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, fairly well-to-do farmer who, like me, suffered from the affliction of being unable to see an injustice without reacting with indignation, and not seldom with bitterness. His acquaintances therefore called him a hot-headed fellow, and certain noblemen called him a restless head who must be suppressed; which was natural enough and had also to succeed. Only one example of his vehemence!
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) To me, his little great-grandson, he would often bring, from nearly an hour’s distance, a basket full of early cherries. This man bore some suspicion of heresy, because he did not receive the whole priestly apparatus with the due captivity of his reason, and especially harboured doubts about the correctness of certain of the Ten Commandments. In the parish, old Jobst was regarded as the dissenting voice when disputes arose. When he died, the family modestly left the funeral arrangements to the pastor, without choosing texts and hymns themselves.
The pastor had nothing but songs of punishment sung, among them the well-known “O Eternity, thou word of thunder,”(2) and for edification and deterrence delivered a true gallows-sermon. My father, among the mourners, in the first effect of the sermon seized the cane of an old relative, rushed with it before the vestry, and would certainly have delivered the preacher a very tangible reply, had he not been held back. “Sir,” he cried in a loud voice, “if only you and your family are as honest and good people as the deceased and his family, you may be content. He could not, and would not, fill your wide insatiable sleeves; that was his whole godlessness.” A consistory trial arose from this,(3) which cost my father much money. The reprimand the pastor received was easily pocketed; but the money it cost my father was not so easily paid.
A coarse charcoal-burner’s faith thus seems not to have been the business of my father’s line; which is why the reverend gentleman at Frankfurt-on-the-Main(4) of our name, who at the beginning of the last century wrote a learned tractatus de SS trinitate,(5) hardly belonged to our family. That my mother would gladly have seen me as a man of God in the pulpit was an ordinary weakness of her sex; but she soon gave it up 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 handsome girl in her youth.