Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

“Civil Disobedience”

originated as a Concord Lyceum lecture delivered on January 26, 1848. It was published as “Resistance to Civil Government,” in May of 1849, in Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers, a short-lived periodical that never managed a second issue. The modern title comes from A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, an 1866 collection of Thoreau’s work. It’s not known if Thoreau ever used the term “civil disobedience.”

While Walden can be applied to almost anyone’s life, “Civil Disobedience” is like a venerated architectural landmark: it is preserved and admired, and sometimes visited, but for most of us there are not many occasions when it can actually be used. Still, although seldom mentioned without references to Gandhi and King, “Civil Disobedience” has more history than many suspect. In the 1940’s it was read by the Danish resistance, in the 1950’s it was cherished by those who opposed McCarthyism, in the 1960’s it was influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, and in the 1970’s it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists. The lesson learned from all this experience is that Thoreau’s ideas really do work, just as he imagined they would.

This work is compiled from http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html using wayback machine

Chapter 1

I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; 1 and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

This American government — what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, 5 and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts — a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it maybe

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to the rampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O’er the grave where our hero we buried.”

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. Avery few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least: — “I am too high-born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ‘75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the ‘‘Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say that “so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed, and no longer” — “This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does any one think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis?

“A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut, To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.’’

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. Oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement for men to settle here? The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow — one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be; who, in short ventures to live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it,

and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico; — see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.

Chapter 2

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves — the union between themselves and the State — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in the same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union, which have prevented them from resisting the State?

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. Action from principle — the perception and the performance of right — changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way; its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is an change for the better, like birth and death which convulse the body.

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with — for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action? I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name — if ten honest men only — ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State’s ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister — though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her — the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her — the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the seizure of his goods — though both will serve the same purpose — because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property. To such the State renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands. If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him. But the rich man — not to make any invidious comparison — is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the "means” are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the Herodians according to their condition. “Show me the tribute-money,” said he; — and one took a penny out of his pocket; — if you use money which has the image of Caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar’s government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it; “Render therefore to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God those things which are God’s” — leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know.

When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government. Confucius said, “If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.” No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. “Pay,” it said, “or be locked up in the jail.” I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster: for I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the Church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in writing: — “Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.” This I gave to the town clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

Chapter 3

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up”; and so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments. My room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer as “a first-rate fellow and a clever man.” When the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from, and what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course; and, as the world goes, I believe he was. “Why,” said he, “they accuse me of burning a barn; but I never did it.” As near as I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. He had the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated.

He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. I had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never see him again; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp.

It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to he there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the townclock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn — a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town . 26 I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When they called for the vessels again, I was green enough to return what bread I had left; but my comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.

When I came out of prison — for some one interfered, and paid that tax — I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene — the town, and State, and country — greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinamen and Malays are; that in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to their property; that after all they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.

It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour — for the horse was soon tackled — was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of "My Prisons .”

I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with — the dollar is innocent — but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.

If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the State, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the State requires. If they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good.

This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biased by obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men. Let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour.

I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to? But I think, again, This is no reason why I should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But, if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect, like Orpheus , to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, I find myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and State governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity.

“We must affect our country as our parents, And if at any time we alienate Our love or industry from doing it honor, We must respect effects and teach the soul Matter of conscience and religion, And not desire of rule or benefit .”

I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then I shall be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen. Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?

However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects, content me as little as any. Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. I know of those whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of his mind’s range and hospitality. Yet, compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank Heaven for him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer’s truth is not truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a follower. His leaders are the men of ‘87 . “I have never made an effort,” he says, “and never propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which the various States came into the Union.” Still thinking of the sanction which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, “Because it was a part of the original compact — let it stand.” Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect — what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here in America to-day with regard to slavery, but ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer as the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a private man — from which what new and singular code of social duties might be inferred? “The manner,” says he, “in which the governments of those States where slavery exists are to regulate it is for their own consideration, under their responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and justice, and to God. Associations formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. They have never received any encouragement from me, and they never will.”

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations. For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to — for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well — is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalism he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience”, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. He work was inspiration to leaders like Gandhi & Martin Luther King

Assessment of Chinese Maritime Interests in Indian Ocean Region Commodore Venugopal Vengalil

Forward by

Travis McCracken

Genghis Khan's fabled decree, "If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you,"

my thought is to argue for a transformative approach,

where we eschew the aggressive postures of nations like Russia and China in favour of creating a global tapestry woven with the threads of abundance and collective well-being.

As we look beyond the strategies that echo the conquests of Genghis Khan, i envision a world where peace is not enforced through dominance but achieved through a shared commitment to prosperity that knows no borders.

It is through this lens that we must view our current geopolitical challenges, seeking not to emulate the punitive forces of history, but to create a society where the specter of scarcity is replaced with the reality of abundance—an abundance that ensures peace and stability far more effectively than any arsenal ever could.

Nations need leaders aligning with the overarching theme of transitioning from traditional military strategies to the creation of a society founded on abundance and peace

In a world where the echoes of history reverberate through the present, it becomes imperative to examine the patterns of international conduct. This comes at a time when the convergence of military ambition and economic expansion by nations like Russia and China signals a crucial juncture in global dynamics. The oft-trodden path of flexing military muscle, under the guise of safeguarding interests, stands in stark contrast to the ideals of global peace and cooperation.

Yet, the question arises: Is it possible to shift from a zero-sum game, dictated by the scarcity of resources, to an economic paradigm of abundance? This collection suggests that the true essence of peacekeeping lies not in the expansion of military outposts and the overt display of power but in the collective endeavor to create a society where abundance is not a privilege but a common wealth.

We stand at the cusp of a new era, where the strategies of the past need not dictate the possibilities of the future. This text aims to foster a dialogue centered on collaboration over confrontation, on building bridges rather than barriers, and ultimately, on redefining the economics of our time to herald an age of unprecedented prosperity and peace.

Assessment of Chinese Maritime Interests in the Indian Ocean Region

By Cmde Venugopal Vengalil

In the span of the last two decades, China has risen meteorically, expanding its economic and military prowess. Its engagements in the Indian Ocean have significantly grown, leading to regional apprehensions regarding its burgeoning naval presence and the deployment of so-called 'debt trap' diplomacy—potentially providing China with significant military advantages in the area. While the exact nature of China’s objectives in the Indian Ocean remains opaque, the Chinese leadership is undoubtedly gearing up to employ a variety of military missions to safeguard what it perceives as its strategic interests.

This discourse aims to dissect the underpinnings and broader implications of China’s maritime strategy, placing a particular emphasis on the Indian Ocean—a region of quintessential importance to China for its energy security and maritime commerce. An analytical examination of their 'String of Pearls' strategy and the strategic inroads achieved to cement a presence in the region will be offered, delineating the implications from both commercial and strategic vantage points. The viability of leveraging these commercial footholds for military purposes stands as a pivotal topic. Furthermore, the evolution of the Chinese Navy from a regional force to one capable of blue-water operations and whether it can effectively project power beyond its traditional borders remains a contentious subject. This paper endeavors to unravel the true capacity of the Chinese Navy to secure its maritime interests in the Indian Ocean.

Admiral Mahan's doctrine of "sea power" encapsulates the notion of achieving command and establishing political and military dominion over pivotal areas. To distill this concept into its essence, he posits a cyclical relationship where commerce spawns wealth, which in turn finances the navy that underpins trade and extends a country's influence. Mahan's further exposition posits that 'sea control', through maritime commerce and naval dominance, spells out a preeminent global influence. This stems from the principle that while the bounty of the land is substantial, it is the mastery of the seas that augments and secures a nation's reach and power.

The Vitality of Maritime Strategy in China’s Doctrine

The sea's role in enabling vital exchanges is paramount, and this holds true for the multifaceted aspects of sea power that China wields—spanning from hard naval strength to the softer power of trade and resource utilization. This enduring relevance is exemplified in China’s modern maritime strategy, which ensures that the Indian Ocean's supply lines, constituting 80% of China's imported oil as of December 2022, remain secure and efficient, with daily consumption reported at 14.295 million barrels.

Beijing has extended its strategic reach across the Indian Ocean, ostensibly reviving the Silk Route under the guise of development and trade, with infrastructure projects designed to fortify its energy security. However, underlying this expansion is a concern for the security of its trade routes, where any disruption could spell an energy crisis or even result in military stagnation.

China’s Evolving Maritime Strategy

Transitioning from a traditional land power, China has experienced a paradigm shift toward a robust maritime consciousness. The post-Cold War era has seen China pivot from a regional security focus to asserting its presence as a central maritime power. The pursuit of sea power and maritime rights has become pivotal to Beijing’s strategic objectives, aiming for substantial politico-economic and military influence within the Indo-Pacific region—a cornerstone in its aspiration to be recognized as a preeminent global maritime force.

This shift necessitates an expansion in maritime capabilities, with a proactive stance towards developing the navy and readiness for potential conflict. This evolved maritime strategy moves beyond Maoist coastal defense towards a proactive offshore and blue-water defense, a stance reinforced by key points in China’s recent defense white paper:

- China’s military direction is increasingly geared towards the protection of its international interests and fostering global peace.

- Securing Chinese investments and the welfare of its citizens abroad has gained new significance in this era.

- Enhancing its capabilities to address both international and domestic security threats is now a priority.

Navigating the Malacca Dilemma

The 'Malacca Dilemma' has gained prominence in discussions on China's maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean. Scrutinizing this dilemma uncovers several ambiguities, particularly concerning geography and security. A comprehensive analysis beyond the narrow focus on the Malacca Strait illuminates that it is not the sole passage from the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Alternative routes through the Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar Straits exist, which are viable and not as economically burdensome as the Chinese narrative suggests. If a chokepoint truly demands attention from Chinese policymakers, then the Strait of Hormuz stands out as a critical concern. This is due to the strait's significant geopolitical implications and the fact that it presents a larger vulnerability for China, being outside of the People's Liberation Army Navy's (PLAN) traditional maritime sphere of influence, which is more effectively countered by U.S. and Indian naval superiority.

Furthermore, the perceived security risks in the Malacca Strait are often overstated by Beijing. Neutral nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore encircle the strait and firmly oppose any single international hegemony, including U.S.-led initiatives. This resistance is rooted in a desire to maintain regional cooperation and autonomy. Disagreements also persist locally over the primary threats to the straits—with the U.S. and Singapore pointing to terrorism and piracy, while Malaysia and Indonesia view these concerns as potentially overstated justifications for strategic dominance. This balance of regional powers effectively mitigates the risk of any one nation imposing control over the Malacca Strait and challenges the narrative of a singular, overarching Chinese security concern.

The Strategic Bluff and its Global Repercussions

The term 'Malacca Bluff' is coined to reflect China's strategic posturing, emphasizing the Indian Ocean Region's (IOR) significance to Beijing. China’s "Two Oceans" doctrine seeks dominion over the Indian and Pacific Oceans, pivotal for its maritime routes, which are essential for the country’s energy requirements and economic sustenance. While the United States and allied powers pose significant resistance, the perceived lack of a cohesive security strategy in the IOR presents China with opportunities for expansion. However, this strategy is not improvised; it aligns with a comprehensive doctrine, as evidenced by Chinese defense white papers that have evolved from a stance of non-intervention to one that endorses distant force projection, stimulated by the global financial crisis of 2008 and the perceived decline of Western hegemony.

China’s doctrine in the IOR can be dissected into economic, military, and diplomatic vectors, with:

Economic Influence

China acknowledges the strategic potency of economic leverage in a region replete with fragile nation-states. The IOR, home to countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, has a history of political instability and susceptibility to external influences. Beijing’s engagement through vast infrastructure projects under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is often pitched as mutually beneficial. Yet, these projects come under scrutiny for potentially precipitating unsustainable debt, thus offering China a strategic foothold and enhanced surveillance capabilities along vital maritime routes. These initiatives, while not immediately economically viable for the host nations, serve a dual purpose: they address China’s own security needs and fortify its geopolitical presence.

Military Expansion

On the military front, China’s geo-economic ambitions are underpinned by a growing military footprint in the IOR, a testament to its quest for regional hegemony. The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has progressively expanded its capabilities, reflecting China’s determination to assert its influence and secure its maritime interests.

Strategic Assertions and Diplomatic Engagements

The enhancement of undersea capabilities and the strategic deployment of naval assets signify China's intention to prioritize maritime domains in its military calculus. The focus on developing both offensive and counteroffensive measures showcases China’s resolve to safeguard its maritime routes, underscoring the value it places on naval strength as a vehicle for securing trade and asserting its economic influence in the IOR.

Diplomatic Leverage through Multinational Forums

China has adeptly cemented its role within the Indian Ocean Region's (IOR) multi-lateral architecture by leveraging diplomatic channels. Beyond its steadfast alliance with Pakistan, Beijing has expanded its military and economic ties with Bangladesh, emerging as a key supplier of military equipment and a prominent trade partner. In the island nations of the IOR — Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius, and Seychelles — which are strategic to China’s maritime routes, it has fostered relationships that serve its strategic imperatives. These relationships have facilitated China’s growing influence within key regional organizations such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), where China is a dialogue partner, and the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC), where it holds observer status.

The Role of China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA)

Established in April 2018, the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) represents Beijing’s ambition for a streamlined and impactful foreign aid strategy, particularly in reinforcing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Indian Ocean Region. At the latest assembly in November 2022, the CIDCA spearheaded discussions for establishing a maritime disaster prevention and mitigation framework within the region. The consensus among participants highlighted the need for enhanced policy coordination and the promotion of sustainable economic growth through marine resources, including fisheries, renewable energy, tourism, and maritime commerce.

Regional Ambitions and Strategic Outposts

Beijing’s assertive drive to establish its hegemony in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is a direct response to the perceived decline of the United States and the strategic vacuum it believes this creates. This assertiveness is part of a calculated three-pronged approach to solidify its influence.

Chinese Engagements in the Indian Ocean Region

Bangladesh

Bangladesh has become a significant focus of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), with substantial contributions to its maritime infrastructure, energy sector, and military capabilities. Notably, a $1.2 billion investment in a submarine base at BNS Sheikh Hasina, commissioned in April 2023, is part of the broader 'Forces Goal 2030' initiative, aiming to modernize Bangladesh’s military capabilities. Further investments in the development of Chittagong, Payra, and Mongla ports underscore China's commitment to deepening its strategic foothold in the region. The possibility of utilizing Cox’s Bazar’s submarine base during peacetime heightens the strategic implications, although this remains a topic of geopolitical contention.

COCO ISLANDS

The developments on the Coco Islands suggest the establishment of an advanced surveillance and communication hub. It is speculated that this could serve as a strategic point for monitoring the eastern flank of India, including missile test sites. Recent satellite imagery from January 2023 indicates significant enhancements to the infrastructure, including an extended 2300-meter runway, a radar installation, and the addition of two new hangars, indicating a growing military presence.

Strategic Developments in Myanmar and Beyond

In Myanmar, China’s investment in critical infrastructure such as parallel oil and natural gas pipelines from Kyaukphyu to Kunming, spanning 771 km, and further extending to Guangxi covering 2806 km in total, represents a strategic maneuver. This network not only bypasses the Malacca Strait but also shortens the transit by approximately 700 km. These pipelines are strategically crucial, offering an alternative route to the Malacca Strait, ensuring energy security in the face of potential blockades. While there are no confirmed reports of Chinese military installations at these ports, China remains a principal military hardware supplier to Myanmar.

Expanding Influence in Sri Lanka

China’s financial infusion into Sri Lanka under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has reached nearly USD 15 billion, targeting key maritime and infrastructure projects. The Hambantota port, funded by China, is strategically located to facilitate the transit of oil tankers from the Middle East and Africa, serving as a vital node in the oceanic routes. Additional major projects include a USD 2 billion investment by China Merchants Group to develop Colombo port into South Asia’s largest logistics hub by 2025. Moreover, the Colombo port city project initiated in 2015 underscores China’s intent to solidify its presence in the Indian Ocean as a strategic and commercial powerhouse. Contrary to some analysts' skepticism, the commitment to infrastructure in Sri Lanka reflects a strategic calculation rather than a miscalculation due to proximity to India and logistical challenges.

The Significance of Gwadar

Gwadar port in Pakistan holds future strategic potential for China as a military outpost, free from the geopolitical constraints typically found in the region. Its location is geopolitically advantageous, situated near the Iranian border and providing a vantage point over the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial maritime chokepoint.

Strategic Maritime Outposts and Policy Shifts

The Chinese naval base in Djibouti, operational since August 2017, represents China’s strategic positioning within close proximity to the Indian Ocean, providing a pivotal location for monitoring and potentially influencing the region’s naval dynamics. This move into Djibouti underlines China’s intention to protect its energy routes and overseas interests with a permanent military presence, which also enables operations ranging from anti-piracy initiatives in the Gulf of Aden to potential non-combatant evacuation scenarios.

Obock Naval Base and its Geostrategic Role

The establishment of the Obock Naval Base aligns with China’s expanding reach in international affairs, particularly in Africa. This base serves China’s broader strategy, functioning as both an economic and military foothold in the Indian Ocean Region. It serves as a logistic and operational hub for the Chinese Navy, bolstering their capability to safeguard maritime trade routes and asserting their rising status as a global maritime power.

People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Aspirations in the Indian Ocean

The PLAN's presence in the Indian Ocean is growing more pronounced, reflecting broader ambitions to extend China’s naval capabilities. By hosting advanced warships and strategic aircraft, China is reinforcing its foreign policy with a demonstration of military strength. This strategic pivot marks a significant evolution in China’s international posture, aiming to reshape existing global frameworks and signaling its intent to wield greater influence through a permanent naval presence.

Strategic Aspirations and Maritime Expansion

The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), one of the world's largest naval forces, is seemingly on course to establish a significant blue-water operational capability, indicating a potential future Indian Ocean fleet. While presently focused on anti-piracy operations and maintaining a naval presence, there are political and technical considerations that may currently preclude the official formation of an Indian Ocean fleet to exert regional dominance.

Modernization and Strategy of the PLAN

The strategic overhaul of the PLAN in recent decades underscores China’s ambition to protect its interests in East Asia and counterbalance any potential threats from contingencies involving Taiwan. The PLAN, now equipped with a modern fleet including over 100 advanced destroyers, frigates, and corvettes, is strategically positioning itself for sustained presence and influence in the Indian Ocean.

Concept of a 'Two Fleet' Strategy

Strategists are debating a future in which the PLAN will focus on two primary theaters: the western Pacific and the northern Indian Ocean, the latter stretching from the Middle East to the Malacca Strait. The concept involves the deployment of two ocean-going fleets: the Pacific fleet centered around aircraft carriers, and the Indian Ocean Fleet, potentially anchored at key locations in friendly nations across the region. Such strategic distribution would enable effective power projection and the assertion of Chinese interests across both critical maritime domains.

The decision to formalize an Indian Ocean fleet remains speculative, and due to various political considerations, China may choose not to label it explicitly as a 'fleet'. Nevertheless, assessments based on open-source intelligence, Belt and Road Initiative port projects, and the concerted effort to commission blue-water capable ships suggest that China is preparing the requisite political, logistical, and security framework for such an endeavor. For China, facing a U.S. seen as a strategic competitor, the establishment of a robust naval presence acts as both a countermeasure and a deterrent against any hegemonic aspirations in the region.

Advancing Naval Capabilities and Air Power

The PLAN’s pursuit of a robust fleet of aircraft carriers is a testament to the navy’s strategic vision. Reports suggest China may commission up to six carriers by the mid-2030s for global blue-water operations, with at least a couple of these potentially patrolling the Indian Ocean. It is critical to recognize that Chinese naval operations in East Asia currently benefit from integrated air support, a component not readily available in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean.

