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

He measured every river, mountain and view in his path, crawled through every hole in the ground and tasted more bears and climbed trees than anyone could imagine. He was the youngest of two brothers. His father was a rich man of low nobility who died early. His mother was with him none other than Goethe asked how he should educate his beauty, a pair of brothers responded to this in which the diversity of human aspirations where the rich possibilities of action and enjoyment of exemplary reality have become reality that in reality is a spectacle that makes sense with hope and to fill the mind with various considerations, no one understood this phrase, not even the mother, nor his motto, musk and a skinny gentleman with big ears, the better to understand what is mine, Kunz finally said until it was an experiment, one must be trained to be a man of culture, the others a man of science and which one to be a man of science. and he thought about it then he shrugged his shoulders 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 classifying them according to the systems he 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. He was the second in Germany. The other was in Göttingen, on the roof. 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.

Anyone who knew him could hardly contain his enthusiasm. 13 He spoke two languages. 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 once 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. He discovered white powder in his food. He knew enough about chemistry to realize that it was rat poison with the students' hands.

He shows the plate away to 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. they. dead looking and talking in 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 You Never Know Metaphysical Fear came up with a story about a madman who had renounced his king and proclaimed 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 explorer had ever penetrated this area and there was no reliable source. 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. One day you will be glad to have solved this moment. Markus Herz, professor of physics and philosophy to his favorite student Immanuel Kant and husband of Henriette, famous for her beauty, poured two substances into a glass jug. The liquid hesitated for a moment before coming out. It changed color with a bang. He let the hydrogen come out of a tube, applied a flame to his mouth and with a scream the fire shot up to half a gram, he said: twelve centimeters high the flame whenever something scared you it was a good idea to measure them in Henriette's living room Cultured people met once a week, they talked about God and their feelings, they cried a little, they wrote letters and gave each other names, 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 open and detailed information about everything that was going on in their souls, which in one's mind was nothing soul before the two brothers had to invent something. The youngest were also necessary, she said that they should come and not miss it in order to educate the heart. She expressly encouraged them to write to Henriette. A neglect of sentimental culture in the first phases of life could later have unpleasant consequences. She automatically understood that each letter owed As expected, the older brother's letters 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 returned unread, La Mettrie's Machine This work is prohibited, it is a despicable pamphlet, he does not even dare to open it, the younger brother said repentantly to the older brother, it is a remarkable book, the Author seriously states that man is a machine, an automatically acting Framework of the highest craftsmanship and Soulless, replied the elder. 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 a political sense for immensity and beauty, contradicted him, but this soul in itself was only a part, albeit the most complicated, of the machinery and he wondered if that does not correspond to the truth. all people machines maybe not all said the young man thoughtfully but beer the pond froze the evening twilight turned the snow and the icicles blue he had something to say to him he said the older man was worried about him his silent nature his nature reserved slow successes in class with both of them standing 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 took a breath and stepped on the lake he thought Whether Klopstock should be skating or reciting, moving his arms a lot, he slid towards the middle, he turned, his brother stood on the edge, slightly leaning back, looking at him, suddenly there was silence, he couldn't see anything anymore 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 while. For a moment he saw a frozen landscape, the houses trembling above, transparent plants like a veil, five alone 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, I breathed in and out and spat, the sharp-edged ice cut his hands, he fell.

He got up, he wanted to get up, he dragged his legs and Laakirchen sobbed as 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 stretched out his hand and He helped him 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 freezing cold. A man entered 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. , he saw something much more tense under an electrically flickering sky and when he opened his eyes again, at noon that day, the winter sun was right in the window and he had a fever.

From now on his grades improved. him with concentration and he took up the habit of clenching his fists when he thought, as if he had to defeat an enemy. He had changed. Henriette wrote to her that she was now scaring her a little. She asked for a night in the empty room. Being able to spend the night in the room from which noises were heard most often at night. The next morning he was pale and calm and the first wrinkle appeared vertically on his forehead and he decided that the elder brother should study law and the younger one. "My brother should study photography.

Of course, I traveled with them to the Frankfurt University hall or accompanied them to lectures and monitored their progress. It was not a good university if someone couldn't do anything and wanted to become a major He wrote to Henriette that he should come with confidence and, for reasons no one knew, he was normally a big dog at the university, he scratched a lot and made noises with the botanist Wilde Noser, the youngest of whom was drying tropical plants for the first time. They had similar excrescences. to antennae, shoots like eyes, and leaves whose surface looked like human skin from dreams.

They looked familiar to him before he cut them. He made careful sketches, tested their reaction to acids and bases, and processed them clearly in the preparations. Now he knew what Zug said and what he wanted to deal with in life. He couldn't prove that. Grundmann said that Grundmann had other tasks in the world than just being there. Life was all that without the content of an 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 to Wild and studied 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 not good enough to print it out. under the name of Humboldt.

We still have to wait to publish it. During the holidays he visited his older brother at a reception given 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 looked at staring 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 something of Humboldt said that writing a novel seemed to him the best way to capture the most fleeting things of the present for the future.

