In his "Biography of Weber", Joachim Radkau told a story derived from "Aesop's Fables": The lion was sick, and a fox came to visit . The lion asked in the cave: "Why don't you come in?" The clever fox replied: "If I hadn't found many footprints entering the cave but no footprints coming out, I might really have gone in."
The image of the sick lion is a perfect metaphor for Weber, who has suffered from mental illness all his adult life and is a tall man with a messy beard. And for those who try to understand and approach him, Weber, like the lion, is full of danger - a danger as deep as a dark cave.
I can only know him through his articles, letters, biographies and other people's comments. For such a prolific scholar, this means a huge amount of reading. Wolfgang Schluchter, a professor at the Department of Sociology at Heidelberg University, later told me that the publication and organization of the "Collected Works of Weber", which he served as editor-in-chief, has now reached the 43rd volume and is still not completed. There are as many as 10 volumes of correspondence between Weber and others - each of which is at least an inch thick. There are piles of biographies about Weber as high as one person. Just a few of the most classic ones are the "Biography of Weber" by Weber's widow Marianne, and the "Biography of Weber" written by Jaspers, Radkau, Bendix, Mitzman and others. Memoirs and biographies—three or four thousand pages alone, not to mention thousands of related essays. Those intertwined dates, places, people, numbers, events and opinions are like a spider web maze, which has exhausted the lifelong efforts of many scholars who are far more knowledgeable and have far more time than me - if I had known from the beginning that it would be such a difficult road. Will you still happily take that first step on a rugged road?
But I don’t want to and can’t look back. Holderlin said: "A certain yearning for a better life also has a powerful impact on our inner happiness." Although Weber tells us that this is a disenchanted world, his life and spiritual world In my eyes, it is still like a scene illuminated by high lights on a stage, with the solemn beauty of some kind of classical ceremony. I want to walk myself into this kind of life, use my steps to connect all the monotonous facts that have been dried by time, and combine my own memories with those of others that have been handed down.
So, I came to this elegant and romantic university town where he once lived, which had not been destroyed by the war. It is said that everything still retains the appearance of 100 years ago. I want, and I can only, complete my understanding of him bit by bit in my narration.
Hilltop Cemetery: The Legend of Heidelberg
The silence in the mountains and forests is like ancient times, the bright sunshine is shining down, and the tombstones that have been eroded by the years but are so clean that they are not stained with any dust are shaking. With the soft and dancing shadows of the trees. This is the mountaintop cemetery (Bergfriedhof) in the southern suburbs of Heidelberg. It is a small gray dot at the bottom of the urban traffic map that is so small that it is almost invisible. Even some people who have lived in Heidelberg for decades have never been here. Max Weber and his wife Marianne Weber are buried here.
There are 17 cemeteries in the whole city of Heidelberg. The hilltop cemetery built on September 18, 1844 is the largest one and the first cemetery managed by the Heidelberg municipal authority. “If you want to understand Heidelberg’s cultural, political, and economic background from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the hilltop cemetery is an excellent starting point.” Professor Schlucht later told me, “Heidelberg’s most important people of that era are buried here. A group of famous people, industrialists, politicians, artists, but most of them are scholars who are inextricably connected with Heidelberg University.”
The administrator of the cemetery is very attentive and provides information at the entrance. The map lists the tombs of historical celebrities who rest here, as well as 4 recommended routes.
There is a brief identity introduction behind each person's name, such as "Friedrich Ebert, President of Germany", "Robert William Benson, chemist, honorary citizen of Heidelberg", "Carl Bosch, chemist, "Nobel Prize winner"...Only when it comes to Weber, the introduction changes to "Max Weber, national economist, omniscient generalist" (Universalgelehrter), "symbol of Heidelberg spirit" (Heidelberger Geist), it is as if it comes from Hands of an admirer.
Weber’s cemetery is halfway up the mountain, and the road is winding and winding, making it quite difficult to walk. However, when I thought about how much more effort it took for him to get here than me, I felt relieved.
