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His family heredity, childhood and early school days

Max Müller is born in Dessau, in a small Duchy called Anhalt-Dessau, on December 6, 1823. He was not born as Max Müller. He is Friedrich Maximilian Müller. He changes his name rather late, at sometime in 1847 while staying in England. He marries in England much later. On the marriage testimony, he is registered as Frederick Maximilian Müller. Why does he do this exercise with his name? Why did he try to conceal his identity as Friedrich Maximilian Müller? We do not know yet. We shall try to find out in due course.

Anhalt-Dessau is a small, prosperous and progressive Duchy. So it is said. Until 1603 Anhalt-Dessau was ruled by the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, and thereafter Anhalt-Dessau was recreated, being raised to a duchy in 1807. It was located in the north-central Europe, south of Prussia, having Zerbst in between, and between the two “provinces” of Saxony. Territory wise the Duchy was about 630 square-kilometres having a maximum 60,000 in population. Dessau was the administrative town having a population of about 3,000. Frederick Leopold IV succeeded Duke Leopold III in 1817. This is the phase not only in the “German” history when the “nobles” are systematically losing their might and economic hegemony leading to the rise of Capitalism in Europe and all that went and goes with it. Occupation of foreign lands, so-called Colonialism included. A land called Germany was not created yet.

“Müller” is a traditional surname widely spread in Germany. The “Müllers” in Germany belonged to the lower strata of the “commons” in the society. Traditionally the “Müllers” were grinders of corns and seeds of all sorts.

Friedrich Maximilian’s parents Wilhelm and Adelheide Müller also gave birth to a daughter, Auguste, on 20. April 1822. Wilhelm Müller was the sixth of seven children of Christian Leopold and of Marie Leopoldine Müller. They were poor. Christian Leopold Müller was a tailor. He was often ill at stretches. Before Wilhelm Müller was three years old, all other children had expired.

Christian Leopold Müller did not try to train Wilhelm as a tailor. In spite of his poverty, he sent his son to schools. He wanted his only surviving son Wilhelm to prosper more in life by getting education. He lost his wife while Wilhelm was fourteen years old, in 1808. A year later, Christian Leopold Müller married the widow of a well-to-do master-butcher, Marie Seelmann, so that he would be able to ensure his son Wilhelm a good education. So it is told. He succeeded.

Wilhelm Müller could begin studying literature, history, and philology at the University in Berlin when he was eighteen, in 1812. We take note that Berlin is far off from Anhalt- Dessau and more expensive than the nearer off university at Leipzig. Six months later, however, Wilhelm joined the Prussian army in the “War of Liberation” against Napoleon, who was retreating from his disastrous invasion of Russia. Within a year, Wilhelm Müller became a lieutenant at the age just over nineteen. On his tour of duty, he stayed in Brussels where he got involved in a love affair that ended badly.

Wilhelm Müller resumed his studies at the University in Berlin in 1814. He completed his studies in 1817 there. While studying he discovered his affinity to cultural activities. He visited literary circles. He wrote also his own verses. He fell in love with the poetess Louise Hensel, who encouraged him in his writer-career but did not return his affections and love. He had also joined the Berliner Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (Berlin Society for the German language). Thus he got the chance to travel to Greece, Egypt and the Middle East with the Prussian chamberlain Baron Sack. Unfortunately, because of the plague in Constantinople they stopped off in Italy. Around Easter, he parted from Baron Sack because he wanted to stay on in Italy, went to Naples and spent the summer in Rome.

On his return from Italy, he was appointed as a teacher of classic languages at Dessau in 1818. Then he took up the job of an assistant librarian in the ducal library in Dessau. A year later, he became a librarian of the small Duchy having a population of maximum 60,000 as we remember. As a librarian, however, he became a part of the administration of the Duchy though on the bottom line to begin with. He was then twenty-five.

Wilhelm Müller, being the son of a poor tailor, thus arrived at the threshold of the entry to the “high society” of Anhalt-Dessau. He made friends in circles engaged in cultural activities also outside Anhalt-Dessau. Franz Schubert will set two of his verses to music: Die Winterreise (The winter trip) and Die schöne Müllerin (The miller's beautiful wife). These two songs are played even today. Max Müller will proudly mention this in his Auld Lang Syne, published by Longmans, Green, and Co., London and Bombay in 1898 (p.42), i.e. two years before his death. Auld Lang Syne is one of our primary sources to reconstruct the real life of Friedrich Maximilian Müller.