Technological Hurdles in Naval Aviation

Significant advancements in naval aviation mark the PLAN’s progress since the Liaoning's maiden voyage in 2012. Notably, the PLAN’s milestone of achieving night-time landings on carriers in 2018 and its plans to replace the J-15 fighter jet, which is plagued by severe technical limitations including weight issues, signify its evolving capabilities. The J-15's limitations necessitate takeoffs with restricted fuel and ordnance load, constraining its operational efficacy compared to lighter counterparts like the American F-18.

Synergy in Carrier Strike Groups

The true strength of an aircraft carrier lies in its coordinated operations with escort ships, without which it becomes a strategic vulnerability. The complexity of forming an integrated carrier strike group, capable of defending against multifaceted threats, is immense. The PLAN's development of the KJ-600, an early warning aircraft, is a strategic addition, potentially enhancing the combat effectiveness and defensive coverage of its carrier groups.

Assessing Carrier Vulnerabilities

Naval Strategy and the Question of Carrier Vulnerability

Chinese analysts have debated the vulnerability of aircraft carriers, questioning their necessity in the Indian Ocean given China's substantial arsenal of sophisticated anti-ship missiles on both naval and land-based platforms. The debate extends to whether the PLAN’s missile capabilities pose a greater offensive threat compared to the defensive role of a carrier needing constant protection in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean.

Strategic Value and Limitations of Carriers

The logistical challenges and vastness of the Indian Ocean raise doubts about the practicality of deploying carriers far from conflict zones, considering the time needed for a carrier to respond. Alternative vessels such as frigates and destroyers on mission-based deployments offer broader protection for Chinese interests and provide operational lessons in blue-water logistics and navigation. Yet, without sufficient air cover, PLAN’s ability to engage effectively in significant combat operations is compromised, confining its capabilities to non-combat operations like evacuations unless shore-based air coverage is strategically addressed.

Overseas Bases and Their Inherent Vulnerabilities

While overseas bases contribute to deterrence, advancements in targeting technology have heightened their vulnerability during conflicts, rendering them susceptible to precise attacks. The operational utility of these bases is contingent on the political dynamics with host governments, as access during hostilities often requires explicit host-nation approval, further complicating their strategic reliability.

Strategic Considerations and Future Ambitions

Advancements in technology have provided alternative options for enhancing maritime capabilities, such as long-range aircraft, aerial refueling, and sea-based support, which may reduce the strategic necessity of overseas bases. However, these bases still carry risks, potentially escalating tensions and prompting hegemonic perceptions, a situation Beijing should navigate with caution to align with its stated aim of fostering global peace.

China's engagement with the Indian Ocean has grown significantly, with indications of a desire for a fleet or force capable of asserting its maritime interests. Evidence from port development initiatives and naval acquisitions suggests a move toward a distinct Indian Ocean presence. While full sea control remains unlikely, China is poised to present a credible counter to threats against its sea lines of communication. Yet, the PLAN’s shortfall in air protection and the geopolitical intricacies of base negotiations, coupled with the strengthening security relationship between India and the United States, present the primary challenges to China’s aspirations in the region.

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As the global landscape continues to evolve, a pattern has emerged, one where the expansionist policies of powers such as Russia and China are reminiscent of a playbook used throughout history—military strength as a means to assert dominance. However, this approach often neglects the fundamental principle that sustainable peace is not maintained through shows of force but through the cultivation of shared prosperity.

The analyses presented within these pages suggest a pivotal redirection: moving away from a competitive stance predicated on scarcity, towards fostering an economy of abundance. The goal is to create not just pockets of wealth, but a global society enriched with opportunity, security, and sustainability for all.

In our hands lies the ability to redefine the narrative

thanks for reading!

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Light editing by Xawat

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Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand: Ein Schauspiel Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand
Ein Schauspiel

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Inhalt

Erster Akt
Zweiter Akt
Dritter Akt
Vierter Akt
Fünfter Akt

Personen:

Kaiser Maximilian
Götz von Berlichingen
Elisabeth, seine Frau
Maria, seine Schwester
Karl, sein Söhnchen
Georg, sein Bube
Bischof von Bamberg
Weislingen, Adelheid von Walldorf, Liebetraut an des Bischofs Hofe
Abt von Fulda
Olearius, beider Rechte Doktor
Bruder Martin
Hans von Selbitz
Franz von Sickingen
Lerse
Franz, Weislingens Bube
Kammerfräulein der Adelheid
Metzler, Sievers, Link, Kohl, Wild, Anführer der rebellischen Bauern
Hoffrauen, Hofleute, am Bambergschen Hofe
Kaiserliche Räte
Ratsherrn von Heilbronn
Richter des heimlichen Gerichts
Zwei Nürnberger Kaufleute
Max Stumpf, Pfalzgräflicher Diener
Ein Unbekannter
Brautvater und Bräutigam, Bauern
Berlichingsche, Weislingsche, Bambergsche Reiter
Hauptleute, Offiziere, Knechte von der Reichsarmee
Schenkwirt
Gerichtsdiener
Heilbronner Bürger
Stadtwache
Gefängniswärter
Bauern
Zigeunerhauptmann
Zigeuner, Zigeunerinnen

Erster Akt

I. Akt, Szene 1

Schwarzenberg in Franken Herberge

Metzler, Sievers am Tische. Zwei Reitersknechte beim Feuer. Wirt.

Sievers. Hänsel, noch ein Glas Branntwein, und meß christlich.

Wirt. Du bist der Nimmersatt.

Metzler (leise zu Sievers). Erzähl das noch einmal vom Berlichingen!
Die Bamberger dort ärgern sich, sie möchten schwarz werden.

Sievers. Bamberger? Was tun die hier?

Metzler. Der Weislingen ist oben auf'm Schloß beim Herrn Grafen schon zwei Tage; dem haben sie das Gleit geben. Ich weiß nicht, wo er herkommt; sie warten auf ihn; er geht zurück nach Bamberg.

Sievers. Wer ist der Weislingen?

Metzler. Des Bischofs rechte Hand, ein gewaltiger Herr, der dem Götz auch auf'n Dienst lauert.

Sievers. Er mag sich in acht nehmen.

Metzler (leise). Nur immer zu! (Laut.) Seit wann hat denn der Götz wieder Händel mit dem Bischof von Bamberg? Es hieß ja, alles wäre vertragen und geschlichtet.

Sievers. Ja, vertrag du mit den Pfaffen! Wie der Bischof sah, er richt nichts aus und zieht immer den kürzern, kroch er zum Kreuz und war geschäftig, daß der Vergleich zustand käm. Und der getreuherzige Berlichingen gab unerhört nach, wie er immer tut, wenn er im Vorteil ist.

Metzler. Gott erhalt ihn! Ein rechtschaffener Herr!

Sievers. Nun denk, ist das nicht schändlich? Da werfen sie ihm einen Buben nieder, da er sich nichts weniger versieht. Wird sie aber schon wieder dafür lausen!

Metzler. Es ist doch dumm, daß ihm der letzte Streich mißglückt ist!
Er wird sich garstig erbost haben.

Sievers. Ich glaub nicht, daß ihn lang was so verdrossen hat. Denk auch: alles war aufs genaueste verkundschaft, wann der Bischof aus dem Bad käm, mit wieviel Reitern, welchen Weg; und wenn's nicht wär durch falsche Leut verraten worden, wollt er ihm das Bad gesegnet und ihn ausgerieben haben.

Erster Reiter. Was räsoniert ihr von unserm Bischof? Ich glaub, ihr sucht Händel.

Sievers. Kümmert euch um eure Sachen! Ihr habt an unserm Tisch nichts zu suchen.

Zweiter Reiter. Wer heißt euch von unserm Bischof despektierlich reden?

Sievers. Hab ich euch Red und Antwort zu geben? Seht doch den
Fratzen!

Erster Reiter (schlägt ihn hinter die Ohren).

Metzler. Schlag den Hund tot!

(Sie fallen übereinander her.)

Zweiter Reiter. Komm her, wenn du 's Herz hast.

Wirt (reißt sie voneinander). Wollt ihr Ruh haben! Tausend
Schwerenot! Schert euch 'naus, wenn ihr was auszumachen habt. In
meiner Stub soll's ehrlich und ordentlich zugehen. (Schiebt die
Reiter zur Tür hinaus.) Und ihr Esel, was fanget ihr an?

Metzler. Nur nit viel geschimpft, Hänsel, sonst kommen wir dir über die Glatze. Komm, Kamerad, wollen die draußen bleuen.

(Zwei Berlichingsche Reiter kommen.)

Erster Reiter. Was gibt's da?.

Sievers. Ei guten Tag, Peter! Veit, guten Tag! Woher?

Zweiter Reiter. Daß du dich nit unterstehst zu verraten, wem wir dienen.

Sievers (leise). Da ist euer Herr Götz wohl auch nit weit?

Erster Reiter. Halt dein Maul! Habt ihr Händel?

Sievers. Ihr seid den Kerls begegnet draußen, sind Bamberger.

Erster Reiter. Was tun die hier?

Metzler. Der Weislingen ist droben auf'm Schloß, beim gnädigen Herrn, den haben sie geleit.

Erster Reiter. Der Weislingen?

Zweiter Reiter (leise). Peter! das ist ein gefunden Fressen! (Laut.)
Wie lang ist er da?

Metzler. Schon zwei Tage. Aber er will heut noch fort, hört ich einen von den Kerls sagen.

Erster Reiter (leise). Sagt ich dir nicht, er wär daher! Hätten wir dort drüben eine Weile passen können. Komm, Veit.

Sievers. Helft uns doch erst die Bamberger ausprügeln.

Zweiter Reiter. Ihr seid ja auch zu zwei. Wir müssen fort. Adies!
(Ab.)

Sievers. Lumpenhunde die Reiter! wann man sie nit bezahlt, tun sie dir keinen Streich.

Metzler. Ich wollt schwören, sie haben einen Anschlag. Wem dienen sie?

Sievers. Ich soll's nit sagen. Sie dienen dem Götz.

Metzler. So! Nun wollen wir über die draußen. Komm! so lang ich einen Bengel hab, fürcht ich ihre Bratspieße nicht.

Sievers. Dürften wir nur so einmal an die Fürsten, die uns die Haut über die Ohren ziehen.

Herberge im Wald

Götz (vor der Tür unter der Linde). Wo meine Knechte bleiben! Auf und ab muß ich gehen, sonst übermannt mich der Schlaf. Fünf Tag und Nächte schon auf der Lauer. Es wird einem sauer gemacht, das bißchen Leben und Freiheit. Dafür, wenn ich dich habe, Weislingen, will ich mir's wohl sein lassen. (Schenkt ein.) Wieder leer! Georg! Solang's daran nicht mangelt und an frischem Mut, lach ich der Fürsten Herrschsucht und Ränke.—Georg!—Schickt ihr nur euern gefälligen Weislingen herum zu Vettern und Gevattern, laßt mich anschwärzen. Nur immer zu. Ich bin wach. Du warst mir entwischt, Bischof! So mag denn dein lieber Weislingen die Zeche bezahlen.—Georg! Hört der Junge nicht? Georg! Georg!

Der Bube (im Panzer eines Erwachsenen). Gestrenger Herr!

Götz. Wo stickst du? Hast du geschlafen? Was zum Henker treibst du für Mummerei? Komm her, du siehst gut aus. Schäm dich nicht, Junge. Du bist brav! Ja, wenn du ihn ausfülltest! Es ist Hansens Küraß?

Georg. Er wollt ein wenig schlafen und schnallt' ihn aus.

Götz. Er ist bequemer als sein Herr.

Georg. Zürnt nicht. Ich nahm ihn leise weg und legt ihn an, und holte meines Vaters altes Schwert von der Wand, lief auf die Wiese und zog's aus.

Götz. Und hiebst um dich herum? Da wird's den Hecken und Dornen gutgegangen sein. Schläft Hans?

Georg. Auf Euer Rufen sprang er auf und schrie mir, daß Ihr rieft.
Ich wollt den Harnisch ausschnallen, da hört ich Euch zwei-, dreimal.

Götz. Geh! bring ihm seinen Panzer wieder und sag ihm, er soll bereit sein, soll nach den Pferden sehen.

Georg. Die hab ich recht ausgefüttert und wieder aufgezäumt. Ihr könnt aufsitzen, wann Ihr wollt.

Götz. Bring mir einen Krug Wein, gib Hansen auch ein Glas, sag ihm, er soll munter sein, es gilt. Ich hoffe jeden Augenblick, meine Kundschafter sollen zurückkommen.

Georg. Ach gestrenger Herr!

Götz. Was hast du?

Georg. Darf ich nicht mit?

Götz. Ein andermal, Georg, wann wir Kaufleute fangen und Fuhren wegnehmen.

Georg. Ein andermal, das habt Ihr schon oft gesagt. O diesmal! diesmal! Ich will nur hintendreinlaufen, nur auf der Seite lauern. Ich will Euch die verschossenen Bolzen wiederholen.

Götz. Das nächstemal, Georg. Du sollst erst ein Wams haben, eine
Blechhaube und einen Spieß.

Georg. Nehmt mich mit! Wär ich letzt dabei gewesen, Ihr hättet die
Armbrust nicht verloren.

Götz. Weißt du das?

Georg. Ihr warft sie dem Feind an Kopf, und einer von den Fußknechten hob sie auf; weg war sie! Gelt ich weiß?

Götz. Erzählen dir das meine Knechte?

Georg. Wohl. Dafür pfeif ich ihnen auch, wann wir die Pferde striegeln, allerlei Weisen und lerne sie allerlei lustige Lieder.

Götz. Du bist ein braver Junge.

Georg. Nehmt mich mit, daß ich's zeigen kann!

Götz. Das nächstemal, auf mein Wort. Unbewaffnet wie du bist, sollst du nicht in Streit. Die künftigen Zeiten brauchen auch Männer. Ich sage dir, Knabe, es wird eine teure Zeit werden: Fürsten werden ihre Schätze bieten um einen Mann, den sie jetzt hassen. Geh, Georg, gib Hansen seinen Küraß wieder und bring mir Wein. (Georg ab.) Wo meine Knechte bleiben! Es ist unbegreiflich. Ein Mönch! Wo kommt der noch her?

(Bruder Martin kommt.)

Götz. Ehrwürdiger Vater, guten Abend! woher so spät? Mann der heiligen Ruhe, Ihr beschämt viel Ritter.

Martin. Dank Euch, edler Herr! Und bin vor der Hand nur demütiger Bruder, wenn's ja Titel sein soll. Augustin mit meinem Klosternamen, doch hör ich am liebsten Martin, meinen Taufnamen.

Götz. Ihr seid müde, Bruder Martin, und ohne Zweifel durstig! (Der
Bub kommt.) Da kommt der Wein eben recht.

Martin. Für mich einen Trunk Wasser. Ich darf keinen Wein trinken.

Götz. Ist das Euer Gelübde?

Martin. Nein, gnädiger Herr, es ist nicht wider mein Gelübde, Wein zu trinken; weil aber der Wein wider mein Gelübde ist, so trinke ich keinen Wein.

Götz. Wie versteht Ihr das?

Martin. Wohl Euch, daß Ihr's nicht versteht. Essen und trinken, mein ich, ist des Menschen Leben.

Götz. Wohl!

Martin. Wenn Ihr gegessen und getrunken habt, seid Ihr wie neu geboren; seid stärker, mutiger, geschickter zu Euerm Geschäft. Der Wein erfreut des Menschen Herz, und die Freudigkeit ist die Mutter aller Tugenden. Wenn Ihr Wein getrunken habt, seid Ihr alles doppelt, was Ihr sein sollt, noch einmal so leicht denkend, noch einmal so unternehmend, noch einmal so schnell ausführend.

Götz. Wie ich ihn, trinke, ist es wahr.

Martin. Davon red ich auch. Aber wir-(Georg mit Wasser.)

Götz (zu Georg heimlich). Geh auf den Weg nach Dachsbach, und leg dich mit dem Ohr auf die Erde, ob du nicht Pferde kommen hörst, und sei gleich wieder hier.

Martin. Aber wir, wenn wir gegessen und getrunken haben, sind wir grad das Gegenteil von dem, was wir sein sollen. Unsere schläfrige Verdauung stimmt den Kopf nach dem Magen, und in der Schwäche einer überfüllten Ruhe erzeugen sich Begierden, die ihrer Mutter leicht über den Kopf wachsen.

Götz. Ein Glas, Bruder Martin, wird Euch nicht im Schlaf stören. Ihr seid heute viel gegangen. (Bringt's ihm.) Alle Streiter!

Martin. In Gottes Namen! (Sie stoßen an.) Ich kann die müßigen Leute nicht ausstehen; und doch kann ich nicht sagen, daß alle Mönche müßig sind; sie tun, was sie können. Da komm ich von St. Veit, wo ich die letzte Nacht schlief. Der Prior führte mich in den Garten; das ist nun ihr Bienenkorb. Vortrefflicher Salat! Kohl nach Herzens Lust! und besonders Blumenkohl und Artischocken, wie keine in Europa!

Götz. Das ist also Eure Sache nicht. (Er steht auf, sieht nach dem
Jungen und kommt wieder.)

Martin. Wollte, Gott hätte mich zum Gärtner oder Laboranten gemacht!
Ich könnte glücklich sein. Mein Abt liebt mich, mein Kloster ist
Erfurt in Sachsen; er weiß, ich kann nicht ruhn; da schickt er mich
herum, wo was zu betreiben ist. Ich geh zum Bischof von Konstanz.

Götz. Noch eins! Gute Verrichtung!

Martin. Gleichfalls.

Götz. Was seht Ihr mich so an, Bruder?

Martin. Daß ich in Euern Harnisch verliebt bin.

Götz. Hättet Ihr Lust zu einem? Es ist schwer und beschwerlich ihn zu tragen.

Martin. Was ist nicht beschwerlich auf dieser Welt! und mir kommt nichts beschwerlicher vor, als nicht Mensch sein dürfen. Armut, Keuschheit und Gehorsam—drei Gelübde, deren jedes, einzeln betrachtet, der Natur das Unausstehlichste scheint, so unerträglich sind sie alle. Und sein ganzes Leben unter dieser Last, oder der weit drückendern Bürde des Gewissens mutlos zu keuchen! O Herr! was sind die Mühseligkeiten Eures Lebens, gegen die Jämmerlichkeiten eines Standes, der die besten Triebe, durch die wir werden, wachsen und gedeihen, aus mißverstandener Begierde Gott näher zu rücken, verdammt?

Götz. Wär Euer Gelübde nicht so heilig, ich wollte Euch bereden, einen Harnisch anzulegen, wollt Euch ein Pferd geben, und wir zögen miteinander.

Martin. Wollte Gott, meine Schultern fühlten Kraft, den Harnisch zu ertragen, und mein Arm Stärke, einen Feind vom Pferd zu stechen!—Arme schwache Hand, von jeher gewohnt, Kreuze und Friedensfahnen zu führen und Rauchfässer zu schwingen, wie wolltest du Lanze und Schwert regieren! Meine Stimme, nur zu Ave und Halleluja gestimmt, würde dem Feind ein Herold meiner Schwäche sein, wenn ihn die Eurige überwältigte. Kein Gelübde sollte mich abhalten wieder in den Orden zu treten, den mein Schöpfer selbst gestiftet hat!

Götz. Glückliche Wiederkehr!