The statement that Max Weber is called the "Legend of Heidelberg" was first seen in Paul Honigsheim's "On Max Weber" (On Max Weber). This German scholar who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and went overseas to teach at Michigan State University in the United States, almost in a race against death a year before his death, wrote about his doctoral studies at Heidelberg University around 1910. Close association with Weber and his understanding of Weber's academic thought. The memoir was officially published only after Honigschheim's death. It only has more than 150 pages, which is completely incomparable in length with several other large Weber biographies. However, his status as a sociologist and historian who is extremely rigorous in his studies, and as a post-scholar who is both close to Weber in the "Weber's Circle" and maintains a certain neutral observation distance, make this book helpful. It is of extremely important and irreplaceable value to understand Weber’s style of conduct and scholarship.
The tomb of Max Weber and his wife in the Heidelberg Hilltop Cemetery
At the beginning of this book, Honigschheim wrote: "Anyone who wants To paint a portrait of Max Weber, whether the person in the portrait is Weber as a scholar or Weber as a person, the Heidelberg of his time must be used as the background. ”
Indeed, it was Germany. The most prosperous era of the empire. In the latter half of the 19th century, after reunification, Germany's economy, technology, and culture developed and expanded at an unprecedented rate, giving it a brilliant and bright metallic texture like a Wagnerian opera. At the University of Heidelberg in that era, the fields of natural science and medicine were at the forefront, and there were countless masters at one time, making this small town have the momentum of a European science center. Relying on the scientific research results of the university, a number of companies that later had a huge impact on Germany's industrial and commercial pattern were established around Heidelberg, giving the city an atmosphere of prosperity and abundance. At the same time, the relaxed political environment also made this city almost the freest and most international city in Germany at that time. It was not only an academic center that local German intellectuals yearned for, but also cultural elites from Austria, Hungary, Russia and other countries in the Balkan Peninsula. They also came in droves. Max Weber's brother Alfred Weber later had a wonderful and apt description of Heidelberg at that time: "This small town did not have a philistine, narrow-minded or self-satisfied atmosphere, but completely absorbed and permeated the atmosphere after the turn of the century. , something new that started to develop in Germany in a strange way, the city was intellectual, exciting and radically open.”
Beyond that, for the Weber brothers, the city was. There is another, more intimate symbolic meaning.
Among the poems about Heidelberg, Holderlin's "Heidelberg" is the most famous one. The poem reads:
"I have loved you for a long time, for my own pleasure
I would like to call you my mother and offer simple poems
You, my motherland "The most beautiful city I have ever seen"
(selected from Yang Yezhi's translation)
In fact, this is indeed Max Weber's "Mother City". The mansion located on the Neckar River and now known as the "Weber House" was originally owned by his maternal grandfather, Georg Fallenstein. In 1847, after moving from Berlin to Heidelberg, Fallenstein personally designed and built this mansion with a rockery, gardens and fountains.
His youngest daughter, Helene, the mother of Max Weber, who was born in 1844, spent her childhood and girlhood here. After marrying Max Weber Sr., she lived with her husband in Erfurt, and later moved to Charlottenburg near Berlin, but she still often took her children back to her family's home in Heidelberg for vacations. It was not until April 1910, after the death of Adolf Hausrath, the heir to the mansion and Helene's brother-in-law, that Max Weber and his friend Ernst Troeltsch, who was the same age as him, A family is living here as tenants.
However, looking back at Max Weber’s 56-year life, his relationship with the City of Heidelberg and the University of Heidelberg was filled with a complex and distant tension, far less than that of his younger brother Alfred. Weber's approach was simple. Alfred, who was 4 years younger than Weber, chose the University of Berlin after graduating from high school, and then found a teaching position at the University of Prague. But when he accepted the professorship at Heidelberg University in 1908, Max Weber introduced it. Until his death at the age of 90 in 1958, Alfred never left Heidelberg and served Heidelberg University diligently for half a century. Today's Institute of Economics at Heidelberg University is named after him.
Max Weber’s former residence is located on the Neckar River. This is now where the University of Heidelberg trains international students in German
The situation at Max Weber was very different. From the first close and long-term contact with Heidelberg as a college freshman in 1882 to his death in Munich in 1920, Weber and Heidelberg separated several times in 38 years. In terms of length of stay, he was away from Heidelberg much longer than he was here. He likes the bustle of Berlin as the political center stage, the warm and bright sunshine in Rome, the tranquility by the lakes in Switzerland and Austria, and the passion and vitality of the New World in the United States. He left again and again and more than once considered starting over in another place. Only in September 1919, six months before Max Weber's death, at a farewell reception held for him by his old friends in Heidelberg, did he reveal his deep reluctance and attachment to Heidelberg. He said Heidelberg's gentleness and kindness helped him slowly wake up from the darkness when he was suffering from the disease, so that he could start a new life. Now, he felt as if he was bidding farewell to his hometown and going to a strange place. Although it was beautiful, it was cold and cold.