In 1821 Wilhelm Müller, when he was 27 years old, entered into a love-match marriage with Adelheid Basedow. She was then 21 years old. Adelheid belonged to a more prominent family, a few ladder higher in the ranking of social-prestige-scale than Wilhelm, in Anhalt-Dessau. The family Basedow did not approve this love-marriage. The newly married couple got thus socially isolated.

Adelheid was granddaughter of Johann Bernard Basedow (1723-1790). He was born at Hamburg in 1723, as the son of a barber and wigmaker. However, we do not know how, he managed to come to Leipzig as a student of theology, but gave himself up entirely to the study of philology, i.e. classic-languages. In 1752 he wrote a thesis: "On the best and hitherto unknown method of teaching children of noblemen", and obtained the degree of Master of Arts from the University at Kiel in the northern part of present Germany. Why at Kiel and not at Leipzig, we do not know. The documents kept in the archives are comparatively rather meagre. He was not that important personality as Max Müller will proudly refer to Johann Bernard Basedow after hundred and eighty years in his Auld Lang Syne and in his My Autobiography published by Longmans, Green, and Co., London and Bombay.

Johann Bernard Basedow evolved to a “pedagogic reformer”. The Duke of Anhalt-Dessau, Wilhelm Leopold III welcomed him to implement his pedagogic ideas in his small Duchy. In 1774 Johann Bernard Basedow was permitted to set up a school, called Philanthropinum, in Anhalt-Dessau. “Philanthropinum” is derived from Greek and means “friend of mankind”. As simple-minded persons, we do not quite comprehend this “pedagogic reform”. We consider only facts and facts behind the facts. And, these are these.

The school opened in December 1774. The motto was, so it is said, "everything according to nature". Rich and poor were to be educated together. The curriculum was practically-based and conducted in German (rather than Latin or Greek), handicrafts were taught, there was an emphasis on games and physical exercise, and school uniform was made simple and more comfortable, so it is handed-down. The facts behind these facts are: The school was open to the children of nobles only. Yet the performances of his first pupils profoundly impressed observers. However, Johann Bernard Basedow’s heavy drinking and emotional outbursts drove away the best teachers from Philanthropinum. In 1784 Johann Bernard Basedow disconnected himself from the school, the Philanthropinum, in Anhalt-Dessau.

Adelheid’s father Ludwig Basedow (1774 – 1835) studied law at Frankfurt University. He returned to Anhalt-Dessau and joined 1807 the Anhalt-Dessau-Administration. In 1814, he then joined the Law Administration of Prussia. Anhalt-Dessau and Prussia were then having Tax disputes. Ludwig Basedow found a mutually accepted solution. Thereafter he got the job of the Head of the Administration of the small Duchy Anhalt-Dessau, still having a population of about maximum 60,000. He was later raised to the title of the lowest ranking heritable noble as Ludwig von Basedow in 1833, only two years before he expired in 1835.

Adelheid could not enjoy the social privileges of eventually being Adelheid von Basedow unlike her two elder brothers. As we recall, she had married Wilhelm Müller in 1821, long before her father was raised to the nobles in 1833. None the less, she belonged to a well to do bourgeois family in Anhalt-Dessau, already a bourgeois in the third generation. She was socially marginalized when she married Wilhelm Müller, who was just on the threshold of climbing the ladder to the class of the bourgeois, and that against the approval of her family.

Being a librarian of the Duchy Wilhelm Müller became a “Hofrat”, a title at the bottom line of a higher carrier-scale of Anhalt-Dessau administration. But he was challenged to excel. Adelheid was proud and ambitious. She pushed him. We know nothing about the education of Adelheid. She encouraged Wilhelm Müller to establish himself as a poet and as a writer and did everything she could to help her husband. Wilhelm Müller started impressively. He undertook many cultural trips together with Adelheid whenever he found a chance in his leisure times being a librarian. This was absolutely necessary to getting known in cultural circles outside Anhalt-Dessau.

Wilhelm Müller prospered. But this exercise was strenuous and exhausting as well. He would have probably become a part of the “society” in Anhalt-Dessau as a poet and as a writer. As ill luck would have it, Wilhelm Müller expired while he was just on the verge of becoming a celebrated personality as a poet and as a writer.