Martin. Das trinke ich nur für Euch. Wiederkehr in meinen Käfig ist allemal unglücklich. Wenn Ihr wiederkehrt, Herr, in Eure Mauern, mit dem Bewußtsein Eurer Tapferkeit und Stärke, der keine Müdigkeit etwas anhaben kann, Euch zum erstenmal nach langer Zeit, sicher vor feindlichem überfall, entwaffnet auf Euer Bette streckt und Euch nach dem Schlaf dehnt, der Euch besser schmeckt als mir der Trunk nach langem Durst: da könnt Ihr von Glück sagen!

Götz. Dafür kommt's auch selten.

Martin (feuriger). Und ist, wenn's kommt, ein Vorschmack des Himmels. —Wenn Ihr zurückkehrt, mit der Beute Eurer Feinde beladen, und Euch erinnert: den stach ich vom Pferd, eh er schießen konnte, und den rannt ich samt dem Pferde nieder, und dann reitet Ihr zu Euerm Schloß hinauf, und-Götz. Was meint Ihr?

Martin. Und Eure Weiber! (Er schenkt ein.) Auf Gesundheit Eurer Frau!
(Er wischt sich die Augen.) Ihr habt doch eine?

Götz. Ein edles vortreffliches Weib!

Martin. Wohl dem, der ein tugendsam Weib hat! des lebt er noch eins so lange. Ich kenne keine Weiber, und doch war die Frau die Krone der Schöpfung!

Götz (vor sich). Er dauert mich! Das Gefühl seines Standes frißt ihm das Herz.

Georg (gesprungen). Herr! ich höre Pferde im Galopp! Zwei! Es sind sie gewiß.

Götz. Führ mein Pferd heraus! Hans soll aufsitzen.—Lebt wohl, teurer Bruder, Gott geleit Euch! Seid mutig und geduldig. Gott wird Euch Raum geben.

Martin. Ich bitt um Euern Namen.

Götz. Verzeiht mir. Lebt wohl! (Er reicht ihm die linke Hand.)

Martin. Warum reicht Ihr mir die Linke? Bin ich die ritterliche
Rechte nicht wert?

Götz. Und wenn Ihr der Kaiser wärt, Ihr müßtet mit dieser vorliebnehmen. Meine Rechte, obgleich im Kriege nicht unbrauchbar, ist gegen den Druck der Liebe unempfindlich: sie ist eins mit ihrem Handschuh; Ihr seht, er ist Eisen.

Martin. So seid Ihr Götz von Berlichingen! Ich danke dir, Gott, daß du mich ihn hast sehen lassen, diesen Mann, den die Fürsten hassen und zu dem die Bedrängten sich wenden! (Er nimmt ihm die rechte Hand.) Laßt mir diese Hand, laßt mich sie küssen!

Götz. Ihr sollt nicht.

Martin. Laßt mich! Du, mehr wert als Reliquienhand, durch die das heiligste Blut geflossen ist, totes Werkzeug, belebt durch des edelsten Geistes Vertrauen auf Gott!

Götz (setzt den Helm auf und nimmt die Lanze).

Martin. Es war ein Mönch bei uns vor Jahr und Tag, der Euch besuchte, wie sie Euch abgeschossen ward vor Landshut. Wie er uns erzählte, was Ihr littet, und wie sehr es Euch schmerzte, zu Eurem Beruf verstümmelt zu sein, und wie Euch einfiel, von einem gehört zu haben, der auch nur eine Hand hatte und als tapferer Reitersmann doch noch lange diente—ich werde das nie vergessen.

(Die zwei Knechte kommen.)

Götz (zu ihnen. Sie reden heimlich).

Martin (fährt inzwischen fort). Ich werde das nie vergessen, wie er im edelsten einfältigsten Vertrauen auf Gott sprach: "Und wenn ich zwölf Händ hätte und deine Gnad wollt mir nicht, was würden sie mir fruchten? So kann ich mit einer"-Götz. In den Haslacher Wald also. (Kehrt sich zu Martin.) Lebt wohl, werter Bruder Martin. (Küßt ihn.)

Martin. Vergeßt mich nicht, wie ich Euer nicht vergesse.

(Götz ab.)

Martin. Wie mir's so eng ums Herz ward, da ich ihn sah. Er redete nichts, und mein Geist konnte doch den seinigen unterscheiden. Es ist eine Wollust, einen großen Mann zu sehn.

Georg. Ehrwürdiger Herr, Ihr schlaft doch bei uns?

Martin. Kann ich ein Bett haben?

Georg. Nein, Herr! ich kenne Betten nur vom Hörensagen, in unsrer
Herberg ist nichts als Stroh.

Martin. Auch gut. Wie heißt du?

Georg. Georg, ehrwürdiger Herr!

Martin. Georg! da hast du einen tapfern Patron.

Georg. Sie sagen, er sei ein Reiter gewesen; das will ich auch sein.

Martin. Warte! (Zieht ein Gebetbuch hervor und gibt dem Buben einen Heiligen.) Da hast du ihn. Folge seinem Beispiel, sei brav und fürchte Gott! (Martin geht.)

Georg. Ach ein schöner Schimmel! wenn ich einmal so einen hätte!—und die goldene Rüstung!—Das ist ein garstiger Drach—Jetzt schieß ich nach Sperlingen—Heiliger Georg! mach mich groß und stark, gib mir so eine Lanze, Rüstung und Pferd, dann laß mir die Drachen kommen!

I. Akt, Szene 2

Jagsthausen. Götzens Burg

Elisabeth. Maria. Karl, sein Söhnchen.

Karl. Ich bitte dich, liebe Tante, erzähl mir das noch einmal vom frommen Kind, 's is gar zu schön.

Maria. Erzähl du mir's, kleiner Schelm, da will ich hören, ob du achtgibst.

Karl. Wart e bis, ich will mich bedenken.—Es war einmal—ja—es war einmal ein Kind, und sein Mutter war krank, da ging das Kind hin-Maria. Nicht doch. Da sagte die Mutter: "Liebes Kind"-Karl. "Ich bin krank"-Maria. "Und kann nicht ausgehn"-Karl. Und gab ihm Geld und sagte. "Geh hin, und hol dir ein Frühstück." Da kam ein armer Mann-Maria. Das Kind ging, da begegnet' ihm ein alter Mann, der war—nun Karl!

Karl. Der war—alt-Maria. Freilich! der kaum mehr gehen konnte, und sagte. "Liebes Kind"-Karl. "Schenk mir was, ich habe kein Brot gessen gestern und heut." Da gab ihm 's Kind das Geld-Maria. Das für sein Frühstück sein sollte.

Karl. Da sagte der alte Mann-Maria. Da nahm der alte Mann das Kind-Karl. Bei der Hand, und sagte—und ward ein schöner glänzender Heiliger, und sagte:—"Liebes Kind"-Maria. "Für deine Wohltätigkeit belohnt dich die Mutter Gottes durch mich: welchen Kranken du an rührst"-Karl. "Mit der Hand"—es war die rechte, glaub ich.

Maria. Ja.

Karl. "Der wird gleich gesund."

Maria. Da lief das Kind nach Haus und konnt für Freuden nichts reden.

Karl. Und fiel seiner Mutter um den Hals und weinte für Freuden-Maria.
Da rief die Mutter: "Wie ist mir!" und war—nun Karl!

Karl. Und war—und war-Maria. Du gibst schon nicht acht!—und war gesund. Und das Kind kurierte König und Kaiser, und wurde so reich, daß es ein großes Kloster bauete.

Elisabeth. Ich kann nicht begreifen, wo mein Herr bleibt. Schon fünf Tag und Nächte, daß er weg ist, und er hoffte so bald seinen Streich auszuführen.

Maria. Mich ängstigt's lang. Wenn ich so einen Mann haben sollte, der sich immer Gefahren aussetzte, ich stürbe im ersten Jahr.

Elisabeth. Dafür dank ich Gott, daß er mich härter zusammengesetzt hat.

Karl. Aber muß dann der Vater ausreiten, wenn's so gefährlich ist?

Maria. Es ist sein guter Wille so.

Elisabeth. Wohl muß er, lieber Karl.

Karl. Warum?

Elisabeth. Weißt du noch, wie er das letztemal ausritt, da er dir
Weck mitbrachte?

Karl. Bringt er mir wieder mit?

Elisabeth. Ich glaub wohl. Siehst du, da war ein Schneider von Stuttgart, der war ein trefflicher Bogenschütz, und hatte zu Köln auf'm Schießen das Beste gewonnen.

Karl. War's viel?

Elisabeth. Hundert Taler. Und darnach wollten sie's ihm nicht geben.

Maria. Gelt, das ist garstig, Karl?

Karl. Garstige Leut!

Elisabeth. Da kam der Schneider zu deinem Vater und bat ihn, er
möchte ihm zu seinem Geld verhelfen. Und da ritt er aus und nahm den
Kölnern ein paar Kaufleute weg, und plagte sie so lang, bis sie das
Geld herausgaben. Wärst du nicht auch ausgeritten?

Karl. Nein! da muß man durch einen dicken, dicken Wald, sind Zigeuner und Hexen drin.

Elisabeth. Ist ein rechter Bursch, fürcht sich vor Hexen!

Maria. Du tust besser, Karl! leb du einmal auf deinem Schloß als ein
frommer christlicher Ritter. Auf seinen eigenen Gütern findet man zum
Wohltun Gelegenheit genug. Die rechtschaffensten Ritter begehen mehr
Ungerechtigkeit als Gerechtigkeit auf ihren Zügen.

Elisabeth. Schwester, du weißt nicht, was du redst. Gebe nur Gott, daß unser Junge mit der Zeit braver wird, und dem Weislingen nicht nachschlägt, der so treulos an meinem Mann handelt.

Maria. Wir wollen nicht richten, Elisabeth. Mein Bruder ist sehr erbittert, du auch. Ich bin bei der ganzen Sache mehr Zuschauer, und kann billiger sein.

Elisabeth. Er ist nicht zu entschuldigen.

Maria. Was ich von ihm gehört, hat mich eingenommen. Erzählte nicht selbst dein Mann so viel Liebes und Gutes von ihm! Wie glücklich war ihre Jugend, als sie zusammen Edelknaben des Markgrafen waren!

Elisabeth. Das mag sein. Nur sag, was kann der Mensch je Gutes gehabt haben, der seinem besten treusten Freunde nachstellt, seine Dienste den Feinden meines Mannes verkauft, und unsern trefflichen Kaiser der uns so gnädig ist, mit falschen widrigen Vorstellungen einzunehmen sucht.

Karl. Der Vater! der Vater! Der Türner bläst 's Liedel: "Heisa, mach 's Tor auf."

Elisabeth. Da kommt er mit Beute.

(Ein Reiter kommt.)

Reiter. Wir haben, gejagt! wir haben gefangen! Gott grüß Euch, edle
Frauen.

Elisabeth. Habt ihr den Weislingen?

Reiter. Ihn und drei Reiter.

Elisabeth. Wie ging's zu, daß ihr so lang ausbleibt?

Reiter. Wir lauerten auf ihn zwischen Nürnberg und Bamberg, er wollte nicht kommen, und wir wußten doch, er war auf dem Wege. Endlich kundschaften wir ihn aus: er war seitwärts gezogen, und saß geruhig beim Grafen auf dem Schwarzenberg.

Elisabeth. Den möchten sie auch gern meinem Mann feind haben.

Reiter. Ich sagt's gleich dem Herrn. Auf! und wir ritten in Haslacher Wald. Und da war's kurios: wie wir so in die Nacht reiten, hüt just ein Schäfer da, und fallen fünf Wölf in die Herd und packten weidlich an. Da lachte unser Herr und sagte: "Glück zu, liebe Gesellen! Glück überall und uns auch!" Und es freuet' uns all das gute Zeichen. Indem so kommt der Weislingen hergeritten mit vier Knechten.

Maria. Das Herz zittert mir im Leibe.

Reiter. Ich und mein Kamerad, wie's der Herr befohlen hatte, nistelten uns an ihn, als wären wir zusammengewachsen, daß er sich nicht regen noch rühren konnte, und der Herr und der Hans fielen über die Knechte her und nahmen sie in Pflicht. Einer ist entwischt.

Elisabeth. Ich bin neugierig, ihn zu sehn. Kommen sie bald?

Reiter. Sie reiten das Tal herauf, in einer Viertelstund sind sie hier.

Maria. Er wird niedergeschlagen sein.

Reiter. Finster genug sieht er aus.

Maria. Sein Anblick wird mir im Herzen weh tun.

Elisabeth. Ah!—Ich will gleich das Essen zurecht machen. Hungrig werdet ihr doch alle sein.

Reiter. Rechtschaffen.

Elisabeth. Nimm den Kellerschlüssel und hol vom besten Wein! Sie haben ihn verdient. (Ab.)

Karl. Ich will mit, Tante.

Maria. Komm, Bursch. (Ab.)

Reiter. Der wird nicht sein Vater, sonst ging' er mit in Stall!

(Götz. Weislingen. Reitersknechte.)

Götz (Helm und Schwert auf den Tisch legend). Schnallt mir den Harnisch auf, und gebt mir mein Wams. Die Bequemlichkeit wird mir wohl tun. Bruder Martin, du sagtest recht—Ihr habt uns in Atem erhalten, Weislingen.

Weislingen (antwortet nichts, auf und ab gehend).

Götz. Seid gutes Muts. Kommt, entwaffnet Euch. Wo sind Eure
Kleider? Ich hoffe, es soll nichts verlorengegangen sein. (Zum
Knecht.) Frag seine Knechte, und öffnet das Gepäcke, und seht zu, daß
nichts abhanden komme. Ich könnt Euch auch von den meinigen borgen.

Weislingen. Laßt mich so, es ist all eins.

Götz. Könnt Euch ein hübsches saubres Kleid geben, ist zwar nur leinen. Mir ist's zu eng worden. Ich hatt's auf der Hochzeit meines gnädigen Herrn des Pfalzgrafen an, eben damals, als Euer Bischof so giftig über mich wurde. Ich hatt' ihm, vierzehn Tag vorher, zwei Schiff auf dem Main niedergeworfen. Und ich geh mit Franzen von Sickingen im Wirtshaus zum Hirsch in Heidelberg die Trepp hinauf. Eh man noch ganz droben ist, ist ein Absatz und ein eisen Geländerlein, da stund der Bischof und gab Franzen die Hand, wie er vorbeiging, und gab sie mir auch, wie ich hintendrein kam. Ich lacht in meinem Herzen, und ging zum Landgrafen von Hanau, der mir gar ein lieber Herr war, und sagte: "Der Bischof hat mir die Hand geben, ich wett, er hat mich nicht gekannt." Das hört' der Bischof, denn ich red't laut mit Fleiß, und kam zu uns trotzig—und sagte: "Wohl, weil ich Euch nicht kannt hab, gab ich Euch die Hand." Da sagt ich: "Herre, ich merkt's wohl, daß Ihr mich nicht kanntet, und hiermit habt Ihr Eure Hand wieder." Da ward das Männlein so rot am Hals wie ein Krebs vor Zorn und lief in die Stube zu Pfalzgraf Ludwig und dem Fürsten von Nassau und klagt's ihnen. Wir haben nachher uns oft was drüber zugute getan.

Weislingen. Ich wollt, Ihr ließt mich allein.

Götz. Warum das? Ich bitt Euch, seid aufgeräumt. Ihr seid in meiner
Gewalt, und ich werd sie nicht mißbrauchen.

Weislingen. Dafür war mir's noch nicht bange. Das ist Eure
Ritterpflicht.

Götz. Und Ihr wißt, daß die mir heilig ist.

Weislingen. Ich bin gefangen; das übrige ist eins.

Götz. Ihr solltet nicht so reden. Wenn Ihr's mit Fürsten zu tun hättet, und sie Euch in tiefen Turn an Ketten aufhingen, und der Wächter Euch den Schlaf wegpfeifen müßte!

(Die Knechte mit den Kleidern.)

Weislingen (zieht sich aus und an).

(Karl kommt.)

Karl. Guten Morgen, Vater!

Götz (küßt ihn). Guten Morgen, Junge. Wie habt ihr die Zeit gelebt?

Karl. Recht geschickt, Vater! Die Tante sagt: ich sei recht geschickt.

Götz. So!

Karl. Hast du mir was mitgebracht?

Götz. Diesmal nicht.

Karl. Ich hab viel gelernt.

Götz. Ei!

Karl. Soll ich dir vom frommen Kind erzählen?

Götz. Nach Tische.

Karl. Ich weiß noch was.

Götz. Was wird das sein?

Karl. Jagsthausen ist ein Dorf und Schloß an der Jagst, gehört seit zweihundert Jahren den Herrn von Berlichingen erb- und eigentümlich zu.

Götz. Kennst du den Herrn von Berlichingen?

Karl (sieht ihn starr an).

Götz (vor sich). Er kennt wohl vor lauter Gelehrsamkeit seinen Vater nicht.—Wem gehört Jagsthausen?

Karl. Jagsthausen ist ein Dorf und Schloß an der Jagst.

Götz. Das frag ich nicht.—Ich kannte alle Pfade, Weg und Furten, eh ich wußte, wie Fluß, Dorf und Burg hieß.—Die Mutter ist in der Küche?

Karl. Ja, Vater! Sie kocht weiße Rüben und ein Lammsbraten.

Götz. Weißt du's auch, Hans Küchenmeister?

Karl. Und für mich zum Nachtisch hat die Tante einen Apfel gebraten.

Götz. Kannst du sie nicht roh essen?

Karl. Schmeckt so besser.

Götz. Du mußt immer was Apartes haben.—Weislingen! ich bin gleich wieder bei Euch. Ich muß meine Frau doch sehn. Komm mit, Karl.

Karl. Wer ist der Mann?

Götz. Grüß ihn. Bitt ihn, er soll lustig sein.

Karl. Da, Mann! hast du eine Hand, sei lustig, das Essen ist bald fertig.

Weislingen (hebt ihn in die Höh und küßt ihn). Glückliches Kind! das kein übel kennt, als wenn die Suppe lang ausbleibt. Gott laß Euch viel Freud am Knaben erleben, Berlichingen.

Götz. Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten—doch wär mir's willkommen. Wollen sehn, was es gibt.

(Sie gehn.)

I. Akt, Szene 3

Weislingen. O daß ich aufwachte! und das alles wäre ein Traum! In Berlichingens Gewalt! von dem ich mich kaum losgearbeitet habe, dessen Andenken ich mied wie Feuer, den ich hoffte zu überwältigen! Und er—der alte treuherzige Götz! Heiliger Gott, was will, will aus dem allen werden? Rückgeführt, Adelbert, in den Saal! wo wir als Buben unsere Jagd trieben—da du ihn liebtest, an ihm hingst wie an deiner Seele. Wer kann ihm nahen und ihn hassen? Ach! ich bin so ganz nichts hier! Glückselige Zeiten, ihr seid vorbei, da noch der alte Berlichingen hier am Kamin saß, da wir um ihn durcheinander spielten und uns liebten wie die Engel. Wie wird sich der Bischof ängstigen, und meine Freunde. Ich weiß, das ganze Land nimmt teil an meinem Unfall. Was ist's! Können sie mir geben, wornach ich strebe?

Götz (mit einer Flasche Wein und Becher). Bis das Essen fertig wird, wollen wir eins trinken. Kommt, setzt Euch, tut, als wenn Ihr zu Hause wärt! Denkt, Ihr seid einmal wieder beim Götz. Haben doch lange nicht beisammengesessen, lang keine Flasche miteinander ausgestochen. (Bringt's ihm.) Ein fröhlich Herz!

Weislingen. Die Zeiten sind vorbei.

Götz. Behüte Gott! Zwar vergnügtere Tage werden wir wohl nicht wieder finden als an des Markgrafen Hof, da wir noch beisammenschliefen und miteinander umherzogen. Ich erinnere mich mit Freuden meiner Jugend. Wißt Ihr noch, wie ich mit dem Polacken Händel kriegte, dem ich sein gepicht und gekräuselt Haar von ungefähr mit dem ärmel verwischt?

