My Parents
"I have often heard that my mother, Regine Liebich, was considered a handsome girl in her youth"
"I have often heard that my mother, Regine Liebich, was considered a handsome girl in her youth"
My father, Andreas, was an honest and fairly prosperous farmer who, like me, suffered from the affliction of being unable to witness an injustice without expressing his indignation, and not seldom his bitterness. His acquaintances therefore called him a hothead, while certain noblemen called him a troublesome man who had to be put down—which was natural enough, and was bound to succeed. Just one example of his impetuousness!
I never knew any of my grandparents, but I did know a great-grandfather on my father’s side, a man of more than ninety years, known simply as “old Jobst.”(1) He would often walk nearly an hour to bring me, his little great-grandson, a basketful of early cherries. He was somewhat suspected of heresy because he did not accept all the pastor’s priestly pretensions with the required surrender of his reason, and in particular entertained doubts about the justice of certain tithe demands. In the parish, old Jobst was known for taking a stand whenever disputes arose. When he died, the family modestly left the arrangements for the funeral to the pastor, without choosing the text or hymns themselves.
The pastor had nothing but hymns of punishment sung, among them the well-known “O Eternity, thou word of thunder,”(2) and delivered, for edification and deterrence, a veritable gallows sermon. My father, who was among the mourners, reacted to the sermon by snatching the Spanish cane of an elderly relative and hurrying with it to the vestry. He would certainly have given the preacher a very tangible reply had he not been restrained. “Sir,” he cried loudly, “if only you and your family are as honest and good as the dead man and his family, you may be satisfied. He could not and would not fill your wide, insatiable sleeves; that was the whole of his godlessness.” The affair led to proceedings before the consistory,(3) which cost my father a great deal of money. The pastor could easily pocket his reprimand; the money my father had to pay was not so easily found.
A sturdy charcoal-burner’s faith—a simple, unquestioning belief—does not therefore seem to have been characteristic of my father’s side of the family. The reverend gentleman of our name at Frankfurt am Main,(4) who wrote a learned tractatus de SS trinitate(5) at the beginning of the previous century, can therefore hardly have belonged to our family. That my mother would have liked to see me as a man of God in the pulpit was an ordinary weakness of her sex; but she soon abandoned the idea when she saw my decided aversion and the various bad clergymen in the neighbourhood. I have often heard that my mother, Regine Liebich, was considered a beautiful girl in her youth.