- 193 -

10th Mar. Pastor Imhof shows Bräker a letter from Johann Anton Sulzer

153

Bräker and his friends:

It is in 1789 that another far-reaching change takes place in Bräker's life: he has become a published author and now longs above all to have the companionship of other authors and scholars. He wants to associate with cultivated people, to visit them not just as a sightseer, as he had done with Lavater and Gessner, but as a guest, even as a friend. Nor does he want to wait for them to seek him out, though he is overwhelmed with gratitude when they do so, but he will take to the road himself, to see them in their own surroundings and far away from the critical eyes of his wife and neighbours. This will also enable him to satisfy his love of travel, awakened when he followed Markoni and the Prussian army in his youth, but since then limited to his regular business journeys to Herisau, Gantersweil and St. Gallen. Fortunately his good health has persisted into middle age, he is willing to walk any distance, over roads good or bad, and in all weathers, to achieve his heart's desire, to enter for a week or two into another world. And if he cannot travel, he will write and receive letters. It is known that he wrote regularly to at least half a dozen correspondents, but only about a score of his letters have survived, mostly addressed to Imhof and Füssli [Voellmy, v 1 p 19].

Much of Bräker's writing about friendship in general and his own friends in particular, must strike a modern reader as at best rather absurd, and at worst raise suspicion that he was seeking to exploit his friends to improve his own financial situation. It is an aspect of culture in which his time and ours are significantly different. In the latter years of the 18th century the cultural pendulum was swinging back from the over-valuation of reason towards the over-valuation of feeling. The steady rise of interest in the individual rather than the group, the greater importance given to individual experience, while liberating individuals from having their thoughts and actions prescribed by their political or religious group, also gave rise to mental isolation and doubt as to how the new freedoms should best be exercised. In this context friendship became highly valued; its extravagant expression, including physical expression, was considered a sign of a noble and sensitive nature. Lavater, meeting an old friend, says "he almost destroyed me with his kisses". This might give rise to cynical suspicions that, as happens in public schools, jails, the armed forces and other single-sex groups, an element of homosexuality had been added to men's friendships by the absence of women educated to be their companions.

This could have been true of Bräker, because at his level of society women were scarcely educated at all, and possibly also true of his new friends, because we learn from the accounts of travellers in Switzerland that women took little part in the social activities of men. Helen Maria Williams, writing at the end of the century, gives a rather shocking description of upper-class women's social life in Basel, saying that they spend their time in "coteries", gatherings of women of the same age and marital status, usually friends from childhood, sewing, playing cards, gossiping, drinking tea and eating pastries all afternoon,

153

Johann Anton Sulzer (1752-1828), holder of a high administrative post at the monastery of Kreuzlingen. He was to become a close friend after Bräker visited him in 1790. [Chronik, p 344]

Contents