Uh-huh, Lichtenberg said. Humboldt blushed, so it was silly that an author like him was becoming fashionable to choose an already distant past as a setting. Lichtenberg narrowed his eyes at him. No, then he said and yes the brothers a second silver disc a little larger next to the mouth that had just opened a hot air balloon the older man explained the bar but here too the Montgolfier employee was currently in nearby Braunschweig the entire city of Rhede soon all "But they wouldn't want that," said the youngest, they were too afraid. Shortly before leaving he met the famous Georg Forster, a thin, coughing man with a sickly complexion.

He had gone around the world. with Cook and more seen than anyone else in Germany was a legend, his book was world famous and he worked as a librarian in Mainz. He spoke of dragons and the loving dead of extremely educated cannibals of the times when it 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 the parable said. It was about Odysseus and the sirens. It was no use tying you to the mast.

Even if you ran away, you couldn't recover from the stranger's proximity, he found himself. He hardly sleeps anymore, the memories are too strong. Recently he received the news that hisThe captain, the big, dark cook, had been cooked and eaten in Hawaii, he called her forehead and looked at the buckles of his shoes cooked and eaten, 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 in Freiberg, where Abraham Werner taught that the Earth's interior was cold and solid, that mountains were formed by chemical precipitation from the ocean.reduced from prehistoric times, that the fire of volcanoes did not come from the depths of the interior. , that they fed on deposits of burning coal, 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 of souls read for his opponents who still denied the truth. He once broke the nose of a hesitant student and allegedly ripped off another's ear many years ago. He was one of the last alchemists, a member of the secret logical knowers of the signs, whom the demons obeyed. He was able to gather What had been destroyed by the smoke and turn it back into something solid from the smoke. 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 if he was Neptune and as a cold memory, Humboldt assured him that he would then have to get married so that Bolt would turn red.

Werner puffed out his cheeks, made a conspiratorial gesture 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, so they say, Humboldt said quickly, of course, wrongly. The single man said that Werner has never been a good Neptune. In the morning he went 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 he found a woman like her in the gearbox who had no equal in the world, he responded politely that he could not come, he recommended time, he crawled through the lowest pits until he got used to it. to his claustrophobia as a pain that did not subside, but that little by little became bearable.

He took temperature measurements, the deeper it went, the warmer it got. And this contradicted all of Abraham Werner's teachers. He realized that there was vegetation even in the deepest caves of darkness. Life seemed to not stop anywhere. Everywhere there was still a form of moss and growth, a kind of stunted plants. He was afraid of them and so he dismantled and examined them, organized them into classes and wrote a treatise on them years later, when similar plants were planted in the cave of the dead that he was. He prepared, graduated, and got a uniform wherever he went, he was supposed to wear it.

His official title was SS in the Mountain and Huts, the partners. He was ashamed of himself and wrote to his brother saying that he was very happy about it. Months later he was already the most reliable mine inspector in Prussia. 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 with the speed with which he took notes, he was in constant motion. and he barely slept and didn't even know what this was all about. He wrote to his brother saying that he was afraid of losing his mind.

He by chance he found a galvanic book on electricity and galvanic frogs had connected severed frog legs with two different ones. The metals and had shown how alive it was due to the legs where there was still life force or the movement was coming from outside due to the difference between the metals and the parts of the frog simply became 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 released 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. The servant asked but was not allowed to take a break. Rowohlt asked him not to act stupid as a silver coin. When they touched him for the second round, a painful throb ran through the muscles of his back all the way to his head. With a trembling hand he noted the angry muscle behind both of their heads. spines, the continuation of spinal vertebra 1, no doubt electricity acts here again, which was said, blows at regular intervals then the colors of known objects, when he came to, the servant saw him on the floor, his face pale, her hands bloody.

Humboldt continued, and with strange horror he realized that something in him felt lust now the frogs did not say that, the servant soon asked him if he wanted to look for a new job, the servant placed four dead frogs, carefully cleaned, on the bloody back of Humboldt, but enough was enough, he said that they were Christians after all. Humboldt ignored him and ordered the silver again. The blows came with each one of them. It was he in the mirror who the frogs jumped 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 two wounds the liquid It was so caustic that his skin became inflamed 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. Well, said Humboldt, then in the name of God he should receive the doctor. He wiped his face and waited until he could use his hands again and write down the most necessary things. The electricity had flowed. He had felt that and it had arisen not from his body and not from the frogs but from the chemical hostility of the metals. It was not easy to explain to the doctor what had happened here, to the servant of The following week, two scars remained, 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 towards one's own body, which is not a thing among things. I ask you to come, the student wants to meet you, do you recognize me, Humboldt responded. , I have discovered that people are willing to experience the image, but a lot of knowledge escapes them because they fear the pain, but those who choose to feel pain understand things that they do not understand. Federweg rubbed his shoulder and crumpled the paper. We begin our brotherhood again. Why does it seem to me to be the real enigma?