In July, 1827 Wilhelm Müller fell ill. Five days later, after he fell ill, he died of an attack in his sleep, just before his thirty-third birthday. Adelheid Müller was then 27 years old, Auguste 5 and Friedrich Maximilian 3 and a half. His untimely death was surrounded by rumours of suicide or murder that persisted over the years which were not favourable for the mental balance and growth of the half-orphan Auguste and Friedrich Maximilian. More over the family was being left behind in poverty without any material resources.

These are the hard facts in regard to the family and social background of Friedrich Maximilian when he is three and half years old. A lot of myths have been written and printed on and about Friedrich Maximilian Müller by Max Müller, by his British wife Georgina Max Müller, and by his son W. G. Max Müller. We take liberty of a break to look a little ahead. We reproduce here an exemplary paragraph on the family background of Friedrich Maximilian Müller which has remained undisputed as yet:

“Max Müller's mother was Adelheid, elder daughter of President von Basedow, Prime Minister of the Duchy of Dessau. She was very small, but very beautiful, clever and lively, and had a fine contralto voice; and it was from her that Max Müller inherited his intense love of music. Frau Hofrathin Müller was a highly cultivated woman, understanding English, French, and Italian perfectly. She was a woman of an eager, even passionate temperament, and her children evidently suffered early from this, as Wilhelm Müller's letters are full of warnings to her not to punish too severely, and not to expect too much from her children (babies of four and five when their father died). Her father, President von Basedow, was himself the son of a man famous in Germany in his day, the pedagogue Basedow, the forerunner of Pestalozzi and Frobel.“

This we read in: THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER, EDITED BY HIS WIFE, in two volumes, here in volume I, Longmans, Green, and Co., 39 Parternoster Row, London, New York and Bombay 1902 by Georgina Max Müller. She is Georgina Adelaide Grenfell, born 1835, marries Friedrich Maximilian Müller in 1859 and becomes Georgina Max Müller.

We have quoted the second paragraph of the very first chapter written by Georgina Max Müller. We have taken a note that the same publisher that brought out the volumes “Auld Lang Syne” as well as “My Autobiography” by Max Müller has printed these volumes by Georgina Max Müller.

“My Autobiography” by Max Müller is another primary source and those two volumes by Georgina Max Müller are our second graded primary source. In our judgement, whatever Georgina Max Müller could write about the life of Friedrich Maximilian Müller came from Max Müller or from her own wishful phantasm. In her volumes, she has included complementary documents to Auld Lang Syne and to My Autobiography by Max Müller. We shall have to judge the quality of these documents in due course.

*****

We get back to the childhood and early school days of Friedrich Maximilian at Dessau. Adelheid has to vacate their common home after the sudden death of Wilhelm Müller. She is unable to pay the rent. She first takes refuge in the house of her parents. But very soon she shifts to a ground floor flat in a tiny house as Wilhelm Müller did not leave behind any cash amount or property for his widow and for the two little kids. She has to manage with a meagre pension granted by the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau. It is the yearly sum of 100 thalers, as long as she remains a widow and until her son has completed his twenty-first year. And thereafter she was to be entitled to draw the sum of fifty thalers for the rest of her life. Here we get an indication of the minimum sum needed for a single person to survive at that period, 50 thalers per annum.

In the archives we are unable find any hints why Adelheid Müller and her two helpless kids do not continue to stay with her affluent parents. We are unable to judge what happens in those days and months. We assume that Adelheid was sidelined or even ostracized by her parental family due to her love-marriage with Wilhelm Müller. She might have been too proud to ask for material support either from her parents, or from the affluent stepmother of Wilhelm Müller. There are no indications that these two affluent families ever communicated with each other.

It is handed-down that Adelheid had earned a reputation of being a good singer with a sweet voice. But she can neither earn additional funds for the family by singing, nor can she spare time to seek an occupation. She is solely dedicated to her two children. She is proud and brave. She does not move in the so-called society.

But she sends her children regularly visiting both the families. She does not accompany them. The children cling to the mother. And the mother clings to the children. In spite of her social isolation and of her extreme poverty Adelheid has been able to educate the kids sending both Auguste and Friedrich Maximilian to schools. There are however indications that a few friends of late Wilhelm Müller came forward to assist her in financial or other crisis now and then, and not her parents, not her brothers, not her well-to-do stepmother-in-law.

