The Sleepwalkers

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  The grandparents' third and last attempt to produce a Sebaldus who would survive.

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  Cf. Kretschmer: "One is tempted to say: genius arises in the hereditary process particularly at that point where a highly gifted family begins to degenerate... This degeneration often announces itself in the generation to which the genius belongs, or even in the preceding one, and generally in the form of psychopathic and psychotic conditions." 6a

  All this mis-shapen progeniture – except those who died in their cots – lived with old choleric Sebaldus and his shrewish wife, crowded into the narrow Kepler house, which, in fact, was rather a cottage. Kepler's father, Heinrich, though the fourth child, was the oldest among those who survived, and thus inherited the house, producing seven children in his turn. Kepler describes him thus:

  "4. Henrich, my father, born 1547, 19 January... A man vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome and doomed to a bad end. Venus and Mars increased his malice. Jupiter combust 7 in descension made him a pauper but gave him a rich wife. Saturn in VII made him study gunnery; many enemies, a quarrelsome marriage ... a vain love of honours, and vain hopes about them; a wanderer... 1577: he ran the risk of hanging. He sold his house and started a tavern. 1578: a hard jar of gunpowder burst and lacerated my father's face... 1589: treated my mother extremely ill, went finally into exile and died."

  There is not even the usual mitigating addendum at the end. The story behind the entries is briefly this:

  Heinrich Kepler married at the age of twenty-four. He seems to have studied no trade or craft, except "gunnery", which refers to his later military adventures. Seven months and two weeks after his marriage to Katherine Guldenmann, Johannes Kepler was born. Three years later, after the birth of his second son, Heinrich took the Emperor's shilling and went off to fight the Protestant insurgents in the Netherlands – an act the more ignominious as the Keplers were among the oldest Protestant families in Weil. The next year, Katherine joined her husband, leaving her children in the care of the grandparents. The year after they both returned, but not to Weil, where they were disgraced; instead, Heinrich bought a house in nearby Leonberg; but in a short time left again for Holland, to join the mercenary hordes of the Duke of Alba. It was apparently on this journey that he "ran the risk of hanging" for some unrecorded crime. He returned once more, sold the house in Leonberg, ran a tavern in Ellmendingen, again went back to Leonberg, and in 1588 vanished forever from the sight of his family. Rumour has it that he enlisted in the Neapolitan fleet.

  His wife Katherine, the inkeeper's daughter, was an equally unstable character. In the family horoscope, Kepler describes her as: "small, thin, swarthy, gossiping and quarrelsome, of a bad disposition". There was not much to choose between the two Katherines, the mother and the grandmother; and yet the mother was the more frightening of the two, with an aura of magic and witchcraft about her. She collected herbs and concocted potions in whose powers she believed; I have already mentioned that the aunt who brought her up, had ended her days at the stake, and that Katherine nearly shared the same fate, as we shall hear.

  To complete the survey of this idyllic family, I must mention our Johannes' brothers and sisters. There were six of them; of whom three again died in childhood, and two became normal, law-abiding citizens (Gretchen, who married a vicar, and Christopher, who became a pewterer). But Heinrich, the next in age to Johannes, was an epileptic and a victim of the psychopathic streak running through the family. An exasperating problem child, his youth seems to have been a long succession of beatings, misadventures and illnesses. He was bitten by animals, nearly drowned and nearly burnt alive. He was apprenticed to a draper, then a baker, and finally ran away from home when his loving father threatened to sell him. In subsequent years, he was a camp follower with the Hungarian army in the Turkish wars, a street singer, baker, nobleman's valet, beggar, regimental drummer, and halberdier. Throughout this chequered career, he remained the hapless victim of one misadventure after another – always ill, sacked from every job, robbed by thieves, beaten up by highwaymen – until he finally gave up, begged his way home to his mother, and hung to her apron strings until he died at forty-two. In his childhood and youth, Johannes conspicuously shared some of his younger brother's attributes, particularly his grotesque accident-proneness, and constant ill-health combined with hypochondria.

