New York Times.

Ten years after his death, in 1882, the publisher James R. Osgood brought out The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber as edited by Thomas Sergeant Perry. The book is, essentially, a compilation of extracts from Lieber’s diaries (intermittently kept between 1816 and 1857) and letters, with a connecting narrative by Perry. This can be freely read online at Internet Archive or Googlebooks. Here’s a selection of extracts from Lieber’s diaries as reproduced by Perry.

18 September 1822
‘Went with Niebuhr and his family to Albano, to the palace of the Consalvi. Beautiful sunset and view of the sea. Marcus already says: “Il tuo caro Mare, il tuo Mare.” Pleasant reception at the palace. From my window a view of the town, Monte Sevello, the plain, and the sea. I thought, during these two weeks in Albano, I could forget everything connected with my experience in Greece, and breathe freely for a short time; and now comes the “Diario di Roma,” confirming the rumor that R. is in Argos.’

20 September 1822
‘With Niebuhr, Amalie, and Marcus to the Rotunda. The church door is ornamented with a beautiful frieze. Niebuhr thinks the old walls we saw were part of a bath built for the Germans in the time of Domitian.

Niebuhr says nothing can be accomplished for the welfare of Italy until the priesthood is suppressed. This could be done gradually by allowing the monks to leave the cloisters with a pension. If a whole cloister should disperse, a certain sum should be divided among the monks in proportion to the income of the cloister. The princes, for instance the Chigi and their descendants, might be taxed for this purpose.’

22 September 1822
‘Went early in the morning on horseback to Ariccia, Genzano, and Velletri. This is the capital of the ancient Volscians, and is beautifully situated on a hill. By way of Giullianello to Cora - cyclopean walls, Temple of Castor and Pollux. Bought Niebuhr a knife which had only been used at sacrifices in time of peace.’

14 June 1823
‘A delightful interview with the great artist Cornelius, whom I found surrounded by his pupils and full of hope for the growth of art in Germany. His wife is a charming woman, so full of her recollections of Rome that we naturally found much to talk about, and it was a great enjoyment to me. Cornelius is finishing his Olympus, and means to begin upon his Neptune. He says the work of Giulio Romano at Mantua is full of original Ideas, equal for originality to Raphael in the Farnesina.’

28 June 1826
‘With Rouquette to the British Museum; meagre, with the exception of the Elgin marbles. What a delight to see these! . . .’

7 July 1826
‘Went to see the Tunnel, a most remarkable work, worthy of the old Romans. . . Mr. Greaves offers me a situation near Plymouth. He is secretary of an infant-school society. We shall see. “No history. We don’t care about history.” I meet everywhere with great kindness; tickets to the Dulwich Gallery are given to me, also to Lord Stafford’s collection, which is not open to the general public.’

15 September 1826
‘With Mr. Greaves to the Refuge of the Destitute, where he wishes me to give instruction in gymnastic exercises gratis. This is a good idea, and I am willing to do it.’

19 October 1826
‘A note inclosing £10, and the words in a disguised handwriting, “Won in a wager by an absent friend,” is sent to me by two-penny post. I cannot find out from whom it comes.’

3 October 1829
‘Arrived in Boston. Many visitors to welcome us. We unpack the large chest from Hamburg. Ce sont les plaisirs de mariage.’

6 December1829
‘Preparing my lecture for the Boston Society of Useful Knowledge.’

14 February 1830
‘I write down my plan for a geographical, statistical, and ethnographical periodical. Letter from Carey. He says he has already printed four thousand copies of the first volume of the “Americana.” ’

30 September 1830
‘Ashton, my famous barber-philosopher, said to-day: “Whenever I go to a sick person I get half a dollar. From poor people I never take anything, never; but then I don’t go to them.” We see a great deal of De Beaumont and De Tocqueville.’

11 October 1830
‘Was introduced to the President. He has a noble, expressive countenance; invites me to dinner on Thursday. . .’

19 October 1830
‘The meeting [in New York, about founding the University of the City of New York] was satisfactory. When I came into the room with Doctor Wainwright I was received with the words that they had heard I was to speak on German Universities, and all were anxious that the meeting should be opened by my exposition; so I read my remarks and thanks were voted to me, and the whole matter was referred to the committee of arrangement for farther consideration. Then I spoke freely in reply to some questions, and I felt how bold I was with my poor English. I dine to-day at Mr. Gallatin’s; you know whom I mean, the former minister to London. I feel quite clerical among all the reverend black-coats.

