GQ«I Those Were Good Days REMINISCENCES Carl Ludwig Schleich TRANSLATED BY Bernard Miall from the 365th printing of the original Besonnte Vergangenheit. Lebenserinnerungen 1922 LONDON George Allen & Unwin Ltd MUSEUM STREET 1935 TO MY WIFE HEDWIG, N£E OELSCHLAEGER AND MY SISTERS KÄTHE AND GERTRUD THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED A song, a joyous, wanderer’s song I followed by the sound, Sped the mighty stream along O’er mead and marshy ground; Many a place to which I’d come I left ere night was over, For that it was more than home I never could discover. TRANSLATED BY Bernard Miall from the 365th printing of the original CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE i. HOME AND CHILDHOOD 13 11. SCHOOL AND EARLY ADVENTURES 28 hi. “LIMEKILNS,” MY MOTHER’S HOME 35 iv. MY FATHER 55 v. UNCLE BOYSEN, THE PRINCE OF DENMARK 68 vi. SCHOOLDAYS IN STETTIN AND STRALSUND 76 vii. “OLD FREESE” 87 viii. ZÜRICH AND GOTTFRIED KELLER 99 ix. STUDYING WITH MY FATHER: GREIFSWALD 116 x. BERNHARD VON LANGENBECK 128 xi. ERNST VON BERGMANN 138 xii. RUDOLF VIRCHOW 150 xiii. THE PHYSICIAN IN STATU NASCENDI 164 xiv. THE SURGEON 178 xv. BELLE-ALLIANCE 190 xvi. AUGUST STRINDBERG 200 xvii. IN THE WORKSHOP 223 xviii. PAUL EHRLICH 233 xix. IRREPLACEABLE LOSSES 247 xx. RICHARD DEHMEL 250 xxi. LAST WORDS 262 xxii. EPILOGUE BY WOLFGANG GOETZ 265 INDEX 277 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS EARLY PORTRAIT Frontispiece FACING PAGE MY MOTHER 36 I WANTED TO BE A COACHMAN 56 MY FATHER 60 ASSISTANT IN THE SURGICAL CLINIC IN GREIFSWALD 120 CARL LUDWIG SCHLEICH’S HAND WITH OPERAT¬ ING KNIFE 185 THE BRIGHT DUNES: PAINTING BY CARL LUDWIG SCHLEICH 228 THE LECTURER 262 AT SIXTY 272 THOSE WERE GOOD DAYS! CHAPTER I HOME AND CHILDHOOD IT was in the ancient city of Stettin, on the Oder, at twelve noon of a Sunday, July 19, 1859, that I first saw the light of this world, and protested long and strenuously against the fact of my existence; or so I am told, for I must admit that I was quite unconscious of my entry into this vale of tears. I squealed appallingly, but I have quite forgotten the reason of my manifest discontent. I have only one really reliable witness as to the happenings of my early career; but she—my mother— is a witness whose testimony I have never, in all my life, found any reason to distrust. According to her account of the matter, I comported myself, from the very first, with a singular ingratitude toward the gift of life and its bestower; although I was greeted with much greater joy and satisfaction than was either of my two predecessors, my sisters Anna and Kathy. Indeed, as far as my mother was concerned I was actually a sort of atonement and means of redemption. Cruelly enough, my grandfather Schleich would hardly look at my mother after the birth of my sisters; he despised her because she was capable of bringing “only girls” into the world. The disgrace into which my mother had fallen, through no fault of her own, was happily effaced by my appearance; but I must confess that my service in this respect was as wholly unconscious, undeserving, and automatic, so to speak, as on other occasions when I have added to my mother’s happiness. But was not this a truly barbarous mode of behaviour in my grandfather, to withhold his favour from a daughter-in-law until she had brought a boy into the world ? Are we all of us, men and women alike, so convinced in our hearts of the greater value of the male? Could anxiety for a timely marriage have 13 Those Were Good Days! shown itself so soon? Was it a question of keeping up the family name? Well, whatever the reason, I myself must regard it as a piece of the greatest good fortune that I did prove to be a boy, when I came into the world ventre ä terre (as my mother and the midwife testified—my father, since he had professional duties elsewhere, had withdrawn from the scene), only to do my best to thrust it from me with protesting hands and feet. But the world proved to be the stronger, and so I remained upon the earth, although in later childhood I made all manner of attempts to withdraw from it, by means of a multiplicity of childish maladies. My principal witness tells me that I was really always ill, and altogether a sickly and delicate child, until I had entered my teens, after which I improved with remarkable rapidity. How hardy can an organism become which has at first to be pampered like a hot-house plant! For a second witness, my wife, will testify