Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1787
(Oil on canvas, 164 × 206 cm)
BY Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
Städel Museum

He was English; the older writer might have missed such a fact in an attempt to find the good in him, submerged it beneath some pretty description or adult barb. As such he exhibited a particular cachet to the women around him; Northern, assertive, the roller of tight joints and the possessor of an iPod stacked to the brim. iPod; how perfectly the name described the conversational monomania of the typical possessor of said device. Occasionally the phrases of dialect he had learnt in his small village upbringing came back to him and he could be quite charming. Today, though, he was unwashed and bleach-eyed as he walked through the classroom door.

Baummüller was there, hands-crossed and pale; opposite from his desk sat Maria, at her most extravagant today. That meant only what their “target language” had down as Kostüme. He positioned himself between the two and took out the reading with great care. Indeed one might say he looked rather like one of the early inhabitants of Britain encountering writing for the first time. Baummüller’s voice was very low. He often liked to mention that T_’s German Department was the oldest in Europe. And he often liked to quote Goethe: Lichter Tag, Lichte Augen.

Light day, light eyes. To try and see the world with new eyes was an important theme in Goethe; Richard wrote it down. He was young but knew Goethe wasn’t the exception here. He tried to look at Maria with new eyes; take in the retroussé nose, the strangely yellowed skin, the fact of her being a few years older and nearly bilingual. And she liked Kleist; she was quoting him now — “wenn ich die Nase aus dem Fenster stecke, das Tageslicht wehe tut, das mir daraufschimmert”^[2] — he wasn’t quite sure what that mean, only that Baummüller and she had adopted the same, indubitably noble, posture in response to it.

Poor kid — he had read Kafka translations when even younger and had decided to study German on the back of it. But the department he arrived at wasn’t what it had been. The basic competencies of those studying had collapsed like those, most probably, in the rest of the English speaking world. Even Baummüller said so, though he went on to see that he hoped Sebastian Beetjes’s arrival on the scene would galvanise the students into actually studying. His conviction sounded as solid as a man dialling from a call centre under pressure to sell more.

Maria might have provided him with a little fire in his belly. She was pretty and sans accent in German from the five years her want-away father spoke German to her in the crib. But then he went and she went off to school with her language incomplete. They had built the foundations but forgotten to live in the house. Maria threw herself into German literature to catch up. In the last year, she had read Von Kleist, Canetti, Sebald, all of Trakl, “Die Wahlverwandschaften” and translated a poem of Rilke’s.

Meanwhile his contribution this term had been to watch one Fassbinder film and to listen to half a Rammstein album.

While they wrestled with the problems of German history and thought, then, he quietly consolidated his great strength: his technological expertise. He had helped set up and now moderated the college library website. His Facebook profile was much admired. He kept up a weblog detailing his musical downloads. All of the girls in his year found him charming, bluff, and sensuous; all the girls, that is, with the exception of Maria. She showed no interest in his gap-year ruminations, rice-cooking abilities or said technical expertise.