Second Lecture

Who was this mother? Dorothea Grimm, née Wild, was from an old Bernese family. She herself was still a citizen of that city. Her ancestors had fought in the Battle of Murten. All the feelings that she had gained there, with all the elemental spirits, were then carried up into Hessian, because the father, who had emigrated from Bern – Herman Grimm's grandfather – had learned the apothecary's trade, then moved to Kassel and founded the Sonnenapotheke (Sun Pharmacy). So if we look for what the elemental spirits were doing in Herman Grimm, what was making the particular configuration of this spirit, so to speak, because these spirits were working in him while he slept, then we have to think of Switzerland, and we are actually talking about the characteristic of Herman Grimm when we speak of the characteristically Bernese-Swiss.