*****

The childhood of Friedrich Maximilian is hard, sad and uneventful. He suffers from chronic headaches from the very childhood till he will be 37 years old. We are unable to judge finally whether Friedrich Maximilian picks up this precarious state of his health before or after the early death of his father. It is doubtless that the life of Friedrich Maximilian changes radically caused by the sudden death of his father.

Max Müller will write two years before his death in his “My Autobiography. A Fragment”, published after his death in 1900 with a preface of his son W. G. Max Müller in the same publishing house as mentioned above, on the childhood of Friedrich Maximilian. There we read (p. 53):

“My childhood at home was often very sad. My mother, who was left a widow at twenty-eight with two children, my sister and myself, was heart-broken. The few years of her married life had been most bright and brilliant. My father was a rising poet, ... Contemporaries and friends of father, particularly Baron Simolin, a very intimate friend, who spent the Christmas of 1825 in our house, ... Anyhow, my father, whose salary was minute, seems to have been able to enjoy the few years of his married life in great comfort. The thought of saving money, however, seems never to have entered his poetical mind, and after the sudden death, due to paralysis of the heart, it was found that hardly any provision had been made for his family. Even the life insurance, which is obligatory on every civil servant, and the pension granted by the duke, gave my mother but a very small income, fabulously small, when one considers that she had to bring up two children on it. It has been a riddle to me ever since how she was able to do it.”

Friedrich Maximilian is marked by poverty from his early childhood. He is also socially isolated between two more or less affluent families. His mother is disinherited from her parental family for all practical purposes. We do not find any indication whether Adelheid Müller ever inherited her legitimate portion of her parental holdings and wealth. All these must have been depressing also for Friedrich Maximilian. None the less, “Max Müller” will write later in his autobiography (p. 53 ff):

“On my mother’s side my relatives were more civilized, and they had but little social intercourse with my grandmother and her relatives. My mother’s father was von Basedow, the president, that is Prime Minister of the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, a position in which he was succeeded by his oldest son, my uncle. He was the first man in the town; the Duke and he really ruled the Duchy exactly as they pleased. ... My grandfather’s father again was the famous reformer of public education in Germany. He (1723–1790) ... migrated to Dessau, to become the founder of the ‘Philanthropinum’, and at the same time the path-breaker for men such as Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and Froebel (1782-1852). ...I was often told that I took after my mother’s family, whatever that may mean, and this was certainly the case in outward appearance, though I hope not in temper. My great-grandfather, the Pedagogue as he was called, was a friend of Goethe’s, and is mentioned in his poems.”

*****

The life of Friedrich Maximilian would have taken a different course if Adelheid could have left Dessau after the sudden death of her husband, Wilhelm Müller. But there is no way out. He has to live with his mother and sister in a tiny ground floor flat in a tiny house at Dessau, which is then a small town having a population of about 3,000. Adelheid is now 27 years old. She never thought of marriage again. She decides to live for her children only. She does her best looking after that both the kids do well at schools. She knows that education was the only way out, at least for Friedrich Maximilian, to do well, to prosper in life.

It is not easy for Friedrich Maximilian in the school. Dessau is a small town. His schoolmates and the teachers know all about his deprivations. He is half orphan, isolated from both of the family lines, poor, a “mummy’s darling” and partly disable being regularly attacked by severe headaches. There are very little positive aspects in his life to talk about with his schoolmates. There are only limited options left for him not to fall into depression: excel in learning, excel in sports, and learn talking on imaginative remote themes, conceived or exaggerated.

We have not found any indication that Friedrich Maximilian ever participated in any sport activities. Due to his chronic headaches, he cannot excel in learning either. He practices talking entertainingly. To begin with glorifying the fame of his father that is always a theme at home also and conceiving fantastic stories.

Max Müller will describe this period of Friedrich Maximilian’s life at Dessau and his situation there in “My Autobiography” (p. 90), written, as mentioned, at the age of around 75, far better than we ever could have done going through historical records in the archives:

“The more I think about that distant, now very distant past, the more I feel how, without being aware of it, my whole character was formed by it. The unspoiled primitiveness of life at Dessau as it was when I was at school there till the age of twelve would be extremely difficult to describe it in all its details. Everybody seemed to know everybody, and everything about everybody. Everybody knew that he was watched, and gossip, in the best sense of the word, ruled supreme in the little town. Gossip was in fact, public opinion with all its good and bad features. Still the result was that no one could afford to lose caste, and that everybody behaved as well as he could.”