20 January 1832
‘Birth of a little daughter. I send the second part of my article “Napoleon” to Joseph Bonaparte [elder brother of Napoleon]. . .’

14 May 1832
‘Letter from Joseph Bonaparte. He says that the article on Napoleon in the Americana is the freest from all prejudice and most truthful of all he had ever read on the subject.’

4 August 1832
‘Swam in the swimming-school with Mr. Audubon, the ornithologist, who has just returned from Florida, where he shot birds and painted for his large work. He discovered many new birds, and is now going to the Bay of Fundy, whence an English revenue cutter will take him to Labrador. On these expeditions he lives like a savage, shooting and fishing, and immediately painting whatever new bird he meets with. This must necessarily produce a valuable work. Doctor Spurzheim is staying at our boarding-house in Boston; he has many very correct ideas. . .’

4 October 1834
‘I have suffered much in these days. I cannot yet write without a bleeding heart. Sent yesterday my “Letters” to Murray in London, with my conditions, and the “United States Gazette” containing my biography.’

14 August 1835
‘Yesterday and the day before, serious riots against the negroes. This evening they assembled to defend themselves. I went to see them. They were an uncommonly fine set of people, well formed and well dressed. There were white men there ready to assist them; the soldiers out. The mayor told them to be quiet, but if they were nevertheless attacked, to fight like good fellows. . .’

14 October 1835
‘It is painful to write in a journal alter hopes have been blighted, of which the preceding pages show so many traces, and when we are living in a particularly dull period; but I must take courage, and who knows how, some time or other, these very pages may become interesting to us. My work goes very slowly through the press. . .’

20 July 1855
‘Again in Philadelphia. Made the acquaintance of Allibone, writer of the “Critical Dictionary of English Literature.” He has an excellent library for it. He rises early, writes until ten o’clock, from ten to one is at his counting-house, and writes again until late in the evening. He is a merchant, and does a large business. How curious and interesting. He spoke to me always as one of his “teachers;” has studied my “Political Ethics,” and my “Pardoning Paper” attracted him much. He was present at the convention where it was first read. . .’

18 May 1857
‘Unanimously elected Professor of History and Political Science in Columbia College. Immense number of letters of congratulation and papers; North and South speak highly of the appointment. House-hunting all the time.’

Wedekind’s erotic life

‘[Katya]’s wearing a brand new silk dress from the Louvre that’s too short for her and hence fastened up with a hundred pins. The opening is even sewn askew. I demolish the entire contraption and dump her into bed. In spite of the good supper with champagne, I can’t manage more than a couple of tributes: her confounded practice of refusing to take off her underclothes may be to blame for that.’ This is from the diaries of Frank Wedekind, a German playwright, a libertarian and forerunner of the Expressionism movement, who died a century ago today. Not well known in the English-speaking world, a few of his plays have been translated and published recently, and his Diary of an Erotic Life was published in 1990.

Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind was born in 1864 in Hannover to a Swiss actress mother and a German father twice her age. He grew up in his father’s Swiss castle, one of six children. He started work at 19, having dropped out of university, first as a journalist, then as a press agent, and then as a private secretary travelling extensively in France and England. By the mid-1890s, he had become an actor of sorts, giving public readings, in Switzerland, of Ibsen plays. A year or two later, he became political editor of Simplicissimus, a German satirical magazine. There followed a period in which he joined a touring company, producing and acting plays (also often Ibsen) through northern Germany, before he took on a similar role for the state theatre company in Munich at the Schauspielhaus.

By the 1890s, Wedekind, settled in Munich, was also writing his own material. First came Frühlings Erwachen in 1891 with such strong sexual content it was banned in Germany. (A hundred or so years later it was successful adapted into a Broadway rock musical, Spring Awakening.) The so-called Lulu plays would become his best known works: Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1904). Most of his plays continued to challenge the prevailing bourgeois attitudes, particularly towards sex, sometimes causing scandal. Indeed, at one point earlier in his life he had served a short term in prison as a result of a lèse-majesté prosecution against Simplicissimus (Kaiser Wilhelm II had objected to an article by Wedekind). Apart from plays, Wedekind also composed (and performed) many Brettl-Lieder (cabaret songs).