Weislingen. Es war bei Tische, und er stach nach Euch mit dem Messer.

Götz. Den schlug ich wacker aus dazumal, und darüber wurdet Ihr mit seinem Kameraden zu Unfried. Wir hielten immer redlich zusammen als gute brave Jungen, dafür erkennte uns auch jedermann. (Schenkt ein und bringt's.) Kastor und Pollux! Mir tat's immer im Herzen wohl, wenn uns der Markgraf so nannte.

Weislingen. Der Bischof von Würzburg hatte es aufgebracht.

Götz. Das war ein gelehrter Herr, und dabei so leutselig. Ich
erinnere mich seiner, so lange ich lebe, wie er uns liebkoste, unsere
Eintracht lobte und den Menschen glücklich pries, der ein
Zwillingsbruder seines Freundes wäre.

Weislingen. Nichts mehr davon!

Götz. Warum nicht? Nach der Arbeit wüßt ich nichts Angenehmers, als mich des Vergangenen zu erinnern. Freilich, wenn ich wieder so bedenke, wie wir Liebs und Leids zusammen trugen, einander alles waren, und wie ich damals wähnte, so sollt's unser ganzes Leben sein! War das nicht all mein Trost,, wie mir diese Hand weggeschossen ward vor Landshut, und du mein pflegtest und mehr als Bruder für mich sorgtest? Ich hoffte, Adelbert wird künftig meine rechte Hand sein. Und nun-Weislingen. Oh!

Götz. Wenn du mir damals gefolgt hättest, da ich dir anlag, mit nach Brabant zu ziehen, es wäre alles gut geblieben. Da hielt dich das unglückliche Hofleben und das Schlenzen und Scherwenzen mit den Weibern. Ich sagt es dir immer, wenn du dich mit den eiteln garstigen Vetteln abgabst und ihnen erzähltest von mißvergnügten Ehen, verführten Mädchen, der rauhen Haut einer Dritten, oder was sie sonst gerne hören: "Du wirst ein Spitzbub", sagt ich, "Adelbert."

Weislingen. Wozu soll das alles?

Götz. Wollte Gott, ich könnt's vergessen, oder es wär anders! Bist du nicht ebenso frei, so edel geboren als einer in Deutschland, unabhängig, nur dem Kaiser untertan, und du schmiegst dich unter Vasallen? Was hast du von dem Bischof? Weil er dein Nachbar ist? dich necken könnte? Hast du nicht Arme und Freunde, ihn wieder zu necken? Verkennst den Wert eines freien Rittersmanns, der nur abhängt von Gott, seinem Kaiser und sich selbst! Verkriechst dich zum ersten Hofschranzen eines eigensinnigen neidischen Pfaffen!

Weislingen. Laßt mich reden.

Götz. Was hast du zu sagen?

Weislingen. Du siehst die Fürsten an, wie der Wolf den Hirten. Und doch, darfst du sie schelten, daß sie ihrer Leut und Länder Bestes wahren? Sind sie denn einen Augenblick vor den ungerechten Rittern sicher, die ihre Untertanen auf allen Straßen anfallen, ihre Dörfer und Schlösser verheeren? Wenn nun auf der andern Seite unsers teuern Kaisers Länder der Gewalt des Erbfeindes ausgesetzt sind, er von den Ständen Hülfe begehrt, und sie sich kaum ihres Lebens erwehren: ist's nicht ein guter Geist, der ihnen einrät, auf Mittel zu denken, Deutschland zu beruhigen, Recht und Gerechtigkeit zu handhaben, um einen jeden, Großen und Kleinen, die Vorteile des Friedens genießen zu machen? Und uns verdenkst du's, Berlichingen, daß wir uns in ihren Schutz begeben, deren Hülfe uns nah ist, statt daß die entfernte Majestät sich selbst nicht beschützen kann.

Götz. Ja! ja! Ich versteh! Weislingen, wären die Fürsten, wie Ihr sie schildert, wir hätten alle, was wir begehren. Ruh und Frieden! Ich glaub's wohl! Den wünscht jeder Raubvogel, die Beute nach Bequemlichkeit zu verzehren. Wohlsein eines jeden! Daß sie sich nur darum graue Haare wachsen ließen! Und mit unserm Kaiser spielen sie auf eine unanständige Art. Er meint's gut und möcht gern bessern. Da kommt denn alle Tage ein neuer Pfannenflicker und meint so und so. Und weil der Herr geschwind etwas begreift, und nur reden darf, um tausend Hände in Bewegung zu setzen, so denkt er, es wär auch alles so geschwind und leicht ausgeführt. Nun ergehn Verordnungen über Verordnungen, und wird eine über die andere vergessen; und was den Fürsten in ihren Kram dient, da sind sie hinterher, und gloriieren von Ruh und Sicherheit des Reichs, bis sie die Kleinen unterm Fuß haben. Ich will darauf schwören, es dankt mancher in seinem Herzen Gott, daß der Türk dem Kaiser die Waage hält.

Weislingen. Ihr seht's von Eurer Seite.

Götz. Das tut jeder. Es ist die Frage, auf welcher Licht und Recht ist, und eure Gänge scheuen wenigstens den Tag.

Weislingen. Ihr dürft reden, ich bin der Gefangne.

Götz. Wenn Euer Gewissen rein ist, so seid Ihr frei. Aber wie war's um den Landfrieden? Ich weiß noch, als ein Bub von sechzehn Jahren war ich mit dem Markgrafen auf dem Reichstag. Was die Fürsten da für weite Mäuler machten, und die Geistlichen am ärgsten. Euer Bischof lärmte dem Kaiser die Ohren voll, als wenn ihm wunder wie! die Gerechtigkeit ans Herz gewachsen wäre; und jetzt wirft er mir selbst einen Buben nieder, zur Zeit da unsere Händel vertragen sind, ich an nichts Böses denke. Ist nicht alles zwischen uns geschlichtet? Was hat er mit dem Buben?

Weislingen. Es geschah ohne sein Wissen.

Götz. Warum gibt er ihn nicht wieder los?

Weislingen. Er hat sich nicht aufgeführt, wie er sollte.

Götz. Nicht wie er sollte? Bei meinem Eid, er hat getan, wie er sollte, so gewiß er mit Eurer und des Bischofs Kundschaft gefangen ist. Meint Ihr, ich komm erst heut auf die Welt, daß ich nicht sehen soll, wo alles hinaus will?

Weislingen. Ihr seid argwöhnisch und tut uns unrecht.

Götz. Weislingen, soll ich von der Leber weg reden? Ich bin euch ein Dorn in den Augen, so klein ich bin, und der Sickingen und Selbitz nicht weniger, weil wir fest entschlossen sind, zu sterben eh, als jemanden die Luft zu verdanken, außer Gott, und unsere Treu und Dienst zu leisten, als dem Kaiser. Da ziehen sie nun um mich herum, verschwärzen mich bei Ihro Majestät und ihren Freunden und meinen Nachbarn, und spionieren nach Vorteil über mich. Aus dem Wege wollen sie mich haben, wie's wäre. Darum nahmt ihr meinen Buben gefangen, weil ihr wußtet, ich hatt' ihn auf Kundschaft ausgeschickt; und darum tat er nicht, was er sollte, weil er mich nicht an euch verriet. Und du, Weislingen, bist ihr Werkzeug!

Weislingen. Berlichingen!

Götz. Kein Wort mehr davon! Ich bin ein Feind von Explikationen; man betriegt sich oder den andern, und meist beide.

Karl. Zu Tisch, Vater.

Götz. Fröhliche Botschaft!—Kommt! ich hoffe, meine Weibsleute sollen Euch munter machen. Ihr wart sonst ein Liebhaber, die Fräulein wußten von Euch zu erzählen. Kommt! (Ab.)

Im bischöflichen Palaste zu Bamberg Der Speisesaal

Bischof von Bamberg. Abt von Fulda. Olearius. Liebetraut. Hofleute.
An Tafel. Der Nachtisch und die großen Pokale werden aufgetragen.

Bischof. Studieren jetzt viele Deutsche von Adel zu Bologna?

Olearius. Vom Adel- und Bürgerstande. Und ohne Ruhm zu melden, tragen sie das größte Lob davon. Man pflegt im Sprichwort auf der Akademie zu sagen: "So fleißig wie ein Deutscher von Adel." Denn indem die Bürgerlichen einen rühmlichen Fleiß anwenden, durch Talente den Mangel der Geburt zu ersetzen, so bestreben sich jene, mit rühmlicher Wetteiferung, ihre angeborne Würde durch die glänzendsten Verdienste zu erhöhen.

Abt. Ei!

Liebetraut. Sag einer, was man, nicht erlebet. So fleißig wie ein
Deutscher von Adel! Das hab ich mein Tage nicht gehört.

Olearius. Ja, sie sind die Bewunderung der ganzen Akademie. Es
werden ehestens einige von den ältesten und geschicktesten als
Doktores zurückkommen. Der Kaiser wird glücklich sein, die ersten
Stellen damit besetzen zu können.

Bischof. Das kann nicht fehlen.

Abt. Kennen Sie nicht zum Exempel einen Junker?—Er ist aus
Hessen-Olearius. Es sind viel Hessen da.

Abt. Er heißt—er ist—Weiß es keiner von euch?—Seine Mutter war eine von—Oh! Sein Vater hatte nur ein Aug—und war Marschall.

Liebetraut. Von Wildenholz?

Abt. Recht—von Wildenholz.

Olearius. Den kenn ich wohl, ein junger Herr von vielen Fähigkeiten.
Besonders rühmt man ihn wegen seiner Stärke im Disputieren.

Abt. Das hat er von seiner Mutter.

Liebetraut. Nur wollte sie ihr Mann niemals drum rühmen.

Bischof. Wie sagtet Ihr, daß der Kaiser hieß, der Euer "Corpus Juris" geschrieben hat?

Olearius. Justinianus.

Bischof. Ein trefflicher Herr! er soll leben!

Olearius. Sein Andenken!

(Sie trinken.)

Abt. Es mag ein schön Buch sein.

Olearius. Man möcht's wohl ein Buch aller Bücher nennen; eine Sammlung aller Gesetze; bei jedem Fall der Urteilsspruch bereit; und was ja noch abgängig oder dunkel wäre, ersetzen die Glossen, womit die gelehrtesten Männer das vortrefflichste Werk geschmückt haben.

Abt. Eine Sammlung aller Gesetze! Potz! Da müssen wohl auch die
Zehn Gebote drin sein.

Olearius. Implicite wohl, nicht explicite.

Abt. Das mein ich auch, an und vor sich, ohne weitere Explikation.

Bischof. Und was das Schönste ist, so könnte, wie Ihr sagt, ein Reich in sicherster Ruhe und Frieden leben, wo es völlig eingeführt und recht gehandhabt würde.

Olearius. Ohne Frage.

Bischof. Alle Doctores Juris!

Olearius. Ich werd's zu rühmen wissen. (Sie trinken.) Wollte Gott, man spräche so in meinem Vaterlande!

Abt. Wo seid Ihr her, hochgelahrter Herr?

Olearius. Von Frankfurt am Main, Ihro Eminenz zu dienen.

Bischof. Steht ihr Herrn da nicht wohl angeschrieben? Wie kommt das?

Olearius. Sonderbar genug. Ich war da, meines Vaters Erbschaft abzuholen; der Pöbel hätte mich fast gesteinigt, wie er hörte, ich sei ein Jurist.

Abt. Behüte Gott!

Olearius. Aber das kommt daher: Der Schöppenstuhl, der in großem Ansehn weit umher steht, ist mit lauter Leuten besetzt, die der Römischen Rechte unkundig sind. Man glaubt, es sei genug, durch Alter und Erfahrung sich eine genaue Kenntnis des innern und äußern Zustandes der Stadt zu erwerben. So werden, nach altem Herkommen und wenigen Statuten, die Bürger und die Nachbarschaft gerichtet.

Abt. Das ist wohl gut.

Olearius. Aber lange nicht genug. Der Menschen Leben ist kurz, und in einer Generation kommen nicht alle Kasus vor. Eine Sammlung solcher Fälle von vielen Jahrhunderten ist unser Gesetzbuch. Und dann ist der Wille und die Meinung der Menschen schwankend; dem deucht heute das recht, was der andere morgen mißbilliget; und so ist Verwirrung und Ungerechtigkeit unvermeidlich. Das alles bestimmen die Gesetze; und die Gesetze sind unveränderlich.

Abt. Das ist freilich besser.

Olearius. Das erkennt der Pöbel nicht, der, so gierig er auf
Neuigkeiten ist, das Neue höchst verabscheuet, das ihn aus seinem
Gleise leiten will, und wenn er sich noch so sehr dadurch verbessert.
Sie halten den Juristen so arg, als einen Verwirrer des Staats, einen
Beutelschneider, und sind wie rasend, wenn einer dort sich
niederzulassen gedenkt.

Liebetraut. Ihr seid von Frankfurt! Ich bin wohl da bekannt. Bei Kaiser Maximilians Krönung haben wir Euern Bräutigams was vorgeschmaust. Euer Name ist Olearius? Ich kenne so niemanden.

Olearius. Mein Vater hieß öhlmann. Nur, den Mißstand auf dem Titel meiner lateinischen Schriften zu vermeiden, nenn ich mich, nach dem Beispiel und auf Anraten würdiger Rechtslehrer, Olearius.

Liebetraut. Ihr tatet wohl, daß Ihr Euch übersetztet. Ein Prophet gilt nichts in seinem Vaterlande, es hätt' Euch in Eurer Muttersprache auch so gehen können.

Olearius. Es war nicht darum.

Liebetraut. Alle Dinge haben ein paar Ursachen.

Abt. Ein Prophet gilt nichts in seinem Vaterlande!

Liebetraut. Wißt Ihr auch warum, hochwürdiger Herr?

Abt. Weil er da geboren und erzogen ist.

Liebetraut. Wohl! Das mag die eine Ursache sein. Die andere ist:
Weil, bei einer näheren Bekanntschaft mit den Herrn, der Nimbus von
Ehrwürdigkeit und Heiligkeit wegschwindet, den uns eine neblichte
Ferne um sie herumlügt; und dann sind sie ganz kleine Stümpfchen
Unschlitt.

Olearius. Es scheint, Ihr seid dazu bestellt, Wahrheiten, zu sagen.

Liebetraut. Weil ich 's Herz dazu hab, so fehlt mir's nicht am Maul.

Olearius. Aber doch an Geschicklichkeit, sie wohl anzubringen.

Liebetraut. Schröpfköpfe sind wohl angebracht, wo sie ziehen.

Olearius. Bader erkennt man an der Schürze und nimmt in ihrem Amte ihnen nichts übel. Zur Vorsorge tätet Ihr wohl, wenn Ihr eine Schellenkappe trügt.

Liebetraut. Wo habt Ihr promoviert? Es ist nur zur Nachfrage, wenn mir einmal der Einfall käme, daß ich gleich vor die rechte Schmiede ginge.

Olearius. Ihr seid verwegen.

Liebetraut. Und Ihr sehr breit.

(Bischof und Abt lachen.)

Bischof. Von was anders!—Nicht so hitzig, ihr Herrn. Bei Tisch geht alles drein—Einen andern Diskurs, Liebetraut!

Liebetraut. Gegen Frankfurt liegt ein Ding über, heißt
Sachsenhausen-Olearius (zum Bischof). Was spricht man vom Türkenzug,
Ihro Fürstliche Gnaden?

Bischof. Der Kaiser hat nichts Angelegners, als vorerst das Reich zu beruhigen, die Fehden abzuschaffen und das Ansehn der Gerichte zu befestigen. Dann, sagt man, wird er persönlich gegen die Feinde des Reichs und der Christenheit ziehen. Jetzt machen ihm seine Privathändel noch zu tun, und das Reich ist, trotz ein vierzig Landfrieden, noch immer eine Mördergrube. Franken, Schwaben, der Oberrhein und die angrenzenden Länder werden von übermütigen und kühnen Rittern verheeret. Sickingen, Selbitz mit einem Fuß, Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand spotten in diesen Gegenden des kaiserlichen Ansehens-Abt. Ja, wenn Ihro Majestät nicht bald dazu tun, so stecken einen die Kerl am End in Sack.

Liebetraut. Das müßt ein Kerl sein, der das Weinfaß von Fuld in den
Sack schieben wollte.

Bischof. Besonders ist der letzte seit vielen Jahren mein unversöhnlicher Feind, und molestiert mich unsäglich; aber es soll nicht lang mehr währen, hoff ich. Der Kaiser hält jetzt seinen Hof zu Augsburg. Wir haben unsere Maßregeln genommen, es kann uns nicht fehlen.—Herr Doktor, kennt Ihr Adelberten von Weislingen?

Olearius. Nein, Ihro Eminenz.

Bischof. Wenn Ihr die Ankunft dieses Mannes erwartet, werdet Ihr Euch freuen, den edelsten, verständigsten und angenehmsten Ritter in einer Person zu sehen.

Olearius. Es muß ein vortrefflicher Mann sein, der solche
Lobeserhebungen aus solch einem Munde verdient.

Liebetraut. Er ist auf keiner Akademie gewesen.

Bischof. Das wissen wir. (Die Bedienten laufen ans Fenster.) Was gibt's?

Ein Bedienter. Eben reit Färber, Weislingens Knecht, zum Schloßtor herein.

Bischof. Seht, was er bringt, er wird ihn melden.

(Liebetraut geht. Sie stehn auf und trinken noch eins.—Liebetraut kommt zurück.)

Bischof. Was für Nachrichten?

Liebetraut. Ich wollt, es müßt sie Euch ein andrer sagen. Weislingen ist gefangen.

Bischof. Oh!

Liebetraut. Berlichingen hat ihn und drei Knechte bei Haslach weggenommen. Einer ist entronnen, Euch's anzusagen.

Abt. Eine Hiobspost.

Olearius. Es tut mir von Herzen leid.

Bischof. Ich will den Knecht sehn, bringt ihn herauf—Ich will ihn selbst sprechen. Bringt ihn in mein Kabinett. (Ab.)

Abt (setzt sich). Noch einen Schluck.

(Die Knechte schenken ein.)

Olearius. Belieben Ihro Hochwürden nicht eine kleine Promenade in den
Garten zu machen? Post coenam stabis seu passus mille meabis.

Liebetraut. Wahrhaftig, das Sitzen ist Ihnen nicht gesund. Sie kriegen noch einen Schlagfluß.

Abt (hebt sich auf).

Liebetraut (vor sich). Wann ich ihn nur draußen hab, will ich ihm fürs Exerzitium sorgen.

(Gehn ab.)

I. Akt, Szene 4

Jagsthausen

Maria. Weislingen.

Maria. Ihr liebt mich, sagt Ihr. Ich glaub es gerne und hoffe, mit
Euch glücklich zu sein und Euch glücklich zu machen.

Weislingen. Ich fühle nichts, als nur daß ich ganz dein bin. (Er umarmt sie.)

Maria. Ich bitte Euch, laßt mich. Einen Kuß hab ich Euch zum Gottespfennig erlaubt; Ihr scheint aber schon von dem Besitz nehmen zu wollen, was nur unter Bedingungen Euer ist.

Weislingen. Ihr seid zu streng, Maria! Unschuldige Liebe erfreut die
Gottheit, statt sie zu beleidigen.

Maria. Es sei! Aber ich bin nicht dadurch erbaut. Man lehrte mich:
Liebkosungen sein wie Ketten, stark durch ihre Verwandtschaft, und
Mädchen, wenn sie liebten, sein schwächer als Simson nach Verlust
seiner Locken.

