Ulrich Noethen liest »Die Vermessung der Welt« von Daniel Kehlmann (Kapitel 1 +2)

two. His father was a rich man of low nobility who died early. Her mother was with him none other than Goethe asked her how she should educate her beauty, a pair of brothers responded to this in that it really expresses the diversity of human aspirations. rich possibilities of action and enjoyment of exemplary reality have come true that it is actually a show that makes sense with hope and to fill the mind with various considerations, no one understood this phrase, neither the mother, nor its motto, musk and a skinny man with big ears, rather to understand my thing, Kunz finally said until it was an experiment, one should be trained to be a man of culture Others to the man of science and which one for what and thought about it then shrugged his shoulders . he shrugged and suggested flipping a coin. 15 well-paid experts gave university-level lectures for the younger brother chemistry physics mathematics for the older language and literature for both Greek Latin and philosophy twelve hours a day, every day of the week without a break or a vacation.

The younger brother, Alejandro, was taciturn and weak. He had to be encouraged to do everything. His grades were mediocre when left alone. He wandered through the forest collecting beetles and sorting them according to systems. He was invented Nine years ago he built a replica of the lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin and fixed it to the roof of the castle where they lived near the capital. It was the second in Germany. The other was on the roof in Göttingen. from physics professor Lichtenberg Only in these two places are you safe from heaven the older brother looked like an angel, he could speak like a poet and he wrote precocious letters to the most famous men in the country from the beginning, those who knew him could hardly. contain his enthusiasm 13 he spoke two languages ​​at 14 4 15 7 he had never been punished.

No one could remember that he had done anything wrong. He spoke to all the English about trade policy with the French about the danger of rebellion. He locked the younger brother in a closet in a remote room while a servant found there the next day the little one, half unconscious, who claimed to have locked himself there. He knew the truth, no one would have believed it on another occasion. He discovered white powder in his food. He knew enough about chemistry to realize that it was rat poison with the students' hands. He showed himself at the plate far away on the other side of the table as the elder looked at him appreciatively with unfathomably bright eyes.

No one could deny that there was nothing spectacular in the haunted castle, only footsteps in empty hallways, children crying without origin and sometimes a shadowy lord who asked them to do so in a hoarse voice. Shoelaces, small toy magnets, or a glass of lemonade. The ghosts were scarier, but the stories about them were, and he gave the two boys books to read that were about monks hanging around open tombs, the elixirs made in the underworld that came from the depths and were sealed shut. them to listen to the. dead looking and speaking with horror, this kind of thing was just becoming fashionable and was still so new that no habit helped against the horror that was explained as necessary.

Encountering darkness was part of growing up and a German man would do it. You never know metaphysical fear. They came across a story about the madman who had renounced his king and made himself emperor of a country. On a nightmarish journey like no other, he and his men drove along the Orinoco, on whose banks the brush was so thick. that it was impossible to go down to land, birds could scream in the languages ​​of extinct peoples and if you looked towards the sky you could see cities whose architecture revealed that their builders were not human. Almost no explorers had penetrated this area and there were no reliable sources. map but he would, said the younger Brother, he will definitely travel there.

I responded to the older man, he was serious. That was clear, said the major and called a servant to declare the day and time. he will be happy to have arranged this moment. Markus Herz, professor of physics and philosophy of his favorite student Immanuel Kant and husband of Henriette, famous for her beauty, poured two substances into a glass jar and the liquid hesitated for a moment. It changed color with a bang He let the hydrogen come out of a tube, he applied a flame to his mouth and with a scream the fire shot up to half a gram and he said the flame was twelve centimeters high when something scared you it was a good idea .

Measure them in Henriette's living room, the educated people met once a week, they talked about God and their feelings cried a little, they wrote letters to each other and named themselves, the virtuous people, no one knew who had come up with that. name. It had to be kept secret from the outside world, but other virtuous people had to give information openly and in detail about everything that was going on in their souls, which was nothing in the soul world before they had to invent something that the two brothers, the younger ones were also necessary, she said that they should come and not miss it to educate the heart, she expressly encouraged them to write to Henriette, a neglect of sentimental culture in the early phases of life could later have unpleasant consequences.

She automatically understood that each card had As expected, the older brother's cards were the best. Henriette answered them politely in uncertain childish handwriting. She was only 19 years old. A book that the youngest had given him, La Machine de. La Mettrie This work is prohibited, it is a despicable pamphlet, she does not even dare to open it, I am sorry to say, the younger brother of the older one, it is a remarkable book, the author seriously affirms that man is a machine, a framework that acts automatically of the highest craftsmanship and Soulless, the elder responded. They walked through the castle park.

There was a thin layer of snow on the bare trees. No, the youngest with a soul, with premonitions and political sense. seeks immensity and beauty, he contradicted it, but this soul itself was only a part, although the most complicated, of the machine and he asked himself if that does not correspond to the truth: all people, machines, perhaps not all, the young man said thoughtfully, but beer the pond froze the afternoon twilight turned the snow and the icicles blue he had something to tell him he said the older man was worried about him his silent nature his reserved nature slow successes in class with the two of He stood up and in the hallway, a great attempt, neither of them had the right to let themselves go.