  2. Job

  Johannes was a sickly child, with thin limbs and a large, pasty face surrounded by dark curly hair. He was born with defective eyesight – myopia plus anocular polyopy (multiple vision). His stomach and gall bladder gave constant trouble; he suffered from boils, rashes, and probably from piles, for he tells us that he could never sit still for any length of time and had to walk up and down.

  The gabled house on the market-place in Weil, with its crooked beams and dolls-house windows, must have been bedlam. The bullying of red-faced old Sebaldus; the high-pitched quarrels of mother Katherine and grandmother Katherine; the brutality of the weak-headed, swashbuckling father; the epileptic fits of brother Heinrich; the dozen or more of seedy uncles and aunts, parents and grandparents, all crowded together in that unhappy little house.

  Johannes was four years old when his mother followed her husband to the wars; five, when the parents returned and the family began its restless wanderings to Leonberg, Ellmendingen, and back to Leonberg. He could attend school only irregularly, and from his ninth to his eleventh year did not go to school at all but was "put to hard work in the country". As a result, and in spite of his precocious brilliance, it took him twice as long as it took normal children to complete the three classes of the elementary Latin school. At thirteen, he was at last able to enter the lower theological seminary at Adelberg.

  The notes on his own childhood and youth, in the family horoscope, read like the diary of Job:

  "On the birth of Johann Kepler. I have investigated the matter of my conception, which took place in the year 1571, May 16, at 4.37 a.m... My weakness at birth removes the suspicion that my mother was already pregnant at the marriage, which was the 15th of May... Thus I was born premature, at thirty-two weeks, after 224 days, ten hours... 1575 [aged four] I almost died of small pox, was in very ill health, and my hands were badly crippled... 1577 [aged six]. On my birthday I lost a tooth, breaking it off with a string which I pulled with my hands... 1585-86 [fourteen-fifteen]. During these two years, I suffered continually from skin ailments, often severe sores, often from the scabs of chronic putrid wounds in my feet which healed badly and kept breaking out again. On the middle finger of my right hand I had a worm, on the left a huge sore... 1587 [sixteen]. On April 4 I was attacked by a fever... 1589 [nineteen]. I began to suffer terribly from headaches and a disturbance of my limbs. The mange took hold of me... Then there was a dry disease... 1591 [twenty]. The cold brought on prolonged mange... A disturbance of body and mind had set in because of the excitement of the Carnival play in which I was playing Mariamne... 1592 [twenty-one]. I went down to Weil and lost a quarter florin at gambling... At Cupinga's I was offered union with a virgin; on New Year's Eve I achieved this with the greatest possible difficulty, experiencing the most acute pains of the bladder..."

  Only two brief memories mitigate the gloom and squalor of this childhood. At the age of six:

  "I heard much of the comet of that year, 1577, and was taken by my mother to a high place to look at it."

  And at the age of nine:

  "I was called outdoors by my parents especially, to look at the eclipse of the moon. It appeared quite red."

  So much for the sunny side of life.

  No doubt, some of his miseries and ailments existed only in his imagination; while others – all these cold sores, worms on the finger, scabs and manges – seem like the stigmata of his self-detestation, physical projections of the image he had formed of himse
lf: the portrait of a child as a mangy dog. He meant this literally, as we shall see.

  3. Orphic Purge

  There are always compensations. In Kepler's case, the compensations offered by destiny were the exceptional educational facilities in his native land.

  The Dukes of Wuerttemberg, after embracing the Lutheran creed, had created a modern educational system. They needed erudite clergymen who could hold their own in the religious controversy that was raging across the country, and they needed an efficient administrative service. The Protestant universities in Wittenberg and Tuebingen were the intellectual arsenals of the new creed; the confiscated monasteries and convents provided ideal accommodation for a network of elementary and secondary schools, which fed the universities and chancelleries with bright young men. A system of scholarships and grants for "the children of the poor and faithful who are of a diligent, Christian and god-fearing disposition" vouchsafed an efficient selection of candidates. In this respect, Wuerttemberg before the Thirty Years War was a modern welfare state in miniature. Kepler's parents would certainly not have bothered about his education; the precocious brilliance of the child automatically guaranteed his progress from school to seminary and from there to university, as on a moving belt.

