The Invention of Nature

Humboldt remained an enigma for many. On the one hand he could be haughty, but at the same time he humbly admitted that he needed to learn more. The students at the University of Berlin were astounded to see the old man shuffle into the auditorium with his folder tucked under his arm – not to present a lecture but to listen to one of the young professors. Humboldt attended lectures on Greek literature to catch up on what he had missed during his own education, he said. As he was writing Cosmos, he followed the latest scientific developments by watching the experiments conducted by a chemistry professor and by listening to geologist Carl Ritter’s lectures. Quietly, always sitting in the fourth or fifth row of the auditorium, near the window, Humboldt took notes just like the young students next to him. No matter how bad the weather was, the old man always came. Humboldt was only absent when the king requested his presence, leaving the students to tease that ‘Alexander is skipping lectures today because he’s having tea with the king.’

The university in Berlin which Wilhelm von Humboldt had founded in 1810 and where Alexander von Humboldt attended lectures (Illustration Credit 18.1)

Humboldt never changed his mind about Berlin, insisting that the city was a ‘little, illiterate, and over-spiteful town’. One of the main consolations of his life there was Wilhelm. Over the past years the two brothers had become close, spending as much time together as possible. After Caroline’s death in spring 1829, Wilhelm had withdrawn to Tegel, but Alexander had visited whenever he could. Only two years older than Alexander, Wilhelm was ageing fast. He seemed older than sixty-seven, and had grown increasingly weaker. He was blind in one eye, his hands shook so badly that he couldn’t write any more and his painfully thin body stooped. Then, in late March 1835, Wilhelm caught a fever after visiting Caroline’s grave in Tegel’s park. Alexander spent the next days at his brother’s bedside. They talked about death and Wilhelm’s wish to be buried next to Caroline. On 3 April Alexander read one of Friedrich Schiller’s poems to his brother. Five days later, Wilhelm died with Alexander at his side.

Bereft, Humboldt felt lonely and abandoned. ‘I never had believed that these old eyes had so many tears left,’ he wrote to an old friend. With Wilhelm’s death, he had lost his family and, as he said, ‘half of myself’. One line in a letter to his French publisher summed up his feelings: ‘Pity me; I am the unhappiest of men.’

Humboldt felt miserable in Berlin. ‘Everything is bleak around me, so bleak,’ he wrote a year after Wilhelm’s death. Luckily one of the employment conditions that he had negotiated with the king allowed Humboldt to travel to Paris every year for a few months in order to collect the latest research for Cosmos

. The thought of Paris was the only thing that cheered him up, he admitted.

In Paris, he easily fell back into his rhythm of intense work, networking and evening entertainments. After an early breakfast of black coffee – ‘concentrated sunshine’, as Humboldt called it – he worked all day and in the evening went on his usual tour of salons until 2 a.m. He visited scientists across town – prodding and poking to learn about their latest discoveries. As much as Paris stimulated him, he always dreaded his return to Berlin, that ‘dancing carnivalesque necropolis’. Each visit to Paris expanded Humboldt’s international network and each return to Berlin was accompanied by trunks filled with new material that needed to be incorporated into Cosmos. But with each discovery, new measurement or bit of data, the publication of Cosmos was delayed yet again.

It didn’t help that in Berlin Humboldt had to juggle his scientific life with his court duties. His financial situation remained difficult and he needed his chamberlain salary. He was required to follow the king’s every move from one castle to another. The king’s favourite palace was Sanssouci in Potsdam about twenty miles from Humboldt’s apartment in Berlin. For Humboldt it meant travelling with the twenty to thirty boxes of material that he needed to write Cosmos – his ‘mobile resources’, as he called them. Some days it seemed he spent more time on the road than anywhere else: ‘yesterday Pfaueninsel, tea at Charlottenburg, comedy and dinner at Sanssouci, today Berlin, tomorrow to Potsdam’ was not an unusual routine. Humboldt felt like a planet moving along its orbital path, always in motion, never stopping.