He hesitated for a moment. The ice was actually quite solid, but yes, the youngest nodded. He took a breath and stepped on the lake. He thought about whether Klopstock should be skating or reciting, swinging. his arms away, he slid towards the middle, he turned around, his brother stood on the shore, slightly leaning back, looking at him suddenly there was silence, he could no longer see anything and the cold almost took away his senses. Then he realized he was underwater, he kicked, his head hit something hard, the ice, his fur hat came off and floated away, his hair stood up, his feet touched the ground, now his eyes were dark.

They got used to the darkness. For a moment he saw a frozen landscape, the houses trembling above, transparent plants like a veil, a single five there, now gone like an illusion, he made swimming movements, got up, crashed against the ice again, he realized that he only had seconds to live, he fumbled and just when he had no more air, he saw a dark spot above him, the opening, he breathed in and out and spit out, the sharp-edged ice cut his hands, he stood up. , he wanted to get up, he dragged his legs and Laakirchen sobbed, his stomach turned and he crawled to the shore, his brother had never been left behind before, with his hands in his pockets, his cap pulled down over his face, He reached out his hand and grabbed it. helped him get up.

At night the fever came. He heard voices and didn't know if they shaped his dreams or belonged to the people surrounding his bed and he still felt the icy cold. He walked into the room with long strides and the doctor probably said and said, decide whether you will succeed or not, that is a decision you just have to endure or but when he wanted to answer that, he no longer remembered what had been said. Instead, he saw something much more tense under an electrically flickering sky, and when he opened his eyes again, at noon last day, the winter sun was right in the window and he had a fever.

From now on his grades improved. He worked with concentration and acquired the habit of clenching his fists when he thought, as if he had to defeat an enemy. Henriette wrote to her that she was now scaring her a little. He asked for a night in the void. room To be able to spend the night in the room from which the most noises were heard at night. The next morning he was pale and calm and the first wrinkle appeared vertically on his forehead and he decided that the older brother should study law and. The younger brother should study photography, of course, he traveled with them to the University of Frankfurt or accompanied them to lectures and monitored their progress.

It wasn't a good university if someone couldn't do anything and wanted to be one. A doctor wrote to Henriette that he should come with confidence and, for reasons no one knew, he was usually a big dog at university, scratching a lot and making noises with the botanist Wilde Noser. The youngest dried tropical plants for him. They had antennae-like outgrowths, eye-like buds, and leaves whose surface looked like human skin from dreams. They looked familiar to her before she cut them up and tested his reaction to the acids and bases. He now knew that Zug and what he wanted to do in life could not prove that Grundmann had other tasks in the world than simply being there. existence, that's not what he meant, he replied, he wanted to explore life, understand the strange persistence with which it spreads across the world, he wanted to know more about it, so he hoped to stay and the older brother moved into the wild and into study.

In the following semester, at the University of Göttingen, while there he met his first friends, drank alcohol for the first time and touched a woman, the youngest wrote his first scientific paper, he said it was good, but it was not good enough as to be. printed with Humboldt's name We still have to wait to publish it. During the holidays he visited his older brother at a reception hosted by the French consul, where he met the mathematician Kästner, his friend Hofrat Zimmermann, and Germany's most important experimental physicist. Professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who shook his hand and stared at a piece of meat, hunchbacked but with an impeccably beautiful face and intelligence, in addition to being close to him up to a volt, asked him if it was true that he was working on a novel No, Lichtenberg responded. with a look as if he saw some of that screwing himself not the rich job in the arms trade of not having made any progress at all Humboldt said that writing novels seemed to him the real way to capture the most fleeting things of the present To the future, Lichtenberg said.

Humboldt blushed. So, it was silly that an author like that was fashionable to choose an already distant past as a setting. Lichtenberg narrowed his eyes at him. the brothers a second, slightly larger silver disc next to the mouth that had just opened a hot air balloon the eldest explained the bar but here too the employee of the Montgolfier was currently in nearby Braunschweig the entire city of Rhede everyone would soon be drinking on the air But they wouldn't want that, said the youngest, they were too scared Shortly before his departure he met the famous Georg Forster, a thin, coughing man with a sickly complexion.

He had gone around the world with Cook and. more viewed than any other German. He was a legend, his book was world famous and he worked as a librarian in Mainz. He talked about dragons and the loving dead of extremely educated cannibals from a time when everything was clearer. that you felt like you were floating over an abyss, of storms so violent that you couldn't. He dared to pray. Melancholy surrounded him like a fine fog. He had seen too much. He said that was exactly what Odysseus' parable said. The sirens were ready. It didn't help tying you to the mast.