Weislingen. Wer lehrte Euch das?

Maria. Die äbtissin meines Klosters. Bis in mein sechzehntes Jahr war ich bei ihr, und nur mit Euch empfind ich das Glück, das ich in ihrem Umgang genoß. Sie hatte geliebt und durfte reden. Sie hatte ein Herz voll Empfindung! Sie war eine vortreffliche Frau.

Weislingen. Da glich sie dir! (Er nimmt ihre Hand.) Wie wird mir's werden, wenn ich Euch verlassen soll!

Maria (zieht ihre Hand zurück). Ein bißchen eng, hoff ich, denn ich weiß, wie's mir sein wird. Aber Ihr sollt fort.

Weislingen. Ja, meine Teuerste, und ich will. Denn ich fühle, welche
Seligkeiten ich mir durch dies Opfer erwerbe. Gesegnet sei dein
Bruder, und der Tag, an dem er auszog, mich zu fangen!

Maria. Sein Herz war voll Hoffnung für ihn und dich. "Lebt wohl!" sagt' er beim Abschied, "ich will sehen, daß ich ihn wiederfinde."

Weislingen. Er hat's. Wie wünscht ich, die Verwaltung meiner Güter und ihre Sicherheit nicht durch das leidige Hofleben so versäumt zu haben! Du könntest gleich die Meinige sein.

Maria. Auch der Aufschub hat seine Freuden.

Weislingen. Sage das nicht, Maria, ich muß sonst fürchten, du empfindest weniger stark als ich. Doch ich büße verdient; und welche Hoffnungen werden mich auf jedem Schritt begleiten! Ganz der Deine zu sein, nur in dir und dem Kreise von Guten zu leben, von der Welt entfernt, getrennt, alle Wonne zu genießen, die so zwei Herzen, einander gewähren! Was ist die Gnade des Fürsten, was der Beifall der Welt gegen diese einfache Glückseligkeit? Ich habe viel gehofft und gewünscht, das widerfährt mir über alles Hoffen und Wünschen.

(Götz kommt.)

Götz. Euer Knab ist wieder da. Er konnte vor Müdigkeit und Hunger kaum etwas vorbringen. Meine Frau gibt ihm zu essen. So viel hab ich verstanden: der Bischof will den Knaben nicht herausgeben, es sollen Kaiserliche Kommissarien ernannt und ein Tag ausgesetzt werden, wo die Sache dann verglichen werden mag. Dem sei, wie ihm wolle, Adelbert, Ihr seid frei; ich verlange weiter nichts als Eure Hand, daß Ihr ins künftige meinen Feinden weder öffentlich noch heimlich Vorschub tun wollt.

Weislingen. Hier faß ich Eure Hand. Laßt, von diesem Augenblick an, Freundschaft und Vertrauen, gleich einem ewigen Gesetz der Natur, unveränderlich unter uns sein! Erlaubt mir zugleich, diese Hand zu fassen (er nimmt Mariens Hand) und den Besitz des edelsten Fräuleins.

Götz. Darf ich ja für Euch sagen?

Maria. Wenn Ihr es mit mir sagt.

Götz. Es ist ein Glück, daß unsere Vorteile diesmal miteinander gehn. Du brauchst nicht rot zu werden. Deine Blicke sind Beweis genug. Ja denn, Weislingen! Gebt Euch die Hände, und so sprech ich Amen!—Mein Freund und Bruder!—Ich danke dir, Schwester! Du kannst mehr als Hanf spinnen. Du hast einen Faden gedreht, diesen Paradiesvogel zu fesseln. Du siehst nicht ganz frei, Adelbert! Was fehlt dir? Ich—bin ganz glücklich; was ich nur träumend hoffte, seh ich, und bin wie träumend. Ach! nun ist mein Traum aus. Mir war's heute nacht, ich gäb dir meine rechte eiserne Hand, und du hieltest mich so fest, daß sie aus den Armschienen ging wie abgebrochen. Ich erschrak und wachte drüber auf. Ich hätte nur fortträumen sollen, da würd ich gesehen haben, wie du mir eine neue lebendige Hand ansetztest—Du sollst mir jetzo fort, dein Schloß und deine Güter in vollkommenen Stand zu setzen. Der verdammte Hof hat dich beides versäumen machen. Ich muß meiner Frau rufen. Elisabeth!

Maria. Mein Bruder ist in voller Freude.

Weislingen. Und doch darf ich ihm den Rang streitig machen.

Götz. Du wirst anmutig wohnen.

Maria. Franken ist ein gesegnetes Land.

Weislingen. Und ich darf wohl sagen, mein Schloß liegt in der gesegnetsten und anmutigsten Gegend.

Götz. Das dürft Ihr, und ich will's behaupten. Hier fließt der Main, und allmählich hebt der Berg an, der, mit äckern und Weinbergen bekleidet, von Euerm Schloß gekrönt wird, dann biegt sich der Fluß schnell um die Ecke hinter dem Felsen Eures Schlosses hin. Die Fenster des großen Saals gehen steil herab aufs Wasser, eine Aussicht viel Stunden weit.

(Elisabeth kommt.)

Elisabeth. Was schafft ihr?

Götz. Du sollst deine Hand auch dazu geben und sagen: "Gott segne euch!" Sie sind ein Paar.

Elisabeth. So geschwind!

Götz. Aber nicht unvermutet.

Elisabeth. Möget Ihr Euch so immer nach ihr sehnen als bisher, da ihr um sie warbt! Und dann! Möchtet Ihr so glücklich sein, als Ihr sie lieb behaltet!

Weislingen. Amen! Ich begehre kein Glück als unter diesem Titel.

Götz. Der Bräutigam, meine liebe Frau, tut eine kleine Reise; denn die große Veränderung zieht viel geringe nach sich. Er entfernt sich zuerst vom Bischöflichen Hof, um diese Freundschaft nach und nach erkalten zu lassen. Dann reißt er seine Güter eigennützigen Pachtern aus den Händen. Und—kommt, Schwester, komm, Elisabeth! Wir wollen ihn allein lassen. Sein Knab hat ohne Zweifel geheime Aufträge an ihn.

Weislingen. Nichts, als was Ihr wissen dürft.

Götz. Braucht's nicht.—Franken und Schwaben! Ihr seid nun verschwisterter als jemals. Wie wollen wir den Fürsten den Daumen auf dem Aug halten!

(Die drei gehn.)

Weislingen. Gott im Himmel! Konntest du mir Unwürdigem solch eine Seligkeit bereiten? Es ist zu viel für mein Herz. Wie ich von den elenden Menschen abhing, die ich zu beherrschen glaubte, von den Blicken des Fürsten, von dem ehrerbietigen Beifall umher! Götz, teurer Götz, du hast mich mir selbst wiedergegeben, und, Maria, du vollendest meine Sinnesänderung. Ich fühle mich so frei wie in heiterer Luft. Bamberg will ich nicht mehr sehen, will all die schändlichen Verbindungen durchschneiden, die mich unter mir selbst hielten. Mein Herz erweitert sich, hier ist kein beschwerliches Streben nach versagter Größe. So gewiß ist der allein glücklich und groß, der weder zu herrschen noch zu gehorchen braucht, um etwas zu sein!

(Franz tritt auf.)

Franz. Gott grüß Euch, gestrenger Herr! Ich bring Euch so viel Grüße, daß ich nicht weiß, wo anzufangen. Bamberg und zehn Meilen in die Runde entbieten Euch ein tausendfaches: Gott grüß Euch!

Weislingen. Willkommen, Franz! Was bringst du mehr?

Franz. Ihr steht in einem Andenken bei Hof und überall, daß es nicht zu sagen ist.

Weislingen. Das wird nicht lange dauern.

Franz. So lang Ihr lebt! und nach Eurem Tod wird's heller blinken als die messingenen Buchstaben auf einem Grabstein. Wie man sich Euern Unfall zu Herzen nahm!

Weislingen. Was sagte der Bischof?

Franz. Er war so begierig zu wissen, daß er mit geschäftiger Geschwindigkeit der Fragen meine Antwort verhinderte. Er wußt es zwar schon; denn Färber, der von Haslach entrann, brachte ihm die Botschaft. Aber er wollte alles wissen. Er fragte so ängstlich, ob Ihr nicht versehrt wäret? Ich sagte: "Er ist ganz, von der äußersten Haarspitze bis zum Nagel des kleinen Zehs."

Weislingen. Was sagte er zu den Vorschlägen?

Franz. Er wollte gleich alles herausgeben, den Knaben und noch Geld darauf, nur Euch zu befreien. Da er aber hörte, Ihr solltet ohne das loskommen und nur Euer Wort das äquivalent gegen den. Buben sein, da wollte er absolut den Berlichingen vertagt haben. Er sagte mir hundert Sachen an Euch—ich hab sie wieder vergessen. Es war eine lange Predigt über die Worte: "Ich kann Weislingen nicht entbehren."

Weislingen. Er wird's lernen müssen!

Franz. Wie meint Ihr? Er sagte: "Mach ihn eilen, es wartet alles auf ihn."

Weislingen. Es kann warten. Ich gehe nicht nach Hof.

Franz. Nicht nach Hof? Herr! Wie kommt Euch das? Wenn Ihr wüßtet, was ich weiß. Wenn Ihr nur träumen könntet, was ich gesehen habe.

Weislingen. Wie wird dir's?

Franz. Nur von der bloßen Erinnerung komm ich außer mir. Bamberg ist nicht mehr Bamberg, ein Engel in Weibesgestalt macht es zum Vorhofe des Himmels.

Weislingen. Nichts weiter?

Franz. Ich will ein Pfaff werden, wenn Ihr sie sehet und nicht außer
Euch kommt.

Weislingen. Wer ist's denn?

Franz. Adelheid von Walldorf.

Weislingen. Die! Ich habe viel von ihrer Schönheit gehört.

Franz. Gehört? Das ist eben, als wenn Ihr sagtet: "Ich hab die Musik gesehen." Es ist der Zunge so wenig möglich, eine Linie ihrer Vollkommenheiten auszudrücken, da das Aug sogar in ihrer Gegenwart sich nicht selbst genug ist.

Weislingen. Du bist nicht gescheit.

Franz. Das kann wohl sein. Das letztemal, da ich sie sahe, hatte ich nicht mehr Sinne als ein Trunkener. Oder vielmehr, kann ich sagen, ich fühlte in dem Augenblick, wie's den Heiligen bei himmlischen Erscheinungen sein mag. Alle Sinne stärker, höher, vollkommener, und doch den Gebrauch von keinem.

Weislingen. Das ist seltsam.

Franz. Wie ich von dem Bischof Abschied nahm, saß sie bei ihm. Sie spielten Schach. Er war sehr gnädig, reichte mir seine Hand zu küssen, und sagte mir vieles, davon ich nichts vernahm. Denn ich sah seine Nachbarin, sie hatte ihr Auge aufs Brett geheftet, als wenn sie einem großen Streich nachsänne. Ein feiner lauernder Zug um Mund und Wange! Ich hätt' der elfenbeinerne König sein mögen. Adel und Freundlichkeit herrschten auf ihrer Stirn. Und das blendende Licht des Angesichts und des Busens, wie es von den finstern Haaren erhoben ward!

Weislingen. Du bist drüber gar zum Dichter geworden.

Franz. So fühl ich denn in dem Augenblick, was den Dichter macht, ein volles, ganz von einer Empfindung volles Herz! Wie der Bischof endigte und ich mich neigte, sah sie mich an und sagte: "Auch von mir einen Gruß unbekannterweise! Sag ihm, er mag ja bald kommen. Es warten neue Freunde auf ihn; er soll sie nicht verachten, wenn er schon an alten so reich ist."—Ich wollte was antworten, aber der Paß vom Herzen nach der Zunge war versperrt, ich neigte mich. Ich hätte mein Vermögen gegeben, die Spitze ihres kleinen Fingers küssen zu dürfen! Wie ich so stund, warf der Bischof einen Bauern herunter, ich fuhr darnach und rührte im Aufheben den Saum ihres Kleides, das fuhr mir durch alle Glieder, und ich weiß nicht, wie ich zur Tür hinausgekommen bin.

Weislingen. Ist ihr Mann bei Hofe?

Franz. Sie ist schon vier Monat Witwe. Um sich zu zerstreuen, hält sie sich in Bamberg auf. Ihr werdet sie sehen. Wenn sie einen ansieht, ist's, als wenn man in der Frühlingssonne stünde.

Weislingen. Es würde eine schwächere Wirkung auf mich haben.

Franz. Ich höre, Ihr seid so gut als verheiratet.

Weislingen. Wollte, ich wär's. Meine sanfte Marie wird das Glück meines Lebens machen. Ihre süße Seele bildet sich in ihren blauen Augen. Und weiß wie ein Engel des Himmels, gebildet aus Unschuld und Liebe, leitet sie mein Herz zur Ruhe und Glückseligkeit. Pack zusammen! und dann auf mein Schloß! Ich will Bamberg nicht sehen, und wenn Sankt Veit in Person meiner begehrte. (Geht ab.)

Franz. Da sei Gott vor! Wollen das Beste hoffen! Maria ist liebreich und schön, und einem Gefangenen und Kranken kann ich's nicht übelnehmen, der sich in sie verliebt. In ihren Augen ist Trost, gesellschaftliche Melancholie.—Aber um dich, Adelheid, ist Leben, Feuer, Mut—Ich würde!—Ich bin ein Narr—dazu machte mich ein Blick von ihr. Mein Herr muß hin! Ich muß hin! Und da will ich mich wieder gescheit oder völlig rasend gaffen.

Zweiter Akt

II. Akt, Szene 1

Bamberg. Ein Saal

Bischof, Adelheid spielen Schach. Liebetraut mit einer Zither.
Frauen, Hofleute um ihn herum am Kamin.

Liebetraut (spielt und singt).

Mit Pfeilen und Bogen Cupido geflogen, Die Fackel in Brand, Wollt mutilich kriegen Und männilich siegen Mit stürmender Hand.

Auf! Auf!

An! An! Die Waffen erklirrten, Die Flügelein schwirrten, Die Augen entbrannt.

Da fand er die Busen Ach leider so bloß, Sie nahmen so willig Ihn all auf den Schoß. Er schüttet' die Pfeile Zum Feuer hinein, Sie herzten und drückten Und wiegten ihn ein.

Hei ei o! Popeio!

Adelheid. Ihr seid nicht bei Eurem Spiele. Schach dem König!

Bischof. Es ist noch Auskunft.

Adelheid. Lange werdet Ihr's nicht mehr treiben. Schach dem König!

Liebetraut. Dies Spiel spielt ich nicht, wenn ich ein großer Herr wär, und verböt's am Hofe und im ganzen Land.

Adelheid. Es ist wahr, dies Spiel ist ein Probierstein des Gehirns.

Liebetraut. Nicht darum! Ich wollte lieber das Geheul der
Totenglocke und ominöser Vögel, lieber das Gebell des knurrischen
Hofhunds Gewissen, lieber wollt ich sie durch den tiefsten Schlaf
hören, als von Laufern, Springern und andern Bestien das ewige:
"Schach dem König!"

Bischof. Wem wird auch das einfallen!

Liebetraut. Einem zum Exempel, der schwach wäre und ein stark Gewissen hätte, wie denn das meistenteils beisammen ist. Sie nennen's ein königlich Spiel und sagen, es sei für einen König erfunden worden, der den Erfinder mit einem Meer von überfluß belohnt habe. Wenn das wahr ist, so ist mir's, als wenn ich ihn sähe. Er war minorenn an Verstand oder an Jahren, unter der Vormundschaft seiner Mutter oder seiner Frau, hatte Milchhaare im Bart und Flachshaare um die Schläfe, er war so gefällig wie ein Weidenschößling und spielte gern Dame und mit den Damen, nicht aus Leidenschaft, behüte Gott! nur zum Zeitvertreib. Sein Hofmeister, zu tätig, um ein Gelehrter, zu unlenksam, ein Weltmann zu sein, erfand das Spiel in usum Delphini, das so homogen mit Seiner Majestät war—und so ferner.

Adelheid. Matt! Ihr solltet die Lücken unsrer Geschichtsbücher ausfüllen, Liebetraut.

(Sie stehen auf.)

Liebetraut. Die Lücken unsrer Geschlechtsregister, das wäre
profitabler. Seitdem die Verdienste unserer Vorfahren mit ihren
Porträts zu einerlei Gebrauch dienen, die leeren Seiten nämlich unsrer
Zimmer und unsers Charakters zu tapezieren; da wäre was zu verdienen.

Bischof. Er will nicht kommen, sagtet Ihr!

Adelheid. Ich bitt Euch, schlagt's Euch aus dem Sinn.

Bischof. Was das sein mag?

Liebetraut. Was? Die Ursachen lassen sich herunterbeten wie ein Rosenkranz. Er ist in eine Art von Zerknirschung gefallen, von der ich ihn leicht kurieren wollt.

Bischof. Tut das, reitet zu ihm.

Liebetraut. Meinen Auftrag!

Bischof. Er soll unumschränkt sein. Spare nichts, wenn du ihn zurückbringst.

Liebetraut. Darf ich Euch auch hineinmischen, gnädige Frau?

Adelheid. Mit Bescheidenheit.

Liebetraut. Das ist eine weitläufige Kommission.

Adelheid. Kennt Ihr mich so wenig, oder seid Ihr so jung, um nicht zu wissen, in welchem Ton Ihr mit Weislingen von mir zu reden habt?

Liebetraut. Im Ton einer Wachtelpfeife, denk ich.

Adelheid. Ihr werdet nie gescheit werden!

Liebetraut. Wird man das, gnädige Frau?

Bischof. Geht, geht. Nehmt das beste Pferd aus meinem Stall, wählt
Euch Knechte, und schafft mir ihn her!

Liebetraut. Wenn ich ihn nicht herbanne, so sagt: ein altes Weib, das Warzen und Sommerflecken vertreibt, verstehe mehr von der Sympathie als ich.

Bischof. Was wird das helfen! Berlichingen hat ihn ganz eingenommen.
Wenn er herkommt, wird er wieder fort wollen.

Liebetraut. Wollen, das ist keine Frage, aber ob er kann. Der Händedruck eines Fürsten, und das Lächeln einer schönen Frau! Da reißt sich kein Weisling los. Ich eile und empfehle mich zu Gnaden.

Bischof. Reist wohl.

Adelheid. Adieu.

(Er geht.)

Bischof. Wenn er einmal hier ist, verlaß ich mich auf Euch.

Adelheid. Wollt Ihr mich zur Leimstange brauchen?

Bischof. Nicht doch.

Adelheid. Zum Lockvogel denn?

Bischof. Nein, den spielt Liebetraut. Ich bitt Euch, versagt mir nicht, was mir sonst niemand gewähren kann.

Adelheid. Wollen sehn.

Jagsthausen

Hans von Selbitz. Götz.

Selbitz. Jedermann wird Euch loben, daß Ihr denen von Nürnberg Fehd angekündigt habt.

Götz. Es hätte mir das Herz abgefressen, wenn ich's ihnen hätte lang schuldig bleiben sollen. Es ist am Tag, sie haben den Bambergern meinen Buben verraten. Sie sollen an mich denken!

Selbitz. Sie haben einen alten Groll gegen Euch.

Götz. Und ich wider sie; mir ist gar recht, daß sie angefangen haben.

Selbitz. Die Reichsstädte und Pfaffen halten doch von jeher zusammen.

Götz. Sie haben's Ursach.

Selbitz. Wir wollen ihnen die Hölle heiß machen.