that I have shown myself to be blessed with a constitution of almost explosive vitality. And this, I think, is due mainly to my mother’s love, which was closely rivalled by the love and care of my old nurse, who came from my mother’s home on the island of Wohin. Bertha Gehm was the dear woman’s name, and for thirteen long years she stood between me and harm. Mother- love can assuredly do much to make up for structural defects in the constitution of such a pampered little mechanism. Needless to say, I caused my mother endless anxiety; I am afraid she still found me a handful even in her very old age— and she lived to be eighty-six. How many things I have to ask her to forgive me when I visit her grave in the churchyard of Stahnsdorf, by the Wannsee, always to feel the same grief at the sight of that flower-covered mound; the grief that is felt by all who visit the graves of those they loved; a grief due less to the fact that the dead are no more than to the thought that we were none of us so kind to them as they deserved that we should be. It is only when we have lost someone dear to us that we are fully conscious of all our failures in loving-kindness. 14 Home and Childhood My family came originally from Bavaria. According to what my father has told me, one Christian Schleich—who, strangely enough, was a Protestant pastor—wandered northwards from Munich to Freienwalde on the Oder. We Pomeranian Schleichs, his descendants, are thus related to the Munich painters of that name; a relationship which fills me with pride, in view of the high artistic achievements of Eduard, Ernst, and Robert Schleich, and which explains why my brother and myself— and above all my uncle Hans Schleich, the well-known marine and landscape painter—felt the urge to paint and draw in our very bones. In the course of time the Pomeranian Schleichs settled down in the neighbourhood of Stettin. About 1780 there was in Stettin a famous “Goldammer and Schleich” granary, founded by one of my ancestors. There survives even to this day a fragment of a popular song which alludes to the old granary: Jo! Wer da wohnt up de Wyk De is so rik As “Goldammer und Shlyk.” (Ay, he who lives up at Wyk [a suburb of Stettin] is as rich as Goldammer and Schleich!) Alas, this mercantile genius seems to be completely extinct! On my mother’s side we are pure Low Saxon. The Küster family came from Mecklenberg, and the earliest ancestor to be traced was a village schoolmaster in Malchin. His descen¬ dants were farmers and fishermen and squatters about the Stettin Haff and on the island of Wollin. The family of my maternal grandmother—Haushalter by name—had long been settled in the town of Wollin, hard by the place where the ancient city of Vineta is supposed to have sunk into the waves. The Haushalters were a typical dynasty of burgomasters. Before I venture to describe my parents and their families I ought to say something of my old native city itself; just as when one is writing the natural history of a bird one specifies the tree or bush in which it nests before enlarging upon the 15 Those Were Good Days! structure of the nest itself. From the structure of the nest, and the nature of the tree, much may be deduced as to the habits of the brood. Stettin, the ancient stronghold of the Wendish race, is a true seaport, although it lies inland on the densely wooded slope of the Uralian-Baltic range. It extends over both banks of the Oder, whose many arms divide some parts of it into islands. The wide, grey, sluggishly moving river flows directly northwards through the “Old Town,” bordered on either hand by docks, wharves, warehouses, villas, and the hilly and beautifully wooded suburbs; which presently, on the right bank, are replaced by level meadows. The river then expands into a great lake, the Dammschersee, and the wide Papen- wasser, discharging itself at length into the mighty Haff. The Haff with its three radiating arms—Peene, Swine, and Dievenow—is enclosed, as though by enormous breakwaters, by the islands of Wohin and Usedom, which divide the Haff from the sea of the Pomeranians and Balts and Scandinavians —the Ostsee, the “Eastern Sea,” or Baltic. The island of Wohin was my mother’s home, where she and her twelve brothers and sisters spent a singularly happy childhood. Her happiness was reflected in my own life, for it was shared by the whole prolific clan that inhabited the village of Kalkofen (“Limekilns”) and the estates of my grandparents and my uncle.