This is reminiscent of a letter Weber wrote to his mother. In 1910, shortly after the Webbs moved into the Webb House, Helene was surprised to find that Webb, as the new tenant, was actually more attached to the house full of her childhood memories than she was. Weber replied: "For me, it is less about loyalty than about being strongly infected by that vivid beauty. I gave this beauty to life and it soaked my blood with its sweetness. Than For you, I am simply caught up in the world. You treat all phenomena more equally, but I love them and need them, and you are immune to their temptations. ”
< p> Max Weber was one of the few philosophers who was willing to admit that he was easily seduced by the world. This gave him the warmth of a living body. Although for different purposes, after his death, his widow Marianne and follower Karl Jaspers attempted to deify him as a saintly genius, through his letters and contemporaries. The narrative restores the complex and full Weber who had human desires and preferences and accepted them as a natural part of his life journey. But that’s why this man who lived a century ago has some connection with us today. When he talks about pain, it is one's pain, and when he struggles between different choices, it is one's confusion. The majestic gods cannot help us, and weakness has its own strength.In Schlucht's view, Weber's every farewell to Heidelberg had complex reasons. For example, the objective background of the last trip to Munich in life was the late "World War I". The German mark devalued significantly. The Webers, who had lived a prosperous life relying on the inheritance for more than ten years before, now needed new sources of income, and Munich The university offered exactly the professorship that interested Weber.
Subjectively, there was also the factor of Else Jaffe, Weber's confidante in the second half of his life who lived outside Munich at the time - "This wonderful and familiar city and the friends living nearby issued a call." In fact, when Weber died, apart from his wife Mary Anne, the other person who was by his side was Elzer.
If Weber knew that this would be his last meeting with Heidelberg, would he still be so decisive? No one can give an answer. As he said, the so-called history is the process of people creating a history that they do not know. People's deduction of various causal relationships of previous events based on subsequent developments is itself a subjective interpretation. If we change the angle and return again and again after leaving, will it also prove the unbreakable fate?
After a long journey, I finally stood in front of Weber’s grave. In 1921, Arnold Rickert, Weber's old friend in Heidelberg and son of the philosopher Heinrich Rickert, designed the Greek column tombstone in front of him at Marianne's request. Buried in the cemetery are Weber's ashes. In 1920, cremation was still very rare in Germany, with less than 1% of people choosing this method - but this was the best way for him to return to old Heidelberg and return to his familiar circle of friends. His wife, Marie-Anne, lived in Heidelberg for another 34 years after his death. She lived in an old house on the Neckar River and used Max Weber's desk as her altar. She spent the rest of her time organizing and publishing Weber's works during his lifetime, and continued to host salon gatherings for people in the original "Weber circle." Like her husband, Mary Anne died in the arms of Elze Jaffe in 1954 and was later buried here with Weber.
The inscription Mary Anne chose for Weber on the tombstone comes from Goethe's "Faust":
We will never see his kind again,
Everything in the world is like this.
(WirFindenNimmerSeinesg-leichen,
Allesverganglicheistnureingleichnis.)
At first glance, this seemed more like a warning to me trying to tell Weber’s story . Do I really have what it takes to tell this story? The more I got to know him, the more I realized the distance between us. I have never even heard his voice, and I have never seen him smile - and in everyone's memories, he is a person who likes to laugh so much. I need more feelings and touches - the stone paths he has walked, the street scenes he has seen, the books he has read, the houses he has lived in, the food he has eaten... those answers may be at the foot of the mountain, or in the old town of Heidelberg. In the city. But, just maybe.