Götz. Ich zählte auf Euch. Wollte Gott, der Burgemeister von Nürnberg, mit der güldenen Kett um den Hals, käm uns in Wurf, er sollt sich mit all seinem Witz verwundern.

Selbitz. Ich höre, Weislingen ist wieder auf Eurer Seite. Tritt er zu uns?

Götz. Noch nicht; es hat seine Ursachen, warum er uns noch nicht öffentlich Vorschub tun darf; doch ist's eine Weile genug, daß er nicht wider uns ist. Der Pfaff ist ohne ihn, was das Meßgewand ohne den Pfaffen.

Selbitz. Wann ziehen wir aus?

Götz. Morgen oder übermorgen. Es kommen nun bald Kaufleute von Bamberg und Nürnberg aus der Frankfurter Messe. Wir werden einen guten Fang tun.

Selbitz. Will's Gott. (Ab.)

Bamberg. Zimmer der Adelheid

Adelheid. Kammerfräulein.

Adelheid. Er ist da! sagst du. Ich glaub es kaum.

Fräulein. Wenn ich ihn nicht selbst gesehn hätte, würd ich sagen, ich zweifle.

Adelheid. Den Liebetraut mag der Bischof in Gold einfassen: er hat ein Meisterstück gemacht.

Fräulein. Ich sah ihn, wie er zum Schloß hereinreiten wollte, er saß auf einem Schimmel. Das Pferd scheute, wie's an die Brücke kam, und wollte nicht von der Stelle. Das Volk war aus allen Straßen gelaufen, ihn zu sehn. Sie freuten sich über des Pferds Unart. Von allen Seiten ward er gegrüßt, und er dankte allen. Mit einer angenehmen Gleichgültigkeit saß er droben, und mit Schmeicheln und Drohen bracht er es endlich zum Tor herein, der Liebetraut mit, und wenig Knechte.

Adelheid. Wie gefällt er dir?

Fräulein. Wie mir nicht leicht ein Mann gefallen hat. Er glich dem Kaiser hier (deutet auf Maximilians Porträt), als wenn er sein Sohn wäre. Die Nase nur etwas kleiner, ebenso freundliche lichtbraune Augen, ebenso ein blondes schönes Haar, und gewachsen wie eine Puppe. Ein halb trauriger Zug auf seinem Gesicht—ich weiß nicht—gefiel mir so wohl!

Adelheid. Ich bin neugierig, ihn zu sehen.

Fräulein. Das wär ein Herr für Euch.

Adelheid. Närrin!

Fräulein. Kinder und Narren-(Liebetraut kommt.)

Liebetraut. Nun, gnädige Frau, was verdien ich?

Adelheid. Hörner von deinem Weibe. Denn nach dem zu rechnen, habt Ihr schon manches Nachbars ehrliches Hausweib aus ihrer Pflicht hinausgeschwatzt.

Liebetraut. Nicht doch, gnädige Frau! Auf ihre Pflicht, wollt Ihr sagen; denn wenn's ja geschah, schwatzt ich sie auf ihres Mannes Bette.

Adelheid. Wie habt Ihr's gemacht, ihn herzubringen?

Liebetraut. Ihr wißt zu gut, wie man Schnepfen fängt; soll ich Euch meine Kunststückchen noch dazu lehren?—Erst tat ich, als wüßt ich nichts, verstünd nichts von seiner Aufführung, und setzt ihn dadurch in den Nachteil, die ganze Historie zu erzählen. Die sah ich nun gleich von einer ganz andern Seite an als er, konnte nicht finden—nicht einsehen—und so weiter. Dann redete ich von Bamberg allerlei durcheinander, Großes und Kleines, erweckte gewisse alte Erinnerungen, und wie ich seine Einbildungskraft beschäftigt hatte, knüpfte ich wirklich eine Menge Fädchen wieder an, die ich zerrissen fand. Er wußte nicht, wie ihm geschah, fühlte einen neuen Zug nach Bamberg, er wollte—ohne zu wollen. Wie er nun in sein Herz ging und das zu entwickeln suchte, und viel zu sehr mit sich beschäftigt war, um auf sich achtzugeben, warf ich ihm ein Seil um den Hals, aus drei mächtigen Stricken, Weiber-, Fürstengunst und Schmeichelei, gedreht, und so hab ich ihn hergeschleppt.

Adelheid. Was sagtet Ihr von mir?

Liebetraut. Die lautre Wahrheit. Ihr hättet wegen Eurer Güter Verdrießlichkeiten—hättet gehofft, da er beim Kaiser so viel gelte, werde er das leicht enden können.

Adelheid. Wohl.

Liebetraut. Der Bischof wird ihn Euch bringen.

Adelheid. Ich erwarte sie. (Liebetraut ab.) Mit einem Herzen, wie ich selten Besuch erwarte.

Im Spessart

Berlichingen. Selbitz. Georg als Reitersknecht.

Götz. Du hast ihn nicht angetroffen, Georg!

Georg. Er war tags vorher mit Liebetraut nach Bamberg geritten und zwei Knechte mit.

Götz. Ich seh nicht ein, was das geben soll.

Selbitz. Ich wohl. Eure Versöhnung war ein wenig zu schnell, als daß sie dauerhaft hätte sein sollen. Der Liebetraut ist ein pfiffiger Kerl; von dem hat er sich beschwätzen lassen.

Götz. Glaubst du, daß er bundbrüchig werden wird?

Selbitz. Der erste Schritt ist getan.

Götz. Ich glaub's nicht. Wer weiß, wie nötig es war, an Hof zu gehen; man ist ihm noch schuldig; wir wollen das Beste hoffen.

Selbitz. Wollte Gott, er verdient' es und täte das Beste!

Götz. Mir fällt eine List ein. Wir wollen Georgen des Bamberger Reiters erbeuteten Kittel anziehen und ihm das Geleitzeichen geben; er mag nach Bamberg reiten und sehen, wie's steht.

Georg. Da hab ich lange drauf gehofft.

Götz. Es ist dein erster Ritt. Sei vorsichtig, Knabe! Mir wäre leid, wenn dir ein Unfall begegnen sollt.

Georg. Laßt nur, mich irrt's nicht, wenn noch so viel um mich herumkrabbeln, mir ist's, als wenn's Ratten und Mäuse wären. (Ab.)

Bamberg

Bischof. Du willst dich nicht länger halten lassen!

Weislingen. Ihr werdet nicht verlangen, daß ich meinen Eid brechen soll.

Bischof. Ich hätte verlangen können, du solltest ihn nicht schwören. Was für ein Geist regierte dich? Konnt ich dich ohne das nicht befreien? Gelt ich so wenig am Kaiserlichen Hofe?

Weislingen. Es ist geschehen; verzeiht mir, wenn Ihr könnt.

Bischof. Ich begreif nicht, was nur im geringsten dich nötigte, den Schritt zu tun! Mir zu entsagen? Waren denn nicht hundert andere Bedingungen, loszukommen? Haben wir nicht seinen Buben? Hätt ich nicht Gelds genug gegeben und ihn wieder beruhigt? Unsere Anschläge auf ihn und seine Gesellen wären fortgegangen—Ach ich denke nicht, daß ich mit seinem Freunde rede, der nun wider mich arbeitet und die Minen leicht entkräften kann, die er selbst gegraben hat.

Weislingen. Gnädiger Herr!

Bischof. Und doch—wenn ich wieder dein Angesicht sehe, deine Stimme höre. Es ist nicht möglich, nicht möglich.

Weislingen. Lebt wohl, gnädiger Herr.

Bischof. Ich gebe dir meinen Segen. Sonst, wenn du gingst, sagt ich:
"Auf Wiedersehn!" Jetzt—Wollte Gott, wir sähen einander nie wieder!

Weislingen. Es kann sich vieles ändern.

Bischof. Vielleicht seh ich dich noch einmal, als Feind vor meinen Mauern, die Felder verheeren, die ihren blühenden Zustand dir jetzo danken.

Weislingen. Nein, gnädiger Herr.

Bischof. Du kannst nicht nein sagen. Die weltlichen Stände, meine
Nachbarn, haben alle einen Zahn auf mich. Solang ich dich hatte—Geht,
Weislingen! Ich habe Euch nichts mehr zu sagen. Ihr habt vieles
zunichte gemacht. Geht!

Weislingen. Und ich weiß nicht, was ich sagen soll.

(Bischof ab.—Franz tritt auf.)

Franz. Adelheid erwartet Euch. Sie ist nicht wohl. Und doch will sie Euch ohne Abschied nicht lassen.

Weislingen. Komm.

Franz. Gehn wir denn gewiß?

Weislingen. Noch diesen Abend.-Franz. Mir ist, als wenn ich aus der
Welt sollte.

Weislingen. Mir auch, und noch darzu, als wüßt ich nicht wohin.

II. Akt, Szene 2

Adelheidens Zimmer

Adelheid. Fräulein.

Fräulein. Ihr seht blaß, gnädige Frau.

Adelheid.—Ich lieb ihn nicht, und wollte doch, daß er bliebe. Siehst du, ich könnte mit ihm leben, ob ich ihn gleich nicht zum Manne haben möchte.

Fräulein. Glaubt Ihr, er geht?

Adelheid. Er ist zum Bischof, um Lebewohl zu sagen.

Fräulein. Er hat darnach noch einen schweren Stand.

Adelheid. Wie meinst du?

Fräulein. Was fragt Ihr, gnädige Frau? Ihr habt sein Herz geangelt, und wenn er sich losreißen will, verblutet er.

(Adelheid. Weislingen.)

Weislingen. Ihr seid nicht wohl, gnädige Frau?

Adelheid. Das kann Euch einerlei sein. Ihr verlaßt uns, verlaßt uns auf immer. Was fragt Ihr, ob wir leben oder sterben.

Weislingen. Ihr verkennt mich.

Adelheid. Ich nehme Euch, wie Ihr Euch gebt.

Weislingen. Das Ansehn trügt.

Adelheid. So seid Ihr ein Chamäleon?

Weislingen. Wenn Ihr mein Herz sehen könntet!

Adelheid. Schöne Sachen würden mir vor die Augen kommen.

Weislingen. Gewiß! Ihr würdet Euer Bild drin finden.

Adelheid. In irgendeinem Winkel bei den Porträten ausgestorbener Familien. Ich bitt Euch, Weislingen, bedenkt, Ihr redet mit mir. Falsche Worte gelten zum höchsten, wenn sie Masken unserer Taten sind. Ein Vermummter, der kenntlich ist, spielt eine armselige Rolle. Ihr leugnet Eure Handlungen nicht und redet das Gegenteil; was soll man von Euch halten?

Weislingen. Was Ihr wollt. Ich bin so geplagt mit dem, was ich bin, daß mir wenig bang ist, für was man mich nehmen mag.

Adelheid. Ihr kommt, um Abschied zu nehmen.

Weislingen. Erlaubt mir, Eure Hand zu küssen, und ich will sagen. Lebt wohl. Ihr erinnert mich! Ich bedachte nicht—Ich bin beschwerlich, gnädige Frau.

Adelheid. Ihr legt's falsch aus: ich wollte Euch forthelfen; denn Ihr wollt fort.

Weislingen. O sagt: ich muß. Zöge mich nicht die Ritterpflicht, der heilige Handschlag-Adelheid. Geht! Geht! Erzählt das Mädchen, die den "Theuerdank" lesen und sich so einen Mann wünschen. Ritterpflicht! Kinderspiel!

Weislingen. Ihr denkt nicht so.

Adelheid. Bei meinem Eid, Ihr verstellt Euch! Was habt Ihr versprochen? Und wem? Einem Mann, der seine Pflicht gegen den Kaiser und das Reich verkennt, in eben dem Augenblick Pflicht zu leisten, da er durch Eure Gefangennehmung in die Strafe der Acht verfällt. Pflicht zu leisten! die nicht gültiger sein kann als ungerechter gezwungener Eid. Entbinden nicht unsere Gesetze von solchen Schwüren? Macht das Kindern weis, die den Rübezahl glauben. Es stecken andere Sachen dahinter. Ein Feind des Reichs zu werden, ein Feind der bürgerlichen Ruh und Glückseligkeit! Ein Feind des Kaisers! Geselle eines Räubers! du, Weislingen, mit deiner sanften Seele!

Weislingen. Wenn Ihr ihn kenntet-Adelheid. Ich wollt ihm Gerechtigkeit widerfahren lassen. Er hat eine hohe unbändige Seele. Eben darum wehe dir, Weislingen! Geh und bilde dir ein, Geselle von ihm zu sein. Geh! und laß dich beherrschen. Du bist freundlich, gefällig-Weislingen. Er ist's auch.

Adelheid. Aber du bist nachgebend und er nicht! Unversehens wird er dich wegreißen, du wirst ein Sklave eines Edelmanns werden, da du Herr von Fürsten sein könntest.—Doch es ist Unbarmherzigkeit, dir deinen zukünftigen Stand zu verleiden.

Weislingen. Hättest du gefühlt, wie liebreich er mir begegnete.

Adelheid. Liebreich! Das rechnest du ihm an? Es war seine Schuldigkeit; und was hättest du verloren, wenn er widerwärtig gewesen wäre? Mir hätte das willkommner sein sollen. Ein übermütiger Mensch wie der-Weislingen. Ihr redet von Euerm Feind.

Adelheid. Ich redete für Eure Freiheit—Und weiß überhaupt nicht, was ich vor einen Anteil dran nehme. Lebt wohl.

Weislingen. Erlaubt noch einen Augenblick. (Er nimmt ihre Hand und schweigt.)

Adelheid. Habt Ihr mir noch was zu sagen?

Weislingen.—Ich muß fort.

Adelheid. So geht.

Weislingen. Gnädige Frau!—Ich kann nicht.

Adelheid. Ihr müßt.

Weislingen. Soll das Euer letzter Blick sein?

Adelheid. Geht, ich bin krank, sehr zur ungelegnen Zeit.

Weislingen. Seht mich nicht so an.

Adelheid. Willst du unser Feind sein, und wir sollen dir lächeln?
Geh!

Weislingen. Adelheid!

Adelheid. Ich hasse Euch!

(Franz kommt.)

Franz. Gnädiger Herr! Der Bischof läßt Euch rufen.

Adelheid. Geht! Geht!

Franz. Er bittet Euch, eilend zu kommen.

Adelheid. Geht! Geht!

Weislingen. Ich nehme nicht Abschied, ich sehe Euch wieder! (Ab.)

Adelheid. Mich wieder? Wir wollen dafür sein. Margarete, wenn er kommt, weis ihn ab. Ich bin krank, habe Kopfweh, ich schlafe—Weis ihn ab. Wenn er noch zu gewinnen ist, so ist's auf diesem Wege. (Ab. )

Vorzimmer

Weislingen. Franz.

Weislingen. Sie will mich nicht sehn?

Franz. Es wird Nacht, soll ich die Pferde satteln?

Weislingen. Sie will mich nicht sehn?

Franz. Wann befehlen Ihro Gnaden die Pferde?

Weislingen. Es ist zu spät! Wir bleiben hier.

Franz. Gott sei Dank! (Ab.)

Weislingen. Du bleibst! Sei auf, deiner Hut, die Versuchung ist groß. Mein Pferd scheute, wie ich zum Schloßtor herein wollte, mein guter Geist stellte sich ihm entgegen, er kannte die Gefahren, die mein hier warteten.—Doch ist's nicht recht, die vielen Geschäfte, die ich dem Bischof unvollendet liegen ließ, nicht wenigstens so zu ordnen, daß ein Nachfolger da anfangen kann, wo ich's gelassen habe. Das kann ich doch alles tun, unbeschadet Berlichingen und unserer Verbindung. Denn halten sollen sie mich hier nicht.—Wäre doch besser gewesen, wenn ich nicht gekommen wäre. Aber ich will fort—morgen oder übermorgen. (Geht ab.)

Im Spessart

Götz. Selbitz. Georg.

Selbitz. Ihr seht, es ist gegangen, wie ich gesagt habe.

Götz. Nein! Nein! Nein!

Georg. Glaubt, ich berichte Euch mit der Wahrheit. Ich tat, wie Ihr befahlt, nahm den Kittel des Bambergischen und sein Zeichen, und damit ich doch mein Essen und Trinken verdiente, geleitete ich Reineckische Bauern hinauf nach Bamberg.

Selbitz. In der Verkappung? Das hätte dir übel geraten können.

Georg. So denk ich auch hintendrein. Ein Reitersmann, der das voraus denkt, wird keine weiten Sprünge machen. Ich kam nach Bamberg, und gleich im Wirtshaus hörte ich erzählen: Weislingen und der Bischof seien ausgesöhnt, und man redte viel von einer Heirat mit der Witwe des von Walldorf.

Götz. Gespräche.

Georg. Ich sah ihn, wie er sie zur Tafel führte. Sie ist schön, bei meinem Eid, sie ist schön. Wir bückten uns alle, sie dankte uns allen, er nickte mit dem Kopf, sah sehr vergnügt, sie gingen vorbei, und das Volk murmelte: "Ein schönes Paar!"

Götz. Das kann sein.

Georg. Hört weiter. Da er des andern Tags in die Messe ging, paßt ich meine Zeit ab. Er war allein mit einem Knaben. Ich stund unten an der Treppe und sagte leise zu ihm: "Ein paar Worte von Euerm Berlichingen." Er ward bestürzt; ich sahe das Geständnis seines Lasters in seinem Gesicht, er hatte kaum das Herz, mich anzusehen, mich, einen schlechten Reitersjungen.

Selbitz. Das macht, sein Gewissen war schlechter als dein Stand.

Georg. "Du bist Bambergisch?" sagt' er.—"Ich bring einen Gruß vom Ritter Berlichingen", sagt ich, "und soll fragen—"—"Komm morgen früh", sagt' er, "an mein Zimmer, wir wollen weiterreden."

Götz. Kamst du?

Georg. Wohl kam ich, und mußt im Vorsaal stehn, lang, lang. Und die seidnen Buben beguckten mich von vorn und hinten. Ich dachte, guckt ihr—Endlich führte man mich hinein, er schien böse, mir war's einerlei. Ich trat zu ihm und legte meine Kommission ab. Er tat feindlich böse, wie einer, der kein Herz hat und 's nit will merken lassen. Er verwunderte sich, daß Ihr ihn durch einen Reitersjungen zur Rede setzen ließt. Das verdroß mich. Ich sagte, es gäbe nur zweierlei Leut, brave und Schurken, und ich diente Götzen von Berlichingen. Nun fing er an, schwatzte allerlei verkehrtes Zeug, das darauf hinausging: Ihr hättet ihn übereilt, er sei Euch keine Pflicht schuldig und wolle nichts mit Euch zu tun haben.

Götz. Hast du das aus seinem Munde?

Georg. Das und noch mehr—Er drohte mir-Götz. Es ist genug! Der wäre nun auch verloren! Treu und Glaube, du hast mich wieder betrogen. Arme Marie! Wie werd ich dir's beibringen!

Selbitz. Ich wollte lieber mein ander Bein dazu verlieren, als so ein
Hundsfott sein. (Ab.)

Bamberg

Adelheid. Weislingen.

Adelheid. Die Zeit fängt mir an unerträglich lang zu werden; reden mag ich nicht, und ich schäme mich, mit Euch zu spielen. Langeweile, du bist ärger als ein kaltes Fieber.

Weislingen. Seid Ihr mich schon müde?

Adelheid. Euch nicht sowohl als Euern Umgang. Ich wollte, Ihr wärt, wo Ihr hinwolltet, und wir hätten Euch nicht gehalten.

Weislingen. Das ist Weibergunst! Erst brütet sie, mit Mutterwärme, unsere liebsten Hoffnungen an; dann, gleich einer unbeständigen Henne, verläßt sie das Nest und übergibt ihre schon keimende Nachkommenschaft dem Tode und der Verwesung.