  The curriculum at the seminary was in Latin, and the pupils were rigorously held to use only Latin even among themselves. In the elementary school already, they were made to read the comedies of Plautus and Terence, to add colloquial fluency to scholarly precision. The German vernacular, though it had acquired a new dignity through Luther's Bible translation, was not yet considered a worthy medium of expression for scholars. As a happy result of this, Kepler's style, in those pamphlets and letters which he wrote in German, has an enchantingly naive and earthy quality which, in contrast to the dehydrated mediaeval Latin, sounds like the joyous din of a country fair after the austerities of the lecture room. Canon Koppernigk's German was modelled on the stilted and devious "Chancellery Style" of the bureaucracy; Kepler's German seems modelled on Luther's pronouncement:

  "One should not imitate those asses who ask the Latin language how German should be spoken; but should ask the mother in her home, the children in the gutters, the common man at the fair, and watch their big mouths as they speak, and do accordingly."

  When he had passed the Elementary Latin school, Johannes' good brains, bad health and interest in religion made the career of a clergyman the obvious choice. The theological seminary which he attended from his thirteenth to his seventeenth year, was divided into a lower (Adelberg) and a higher course (Maulbronn). The curriculum was broad and rounded, adding Greek to Latin, and embracing, besides theology, the study of the pagan classics, rhetorics and dialectics, mathematics and music. Discipline was strict: classes started in summer at four, in winter at five o'clock in the morning; the seminarists had to wear a sleeveless, shapeless cloak reaching below their knees, and were hardly ever allowed out on leave. Young Kepler recorded two of his most daring and paradoxical utterances from his seminarist days: that the study of philosophy was a symptom of Germany's decline; and that the French language was worthier of study than the Greek. No wonder his fellows regarded him as an intolerable egghead and beat him up at every opportunity.

  He was, indeed, as unpopular among his schoolmates as he was beloved by his friends in later years. In his horoscope record, the entries relating his physical afflictions alternate with others which reveal his moral misery and loneliness:

  " February, 1586. I suffered dreadfully and nearly died of my troubles. The cause was my dishonour and the hatred of my school fellows whom I was driven by fear to denounce... 1587. On April 4 I was attacked by a fever from which I recovered in time, but I was still suffering from the anger of my schoolmates with one of whom I had come to blows a month before. Koellin became my friend; I was beaten in a drunken quarrel by Rebstock; various quarrels with Koellin... 1580. I was promoted to the rank of Bachelor. I had a most iniquitous witness, Mueller, and many enemies among my comrades..."

  The narrative of the horoscope was continued in the same year (his twenty-sixth) in another remarkable document, a selfanalysis more unsparing than Rousseau's. 8 Written in the year when his first book was published, when he had undergone a kind of orphic purge and found his final vocation, it is perhaps the most introspective piece of writing of the Renaissance. Several pages of it describe his relations with colleagues and teachers at the seminary, and later at the University of Tuebingen. Referring to himself in the third person, as he mostly does in this document, the passage begins: "From the time of his arrival [at the seminary] some men were his adversaries". He lists five of them, then continues: "I record the most lasting enemies".

  He lists another seventeen, "and many other such". He explains their hostility mainly on the grounds that "they were always rivals in worth, honours and success". There follows a monotonous and depressing record of these enmities and quarrels. Here are samples:

  " Kolinus did not hate me, rather I hated him. He started a friendship with me, but continually opposed me... My love of pleasure and other habits turned Braunbaum from being a friend into an equally great enemy... I willingly incurred the hatred of Seiffer because the rest hated him too, and I provoked him although he had not harmed me. Ortholphus hated me as I hated Kolinus, although I, on the contrary, liked Ortholphus, but the rivalry between us was many-sided... I have often incensed everyone against me through my own fault: at Adelberg it was my treachery [in denouncing his schoolmates]; at Maulbronn, my offence of Graeter; at Tuebingen, my violent request for silence. Lendlinus I alienated by foolish writings, Spangenburg, by my temerity in correcting him when he was my teacher; Kleberus hated me as a rival... The reputation of my talent annoyed Rebstock and also my frivolousness... Husalius opposed my progress... With Dauber there was a secret rivalry and jealousy... My friend Jaeger betrayed my trust: he lied to me and squandered much of my money. I turned to hatred and exercised it in angry letters during the course of two years."