A city that has been constantly poeticized and romanticized throughout history - a panoramic view of the ancient city of Heidelberg
When I turned around and went down the mountain, at a certain corner, I saw the slowly flowing Neckar River and the When the old pink and white house by the river suddenly appeared in front of me, I was suddenly relieved. Because I know that no matter what, I did not come in vain. Only at this moment, from this angle, standing here, overlooking such a quiet and beautiful scenery, can we understand another meaning that Mary Anne chose this passage as Weber's epitaph that she had never understood clearly - and this is from What can never be read in words or paper. That was Faust's last call to the world at the end of his life - whether it was also the voice of Max Weber and Marianne towards Heidelberg:
Stay a while, you are so beautiful!
University Square: Student Life
Looking up, a lion wearing a crown and holding a sword high seemed to be roaring angrily to the sky, but what came to his ears was a soft voice. The sound of gurgling water. This is the old town of Heidelberg, in the middle of the University Square (Universitaetsplatz), the famous Lion Spring (Lowenbrunnen). Most of the various sightseeing activities in the Old Town are here as a gathering point, but in a longer period of time, it was the geographical center that Heidelberg University students passed by in their daily activities.
Standing under the Lion Spring, I was reading a letter written by Weber to his family in 1882:
The logic class at 7 am forced me to get up early in the morning. I have to run around the fencing hall for an hour every morning, and then stay there sincerely until I finish my class.
Go to the next door at 11:30 to have lunch for 1 mark, and sometimes drink 1/4 liter of wine or beer. Then Otto, Mr. Ikrat, the owner of the inn, and I often went roller skating together. After 14 o'clock, we returned to our respective residences. I reviewed my lecture notes and read Strauss's "Old Faiths and New Faiths." We sometimes go hiking in the afternoon. In the evening we met again at Ikrat's, had a fine dinner for eighty cents, and then read Lotze's "Human Society" as usual, about which we had the most animated debate.
I looked around, trying to recall the scene in the eyes of that 18-year-old boy who had just passed the Abitur and came to Heidelberg to study law 129 years ago.
Directly in front of me is the Baroque-style old university building built in 1728. It is not only the office of the president of Heidelberg University, but also the university museum. In 1886, the 500th anniversary of Heidelberg University, the old auditorium in the building was renovated. After that, celebrations and major ceremonies were usually held in this magnificent hall. However, at that time, Weber had already left Heidelberg and transferred to Heidelberg. I continued my studies at Tingen University and was unable to catch this event.
To my right is the new university building built in 1930 with $500,000 raised by Jacob Gould Schurman, the U.S. ambassador to Germany. He was 10 years older than Max Weber. He went to Heidelberg University to study two years before Weber. Later he returned to the United States and served as the president of Cornell University for more than 20 years. During this period, he created the modern state-funded research model in the United States by referring to the German university system. University model.
In the open space between the Old University Building and the New University Building, Martin Luther gave a speech here on April 26, 1518, promoting his views on justice, original sin, free will and faith. , the German religious reform intensified. The concept of "vocation" (Beruf) discussed by Weber in "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" and in many articles originated from Martin Luther, and Martin Luther's famous sayings were also repeated by Weber in his articles Quote. It was also here, on May 17, 1933, that fanatical professors and students at Heidelberg University threw thousands of "un-German spiritual" books into a raging fire and burned them. The man who led this and Germany's book burning incident behind the scenes was , it was Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister who graduated from Heidelberg University. It is said that Goebbels was an admirer of Weber and carried Weber's works with him wherever he went.
Behind me is the quadrangle of the Heidelberg University Library. Although the history of the Heidelberg University Library can be traced back to the 14th century, in fact it was not until Karl Zangemeister became the first full-time director from 1873 to 1902 that it truly became a modern library. The library's collection quickly increased to more than 400,000 books, and in 1938 it became one of the richest libraries in Germany with a collection of 1.15 million books. It was also under the auspices of Chagminster that in 1901, Joseph Durm, the most famous architect of that era, built a magnificent Renaissance-style palace using the same red sandstone material as the hilltop castle. The new library building was officially opened in 1905. When I interviewed Ms. Rike Balzuweit, the executive director of the library, she told me that Max Weber was a frequent visitor here around 1910, but he was not a model reader worth emulating—in His comments were left in the margins of many books. (To be continued...please see the next part)
Author丨Ruy
Source丨Life Weekly Issue 38, 2011
Editor 丨Jogging
■■■
Return to Sohu to see more