Adelheid. Scheltet die Weiber! Der unbesonnene Spieler zerbeißt und zerstampft die Karten, die ihn unschuldigerweise verlieren machten. Aber laßt mich Euch was von Mannsleuten erzählen. Was seid denn ihr, um von Wankelmut zu sprechen? Ihr, die ihr selten seid, was ihr sein wollt, niemals, was ihr sein solltet. Könige im Festtagsornat, vom Pöbel beneidet. Was gäb eine Schneidersfrau drum, eine Schnur Perlen um ihren Hals zu haben, von dem Saum eures Kleids, den eure Absätze verächtlich zurückstoßen!

Weislingen. Ihr seid bitter.

Adelheid. Es ist die Antistrophe von Eurem Gesang. Eh ich Euch kannte, Weislingen, ging mir's wie der Schneidersfrau. Der Ruf, hundertzüngig, ohne Metapher gesprochen, hatte Euch so zahnarztmäßig herausgestrichen, daß ich mich überreden ließ zu wünschen: möchtest du doch diese Quintessenz des männlichen Geschlechts, den Phönix Weislingen zu Gesicht kriegen! Ich ward meines Wunsches gewährt.

Weislingen. Und der Phönix präsentierte sich als ein ordinärer
Haushahn.

Adelheid. Nein, Weislingen, ich nahm Anteil an Euch.

Weislingen. Es schien so-Adelheid. Und war. Denn wirklich, ihr übertraft Euern Ruf. Die Menge schätzt nur den Widerschein des Verdienstes. Wie mir's denn nun geht, daß ich über die Leute nicht denken mag, denen ich wohlwill; so lebten wir eine Zeitlang nebeneinander, es fehlte mir was, und ich wußte nicht, was ich an Euch vermißte. Endlich gingen mir die Augen auf. Ich sah statt des aktiven Mannes, der die Geschäfte eines Fürstentums belebte, der sich und seinen Ruhm dabei nicht vergaß, der auf hundert großen Unternehmungen, wie auf übereinander gewälzten Bergen, zu den Wolken hinaufgestiegen war: den sah ich auf einmal, jammernd wie einen kranken Poeten, melancholisch wie ein gesundes Mädchen und müßiger als einen alten Junggesellen. Anfangs schrieb ich's Euerm Unfall zu, der Euch noch neu auf dem Herzen lag, und entschuldigte Euch, so gut ich konnte. Jetzt, da es von Tag zu Tage schlimmer mit Euch zu werden scheint, müßt Ihr mir verzeihen, wenn ich Euch meine Gunst entreiße. Ihr besitzt sie ohne Recht, ich schenkte sie einem andern auf Lebenslang, der sie Euch nicht übertragen konnte.

Weislingen. So laßt mich los.

Adelheid. Nicht, bis alle Hoffnung verloren ist. Die Einsamkeit ist in diesen Umständen gefährlich.—Armer Mensch! Ihr seid so mißmütig, wie einer, dem sein erstes Mädchen untreu wird, und eben darum geb ich Euch nicht auf. Gebt mir die Hand, verzeiht mir, was ich aus Liebe gesagt habe.

Weislingen. Könntest du mich lieben, könntest du meiner heißen Leidenschaft einen Tropfen Linderung gewähren! Adelheid! deine Vorwürfe sind höchst ungerecht. Könntest du den hundertsten Teil ahnen von dem, was die Zeit her in mir arbeitet, du würdest mich nicht mit Gefälligkeit, Gleichgültigkeit und Verachtung so unbarmherzig hin und her zerrissen haben—Du lächelst!—Nach dem übereilten Schritt wieder mit mir selbst einig zu werden, kostete mehr als einen Tag. Wider den Menschen zu arbeiten, dessen Andenken so lebhaft neu in Liebe bei mir ist.

Adelheid. Wunderlicher Mann, der du den lieben kannst, den du beneidest! Das ist, als wenn ich meinem Feinde Proviant zuführte.

Weislingen. Ich fühl's wohl, es gilt hier, kein Säumen. Er ist berichtet, daß ich wieder Weislingen bin, und er wird sich seines Vorteils über uns ersehen. Auch, Adelheid, sind wir nicht so träg, als du meinst. Unsere Reiter sind verstärkt und wachsam, unsere Unterhandlungen gehen fort, und der Reichstag zu Augsburg soll hoffentlich unsere Projekte zur Reife bringen.

Adelheid. Ihr geht hin?

Weislingen. Wenn ich eine Hoffnung mitnehmen könnte! (Küßt ihre Hand. )

Adelheid. O ihr Ungläubigen! Immer Zeichen und Wunder! Geh,
Weislingen, und vollende das Werk. Der Vorteil des Bischofs, der
deinige, der meinige, sie sind so verwebt, daß, wäre es auch nur der
Politik wegen-Weislingen. Du kannst scherzen.

Adelheid. Ich scherze nicht. Meine Güter hat der stolze Herzog inne, die deinigen wird Götz nicht lange ungeneckt lassen; und wenn wir nicht zusammenhalten wie unsere Feinde und den Kaiser auf unsere Seite lenken, sind wir verloren.

Weislingen. Mir ist's nicht bange. Der größte Teil der Fürsten ist unserer Gesinnung. Der Kaiser verlangt Hülfe gegen die Türken, und dafür ist's billig, daß er uns wieder beisteht. Welche Wollust wird mir's sein, deine Güter von übermütigen Feinden zu befreien, die unruhigen Köpfe in Schwaben aufs Kissen zu bringen, die Ruhe des Bistums, unser aller herzustellen. Und dann—?

Adelheid. Ein Tag bringt den andern, und beim Schicksal steht das
Zukünftige.

Weislingen. Aber wir müssen wollen.

Adelheid. Wir wollen ja.

Weislingen. Gewiß?

Adelheid. Nun ja. Geht.

Weislingen. Zauberin!

Herberge Bauernhochzeit. Musik und Tanz draußen

Der Brautvater, Götz, Selbitz am Tische. Bräutigam tritt zu ihnen.

Götz. Das Gescheitste war, daß ihr euern Zwist so glücklich und fröhlich durch eine Heirat endigt.

Brautvater. Besser, als ich mir's hätte träumen lassen. In Ruh und
Fried mit meinem Nachbar, und eine Tochter wohl versorgt dazu!

Bräutigam. Und ich im Besitz des strittigen Stücks, und drüber den hübschten Backfisch im ganzen Dorf. Wollte Gott, Ihr hättet Euch eher drein geben.

Selbitz. Wie lange habt ihr prozessiert?

Brautvater. An die acht Jahre. Ich wollte lieber noch einmal so lang das Frieren haben, als von vorn anfangen. Das ist ein Gezerre, Ihr glaubt's nicht, bis man den Perücken ein Urteil vom Herzen reißt; und was hat man darnach? Der Teufel hol den Assessor Sapupi! 's is ein verfluchter schwarzer Italiener.

Bräutigam. Ja, das ist ein toller Kerl. Zweimal war ich dort.

Brautvater. Und ich dreimal. Und seht, ihr Herrn: kriegen wir ein Urteil endlich, wo ich so viel Recht hab als er, und er so viel als ich, und wir eben stunden wie die Maulaffen, bis mir unser Herrgott eingab, ihm meine Tochter zu geben und das Zeug dazu.

Götz (trinkt). Gut Vernehmen künftig.

Brautvater. Geb's Gott! Geh aber, wie's will, prozessieren tu ich mein Tag nit mehr. Was das ein Geldspiel kost! Jeden Reverenz, den euch ein Prokurator macht, müßt ihr bezahlen.

Selbitz. Sind ja jährlich Kaiserliche Visitationen da.

Brautvater. Hab nichts davon gehört. Ist mir mancher schöne Taler nebenaus gangen. Das unerhörte Blechen!

Götz. Wie meint Ihr?

Brautvater. Ach, da macht alles hohle Pfötchen. Der Assessor allein,
Gott verzeih's ihm, hat mir achtzehn Goldgulden abgenommen.

Bräutigam. Wer?

Brautvater. Wer anders als der Sapupi?

Götz. Das ist schändlich.

Brautvater. Wohl, ich mußt ihm zwanzig erlegen. Und da ich sie ihm hingezahlt hatte, in seinem Gartenhaus, das prächtig ist, im großen Saal, wollt mir vor Wehmut fast das Herz brechen. Denn seht, eines Haus und Hof steht gut, aber wo soll bar Geld herkommen? Ich stund da, Gott weiß, wie mir's war. Ich hatte keinen roten Heller Reisegeld im Sack. Endlich nahm ich mir 's Herz und stellt's ihm vor. Nun er sah, daß mir 's Wasser an die Seele ging, da warf er mir zwei davon zurück und schickt' mich fort.

Bräutigam. Es ist nicht möglich! Der Sapupi?

Brautvater. Wie stellst du dich! Freilich! Kein andrer!

Bräutigam. Den soll der Teufel holen, er hat mir auch funfzehn
Goldgülden abgenommen.

Brautvater. Verflucht!

Selbitz. Götz! Wir sind Räuber!

Brautvater. Drum fiel das Urteil so scheel aus. Du Hund!

Götz. Das müßt ihr nicht ungerügt lassen.

Brautvater. Was sollen wir tun?

Götz. Macht euch auf nach Speier, es ist eben Visitationszeit, zeigt's an, sie müssen's untersuchen und euch zu dem Eurigen helfen.

Bräutigam. Denkt Ihr, wir treiben's durch?

Götz. Wenn ich ihm über die Ohren dürfte, wollt ich's euch versprechen.

Selbitz. Die Summe ist wohl einen Versuch wert.

Götz. Bin ich wohl eher um des vierten Teils willen ausgeritten.

Brautvater. Wie meinst du?

Bräutigam. Wir wollen, geh's wie's geh.

(Georg kommt.)

Georg. Die Nürnberger sind im Anzug.

Götz. Wo?

Georg. Wenn wir ganz sachte reiten, packen wir sie zwischen Beerheim und Mühlbach im Wald.

Selbitz. Trefflich!

Götz. Kommt, Kinder. Gott grüß euch! Helf uns allen zum Unsrigen!

Bauer. Großen Dank! Ihr wollt nicht zum Nacht-Ims bleiben?

Götz. Können nicht. Adies.

Dritter Akt

III. Akt, Szene 1

Augsburg. Ein Garten

Zwei Nürnberger Kaufleute.

Erster Kaufmann. Hier wollen wir stehn, denn da muß der Kaiser vorbei.
Er kommt eben den langen Gang herauf.

Zweiter Kaufmann. Wer ist bei ihm?

Erster Kaufmann. Adelbert von Weislingen!

Zweiter Kaufmann. Bambergs Freund! Das ist gut.

Erster Kaufmann. Wir wollen einen Fußfall tun, und ich will reden.

Zweiter Kaufmann. Wohl, da kommen sie.

(Kaiser. Weislingen.)

Erster Kaufmann. Er sieht verdrießlich aus.

Kaiser. Ich bin unmutig, Weislingen, und wenn ich auf mein vergangenes Leben zurücksehe, möcht ich verzagt werden; so viel halbe, so viel verunglückte Unternehmungen! und das alles, weil kein Fürst im Reich so klein ist, dem nicht mehr an seinen Grillen gelegen wäre als an meinen Gedanken.

(Die Kaufleute werfen sich ihm zu Füßen.)

Kaufmann. Allerdurchlauchtigster! Großmächtigster!

Kaiser. Wer seid ihr? Was gibt's?

Kaufmann. Arme Kaufleute von Nürnberg, Eurer Majestät Knechte, und flehen um Hülfe. Götz von Berlichingen und Hans von Selbitz haben unser dreißig, die von der Frankfurter Messe kamen, im Bambergischen Geleite niedergeworfen und beraubt; wir bitten Eure Kaiserliche Majestät um Hülfe, um Beistand, sonst sind wir alle verdorbene Leute, genötigt, unser Brot zu betteln.

Kaiser. Heiliger Gott! Heiliger Gott! Was ist das? Der eine hat nur eine Hand, der andere nur ein Bein; wenn sie denn erst zwei Hände hätten, und zwei Beine, was wolltet ihr dann tun?

Kaufmann. Wir bitten Eure Majestät untertänigst, auf unsere bedrängten Umstände ein mitleidiges Auge zu werfen.

Kaiser. Wie geht's zu! Wenn ein Kaufmann einen Pfeffersack verliert, soll man das ganze Reich aufmahnen; und wenn Händel vorhanden sind, daran Kaiserlicher Majestät und dem Reich viel gelegen ist, daß es Königreich, Fürstentum, Herzogtum und anders betrifft, so kann euch kein Mensch zusammenbringen.

Weislingen. Ihr kommt zur ungelegnen Zeit. Geht und verweilt einige
Tage hier.

Kaufleute. Wir empfehlen uns zu Gnaden. (Ab.)

Kaiser. Wieder neue Händel. Sie wachsen nach wie die Köpfe der Hydra.

Weislingen. Und sind nicht auszurotten als mit Feuer und Schwert und einer mutigen Unternehmung.

Kaiser. Glaubt Ihr?

Weislingen. Ich halte nichts für tunlicher, wenn Eure Majestät und die Fürsten sich über andern unbedeutenden Zwist vereinigen könnten. Es ist mit nichten ganz Deutschland, das über Beunruhigung klagt. Franken und Schwaben allein glimmt noch von den Resten des innerlichen verderblichen Bürgerkriegs. Und auch da sind viele der Edeln und Freien, die sich nach Ruhe sehnen. Hätten wir einmal diesen Sickingen, Selbitz—Berlichingen auf die Seite geschafft, das übrige würde bald von sich selbst zerfallen. Denn sie sind's, deren Geist die aufrührische Menge belebt.

Kaiser. Ich möchte die Leute gerne schonen, sie sind tapfer und edel.
Wenn ich Krieg führte, müßten sie mit mir zu Felde.

Weislingen. Es wäre zu wünschen, daß sie von jeher gelernt hätten, ihrer Pflicht zu gehorchen. Und dann wär es höchst gefährlich, ihre aufrührischen Unternehmungen durch Ehrenstellen zu belohnen. Denn eben diese kaiserliche Mild und Gnade ist's, die sie bisher so ungeheuer mißbrauchten, und ihr Anhang, der sein Vertrauen und Hoffnung darauf setzt, wird nicht ehe zu bändigen sein, bis wir sie ganz vor den Augen der Welt zunichte gemacht und ihnen alle Hoffnung, jemals wieder emporzukommen, völlig abgeschnitten haben.

Kaiser. Ihr ratet also zur Strenge?

Weislingen. Ich sehe kein ander Mittel, den Schwindelgeist, der ganze Landschaften ergreift, zu bannen. Hören wir nicht schon hier und da die bittersten Klagen der Edeln, daß ihre Untertanen, ihre Leibeignen sich gegen sie auflehnen und mit ihnen rechten, ihnen die hergebrachte Oberherrschaft zu schmälern drohen, so daß die gefährlichsten Folgen zu fürchten sind?

Kaiser. Jetzt wär eine schöne Gelegenheit wider den Berlichingen und Selbitz; nur wollt ich nicht, daß ihnen was zuleid geschehe. Gefangen möcht ich sie haben, und dann müßten sie Urfehde schwören, auf ihren Schlössern ruhig zu bleiben und nicht aus ihrem Bann zu gehen. Bei der nächsten Session will ich's vortragen.

Weislingen. Ein freudiger beistimmender Zuruf wird Eurer Majestät das
Ende der Rede ersparen. (Ab.)

Jagsthausen

Sickingen. Berlichingen.

Sickingen. Ja, ich komme, Eure edle Schwester um ihr Herz und ihre
Hand zu bitten.

Götz. So wollt ich, Ihr wärt eher kommen. Ich muß Euch sagen: Weislingen hat während seiner Gefangenschaft ihre Liebe gewonnen, um sie angehalten, und ich sagt sie ihm zu. Ich hab ihn losgelassen, den Vogel, und er verachtet die gütige Hand, die ihm in der Not Futter reichte. Er schwirrt herum, weiß Gott auf welcher Hecke seine Nahrung zu suchen.

Sickingen. Ist das so?

Götz. Wie ich sage.

Sickingen. Er hat ein doppeltes Band zerrissen. Wohl Euch, daß Ihr mit dem Verräter nicht näher verwandt worden.

Götz. Sie sitzt, das arme Mädchen, verjammert und verbetet ihr Leben.

Sickingen. Wir wollen sie singen machen.

Götz. Wie! Entschließet Ihr Euch, eine Verlaßne zu heiraten?

Sickingen. Es macht euch beiden Ehre, von ihm betrogen worden zu sein. Soll darum das arme Mädchen in ein Kloster gehn, weil der erste Mann, den sie kannte, ein Nichtswürdiger war? Nein doch! ich bleibe darauf, sie soll Königin von meinen Schlössern werden.

Götz. Ich sage Euch, sie war nicht gleichgültig gegen ihn.

Sickingen. Traust du mir nicht zu, daß ich den Schatten eines Elenden sollte verjagen können? Laß uns zu ihr! (Ab.)

Lager der Reichsexekution

Hauptmann. Offiziere.

Hauptmann. Wir müssen behutsam gehn und unsere Leute so viel möglich schonen. Auch ist unsere gemessene Order, ihn in die Enge zu treiben und lebendig gefangenzunehmen. Es wird schwerhalten, denn wer mag sich an ihn machen?

Erster Offizier. Freilich! Und er wird sich wehren wie ein wildes
Schwein. Überhaupt hat er uns sein Lebelang nichts zuleid getan, und
jeder wird's von sich schieben, Kaiser und Reich zu Gefallen Arm und
Bein daranzusetzen.

Zweiter Offizier. Es wäre eine Schande, wenn wir ihn nicht kriegten.
Wenn ich ihn nur einmal beim Lappen habe, er soll nicht loskommen.

Erster Offizier. Faßt ihn nur nicht mit Zähnen, er möchte Euch die Kinnbacken ausziehen. Guter junger Herr, dergleichen Leut packen sich nicht wie ein flüchtiger Dieb.

Zweiter Offizier. Wollen sehn.

Hauptmann. Unsern Brief muß er nun haben. Wir wollen nicht säumen und einen Trupp ausschicken, der ihn beobachten soll.

Zweiter Offizier. Laßt mich ihn führen.

Hauptmann. Ihr seid der Gegend unkundig.

Zweiter Offizier. Ich hab einen Knecht, der hier geboren und erzogen ist.

Hauptmann. Ich bin's zufrieden. (Ab.)

Jagsthausen

Sickingen.

Sickingen. Es geht alles nach Wunsch; sie war etwas bestürzt über meinen Antrag und sah mich vom Kopf bis auf die Füße an; ich wette, sie verglich mich mit ihrem Weißfisch. Gott sei Dank, daß ich mich stellen darf. Sie antwortete wenig und durcheinander; desto besser! Es mag eine Zeit kochen. Bei Mädchen, die durch Liebesunglück gebeizt sind, wird ein Heiratsvorschlag bald gar.

(Götz kommt.)

Sickingen. Was bringt Ihr, Schwager?

Götz. In die Acht erklärt!

Sickingen. Was?

Götz. Da lest den erbaulichen Brief. Der Kaiser hat Exekution gegen mich verordnet, die mein Fleisch den Vögeln unter dem Himmel und den Tieren auf dem Felde zu fressen vorschneiden soll.

Sickingen. Erst sollen sie dran. Just zur gelegenen Zeit bin ich hier.

