Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl

Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein… all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg’s real-life romance with the model of beauty and sweetness, Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. The greater part of what I commit to paper is untrue, and the best of it is fiction! exclaims Lichtenberg, our hunchbacked hero. His daily life of wrestling with death, of electricity machines and exploding gases is plunged into new passion the day he encounters the little Stechard girl: Something is found that was lost for a long time. Soon he teaches her to read and write, she helps him keep house… and then? Colored with Lichtenberg’s humorous, enlightening meditations on life, death, and everything in-between, Hofmann works a subtle magic in this unusual fable-of-awakening about the transience of human attachments and the resilience of the human spirit.