Even if you ran away, you couldn't recover from the stranger's proximity. He hardly sleeps anymore, the memories are too strong. received the news that his The captain, the big, dark cook, had been cooked and eaten in Hawaii, he called her forehead and looked at the buckles of his cooked and eaten shoes, he himself also traveled, said Humboldt Forster nodded, some wanted that and everyone regretted it later, why, because you will never be able to come. Back Forster recommended him to the mining academy at Freiberg, where Abraham Werner taught that the Earth's interior was cold and solid, that mountains were formed by chemical precipitation from the shrinking ocean of prehistoric times, that the fire of volcanoes did not come from the depths of the interior. , that they fed on burning coal deposits, that the core of the Earth was made of hard stone, this doctrine was called Neptunism and was defended by both churches and by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

In the Freiberg chapel, Werner had masses on the soul read for hisopponents, who were still there. he denied the truth. She once broke a doubting student's nose and supposedly ripped off another's ear many years ago. He was one of the last alchemists, a member of the secret logical connoisseurs of the signs, which the demons knew how to gather. what had been destroyed by smoke and turn it back into something solid. He had also talked to the devil and made gold. However, he still didn't seem smart. He leaned back, narrowed his eyes and asked Humboldt. He was Neptune and as a cold memory, Humboldt assured him that then he would have to marry to make Bolt blush.

Werner puffed out his cheeks, made a conspiratorial joke and asked him if he had a girlfriend. The obstacle just said. marry Bolt man if you have nothing important in life Werner stared at him, that's what they say, Humboldt said quickly, of course, wrong bachelor said Werner has never been a good Neptune, Humboldt has been through the The curriculum of the academy in a room. In the morning he was underground for six hours. In the afternoon he listened to lectures and in the afternoon and midnight he studied for the next day. He had no friends and when his brother invited him to his wedding.

She found a woman like her in the gearbox who had no equal in the world, she politely answered that she couldn't come, she recommended time, she crawled through the lowest wells until she got used to her claustrophobia like a pain. that did not diminish, but gradually it became bearable. He took temperature measurements, the deeper it went, the warmer it became. And that contradicted all of Abraham Werner's teachers. He realized that there was vegetation even in the deepest caves of life. He didn't seem to stop anywhere. Everywhere there was still a form of moss and growth, some kind of stunted plants.

He was afraid of them and that's why he dismantled them and examined them, organized them into classes and wrote a treatise about them years later when they were planted. similar plants in the cave of the dead prepared him he graduated and got a uniform wherever he went he had to wear it his official title was SS in the mountains and Huts the partners He was ashamed to write to his brother that A few months later he was already the Prussia's most reliable mine inspector. He let himself be carried through the rows of peat cutters and into the kilns of the royal porcelain factory.

Everywhere he scared the workers. he took notes he was constantly moving and he barely slept and he didn't even know what it was about. He wrote to his brother that he was afraid of losing his mind. By chance he found a galvanic book about electricity and galvanic frogs. They had connected frog legs cut from two different metals and shown how alive it was due to the legs where there was still life force or the movement came from outside due to the difference between the metals and the parts of the frog were simply made. visible. so Bol decided to find out.

He took off his shirt, lay down on the bed and ordered his servant to put two bleeding plasters on his back. The servant obeyed. Humboldt's skin gave him two large blisters and now he had to open the blisters. The servant hesitated because Bolt had to raise his voice. The servant took a scalpel that was so sharp that the cut barely hurt, blood dripping onto the floor, Rowohlt infested, to put a piece of zinc in one of the wounds. he was not allowed to take a break. Rowohlt asked him not to act stupid like a piece of silver.

When they touched him for the second round, a painful sting ran through the muscles of his back all the way to his head. With a shaking hand, he noted. the choleric muscle behind the head of both spines, the continuation of spinal vertebra 1, no doubt electricity also acts here, which he said to himself, blows at regular intervals and then the colors of familiar objects when he comes to his senses , the servant saw him on the ground, his face pale, his hands bloody, Humboldt continued, and with strange horror he realized that something in him felt lust now the frogs didn't say that, the servant soon asked him if he wanted to look.

For a new job, the servant placed four carefully cleaned dead frogs on Humboldt's bloody back, but enough was enough, he said that they were Christians after all. Humboldt ignored him and put the silver back in order. The blows came with each one of them. It was him in the mirror that the frogs jumped to Body how alive he was right on the pillow the fabric was wet from his tears the servant laughed hysterically around Bolt wanted to take notes but his hands were too weak with difficulty he got up from the In two wounds the The liquid was so caustic that it inflamed his skin and he soon tried to collect some in a glass tube but his shoulder was swollen and he couldn't turn.

He saw the servant who shook his head. then, in the name of God, he should go to the doctor. He wiped his face and waited until he could use his hands again and write down the most necessary things. He had felt that and it had not come from his body. and not because of the frogs but because of the chemical hostility of metals. It was not easy to explain to the doctor what had happened here, to the servant in The following week there were two scars and the treatise on living muscle fiber as a conductive substance. established Humboldt's scientific reputation He seemed confused, his brother wrote to him from China, but he must remember that one also has moral obligations to his own body, which is not one of the things I ask you to come, student I would like to know.

You recognize me, Humboldt replied, I have discovered that people are willing to live the image, but they miss a lot of knowledge because they fear pain, but those who decide to feel pain understand things that they do not understand. Federweg rubbed his shoulder and crumpled the paper. He started our brotherhood anew. Why does it seem to me to be the real enigma?