As already indicated, several adverse factors could have lead Friedrich Maximilian to a traumatic life which he has to tackle from the very early childhood: we recall, the sudden death of his father, negligence by families of both sides, depressions of Adelheid, their social isolation, Adelheid’s ambitions, poverty and his severe migraines. Friedrich Maximilian has to cope with the adverse situation and to develop strategies. He makes the best of it. His basic personality is being set accordingly. He does it in his own way. We shall come along to “his way” in due courses. Presently we read in “My Autobiography” by Max Müller on the early childhood of Friedrich Maximilian (p. 52 - 57):

“My sister and I were always terrified when we were sent to visit her, for with her dishevelled grey hair, her thin white face, and her piercing eyes, she was to us the old grandmother or the witch of Grimm’s stories; and the language she used was such that, if we repeated at home, we were severely reprimanded. She knew very little about my father, but her memory about her first husband and about her own youth and childhood was very clear, though not always edifying. Her stories about ghosts, witches, ogres, knickers, and the whole of that race were certainly enough to frighten a child and some of them clung to me for a very long time, ... On my mother’s side my relations, who were all high in the public service, my grandfather, as I said, being the Duke’s chief minister, made life more easy and pleasant b for us; but for many years my mother never went into society, and our society consisted of members of our own family only. All I remember of my mother at that time was that she took her two children day after day to the beautiful Gottesacker (God’s Acre), where she stood for hours at our father’s grave, and sobbed and cried. ... At home the atmosphere was certainly depressing to a boy. I heard and thought more about death than about life, though I knew little of course of what life or death meant. I had but few pleasures, and my chief happiness was to be with my mother, I shared her grief without understanding much about it. She was passionately devoted to her children and I was passionately fond of her. What there was left of life to her, she gave it to us, she lived for us only, and tried very hard not to deprive our childhood of all brightness. She was certainly most beautiful, and quite different from all other ladies at Dessau, not only in the eyes of her son, but it seemed to me, of everybody. ... As far as I can recollect, I was never so happy as when I could be with her. She read so much to us that I was quite satisfied, and saw perhaps less of my young friends than I ought. When my mother said she wished to die, and to be with our father, I feel sure that my sister and I were only anxious that she should take us with her, for there were few golden chains that bound us as yet to this life.”

Is it not a morbid atmosphere for children? This atmosphere will continue until Friedrich Maximilian becomes 12 years old. Thereafter he will be sent to a school at Leipzig. How he fares in the school in Dessau? There are no significant indications. Friedrich Maximilian enters the “Gymnasium” (High School) at Dessau when he is six years old. “Gymnasiums” then had 13 classes.

Georgina Max Müller reports (p. 6) in her book: “His school reports were not remarkable, and certainly at that time he gave little evidence of the power that was in him. ‘Writing bad’ was the almost invariable report, and in later years he often lamented the small pains taken by the writing master to improve it.”

We do not know more about the real child-life of Friedrich Maximilian at Dessau that constituted his basic personality. We assume, poverty and his migraine have played an important role in his basic personality, in his childhood and in his early school days.

A lot has been published on “Max Müller” later. His biographers, including his wife, Georgina Max Müller, and his son, W. G. Max Müller, have totally left out the background that constituted his basic personality. It has even been totally ignored that there is the chapter two in the “My Autobiography” which is titled “Childhood at Dessau”, p. 45 – 94. There we read in the pages 65 ff memorizing the school life of Friedrich Maximilian at Dessau:

“I remember a number of small events in my school-life at Dessau ... The influence which music exercised on my mind ... My work at school and at home was not too heavy; I was fond of it and very fond of books. ... Paper was so dear that one had to be very sparing in its use. Every margin and cover was scribbled over before it was thrown away, and I fest often so happened by the scarcity of paper that I gladly accepted a set of copybooks instead of any other present that I might have asked for on my birthday or at Christmas. I am sorry to say I have had to suffer all my life from the inefficiency of our writing master or may be from the fact that my thoughts were too quick for my pen. In other subjects I did well, but though I was among the first in each class, I was by no means cleverer than other boys. ... I feel sure I could have done a great deal more at school than I did, but it was partly my music and partly my incessant headaches that interfered with my school work. ... I was fortunate at school. I could hold my own with the boys, and as to the masters, several of them had known my father or had been his pupils, and they took a personal interest in me. I remember more particularly one young master who was very kind to me, and took me home for private lessons and for giving me some good advice.”

