Laudator Temporis Acti

Christopher De Hamel, The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts (New York: Penguin Press, 2023), pp. 392-393:

Although he remained clean-shaven, Mommsen’s hair was always shoulder-length and untidy, turning grey and finally white, resembling a witch or a wizard, as his critics observed. Possibly through the fame of Mommsen, wild hair in old age became a recognizable badge of an eccentric professor or genius, cultivated later by Einstein and generations of academics ever since.

In other ways too, Mommsen seemed the very model of a modern academic. He was very thin and generally graceless in movement. He had a high forehead, a straight slightly aquiline nose and deep-set piercing eyes, beneath very dark eyebrows. His eyes were described both as pale blue and as almost black. He looked fearsomely clever; all people who met him agreed on this. He had great presence, and he was quick and dogmatic in giving opinions in a high-pitched voice. Throughout his adult life, he wore thick oval wire-rimmed glasses, which he pushed up onto the top of his head for close reading. He dressed formally, often in a bow tie, although his clothes were reported as being too big for him and looking slept in, like the Bücherwurm in that fictional painting by Spitzweg. Mommsen was immediately recognizable. Even the tram conductors in Berlin pointed him out with awe to visitors when he was seen in the street.

There are legends of eccentricities, doubtless exaggerated or even invented, like many student fables of their professors, such as that he put a baby in the wastepaper basket to stop it crying and that he did not remember his own children’s names. A credible anecdote was told by his daughter. He always welcomed visitors at home in the ground-floor reception room in a formal tailcoat. One day in 1858 or 1859, he emerged to greet an important guest wearing the coat but having forgotten to change out of his yellow slippers. This became an often-repeated family joke for the rest of his life. If it does not seem especially funny to us now, it does tell us something of his Biedermeier world of middle-class respectability and convention, and how academia was the exception, forgiven or even admired for failing to conform.

Hat tip: Alan Crease.