  And so on. The list of friends turned into enemies ends with the pathetic remark:

  "Lastly, religion divided Crellius from me, but he also broke faith; henceforth I was enraged with him. God decreed that he should be the last. And so the cause was partly in me and partly in fate. On my part anger, intolerance of bores, an excessive love of annoying and of teasing, in short of checking presumptions..."

  Even more pathetic is the one exception in the list:

  "Lorhard never communicated with me. I admired him, but he never knew this, nor did anyone else."

  Immediately following this dismal recital, Kepler put down, with add amusement, this portrait of himself – where the past tense alternates revealingly with the present 9 :

  "That man [i.e. Kepler] has in every way a dog-like nature. His appearance is that of a little lap-dog. His body is agile, wiry and well-proportioned. Even his appetites were alike: he liked gnawing bones and dry crusts of bread, and was so greedy that whatever his eyes chanced on, he grabbed; yet, like a dog, he drinks little and is content with the simplest food. His habits were similar. He continually sought the goodwill of others, was dependent on others for everything, ministered to their wishes, never got angry when they reproved him and was anxious to get back into their favour. He was constantly on the move, ferreting among the sciences, politics and private affairs, including the lowest kind; always following someone else, and imitating his thoughts and actions. He is bored with conversation, but greets visitors just like a little dog; yet when the last thing is snatched away from him, he flares up and growls. He tenaciously persecutes wrong-doers – that is, he barks at them. He is malicious and bites people with his sarcasms. He hates many people exceedingly and they avoid him, but his masters are fond of him. He has a dog-like horror of baths, tinctures and lotions. His recklessness knows no limits, which is surely due to Mars in quadrature with Mercury, and in trine with the moon; yet he takes good care of his life... [He has] a vast appetite for the greatest things. His teachers praised
him for his good dispositions, though morally he was the worst among his contemporaries... He was religious to the point of superstition. As a boy of ten years when he first read Holy Scripture ... he grieved that on account of the impurity of his life, the honour to be a prophet was denied him. When he committed a wrong, he performed an expiatory rite, hoping it would save him from punishment: this consisted in reciting his faults in public.

  In this man there are two opposite tendencies: always to regret any wasted time, and always to waste it willingly. For Mercury makes one inclined to amusements, games, and other light pleasures... Since his caution with money kept him away from play, he often played by himself. [The word for 'play', lusu, may refer here either to gambling or to sex.] It must be noted that his miserliness did not aim at acquiring riches, but at removing his fear of poverty – although, perhaps avarice results from an excess of this fear..."

  Of love, there is no mention, with two scant exceptions: the painful episode with the virgin on New Year's Eve, and an isolated obscure entry, referring to his twentieth year:

  " 1591. The cold brought on prolonged mange. When Venus went through the Seventh House, I was reconciled with Ortholphus: when she returned, I showed her to him; when she came back a third time, I still struggled on, wounded by love. The beginning of love: April 26."

  That is all. We are told no more about that nameless "she". We remember that Kepler wrote this at the age of twenty-six. It would be a harsh self-portrait even for a modern young man, reared in the age of psychiatry, anxiety, masochism and the rest; coming from a young German at the close of the sixteenth century, the product of a coarse, brutal and callow civilization, it is an astonishing document. It shows the ruthless intellectual honesty of a man whose childhood was spent in hell and who had fought his way out of it.

  With all its rambling inconsequences, its baroque mixture of sophistication and naivety, it unfolds the timeless case-history of the neurotic child from a problem-family, covered with scabs and boils, who feels that whatever he does is a pain to others and a disgrace to himself. How familiar it all is: the bragging, defiant, aggressive pose to hide one's terrible vulnerability; the lack of self-assurance, the dependence on others, the desperate need for approval, leading to an embarrassing mixture of servility and arrogance; the pathetic eagerness for play, for an escape from the loneliness which he carries with him like a portable cage; the vicious circle of accusations and self-accusations; the exaggerated standards applied to one's own moral conduct which turns life into a long series of Falls into the ninefold inferno of guilt.