Genius Fan

The Prussian Road Trip Part II

So my wife plans a trip to Berlin. Her idea is to travel as a tourist and explore the city of the Cold War and post-unification. I’m on a different wavelength: traveling as a fancy-myself-a-scholar and exploring James Boswell’s time in the city of Eighteenth century Prussia.

Daydreaming about being a scholar

The Eighteenth century’s my thing. Since summer 2021 I’ve been working my way through books and papers by, and about, Scottish writer and lawyer James Boswell and his life and times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not reading everything, or a lot, or even anywhere near as much as I’d like. Life gets in the way: working, sleeping, dog walking, spending time with my wife (that probably should have come top of the list)…so I’ve only got time to read bits and pieces. I start a book and not finish it, usually the Introduction. I read a chapter here and there. I bash through an article on the web. Then, at some point along the way, I began comparing my all-consuming interest with my skimpy reading habits, and wondering about the scholarship behind all those books and papers I read.

Scholarship and adventure

Back in 2024 I read Richard Altick’s The Scholar Adventurers and that may have triggered something latent inside me. I’m susceptible. You see I’m part of the Generation X that saw the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark and then went on to study archaeology. Altick gives wonderful accounts of literary history detective work, including the discovery of the Boswell manuscripts, that felt very much like the occupation of digging. Scraps of information are as appealing to the curiosity of the historian (literary or otherwise) as are bones, shards and the pits they come from, to the archaeologist. And, of course, all may lead to…treasure!

Adventure in discovering connections

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the pleasure I get from learning how the Eighteenth century connects up. For example, I did a quadruple take the other day when I learned that French writer and thinker Germaine de Staël was the daughter of French finance minister Jacques Necker and, wait for it, Suzanne Curchod. I remembered her name from reading I did earlier this year – in her pre-marriage days Suzanne was the love interest (or a ‘fancy piece’, as we say in some parts of Scotland) of none other than Edward Gibbon. That’s treasure for me, and my face I imagine engoldens (I made that word up) just as that of the pirate as he pries open the lid of a treasure chest.

That fact, along with another connection I made (Curchod, later in life, proposed a match between her daughter Germaine and William Pitt the Younger, while the 23-year-old MP was visiting them as part of a lads boozing trip to France with William Wilberfoce) are accidental discoveries. There’s no intent there, they’re serendipitous outcomes. Though they could become clues in another research project.

Clues and the Berlin trip

I believed our Berlin trip offered more than chance discovery. Here was an opportunity to find and follow clues. And this would be even more of an adventure because I would be searching in a foreign country. I felt I would be hyping up that adventure and mystery even more – this is before I’ve even found a clue, mark you – by blanketing the city of Berlin with my own invisible Eighteenth century map. Nothing unusual in that. My wife would have her own map of Post-war Berlin, after all. So, treasure map was in place (Berlin and neighbouring Potsdam), all I had to do was find a clue.

I slipped Boswell’s German journal (Trade edition) off the bookcase to re-read the entries for those months of 1764 in which he stayed in Berlin and Potsdam. I bought the Research version of the same German journal – so that was to be read as well. (I’ll tell Boswell’s story in the next post.) Clues? Clues can be anything. A clue can be something that helps me understand something commonly known. But it can also lead to something previously unknown or to an unknown connection. The importance of a clue is therefore tied to what it leads to, known or unknown. A clue is a clue is a clue. I’ll be saying the word clue a lot in this post.

