lofty Steiger at sunset were explored. There were swimming and skating and
games, and the maxim of the school, "Friede, Freude, Freiheit,"[Peace, joy,
freedom] was lived up to. The boys hung on their teachers for stories. The
teachers took their boys into their confidence for all their own literary aims,
loves, and ideals. One had seen the corpse of Körner and another knew
Prohaska. "The Roman postulate that knowledge should be imparted to boys
according to a thoroughly tested method approved by the mature human intellect
and which seems most useful to it for later life" was the old system of sacrificing
the interests of the child for those of the man. Here childhood was to live itself
out completely and naturally into an ever renewed paradise. The temperaments,
dispositions, and characters of each of the sixty boys were carefully studied and
recorded. Some of these are still little masterpieces of psychological penetration,
and this was made the basis of development. The extreme Teutonism cultivated
by wrestling, shooting, and fencing, giving each a spot of land to sow, reap, and
shovel, and all in an atmosphere of adult life, made an environment that fitted
the transition period as well as any that the history of education affords. Every
tramp and battle were described in a book by each boy. When at fifteen Ebers
was transferred to the Kottbus Gymnasium, he felt like a colt led from green
pastures to the stable, and the period of effervescence made him almost
possessed by a demon, so many sorts of follies did he commit. He wrote "a poem
of the world," fell in love with an actress older than himself, became known as
foolhardy for his wild escapades, and only slowly sobered down.
In Gottfried Kelley's "Der grüne Heinrich,"[50] the author, whom R.M. Meyer
calls "the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth century," reviews the
memories of his early life. This autobiography is a plain and very realistic story
of a normal child, and not adulterated with fiction like Goethe's or with
psychoses like Rousseau or Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy like all other boys, and
his childhood and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this
work, which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most important,
and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minuteness. It is a tale of
little things. All the friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is
fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when
his beloved Army died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child,
found two kinds of love in his heart—the idea and the sensual, very independent
—the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb young woman
years older than he, pure, although the personification of sense. He gives a rich
harvest of minute and sagacious observations about his strange simultaneous
loves; the peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and his rather prolonged