In Göttingen

Abstract

In the middle of the quiet week preceding Good Friday, 1874, Gösta left Paris. The train departed at 8 p.m. The next morning he sat in the train station in Cologne and wrote a letter home as he waited for the connecting train to Kassel. He was astonished by the fact that on his first day on German soil, he’d hardly been able to speak a single sentence in German. French words kept breaking through. Images from his days in Paris whirled through his mind, and he asked himself what he had gained during that time and what he had lost. The answer was: “I don’t know.” A multitude of ideas and viewpoints that he had never before encountered had broadened his horizons, even though he hadn’t come any closer to finding any solution to the “big questions” that had plagued humanity since the dawn of time, as he put it. With a mixture of wistfulness and joy he looked back on those days. Memories of the crowds of people and the splendor of the boulevards, the solitude and silence of his meager lodgings all flooded his “restless thoughts.”