The Invention of Nature Read Free Page B

winters in Berlin and their summers at the family estate of Tegel, a small castle about ten miles north-west of the city. His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, was an officer in the army, a chamberlain at the Prussian court and a confidant of the future king Friedrich Wilhelm II. Alexander’s mother, Marie Elisabeth, was the daughter of a rich manufacturer who had brought money and land into the family. The Humboldt name was held in high regard in Berlin and the future king was even Alexander’s godfather. But despite their privileged upbringing, Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, had an unhappy childhood. Their beloved father died suddenly when Alexander was nine and their mother never showed her sons much affection. Where their father had been charming and friendly, their mother was formal, cold and emotionally distant. Instead of maternal warmth, she provided the best education then available in Prussia, arranging for the two boys to be privately tutored by a string of Enlightenment thinkers who instilled in them a love of truth, liberty and knowledge.
    These were strange relationships in which the boys sometimes searched for a father figure. One tutor in particular, Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth, who oversaw their education for many years, taught them with a peculiar combination of expressing displeasure and disappointment while at the same time encouraging a sense of dependency. Hovering behind them and watching over their shoulders as they calculated, translated Latin texts or learned French vocabulary, Kunth constantly corrected the brothers. He was never quite satisfied with their progress. Whenever they made a mistake, Kunth reacted as if they had done so to hurt or offend him. For the boys, this behaviour was more painful than if he had spanked them with a cane. Always desperate to please Kunth, as Wilhelm later recounted, they had felt a ‘perpetual anxiety’ to make him happy.
    It was particularly difficult for Alexander who was taught the same lessons as his precocious brother, despite being two years younger. The result was that he believed himself to be less talented. When Wilhelm excelled in Latin and Greek, Alexander felt incompetent and slow. He struggled so much, Alexander later told a friend, that his tutors ‘were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be developed in him’.
    Schloss Tegel and the surrounding estate (Illustration Credit 1.1)
    Wilhelm lost himself in Greek mythology and histories of ancient Rome, but Alexander felt restless with books. Instead he escaped the classroom whenever he could to ramble through the countryside, collecting and sketching plants, animals and rocks. When he returned with his pockets full of insects and plants his family nicknamed him ‘the little apothecary’, but they didn’t take his interests seriously. According to family lore, one day the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, asked the boy if he planned to conquer the world like his namesake, Alexander the Great. Young Humboldt’s answer was: ‘Yes, Sir, but with my head.’
    Much of his early life, Humboldt later told a close friend, was spent among people who loved him but who didn’t understand him. His teachers were demanding and his mother lived withdrawn from society and her sons. Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt’s greatest concern was, Kunth said, to foster the ‘intellectual and moral perfection’ of Wilhelm and Alexander – their emotional wellbeing was seemingly of no interest. ‘I was forced into a thousand constraints,’ Humboldt said, and into loneliness, hiding behind a wall of pretence because he never felt that he could be himself with his stern mother watching his every step. Expressions of excitement or of joy were unacceptable behaviour in the Humboldt household.
    Alexander and Wilhelm were very different. Where Alexander was adventurous and enjoyed being outside, Wilhelm was serious and studious. Alexander was often torn between emotions, while