Wilhelm von Humboldt: Leben und Forschen mit der Parkinson-Krankheit

I'd like to welcome you to the second round of our small Prussia Salon. This year's Salon Sophie Charlotte is looking for answers to the questions about the forms of measuring and shaping life with its guests under the title Still Life is Life. We had the impression that, especially in times of pandemic, climate crisis and war, the fragility of life is particularly clear and the need to discuss these issues is growing more and more. Our second round in the Prussia Salon on this topic will take us back to the 19th century, to a world in which disease and death are much more present than the sources and stories we normally read about today. Ute Tintemann will now lead us in her lecture to Wilhelm Humboldt and in Wilhelm Humboldt's life and research ask how it actually went under the condition that he was Parkinson's disease. This is a circumstance that is almost never told, because it is so poorly integrated into hero stories. But if you know that, it turns out that you are even more impressed than before. Ute Tintemann originally studied general and German linguistics and Italian philology. From there she got into a larger research project on Humboldt's writings on linguistics. This is the project that gives us the backstage version. Basically, she tells us backstage about the emergence of these research works. Meanwhile, she no longer works in the research projects herself, but is a scientific reference for the interdisciplinary work groups and initiatives here and I think she gets a lot more backstage information from research than she usually gets from the sources in her research projects. That means that at some point she will probably write a making-of story in her memoirs. I am very happy that you will give us a lecture, Ms. Tintemann, and I wish you a lot of fun. Thank you very much, Ms. Schmidt, for the nice introduction. I've been here at the Academy for a long time. I was here before Wilhelm von Humboldt. Before I did research on Wilhelm von Humboldt, I was already here. But when we edited Wilhelm von Humboldt's writings on linguistics, I saw it for the first time. The evidence, his manuscripts, that he lived under Parkinson. Wilhelm von Humboldt died on April 8, 1835, in his 67th year of life. About two weeks before his death, on March 22, Alexander von Humboldt wrote in a letter to Carl Josias von Bunsen about the health condition of his brother. Quote, My brother's condition has made me quite sad again for a few weeks. His muscle weakness and the curvature of his back increase more and more and produce an annoying impoliteness, which gives the saddest look. Although Humboldt was already very ill at that time, he continued to work on his linguistics, as Alexander found admiringly. Quote, His mental strength is so incredible that I have read him over 600 pages of manuscripts on the philosophy of language in general. It is one of the most successful essays he has ever written. The manuscript mentioned here on the philosophy of language in general is the so-called Kavi introduction. That is, the text on the diversity of human language and its influence on the spiritual development of the human race. It formed the linguistic-philosophical introduction to Humboldt's three-volume main work about the Kavi language on the island of Java, on which he worked continuously between 1828 and 1835. At the time of his death, the pressure plates of the First Band were already in place. The so-called Kavi work was published by Humboldt's secretary, Karl Eduard Buschmann, on behalf of Alexander between 1836 and 1839. The muscle weakness and crumpling of the back described by Alexander were only the most visible physical limitations due to Parkinson's disease When I received this lecture, it became very clear to me how much strength and self-discipline Humboldt had to have to continue his linguistic studies, which he had been working on since 1820, despite the severe disease breakdown. I always had my colleague Manfred Ringmacher in mind, who had worked on Humboldt's edition of the linguistic-scientific writings for much longer than I did. Manfred Ringmacher also suffered from Parkinson's disease and was already very restricted before his retirement in his movements, despite the medication. He died on January 5th of this year. This lecture was dedicated to him. Wilhelm von Humboldt is the first to describe the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in great detail to himself. However, he did not write a continuous report. Much of his self-description can be found in letters, most of which are addressed to his young girlfriend Charlotte Diede and to his daughter Gabriele. However, Humboldt did not know that the symptoms he observed were one and the same disease. In other words, Humboldt could not know that he was suffering from a neurodegenerative disease whose course could only be medically limited since the 1960s. Individual symptoms, such as tremor or leaning forward posture, were known since antiquity, but they could not be classified as one and the same disease. The main symptoms were first described in 1817 by the English doctor James Parkinson in his essay On the Shaking Palsy. Parkinson described this neurological disease as shaking. It was not until the mid-19th century, however, that the knowledge of Parkinson's disease spread. The doctor Jean-Martin Chacot, who in 1876 was also the