There is not much more about Friedrich Maximilian’s real childhood in the chapter “Childhood at Dessau”. Information on his childhood and on his school life at Dessau is unsystematically touched in this chapter now and then. This scattered information is packed between Max Müller’s uncalled for reflections on “God and the world”; on the Jews in Anhalt-Dessau and on persons, he met during the years of his life that have nothing to do with Friedrich Maximilian’s “Childhood at Dessau”. It is an unsystematic narration full of phantasm than an autobiography describing his childhood. We have taken a note of this aspect in his writings in “My Autobiography” and the volumes of “Auld Lang Syne” and we shall keep our eyes wide open.

We put together the scattered information in pages chronologically. Max Müller remembers Friedrich Maximilian’s school days in his autobiography (p. 62–63):

“At school our religious teaching was chiefly historical and moral. ... Some, by no means all, children of Roman Catholic and Jewish parents were allowed to be absent from religious lessons. ... If Jews or Roman Catholics wished for any special religious instructions it was given by their own priests or Rabbis, and was given without any interference on the part of the Government. ... Thus we grew up from our earliest youth, being taught to look upon Christianity as an historical fact, on Christ and on His disciples as historical characters, on the Old and New Testaments as real historical books. Though we did not understand as yet the deeper meaning of Christ and of His words, we had at least nothing to unlearn in later times ...“

His memories of the childhood of Friedrich Maximilian written a little before he will die are yet remarkable. We find on pages 67-69 of his autobiography:

“A large number of Jews had been received at Dessau by a former duke; ...he stipulated that they should only settle in certain streets. These streets were by no means the worst streets of the town; on the contrary, they showed greater comfort and hardly any of the squalor which disgraced the Jewish quarters in other towns in Germany. As children we were brought up without any prejudice against the Jews, though we had, no doubt, a certain feeling that they were tolerated only, and were not quite on the same level with ourselves. We also felt the religious difficulty sometimes very strongly. Were the Jews not the murderers of Christ? And had they not said: ‘the blood be on us and on our children’? ...I knew several Jewish families, and received much kindness from them as a boy. Many of these families were wealthy, but they never displayed their wealth, and in consequence excited no envy. All that is changed now. The children of the Jews who formerly lived in a very quiet style at Dessau, now occupy the best houses, indulge in most expensive tastes, and try in every way to outshine their non-Jewish neighbours. They buy themselves, and, when they can, stipulate for stars and orders as rewards for successful financial operations, carried out with the money of princely personages. Hence the revulsion of feeling all over Germany, or what is called Anti-Semitism, which has assumed not only a social, but also a political significance. I doubt whether there is anything religious in it, as there was when we were boys. ...One cannot blame the Jews or any other speculator for using their opportunities, but they must not complain either if they excite envy, and if that envy assumes in the end a dangerous character.”

On page 77 ff we read:

“The very idea of death never came near me till my grandfather died (1835), but even then I was only about twelve years old, and though I had seen much of him, particularly during the years that my mother lived again in his house, yet he was too old to take much share in his grandchildren’s amusements. ...He made no secret that he cared more for the son of his son who was the heir, and was to perpetuate the name of Basedow, than for the son of his daughter.”

As indicated earlier Adelheid is keen maintaining her social duties. She sends her children to visit both families. She does not visit them. What Max Müller lets us know in the following sub-sentence is puzzling: “particularly during the years that my mother lived again in his house”. We keep this small puzzle in mind.

