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Updated: May 23, 2025
I was now to learn what circumstances I should find in my new relations, and in what way they would prove teachers to me. I was to be placed at school in Kottbus, at that time still a little manufacturing town in the Mark. My mother did not venture to keep me in Berlin during the critical years now approaching. Kottbus was not far away, and knowing that I was backward in the science that Dr.
I felt that she regarded me as a man, and she afterwards confessed how great her hopes were at that time, especially as Professor Tzschirner had encouraged her to cherish them. After returning to Kottbus from the Christmas vacation I plunged headlong into work, and as I exerted all my powers I made rapid progress.
Nay, though only nineteen, I even considered whether I should not unite her destiny with mine, and formally ask her hand. My father had offered himself to my mother at the same age. In Kottbus I was treated with the respect due to a man, but at home I was still "the boy," and the youngest of us three "little ones." Ludo, as a lieutenant, had a position in society, while I was yet a schoolboy.
Even in the second year of my stay at Kottbus I went to every dance given on the estates in the neighbourhood and visited many a delightful home in the town. Then there were long walks sometimes with Dr. Boltze and my school-mates, sometimes with friends, and often alone.
I was always reminded of the state of affairs immediately after my arrival; for during the first years of my school life at Kottbus no one was permitted to enter the city without a paper proving identity, which was demanded by constables at the exits of railway stations or in the yards of post-houses.
When they left me twilight was gathering, but the happiness I had just enjoyed shone radiantly around me, and I lived over for the second time all the delights I had experienced. But the nearer I approached Kottbus the more frequently arose the fear that the French teacher might make our meeting the cause of an accusation.
Poor woman! She had made such careful inquiries before sending me here; and what a dangerous soil for a precocious boy just entering the years of youth was this manufacturing town and an institution so badly managed as the Kottbus School!
At the close of the session I was standing in the square in front of the school when Professor Tzschirner approached, and I asked his permission to leave school that very day. A smile of satisfaction flitted over his manly, intellectual face, and he granted my request at once. So my Kottbus school-days ended, and, unfortunately, in a way unlike what I had hoped.
In 1846 he parted from his affinity, who survived the separation little more than a year, and retired with a heavy heart to his paternal castle of Branitz, near Kottbus, where he occupied himself in planting a park and laying out gardens.
Of course, all this could not remain permanently concealed from the higher authorities. The old head-master was suddenly retired, and one of the best educators summoned in his place man who quickly succeeded in making the decaying Kottbus School one of the most excellent in all Prussia.
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