name-giver of Parkinson's disease. Roughly speaking, Parkinson's disease is characterized by a death of the nerve cells in the brain responsible for the transport of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which in turn is responsible for the control of movement. The death of the nerve cells leads to a lack of dopamine, which in turn leads to characteristic symptoms such as tremor, muscle stiffness and slowed movements. So far my attempt at an explanation from the patient perspective of a linguist. Humboldt himself described the symptoms of the disease as premature age. On September 7, 1830, he wrote to his young friend Charlotte Dede, quote, By the way, you look at my age much more than other people of the same age. And I am, but less mature than it is in my and a much older age. Also absent, you can see this in my handwriting, whose unevenness and firmness does not come from the eyes at all, but comes alone from the hand. This is, however, a consequence of the years, but that it came so suddenly, that is alone the consequence of the death of my wife. Not only at this point, but also in other letters he dated the beginning of the complaints he called age-weakness to the time after the very painful death of his on March 26, 1829 deceased wife Caroline. But the disease probably started several years earlier. When exactly is difficult to say, because Humboldt, in the letters to the death of Caroline, although very often referred to the poor health of his wife, but not to his own. But notes of his wife in letters suggest that the disease must have broken out around 1824. So Caroline von Humboldt wrote on December 4, 1826 to her friend Friederike Brun, quote, Humboldt is only unchanged in spirit, in serious thinking and research, but his health has suffered a bit for some years. And on March 27, 1827, to Alexander von Rennenkamp, quote, But Humboldt is still so calm, I can't help but wonder that his health needs more consideration for three years. Caroline von Humboldt did not explain the physical changes observed any closer. But with today's knowledge that the disease begins slowly and that it is still difficult to correctly interpret certain initial symptoms, one would interpret the deterioration of her husband's health observed by her as a possible beginning of Parkinson's disease. Humboldt was 57 years old in 1824, so that it would also fit from the time that Parkinson's disease usually begins between the 55th and 60th year of life. As a first sign of Parkinson's disease, changes in the writing also apply. After that, I also looked at several handwritten testimonies from Humboldt's linguistic background from that time. On this slide you can see Humboldt's normal handwriting. Before the outbreak of the disease. This page is dated around 1820, when Humboldt conducted his research on the native languages of America. This is an excerpt from his Mexican grammar. Humboldt wrote, as here, almost always with Latin letters. He only used the German current writing for letters to German-speaking addressees. He had, as you can see, a very uniform and very well readable handwriting. Slight changes, however, can be seen in the contrast of two other texts. To give you an overall impression, I will first show you in the overview on the left the beginning of Humboldt's text Testimony of the Spaniards. It was printed in 1821, and was only published by Bernard Huych in the Book of History and Early History of the Basque and the Basque Language. By the way, the volume will be presented here in the Academy at noon on June 2nd. In addition to this excerpt, I have put the page of a draft of the 1827 printed Lettre à Monsieur Abel Remusard, a text written in French from 1826-1827. You can see, especially with this enlargement, that his handwriting from 1826-1827 appears smaller than before. The imprint of the feathers appears more irregular, and the writing appears more fleeting. The lines are also no longer kept exactly. However, the picture is not entirely clear, especially since the quality of the feathers and the paper could have played a role in the writing. But since changes can already be seen, this could be interpreted as a first symptom. I will come back to the changes in the handwriting later. After the death of his wife on March 6th, 1829, Humboldt was referred to as, quote, unfortunate, who could do nothing good again, he withdrew almost completely from social life. He spent most of his time in his castle in Tegel. There he had buried his wife in the garden and had the abyss of a stela of the goddess Bess of hope built over the grave. In the following years, he also stayed in Tegel in winter, which the family had previously mainly brought to Berlin. In the following years, Humboldt preferred to be alone. As he wrote to Charlotte Dede on September 7th, 1830, quote, Humboldt describes that he met friends who he had met at least three or four times in the one and a half years after his wife's death, but Humboldt was less alone than he wished, and as it sometimes seems when you read his letters. On the one hand, his daughter Caroline was always with him. On the other hand, King Friedrich Wilhelm III took some measures to distract his chamberlain from his pain over the loss of his wife. So he first moved Humboldt's son, son-in-law August Hedemann, to Berlin, so that the daughter Adelheid could often be with him. His brother Alexander also visited him as often as he could. In