In the knowledge that I was wearing a black dress-coat and gray trousers – that is, the right mix of respectability and familiarity – I began to stir my punch, with feeling, adding well-proven lines from the Grenzboten, along with profound observations about fate and the human condition. This pleased the lads [ . . . ]. Coarseness carried the day, Lucius’ star fell, and with a loud cry and the shaking of hands all around I was proclaimed the chosen one. A sculptor requested that I model for him, a court photographer also asked for sittings, the publisher of the Thüringische Zeitung declared that his wife had just given birth and that I should serve as the child’s godfather, a peasant from Windisch-Holzhausen regaled me with a short speech and expressed the wish to own a copy of Soll und Haben [Debit and Credit] – he could buy one, of course, but would prefer that I present it to him as a gift. And the old theater curtain dangled happily above us.
On the next day, [ . . . ] I obliged the sculptor, sat for the photographer, attended a baptismal breakfast with the new father, and sent the book to the peasant, while my committee proceeded with the cleverness of lions.
The constituency that is supposed to elect me consists of all the small patches of Prussian cloth that were sewn onto Thuringia and Franconia. Suhl and Schleusingen; then Ziegenrück and Ranis in a little-known wilderness to which, as one hears, only mountain trails lead; followed by Gefell and other enclaves adjacent to Bavaria, and finally Wandersleben. From all sides come demands from my voters that I visit them and provide them with an evening’s entertainment, and the correspondence with influential lawyers and innkeepers is becoming enormous. Oh, this universal suffrage ruins a man’s character: for fifty years I didn’t give popularity a second thought, and now I send a bouquet of flowers to a woman in childbed without knowing whether she had a boy or a girl, and I shake the hands of a hundred dear friends whose names I don’t know and never will know. Fie, Bismarck, that was no master stroke! And in the end, they’ll probably vote for someone else anyway.
[ . . . ]
Your Highness’s
Most obedient
Freytag.
Source: Gustav Freytag to Duke Ernst of Coburg, Leipzig, letters of January 21, 1867 (Part I) and January 30, 1867 (Part II). Original German text reprinted in Gustav Freytag und Herzog Ernst von Coburg im Briefwechsel 1853 bis 1893 [The Correspondence of Gustav Freytag and Duke Ernst von Coburg 1853 to 1893], ed. Eduard Tempeltey. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1904, pp. 212-17.
Translation: James Retallack and Erwin Fink
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