Wedekind’s private life, associating with bohemian artists and political activists, was notoriously as libertarian as his writing. He enjoyed numerous relationships, and often visited prostitutes. He had an affair with the Austrian writer, Frida Uhl, who bore him a child in 1897 (she was already mother to one child by the playwright Auguste Strindberg). And he had another illegitimate child with his housemaid Hildegard Zellner. But, in 1906, he married an Austrian actress Tilly Newes, half his age, with whom he had two children. Their relationship was reportedly faithful though tempestuous. Wedekind died relatively young, from post-surgery complications, on 9 March 1918. Although much forgotten in the English-speaking world during the 20th century, he is back in print, perhaps because of the success of Spring Awakening. See Bloomsbury Publishing for translated plays currently available. For further biographical information see Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com, Spartacus, and Samuel A. Eliot’s introduction to his translation of four Wedekind’s plays - Tragedies of Sex (freely available at Internet Archive).

Eliot gives this assessment of Wedekind’s influence: ‘Though he died in March, 1918, he had incorporated in many a play before then both the sensational content and the free, direct, spasmodic form which German literature, especially German drama, was to show in the post-War turmoil and distress. Georg Kaiser and the other Expressionists so prized to-day can make no secret of their debt to him, and the wild rush they represent and play to - to contemplate man’s lowest impulses, the roots of will and feeling, the instincts, not the ideals that actuate confused and drifting peoples, and having studied them in crude, disordered life to set them down in baldest, swiftest speech, in rank but penetrating truth - this rush that is observed in all the Continental countries but most among the Germans did there alone possess a guide and prophet in the dead author, analyzer, wry and bitter thinker, Wedekind.’

Wedekind kept a diary at different times in his life, and surviving manuscripts were put together and edited by Gerhard Hay, and published in German for the first time in 1986. This work was translated into English by W. E. Quill and published by Basil Blackwell Ltd in 1990 as Diary of an Erotic Life. For the most part, Quill says in his preface, the original German publication includes ‘practically everything that survives in the way of Wedekind’s diaries and personal notebooks’. Some of these texts, he explains, had been published but many had not, and were only released by Wedekind’s daughter Frau Kadidja Wedekind-Biel in 1986. ‘The surviving diaries - whether in print or in manuscript - are discontinuous and at times fragmentary, but they do have a kind of fortuitous continuity as a series of mirrors reflecting the phases of the author’s development from the juvenile erotic skirmishes and fantasies of Lenzburg, through his years in Berlin and Munich, where he seems to have hovered diffidently on the brink of sexual adventure, to his time in Paris, where he celebrated his sexual coming of age.’

More from Quill’s preface: ‘Wedekind’s Diaries may perhaps best be left to speak for themselves: they are a plain record of a life largely devoted to social intercourse. It is indeed remarkable how unliterary they are as compared with the diaries of most professional writers. Wedekind very rarely writes about his current literary preoccupations in any detail. As he himself points out, the diaries had a kind of clinical function as a record of his responses to everyday experiences. They were intended to be a self-portrait, and this they certainly are to an almost embarrassing degree, portraying their author, piles, gumboils, false teeth and all. Given the emotive nature of many of the incidents described, they are remarkably dispassionate and objective. [. . .] Apart from recording Wedekind’s emotional and intellectual responses, the diaries seem to have served another purpose: the careful recording of social environment and behaviour, particularly evident in the graphic descriptions of cafe society in Munich, Berlin and Paris.’

I have not been able to track down any samples or extracts of Diary of an Erotic Life online, and the starting price for second hand copies is quite high, in the region of £50 - see Abebooks. One review - with quotes - can be found at The New York Times (the reviewer believes ‘the diary is full of detailedly, intimately, multifariously welcoming passages, far better than anything in Henry Miller or Frank Harris’). Here, though, are a few extracts from the 1990 print edition.

17 February 1887
‘I go to see Wilhelmine between two and three. Her sister is at home. When she goes off to her Women’s Guild at last, we are both glad to watch from the window as she departs. There are folk you prefer to see from behind rather than from in front, who cause you pain when you see them from the front, and pleasure when you see them from the back. I explain to Wilhelmine that this is the basis of Greek love. She cannot understand how a mind like mine which aspired towards the ultimate extreme could even reflect on such a serious matter. Then we talk about top-hats. If I ever want to cool her ardour, then I need only come to her wearing a top-hat. We would get married in an artist’s slouch hat, and divorced in a top-hat. As we part she begs me, if I have the smallest spark of feeling for her, to write her a poem by tomorrow. We intended to go to Aarau, and I should read it to her in the railway carriage. Gretchen comes for her piano lesson. Wilhelmine pushes me into the next room without a word and strangles me, so that I turn red and blue, then she returns with the maternal composure of a Madonna to the music-room, while I slink out of the house on tiptoe.