addition, Friedrich Wilhelm III first transferred Humboldt's commission to the establishment of the museum, i.e. the present-day Alte Museum, to which, quote, Humboldt did not deny this task, and on the day of the museum's opening on August 3, 1830, the king rewarded him with the Black Eagle Order, an award that Wilhelm was very happy about. The king also called him back to the state council, from which Humboldt had been expelled in 1819 when he resigned from the state service. The work in the state council was, in its introduction to the letter exchange between Alexander von Humboldt and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, described as a work-intensive honorary office. The state council was, I quote Berbel Holz, the highest advisory authority of the king. It had to assess all drafts for laws, regulations, constitutional and administrative norms and to express competence conflicts between ministries before they were submitted to the king for signature. The state council met about every 14 days, which for Wilhelm von Humboldt meant a one-and-a-half-hour carriage ride from Tegel to the city and back. However, he succeeded in this office with greater certainty until 1834. In contrast to his brother Alexander, who, according to Berbel Holz, should have succeeded in this task in the 1840s, but did not. When Wilhelm saw this office as his physical suffering was already very advanced, Henriette Herz commented in June 1833 in a letter to Alexander von Rennenkamp, I quote, Tremor described by Henriette Herz as one of the visible main symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Humboldt had already reported to his daughter Gabriele a year earlier. I quote, He wrote to his daughter Gabriele on January 14, 1832, in addition to how much his age weakness was hindering him in his daily activities. You don't believe, dear child, how physically I feel an age that I don't even have yet. I would like to call it helplessness as a weakness, because I can walk, climb stairs and mountains very well. But the rest, putting on clothes, eating, making a button, closing a drawer, opening a place in a book, everything takes six times as long as usual. That's why I need to do little all day. Humboldt describes here very precisely the slowed down movements, the so-called bradykinesis, which, as we know today, is another main symptom of Parkinson's disease. Humboldt, on the other hand, suspected that the back pain would help with the incision of the back. On September 20, 1834, Humboldt finally wrote to Nicolaus that he had been unwell without actual illness for several weeks and that he could not come to the city for the meetings of the state council. But only on February 5, 1835, he asked to appear only occasionally at the meetings. He also defended himself against rumors spread in the newspapers that he was very unwell. Quote Humboldt, I am not a sufferer, but rather lead with my children and lonely between work and dreams in memory of the past and a cheerful thought of the future, a quiet, happy life. This quote is in so far typical for Humboldt when he looked at his age suffering over all the years from his health condition and in recent years also from his mental condition. He wrote very often until the end that he was basically fine and that he was very well, to put it in his own words. For outsiders, the situation was opposite to how one can take away another letter from Henriette Herz in March 1835. Quote, Wilhelm von Humboldt, I fear, will soon leave this earth. Without being ill, he becomes weaker and weaker and sings completely together. But he still works, freely dictating, because he can neither hold a feather nor lead. He can no longer live for a long time. Their prophecy was confirmed within a few weeks, because Humboldt died on April 8 in the presence of his brother and his children in Tegel as a result of pneumonia, as it was called, but also as a result of Parkinson's disease. Despite his suffering and all the restrictions associated with it, Humboldt was, as already mentioned, scientifically productive until a few days before his death. His mental forces, to put it in the ductus of time, were in no way restricted. In addition to his activities in the State Council, Humboldt was also obliged to hold lectures on his research until June 1831 as a member of our Academy. In 1829, two years later, he even held seven lectures on linguistic-theoretical questions, but above all on the Kavi, i.e. the ancient Javanese literary language, to which he dedicated his already mentioned main work on the Kavi language on the island of Java. His manuscripts on the academic speeches and on the Kavi work and the linguistic-scientific letter exchange in connection with it can also be read in parallel to the already described symptoms and the increasing difficulties in writing. Humboldt also commented in his letters, as in the following to Charlotte Diede from November 24, 1829. Quote Humboldt made the greatest effort at the latest at the end of 1829. He analyzed correctly that possible reasons such as the decrease in vision and gout, which, for example, prevented his wife Caroline from writing for months in her last years of life, could not be found. What he could not know was that dying nerve cells in the brain were also the cause of his writing disorder. Humboldt also observed that the tremor, as is typical of Parkinson's patients, was mainly noticeable in a resting position