When Friedrich Maximilan has just passed twelve, Adelheid sends him to one Professor Carus at Leipzig, a friend of late Wilhelm Müller. It seems, Adelheid loses control over him and feels that he needed the guidance of a male authority. So it is handed-down. Professor Carus admits him to the best school at Leipzig. His son Victor is of the same age and visits the same school. We turn again to Max Müller‘s autobiography, to the chapter “Childhood at Dessau”, p. 79:

“As far back as I can remember I was a martyr to headaches. No doctor could help me, no one seemed to know the cause. It was a migraine, and though I watched carefully I could not trace it to any fault of mine. The idea that it came from overwork was certainly untrue. It came and went, and if it was one day on the right side it was always the next time on the left, even though I was free from it sometimes for a week or a fortnight, or even longer. It was strange also that it seldom lasted beyond one day, and that I always felt particularly strong and well the day after I had been prostrate. For prostrate I was, and generally quite unable to do anything. I had to lie down and try to sleep. After a good sleep I was well, but when the pain had been very bad I found that sometimes the very skin of my forehead had peeled off. In this way I often lost two or three days in a week and as my work had to be done somehow, it was often done anyhow, and I was scolded and punished, really without any fault of mine own.”

All in all, the child-life of Friedrich Maximilian at Dessau has been depressive which demanded strategies to stand the adversities he faces. Max Müller closes this chapter in his Autobiography with the words, p. 92/93:

“My narrow Dessau views became a little widened when I went to school at Leipzig; still more when I spent two years and a half at the University of Leipzig, and afterwards at Berlin. Still, during all this time I saw but little of what is called society, I only knew of people whom I loved and of people whom I disliked. There was no room as yet for indifferent people, whom one tolerates and is civil to without caring whether one sees them again or not. Of the simplest duties of society also I was completely ignorant. No one ever told me what to say and what to do or what not to say and what not to do. What I felt I said, what I thought right I did. There was, in fact, in my small native town very little that could be called society.

*****

We have put together the factors that engraved the basic personality of Friedrich Maximilian at Anhalt-Dessau mostly in the words written by Max Müller. We have not commented or analysed contradictions in them or on Friedrich Maximilian’s internalized strategies to compensate his agonies experienced in child-life, nor on repressions exercised by social facts. We feel we should not conceal our conclusions before we close this chapter, i.e. “Childhood at Dessau” as it has been chaptered by Max Müller.

As mentioned earlier, the surname Müller is extremely frequent all over Germany. Friedrich Maximilian does not feel comfortable to be a “Müller”. His paternal grandfather was a poor tailor. His grandfather marries a relatively rich widow of a master butcher to provide education for his son Wilhelm, the only child alive out of seven children. Well, a butcher become quite well to do in terms of money, but is not considered to be a respected occupation in Dessau or elsewhere either.

As a child, he identifies more with the family of his mother and glorifies “achievements” of his father. Thus, he represses the background of being a “Müller” and all that goes with it. We recall that Wilhelm Müller dies early at the age of 33. He becomes a schoolteacher when he passed his 25. Shortly later, he becomes the librarian of the small Duchy Anhalt-Dessau. He does not have much time to excel as a writer and a poet. Yet we find the following lines (Autobiography, p. 47-48) in the beginning pages of the same chapter “Childhood at Dessau”.

“There is curious race of people, who, as soon as a man of any note dies, are ready to found anything for him – a monument, a picture, a school, a prize, a society – to keep alive his memory. Of course societies want presidents, members of council, committees, secretaries &c., and at last, subscriptions also. Thus it has happened that the name of founder (Gründer) has assumed particularly in Germany, a perfume by no means sweet. Those who are asked to subscribe to such testimonials know how disagreeable it is to decline to give at least their name, deeply as they feel that in giving it they are offending against the rules of historical perspective. I should not say that my father was one of the great poets of Germany, though Heine, no mean critic, declared that he placed his lyric poetry next to that of Goethe. ... His poems became popular in the true sense of the word, and there are some which the people in the street sing even now without being aware of the name of their author. Schubert’s compositions also have contributed much to the wide popularity of his Schöne Müllerin and his Winterreise, ... In the company of Mendelsohn, the philosopher and of F. Schneider, the composer, a monument of my father in the principal street of his native town, and before the school in which he had been a pupil and a teacher, could hardly seen out of place.”

Well, it is more than a “Freudian slip”, it is more than “going the extra mile”; it is more than “bigger, nicer, better”. We keep in mind; whatever we know about the childhood of Friedrich Maximilian, we know a little from the archives, from “My Autobiography” written by Max Müller in 1898–99, a little before he dies and those two volumes written by Georgina Max Müller. Usually narrated facts as memories are not checked, if it is palatably presented. We do read carefully and check published memories. Max Müller obviously commanded over this art of telling tales. In Germany, there is an old proverb: “Kein Meister ist vom Himmel gefallen” (No master falls from Heaven). He seems to have learnt this art right from his very childhood.