After supper I hunt through all my poems but can’t find anything suitable. I lie down full-length on the divan, but don’t manage to concentrate my thoughts on her. I fall asleep.’

3 May 1892
‘Sign my power of attorney at the Swiss Consulate, where Dr Stumm stamps me as a Swiss. Write to Mama. Dine with Katja and Weinhöppel, and discuss the Ballet Roquanedin at the Eden Theatre with him. Until two in the Pont Neuf, where we drink Baron Habermann’s health in Americain. Then I take the pair of them to an all-night cafe in the Halles, where Katja gets totally drunk. She refuses to take my arm, and I leave her to Weinhoppel, who trots out triumphantly with her into the Rue Montmartre. I keep out of sight and follow them about a hundred paces to the rear. Weinhoppel at last asks a passer-by, who directs him in the opposite direction. So they contrive to make their way over the Pont Neuf, which is just beginning to emerge in the first light of dawn, and get into the Boulevard St Germain, where they once more lose the track. They set out towards the Bastille. On the Boulevard St Michel they ask their way again and turn back the way they came. As they pass me, Katja asks me for her key. At the Eglise St Germain-des-Prés they lose their bearings once more and wait for me. I cross to the opposite pavement, they pursue me. I take refuge in a urinal and make them wait ages for me. Katja leans against a tree and starts crying. Finally they start walking round and round the urinal, come to the conclusion that I’m no longer inside, and set off again in search of the Rue Bonaparte. After wandering round for ages they return to my urinal, where I stick my umbrella out under the screen. They’ve finally found the right way. I once again follow them at a distance of a hundred yards, until Katja disappears in the entrance to the Hotel St Georges. Weinhoppel then comes up to my room. I go to bed about six.’

22 May 1892
‘I wait for Katja in a cafe. We take a cab to St Cloud, sit down in front of the restaurant, and drink until it’s time to go back. We dine together at Marguerite’s and then drive back to my room at one o’clock, where I invite her to get into bed. She’s wearing a brand new silk dress from the Louvre that’s too short for her and hence fastened up with a hundred pins. The opening is even sewn askew. I demolish the entire contraption and dump her into bed. In spite of the good supper with champagne, I can’t manage more than a couple of tributes: her confounded practice of refusing to take off her underclothes may be to blame for that. I don’t care in the least for her caresses. Her lips are flabby and she slobbers all over my face. I keep on pouring cognac into her, and the powerful aroma comes back at me. Elle me veut tailler une . . . , mais elle me mord les testicles que je crie par douleur. At the same time she keeps on making such clumsy attempts to address me in the familiar form that I simply can’t bring myself to reply in the same terms. Between four and five, in broad daylight, I take her home, and go to bed about seven.’

17 July 1892
‘I get up at nine o’clock and have just got dressed when there’s a knock. I draw the curtains in front of the alcove and ask Herr Weintraub to come in. He asks for 45 francs for copying the manuscript and spends an hour telling me how badly off he is. We read Hebrew together, and I serve him a schnaps. After he’s gone, I get back into bed with Rachel. We get up about four and go to lunch. She would simply love to go bathing with me in Chernetre, but I’m too lazy. We part after coffee.’

27 July 1892
‘Fetch Rachel from the Café d’Harcourt. She gets completely undressed in my room, apart from her vest, a diaphanous pink petticoat and her black stockings. In this outfit, with her hair let down and holding her black fan, she wallows around on my sofa between my guitar, my various fat lexicons and a couple of shapeless hessian cushions. She takes up one delicious pose after another, at the same time sucking down to the last drop a lemon which happened to be lying on the table. The lemon inspires her - and me as well - with lascivious ideas. After we’ve got into bed she sucks me off, which I can’t stand for long, as I find it drives me to utter distraction. The next morning she tells me she had dreamt about her mother all night. She had desperately wanted to suck her mother’s cunt. At first her mother wouldn’t let her, but then she had consented, and it had been so sweet, so sweet.’

25 January 1894
‘I go to the National Gallery and am furiously annoyed by the glass over all the pictures. After lunch I get on the Underground at Charing Cross and travel to the Tower, look round the museum, the most boring and tasteless I have ever seen, travel under the Thames via London Bridge and come back home through the underworld, dine at seven o’clock and take the omnibus to the London Pavilion. Apart from a couple of authentic English children, I find nothing new and very little that’s congenial. I spend some time in a bar amid a pack of frightful whores, and go to bed at twelve o’clock.’