and less in the execution of movements such as writing. Quote Although Humboldt dictated most of it from 1829, he still wrote a lot of things himself. An example of this is the draft for his speech at the Academy on November 24, 1829. Here he at least summarized the first pages himself. Here you can see the first pages and first for the overall impression again on the left the beginning of the text about the Basques of 1820-21 and next to it the beginning of the lecture for the Academy on November 24, 1829. The characteristics of the font change can be seen in detail. The font is very small, but the individual letters are still easy to read. The clearly visible micrography is another characteristic feature of a handwriting changed by Parkinson, as well as the inability to keep a straight line, which Humboldt increasingly lacked. For orientation, he indicated the lines by placing points in the middle of the page He only wrote letters or drafts from the second half of 1829 in a few cases himself, and actually only some in French or English. In 1830, for example, these were 5 of 34 letters of linguistic content. He probably did so because his writers were not so or not at all fluent in this language and he would have had to correct too much. You can see this in the texts written by all the writers here, as in this example from the Academy speech on November 24. The texts always required corrections, which Humboldt made almost until the end of his life. In 1831, a dotting of the beginning of the line was no longer enough. Humboldt could now line the pages with a pencil, as in this draft of a letter to the former governor of Singapore, John Crawford. Although the handwritten writing was obviously less and less successful, Humboldt wrote another 6 long drafts of linguistic content in August 1831, during his bath on the island of Norderney. Humboldt himself considered the bath to be healing and beneficial. Obviously, the bath also had the effect that he was able to write the drafts on his own. But the bath only brought short-term relief. The illness and thus also the writing disorder continued to advance, as can be seen in this draft written a year later to the Belgian orientalist Eugène Jacquet from June 1832. Humboldt was no longer able to write between the lines, he wrote much more below a line, the line he took as orientation. Already in May 1832, he complained to his daughter Gabriele about his handwriting, which was more and more like his grandson Wilhelm's. Quote, Humboldt, as a teacher, perceived the loss of writing as the strongest limitation, also goes out of a letter to his daughter Gabriele. He wrote her on January 14, 1833, Quote, Despite all the obstacles, as already mentioned, he continued to work on the Kawi work. In January 1833, he had already finished the first volume, although, as he wrote to Franz Bob, his quote, From 1833 on, he only dictated, because from a certain point on, he could no longer hold the feather. Henriette Herz also mentioned this in a letter. In addition, his ability to read, at least in the last months of his life, that his brother Alexander, as I quoted at the beginning, had to read the several hundred pages of the invitation to the Kawi work. That for Humboldt his language studies were not only extremely important, so that he would have preferred to deal with them all the time, and that he perceived most distractions as disturbances, was not only the case since the outbreak of Parkinson's disease. Humboldt has always preferred to work intellectually and felt tendentially disturbed by his professional activity. During the long phase of his illness, however, the intellectual confirmation for Humboldt also had another, a so-called therapeutic function, as in the letter to his son-in-law, August Hegemann, from August 1831. Quote, But I know from long experience that the constant preoccupation of thoughts does not exhaust me at all, but rather keeps me more and more cheerful and healthier and finds even real physical evil scattered like in a fog. That Humboldt perceived the constant preoccupation of thoughts as a well-doing therapeutic and led a quiet, happy life until the end of his life, from my own point of view, has something comforting in the face of Parkinson's disease. In the biographies about Humboldt, the disease is only mentioned in Lothar Galt's Prussia von Welt. In most others, the image of an old man living in Tegel Castle dominates, who, after the end of his political career, quote, Manfred Geyer, deepened in his lonely studies of languages. Yes, that's true on the one hand, because the language studies for Humboldt were of central importance, but on the other hand, the tendency to retreat from the suffering described here appears in a completely different light. It can be said that Humboldt, despite Parkinson's disease, has done a lot in an admirable way. I'll just mention the keywords again, language studies, academy lectures, museum foundation, state council. Humboldt's self-descriptions have, by the way, been appreciated in several medically-oriented articles since the 1990s. So by the physicians Reinhardt and Leonhard Horowski and Friedrich Wilhelm Kielhorn. Humboldt's self-descriptions have also been recognized in professional circles as the German Society for Parkinson's and Motion Disorders, long-term board members and special merits in the field of Parkinson's research with the Humboldt plaque. Thank you. That's it.