in the Hanoverian Legion. After the Peace of Paris he gave up his commission. And he married, but in 1769 there was an epidemic of smallpox in the towns along the Wipper, and his young wife died. The Freiherr nursed the infected and the dying, and those whose families could not afford a grave were buried in the grounds of Oberwiederstadt which, having once been a convent, still had some consecrated earth. He had undergone a profound religious conversion – but I have not! said Erasmus, as soon as he was old enough to ask about the rows of green mounds so close to the house. ‘I have not – does he ever think of that?’
On each grave was a plain headstone, carved with the words: He, or she, was born on—, and on—returned home. This was the inscription preferred by the Moravians. The Freiherr now worshipped with the Moravian Brethren, for whom every soul is either dead, awakened, or converted. A human soul is converted as soon as it realises that it is in danger, and what that danger is, and hears itself cry aloud, He is my Lord.
A little over a year after his wife’s death the Freiherr married his young cousin Bernadine von Böltzig. ‘Bernadine, what an absurd name! Have you no other?’ Yes, her second name was Auguste. ‘Well, I shall call you Auguste henceforward.’ In his gentler moments, she was Gustel. Auguste, though timorous, proved fertile. After twelve months the first daughter, Charlotte, was born, and a year later, Fritz. ‘When the time comes for their education,’ the Freiherr said, ‘both shall be sent to the Brethren at Neudietendorf.’
Neudietendorf, between Erfurt and Gotha, was a colony of the Herrnhut. The Herrnhut was the centre where fifty years earlier the Moravians, refugees from persecution, had been allowed to settle down in peace. To the Moravians, a child is born into an ordered world into which he must fit. Education is concerned with the status of the child in the kingdom of God.
Neudietendorf, like the Herrnhut, was a place of tranquillity. Wind instruments, instead of bells, summoned the children to their classes. It was also a place of total obedience, for the meek are the inheritors. They must always go about in threes, so that the third might tell the Prediger what the other two had found to talk about. On the other hand, no teacher might give a punishment while he was still angry, since an unjust punishment is never forgotten.
The children swept the floors, tended the animals and made the hay, but they were never allowed to strive against each other, or take part in competitive games. They received thirty hours a week of education and religious instruction. All must be in bed by sunset, and remain silent until they got up at five the next morning. After any communal task had been completed – say, whitewashing the henhouses – the long trestle tables were brought out for a ‘love-feast’, when all sat down together, hymns were sung and a small glass of homemade liqueur was handed to everyone, even the youngest. The boarding fees were eight thaler for a girl, ten thaler for a boy (who ate more, and needed a Latin and a Hebrew grammar).
Charlotte von Hardenberg, the eldest, who took after her mother, did very well at the House of Maidens. She married early, and had gone to live in Lausitz. Fritz had been born a dreamy, seemingly backward little boy. After a serious illness when he was nine years old, he became intelligent and in the same year was despatched to Neudietendorf. ‘But in what has he fallen short?’ demanded the Freiherr, when only a few months later he was requested by the Prediger, on behalf of the Elders, to take his son away. The Prediger, who was very unwilling to condemn any child absolutely, explained that Fritz perpetually asked questions, but was unwilling to receive answers. Let us take – said the Prediger – the ‘children’s catechism’. In the course of this the instructor asks, ‘What are you?’
A I am a human being.
Q Do you feel it when I take hold of you?
A I feel it well.
Q What is this, is it not flesh?
A Yes, that is flesh.
Q All this flesh which you have is called the body.
What is it called?
A The body.
Q How do you know when people have died?
A They cannot speak, they cannot move anymore.
Q Do you know why not?
A I do not know why not.
‘Could he not answer these questions?’ cried the Freiherr.
‘It may be that he could, but the answers he gave in fact were not correct. A child of not quite ten years old, he insists that the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul.’
‘But this is only one instance –’
‘I could give many others.’
‘He has not yet learned –’
‘He is dreaming away his opportunities. He will never become an acceptable member of Neudietendorf.’
The Freiherr asked whether not even one sign of moral grace had been detected in his son. The Prediger avoided a reply.
The mother, poor Auguste, who soon became sickly (although she outlived all but one of her eleven children) and seemed always to be looking for someone to whom to apologise, begged to be allowed to teach Fritz herself. But what could she have taught him? A little music perhaps. A tutor was hired from Leipzig.
WHILE they were living at Oberwiederstadt, the Hardenbergs did not invite their neighbours, and did not accept their invitations, knowing that this might lead to worldliness. There was also the question of limited means. The Seven Years’ War was expensive – Friedrich II was obliged to open a state lottery to pay for it – and for some of his loyal landholders, quite ruinous. In 1780 four of the smaller Hardenberg properties had to be sold, and at another one, Möckritz, there was an auction of the entire contents. Now it stood there without crockery, without curtains, without livestock. As far as the low horizon the fields lay uncultivated. At Oberwiederstadt itself, you saw through the narrow ancient windows row after row of empty dovecotes, and a Gutshof too vast to be filled, or even half-filled, which had once been the convent chapel. The main building was pitiable, with missing tiles, patched, weather-beaten, stained with water which had run for years from the loosened guttering. The pasture was dry over the old plague tombstones. The fields were starved. The cattle stood feeding at the bottom of the ditches, where it was damp and a little grass grew.
Smaller and much more agreeable was Schlöben-bei-Jena, to which the family sometimes made an expedition. At Schlöben, with its mill-stream and mossy oaks, ‘the heart,’ Auguste said tentatively, ‘can find peace’. But Schlöben was in almost as much difficulty as the other properties. There is nothing peaceful, the Freiherr told her, about a refusal to extend credit.
As a member of the nobility, most ways of earning money were forbidden to the Freiherr, but he had the right to enter the service of his Prince. In 1784 (as soon as the existing Director had died) he was appointed Director of the Salt Mines of the Electorate of Saxony at Dürrenberg, Kösen and Artern, at a salary of 650 thaler and certain concessions of firewood. The Central Saline Offices were at Weissenfels, and in 1786 the Freiherr bought the house in the Kloster Gasse. It was not like Schlöben, but Auguste wept with relief, praying that her tears were not those of ingratitude, at leaving the chilly solitude and terribly out-of-date household arrangements of Oberwiederstadt. Weissenfels had two thousand inhabitants – two thousand living souls – brickyards, a prison, a poor-house, the old former palace, a pig-market, the river’s traffic and the great clouds reflected in the shining reach, a bridge, a hospital, a Thursday market, drying-meadows and many, many shops, perhaps thirty. Although the Freifrau had no spending allowance of her own and had never been into a shop, indeed rarely left the house except on Sundays, she received a faltering glow, like an uncertain hour of winter sunshine, from the idea of there being so many things and so many people