My clue progression for Boswell in Berlin

First round – a single clue
Clue 1: Boswell spent time in Berlin.
Action 1: Read the Trade and Research editions of Boswell’s German journal
Outcome: Discovered next clues:
• Earl Marischal George Keith
• Sir Andrew Mitchell
• Alexander Burnett
• Frederick the Great of Prussia

Second round – four new clues
Clue 1: Boswell travelled with Earl Marischal George Keith from Utrecht to Berlin. The Earl Marischal was a trusted friend of Frederick the Great, he was a Scot from Aberdeenshire with a background in supporting theJacobites and a friend of Boswell’s father. (Discovered after reading Boswell’s journal.)
Action 1: Start reading about Earl Marischal (all online)

Clue 2: In Berlin, Boswell was introduced to Sir Andrew Mitchell, a Scot from Aberdeenshire and British diplomat to Frederick’s Prussian court. (Discovered after reading Boswell’s journal.)
Action 2: Start reading about Sir Andrew Mitchell (all online)

Clue 3: Also in Berlin, Mitchell introduced Boswell to his secretary Alexander Burnett, yet another Scot from Aberdeenshire and part of the British embassy in Prussia. (Discovered after reading Boswell’s journal.)
Action 3: Start reading about Alexander Burnett (all online)

Clue 4: Boswell tries to connect to Frederick the Great. (He was always trying to get to know people of power and intellect and tried frequently, but failed to get an audience with the Prussian king.)
Action 4: Start reading about Frederick the Great. Bought the most up-to-date book on Frederick the Great, by Tim Blanning (2016) and also Nancy Mitford’s 1970 biography (full of photos).

All of this going on while my wife’s reading about the brutalist architecture of Cold War East Berlin, photography exhibitions, photo opportunities on the Berlin underground, radical and protest art…etc. Reminder: This is her holiday, so I’ve gotta avoid turning it into a Boswell hunt.

The Prussian highlights and must-see stops

As days and weeks pass and the holiday gets closer, I realise I’ll never be able to research and read as much as I’d like to in order to fulfil the vague idea of scholarship I have in my head. But I can do the basics. I make notes of the places Boswell visited and link them to people he met and any significant observations he made. I then have to look at the modern Twenty first century map to see where these places are and then work out an itinerary which allows us both to experience Berlin, but not dominate our shared time on Boswell-related visits.

I identify some must-see, Bowell-related places so that I come home with at least something (Unter den Linden, Sanssouci, Tiergarten), and then I look for details that could become clues (the graves of Frederick, Earl Marischal, Mitchell and Burnett). I read over and over again the Berlin and Potsdam entries looking for scenes that Boswell would have seen. And an awkward situation dawns upon me. I’m struggling to find much in Berlin because the Allies bombed and flattened Berlin in the last days of World War II leaving very buildings standing. Very little, if anything, that Boswell would have seen would still be there.

If you’re a proper fan then follow your nose

Picking out buildings, places, streets, neighbourhoods has a very holidaymaker feel to it. But the Eighteenth century city map I’ve been building in my head makes it secretly scholarly, with a small ‘s’. Each stop is a potential clue. I imagine it’s the way it works. It’s Richard Holmes’ ‘Footsteps Principle’. You follow the route your subject took. You look at what they looked at. You put yourself in their position. And you piece together their thoughts. But there has to be a point. And how do you find that point? Holmes’ would say, I suppose, you dig deeper and ask more questions of the minutiae you encounter.

Without expert guidance, say a PhD/Doctoral supervisor who knows the gaps in existing knowledge (ie. topics ripe for research and scholarship), the amateur scholar has to make his or her way in the blind. They must keep going, exploring, reading and researching. Following clues for the pleasure of it until they find something that no-one knows – a gap in the existing knowledge. Does it have to be new knowledge? It could be synthesis – that’s what I do in Genius Fan…retelling the same stories in a slightly different way. So now I’m on the look out for things related to Boswell that are new, or new perspectives. No, not Marxist or feminist or colonial interpretations, but a new fact. Yes, a FACT!

Preview of Prussian Road Trip III

We wore out some amount of shoe leather on our 5 day trip. I didn’t discover any new facts, but the experience of following Boswell around Berlin and Potsdam was very enlightening for my understanding of scholarship and the lengths one could go to for a story.

Notes
Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, Ed. FA Pottle (1953) [This is what’s known as the Trade edition]
James Boswell: The Journal of His German and Swiss Travels, 1764. Ed. Marlies K Danziger (2008) [This is the research edition]
The Scholar Adventurer, Richard Altick (1951)
This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes (2016)