Exchange of surname is possible today. At that time at Dessau Friedrich Maximilian does not know that he will later become Max Müller. If we are ready to follow Max Müller, then Friedrich Maximilian has compensated his being a “Müller” in his own way. He identifies with the family of his mother in spite of severe neglects. Max Müller refers back to the grandfather of his mother, though she is born ten years after her grandfather had expired. The reason is simple. Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724 –1790) was a known as an educationist. Johann Bernhard Basedow‘s descendants, the grandfather and granduncle of Friedrich Maximilian are not such known personalities.

Max Müller tells little about his own grandfather Ludwig Basedow (1774 – 1835). Naturally, he is proud that his grandfather earned a heritable title of a noble “Von” as late as in 1833, when Friedrich Maximilian was just ten years old. Max Müller does not tell us anything about Friedrich Maximilian‘s relationship with his uncle either. He tells us only that (p. 53):

“On my mother’s side my relatives were more civilized, and they had but little social intercourse with my grandmother and her relatives. My mother’s father was von Basedow, the president, that is Prime Minister of the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, a position in which he was succeeded by his oldest son, my uncle.”

Well. Anhalt-Dessau was one of the smallest Duchies neighbouring Prussia having a population of at most 60,000 only. His mother’s father, “von Basedow”, was not “the president, that is Prime Minister of the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau” but simply the head administrator. In the memory of Max Müller the head administrator of one of the smallest Duchies in Germany becomes the “Prime Minister of the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau.”

On page 56 he wants us to note: “My mother’s relations, who were all high in the public service, my grandfather, as I said, being the Duke’s chief Minister, made life more easy and pleasant for us; but for many years my mother never went into society, and our society consisted of members of our own family only.” Is it not amazing that Max Müller does not even indicate that his mother, his sister and he himself has just been neglected by his “mother’s relations”?

Remembering his childhood at Dessau Max Müller fails to develop a sense of looking at realities. As Friedrich Maximilian he obviously suffered from poverty, but is unable to comprehend the cause of the poverty. Though, as Friedrich Maximilian, he was not considered to be a part of his “mother’s relations, who were all high in the public service”, he wishes to have belonged to “Basedows” while writing his “Autobiography”. In his fantasy, he is actually a “von Basedow”, almost a “noble”. In his wishful thinking he is nearer to the nobles rather than being a “Müller”. To what extent he identified himself with the Basedows is reflected in his remark (p. 53): “I was often told that I took after my mother’s family, whatever that may mean, and this was certainly the case in outward appearance, though I hope not in temper.”

Almost at the end of this chapter of ours, we repeat a quote from “My Autobiography”:

“My childhood at home was often very sad. My mother, who was left a widow at twenty-eight with two children, my sister and myself, was heart-broken. The few years of her married life had been most bright and brilliant. My father was a rising poet, ... Contemporaries and friends of father, particularly Baron Simolin, a very intimate friend, who spent the Christmas of 1825 in our house.”

In 1825, Friedrich Maximilian is two years old. How can Max Müller remember in 1898 that “Baron Simolin, a very intimate friend”, had “spent the Christmas of 1825 in our house”?

We apologise taking a little aside and looking a little ahead. Neither Max Müller nor Friedrich Maximilian in his letters to his mother has ever mentioned this Baron Simolin with his first name. Simolins are known as “Freiherren” since the 17th Century. There are many “Simolins”, having at least three lineages. Max Müller uses the technique to relate himself to many celebrated surnames and conceals the first names, as we shall see also later. It is a hollow technique to suggest that he came along with almost all celebrated persons of his time.

We are unable to ascertain whether Max Müller has been unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality or Friedrich Maximilian had evolved systematically to a Max Müller as we are experiencing by his memories on the life of Friedrich Maximilian which are far from truths. We shall have to look into evidences.

We close this chapter here ascertaining that all along his schools life in Dessau Friedrich Maximilian could not excel due to his poverty, due to his chronic headaches, due to his humble social background and due to his social deprivations. He tried to compensate his sufferings and deprivations by creating daydreams, inventing fantastic episodes, developing aspirations that could not be related to the reality. These ways of compensations are not unusual.