Götz. Nein, Sickingen, Ihr sollt fort. Eure großen Anschläge könnten darüber zugrunde gehn, wenn Ihr zu so ungelegner Zeit des Reichs Feind werden wolltet. Auch mir werdet Ihr weit mehr nutzen, wenn Ihr neutral zu sein scheint. Der Kaiser liebt Euch, und das Schlimmste, das mir begegnen kann, ist, gefangen zu werden; dann braucht Euer Vorwort und reißt mich aus einem Elend, in das unzeitige Hülfe uns beide stürzen könnte. Denn was wär's? Jetzo geht der Zug gegen mich; erfahren sie, du bist bei mir, so schicken sie mehr, und wir sind um nichts gebessert. Der Kaiser sitzt an der Quelle, und ich wär schon jetzt unwiederbringlich verloren, wenn man Tapferkeit so geschwind einblasen könnte, als man einen Haufen zusammenblasen kann.

Sickingen. Doch kann ich heimlich ein zwanzig Reiter zu Euch stoßen lassen.

Götz. Gut. Ich hab schon Georgen nach dem Selbitz geschickt, und
meine Knechte in der Nachbarschaft herum. Lieber Schwager, wenn meine
Leute beisammen sind, es wird ein Häufchen sein, dergleichen wenig
Fürsten beisammen gesehen haben.

Sickingen. Ihr werdet gegen die Menge wenig sein.

Götz. Ein Wolf ist einer ganzen Herde Schafe zu viel.

Sickingen. Wenn sie aber einen guten Hirten haben?

Götz. Sorg du. Es sind lauter Mietlinge. Und dann kann der beste Ritter nichts machen, wenn er nicht Herr von seinen Handlungen ist. So kamen sie mir auch einmal, wie ich dem Pfalzgrafen zugesagt hatte, gegen Konrad Schotten zu dienen; da legt' er mir einen Zettel aus der Kanzlei vor, wie ich reiten und mich halten sollt; da warf ich den Räten das Papier wieder dar und sagt: ich wüßt nicht darnach zu handlen, ich weiß nicht, was mir begegnen mag, das steht nicht im Zettel, ich muß die Augen selbst auftun und sehn, was ich zu schaffen hab.

Sickingen. Glück zu, Bruder! Ich will gleich fort und dir schicken, was ich in der Eil zusammentreiben kann.

Götz. Komm noch zu den Frauen, ich ließ sie beisammen. Ich wollte, daß du ihr Wort hättest, ehe du gingst. Dann schick mir die Reiter, und komm heimlich wieder, Marien abzuholen, denn mein Schloß, fürcht ich, wird bald kein Aufenthalt für Weiber mehr sein.

Sickingen. Wollen das Beste hoffen. (Ab.)

Bamberg. Adelheidens Zimmer

Adelheid. Franz.

Adelheid. So sind die beiden Exekutionen schon aufgebrochen?

Franz. Ja, und mein Herr hat die Freude, gegen Eure Feinde zu ziehen.
Ich wollte gleich mit, so gern ich zu Euch gehe. Auch will ich jetzt
wieder fort, um bald mit fröhlicher Botschaft wiederzukehren. Mein
Herr hat mir's erlaubt.

Adelheid. Wie steht's mit ihm?

Franz. Er ist munter. Mir befahl er, Eure Hand zu küssen.

Adelheid. Da—deine Lippen sind warm.

Franz (vor sich, auf die Brust deutend). Hier ist's noch wärmer! (Laut.) Gnädige Frau, Eure Diener sind die glücklichsten Menschen unter der Sonne.

Adelheid. Wer führt gegen Berlichingen?

Franz. Der von Sirau. Lebt wohl, beste gnädige Frau! Ich will wieder fort. Vergeßt mich nicht.

Adelheid. Du mußt was essen, trinken, und rasten.

Franz. Wozu das? Ich hab Euch ja gesehen. Ich bin nicht müd noch hungrig.

Adelheid. Ich kenne deine Treu.

Franz. Ach, gnädige Frau!

Adelheid. Du hältst's nicht aus, beruhige dich, und nimm was zu dir.

Franz. Eure Sorgfalt für einen armen Jungen! (Ab.)

Adelheid. Die Tränen stehn ihm in den Augen. Ich lieb ihn von Herzen.
So wahr und warm hat noch niemand an mir gehangen. (Ab.)

Jagsthausen

Götz. Georg.

Georg. Er will selbst mit Euch sprechen. Ich kenn ihn nicht; es ist ein stattlicher Mann, mit schwarzen feurigen Augen.

Götz. Bring ihn herein.

(Lerse kommt.)

Götz. Gott grüß Euch! Was bringt Ihr?

Lerse. Mich selbst, das ist nicht viel, doch alles, was es ist, biet ich Euch an.

Götz. Ihr seid mir willkommen, doppelt willkommen, ein braver Mann, und zu dieser Zeit, da ich nicht hoffte, neue Freunde zu gewinnen, eher den Verlust der alten stündlich fürchtete. Gebt mir Euern Namen.

Lerse. Franz Lerse.

Götz. Ich danke Euch, Franz, daß Ihr mich mit einem braven Mann bekannt macht.

Lerse. Ich machte Euch schon einmal mit mir bekannt, aber damals danktet Ihr mir nicht dafür.

Götz. Ich erinnere mich Eurer nicht.

Lerse. Es wäre mir leid. Wißt Ihr noch, wie Ihr um des Pfalzgrafen willen Konrad Schotten feind wart und nach Haßfurt auf die Fastnacht reiten wolltet?

Götz. Wohl weiß ich es.

Lerse. Wißt Ihr, wie Ihr unterwegs bei einem Dorf fünfundzwanzig
Reitern entgegenkamt?

Götz. Richtig. Ich hielt sie anfangs nur für zwölfe und teilt meinen Haufen, waren unser sechzehn, und hielt am Dorf hinter der Scheuer, in willens, sie sollten bei mir vorbeiziehen. Dann wollt ich ihnen nachrucken, wie ich's mit dem andern Haufen abgeredt hatte.

Lerse. Aber wir sahn Euch und zogen auf eine Höhe am Dorf. Ihr zogt herbei und hieltet unten. Wie wir sahn, Ihr wolltet nicht heraufkommen, ritten wir herab.

Götz. Da sah ich erst, daß ich mit der Hand in die Kohlen geschlagen hatte. Fünfundzwanzig gegen acht! Da galt's kein Feiern. Erhard Truchseß durchstach mir einen Knecht, dafür rannt ich ihn vom Pferde. Hätten sie sich alle gehalten wie er und ein Knecht, es wäre mein und meines kleinen Häufchens übel gewahrt gewesen.

Lerse. Der Knecht, wovon Ihr sagtet-Götz. Es war der bravste, den ich gesehen habe. Er setzte mir heiß zu. Wenn ich dachte, ich hätt ihn von mir gebracht, wollte mit andern zu schaffen haben, war er wieder an mir und schlug feindlich zu. Er hieb mir auch durch den Panzerärmel hindurch, daß es ein wenig gefleischt hatte.

Lerse. Habt Ihr's ihm verziehen?

Götz. Er gefiel mir mehr als zu wohl.

Lerse. Nun, so hoff ich, daß Ihr mit mir zufrieden sein werdet; ich hab mein Probstück an Euch selbst abgelegt.

Götz. Bist du's? O willkommen, willkommen! Kannst du sagen,
Maximilian, du hast unter deinen Dienern einen so geworben!

Lerse. Mich wundert, daß Ihr nicht eh auf mich gefallen seid.

Götz. Wie sollte mir einkommen, daß der mir seine Dienste anbieten würde, der auf das feindseligste mich zu überwältigen trachtete?

Lerse. Eben das, Herr! Von Jugend auf dien ich als Reitersknecht, und hab's mit manchem Ritter aufgenommen. Da wir auf Euch stießen, freut ich mich. Ich kannte Euern Namen, und da lernt ich Euch kennen. Ihr wißt, ich hielt nicht stand; Ihr saht, es war nicht Furcht, denn ich kam wieder. Kurz, ich lernt Euch kennen, und von Stund an beschloß ich, Euch zu dienen.

Götz. Wie lange wollt Ihr bei mir aushalten?

Lerse. Auf ein Jahr. Ohne Entgelt.

Götz. Nein, Ihr sollt gehalten werden wie ein anderer, und drüber, wie der, der mir bei Remlin zu schaffen machte.

(Georg kommt.)

Georg. Hans von Selbitz läßt Euch grüßen. Morgen ist er hier mit funfzig Mann.

Götz. Wohl.

Georg. Es zieht am Kocher ein Trupp Reichsvölker herunter; ohne
Zweifel, Euch zu beobachten.

Götz. Wieviel?

Georg. Ihrer funfzig.

Götz. Nicht mehr! Komm, Lerse, wir wollen sie zusammenschmeißen, wenn Selbitz kommt, daß er schon ein Stück Arbeit getan findet.

Lerse. Das soll eine reichliche Vorlese werden.

Götz. Zu Pferde! (Ab.)

III. Akt, Szene 2

Wald an einem Morast

Zwei Reichsknechte begegnen einander.

Erster Knecht. Was machst du hier?

Zweiter Knecht. Ich hab Urlaub gebeten, meine Notdurft zu verrichten. Seit dem blinden Lärmen gestern abends ist mir's in die Gedärme geschlagen, daß ich alle Augenblicke vom Pferd muß.

Erster Knecht. Hält der Trupp hier in der Nähe?

Zweiter Knecht. Wohl eine Stunde den Wald hinauf.

Erster Knecht. Wie verläufst du dich denn hieher?

Zweiter Knecht. Ich bitte dich, verrat mich nicht. Ich will aufs nächste Dorf und sehn, ob ich nit mit warmen überschlägen meinem übel abhelfen kann. Wo kommst du her?

Erster Knecht. Vom nächsten Dorf. Ich hab unserm Offizier Wein und
Brot geholt.

Zweiter Knecht. So, er tut sich was zugut vor unserm Angesicht, und wir sollen fasten! Schön Exempel!

Erster Knecht. Komm mit zurück, Schurke.

Zweiter Knecht. Wär ich ein Narr! Es sind noch viele unterm Haufen, die gern fasteten, wenn sie so weit davon wären als ich.

Erster Knecht. Hörst du! Pferde!

Zweiter Knecht. O weh!

Erster Knecht. Ich klettere auf den Baum.

Zweiter Knecht. Ich steck mich ins Rohr.

(Götz, Lerse, Georg, Knechte zu Pferde.)

Götz. Hier am Teich weg und linker Hand in den Wald, so kommen wir ihnen in Rücken.

(Sie ziehen vorbei.)

Erster Knecht (steigt vom Baum). Da ist nicht gut sein. Michel! Er antwortet nicht? Michel, sie sind fort! (Er geht nach dem Sumpf.) Michel! O weh, er ist versunken. Michel! Er hört mich nicht, er ist erstickt. Bist doch krepiert, du Memme.—Wir sind geschlagen. Feinde, überall Feinde!

(Götz, Georg zu Pferde.)

Götz. Halt, Kerl, oder du bist des Todes!

Knecht. Schont meines Lebens!

Götz. Dein Schwert! Georg, führ ihn zu den andern Gefangenen, die Lerse dort unten am Wald hat. Ich muß ihren flüchtigen Führer erreichen. (Ab.)

Knecht. Was ist aus unserm Ritter geworden, der uns führte?

Georg. Unterst zu oberst stürzt' ihn mein Herr vom Pferd, daß der Federbusch im Kot stak. Seine Reiter huben ihn aufs Pferd und fort, wie besessen. (Ab.)

Lager

Hauptmann. Erster Ritter.

Erster Ritter. Sie fliehen von weitem dem Lager zu.

Hauptmann. Er wird ihnen an den Fersen sein. Laßt ein funfzig ausrücken bis an die Mühle; wenn er sich zu weit verliert, erwischt Ihr ihn vielleicht.

(Ritter ab.—Zweiter Ritter geführt.)

Hauptmann. Wie geht's, junger Herr? Habt Ihr ein paar Zinken abgerennt?

Ritter. Daß dich die Pest! Das stärkste Geweih wäre gesplittert wie Glas. Du Teufel! Er rannt auf mich los, es war mir, als wenn mich der Donner in die Erd hineinschlüg.

Hauptmann. Dankt Gott, daß Ihr noch davongekommen seid.

Ritter. Es ist nichts zu danken, ein paar Rippen sind entzwei. Wo ist der Feldscher? (Ab.)

Jagsthausen

Götz. Selbitz.

Götz. Was sagst du zu der Achtserklärung, Selbitz?

Selbitz. Es ist ein Streich von Weislingen.

Götz. Meinst du?

Selbitz. Ich meine nicht, ich weiß.

Götz. Woher?

Selbitz. Er war auf dem Reichstag, sag ich dir, er war um den Kaiser.

Götz. Wohl, so machen wir ihm wieder einen Anschlag zunichte.

Selbitz. Hoff's.

Götz. Wir wollen fort! und soll die Hasenjagd angehn.

Lager

Hauptmann. Ritter.

Hauptmann. Dabei kommt nichts heraus, ihr Herrn. Er schlägt uns einen Haufen nach dem andern, und was nicht umkommt und gefangen wird, das läuft in Gottes Namen lieber nach der Türkei als ins Lager zurück. So werden wir alle Tag schwächer. Wir müssen einmal für allemal ihm zu Leib gehen, und das mit Ernst; ich will selbst dabei sein, und er soll sehn, mit wem er zu tun hat.

Ritter. Wir sind's all zufrieden; nur ist er der Landsart so kundig, weiß alle Gänge und Schliche im Gebirg, daß er so wenig zu fangen ist wie eine Maus auf dem Kornboden.

Hauptmann. Wollen ihn schon kriegen. Erst auf Jagsthausen zu. Mag er wollen oder nicht, er muß herbei, sein Schloß zu verteidigen.

Ritter. Soll unser ganzer Hauf marschieren?

Hauptmann. Freilich! Wißt Ihr, daß wir schon um hundert geschmolzen sind?

Ritter. Drum geschwind, eh der ganze Eisklumpen auftaut; es macht warm in der Nähe, und wir stehn da wie Butter an der Sonne. (Ab.)

Gebirg und Wald

Götz. Selbitz. Trupp.

Götz. Sie kommen mit hellem Hauf. Es war hohe Zeit, daß Sickingens
Reiter zu uns stießen.

Selbitz. Wir wollen uns teilen. Ich will linker Hand um die Höhe ziehen.

Götz. Gut. Und du, Franz, führe mir die funfzig rechts durch den Wald hinauf; sie kommen über die Heide, ich will gegen ihnen halten. Georg, du bleibst um mich. Und wenn Ihr seht, daß sie mich angreifen, so fallt ungesäumt in die Seiten. Wir wollen sie patschen. Sie denken nicht, daß wir ihnen die Spitze bieten können. (Ab.)

Heide

Auf der einen Seite eine Höhe, auf der andern Wald.

Hauptmann. Exekutionszug.

Hauptmann. Er hält auf der Heide! Das ist impertinent. Er soll's büßen. Was! Den Strom nicht zu fürchten, der auf ihn losbraust?

Ritter. Ich wollt nicht, daß Ihr an der Spitze rittet; er hat das Ansehn, als ob er den ersten, der ihn anstoßen möchte, umgekehrt in die Erde pflanzen wollte. Reitet hinterdrein.

Hauptmann. Nicht gern.

Ritter. Ich bitt Euch. Ihr seid noch der Knoten von diesem Bündel
Haselruten; löst ihn auf, so knickt er sie Euch einzeln wie Riedgras.

Hauptmann. Trompeter, blas! Und ihr blast ihn weg! (Ab.)

(Selbitz hinter der Höhe hervor im Galopp.)

Selbitz. Mir nach! Sie sollen zu ihren Händen rufen: "Multipliziert euch!" (Ab.)

(Lerse aus dem Wald.)

Lerse. Götzen zu Hülf! Er ist fast umringt. Braver Selbitz, du hast schon Luft gemacht. Wir wollen die Heide mit ihren Distelköpfen besäen. (Vorbei.)

(Getümmel.)

Eine Höhe mit einem Wartturn

Selbitz verwundet. Knechte.

Selbitz. Legt mich hieher und kehrt zu Götzen.

Erster Knecht. Laßt uns bleiben, Herr, Ihr braucht unser.

Selbitz. Steig einer auf die Warte und seh, wie's geht.

Erster Knecht. Wie will ich hinaufkommen?

Zweiter Knecht. Steig auf meine Schultern, da kannst du die Lücke reichen und dir bis zur öffnung hinaufhelfen.

Erster Knecht (steigt hinauf). Ach, Herr!

Selbitz. Was siehest du?

Erster Knecht. Eure Reiter fliehen der Höhe zu.

Selbitz. Höllische Schurken! Ich wollt, sie stünden und ich hätt eine Kugel vorm Kopf. Reit einer hin! und fluch und wetter sie zurück. (Knecht ab.) Siehest du Götzen?

Knecht. Die drei schwarzen Federn seh ich mitten im Getümmel.

Selbitz. Schwimm, braver Schwimmer. Ich liege hier!

Knecht. Ein weißer Federbusch, wer ist das?

Selbitz. Der Hauptmann.

Knecht. Götz drängt sich an ihn—Bauz! Er stürzt.

Selbitz. Der Hauptmann?

Knecht. Ja, Herr.

Selbitz. Wohl! Wohl!

Knecht. Weh! Weh! Götzen seh ich nicht mehr.

Selbitz. So stirb, Selbitz!

Knecht. Ein fürchterlich Gedräng, wo er stund. Georgs blauer Busch verschwindt auch.

Selbitz. Komm herunter. Siehst du Lersen nicht?

Knecht. Nichts. Es geht alles drunter und drüber.

Selbitz. Nichts mehr. Komm! Wie halten sich Sickingens Reiter?

Knecht. Gut.—Da flieht einer nach dem Wald. Noch einer! Ein ganzer
Trupp! Götz ist hin.

Selbitz. Komm herab.

Knecht. Ich kann nicht.—Wohl! Wohl! Ich sehe Götzen! Ich sehe
Georgen!

Selbitz. Zu Pferd?

Knecht. Hoch zu Pferd! Sieg! Sieg! Sie fliehn.

Selbitz. Die Reichstruppen?

Knecht. Die Fahne mittendrin, Götz hintendrein. Sie zerstreuen sich.
Götz erreicht den Fähndrich—Er hat die Fahn—Er hält. Eine Handvoll
Menschen um ihn herum. Mein Kamerad erreicht ihn—Sie ziehn herauf.

(Götz. Georg. Lerse. Ein Trupp.)

Selbitz. Glück zu, Götz! Sieg! Sieg!

Götz (steigt vom Pferd). Teuer! Teuer! Du bist verwundt, Selbitz?

Selbitz. Du lebst und siegst! Ich habe wenig getan. Und meine Hunde von Reitern! Wie bist du davongekommen?

Götz. Diesmal galt's! Und hier Georgen dank ich das Leben, und hier Lersen dank ich's. Ich warf den Hauptmann vom Gaul. Sie stachen mein Pferd nieder und drangen auf mich ein. Georg hieb sich zu mir und sprang ab, ich wie der Blitz auf seinen Gaul, wie der Donner saß er auch wieder. Wie kamst du zum Pferd?

Georg. Einem, der nach Euch hieb, stieß ich meinen Dolch in die Gedärme, wie sich sein Harnisch in die Höhe zog. Er stürzt', und ich half Euch von einem Feind und mir zu einem Pferde.

Götz. Nun staken wir, bis sich Franz zu uns hereinschlug, und da mähten wir von innen heraus.

Lerse. Die Hunde, die ich führte, sollten von außen hineinmähen, bis sich unsere Sensen begegnet hätten; aber sie flohen wie Reichsknechte.

Götz. Es flohe Freund und Feind. Nur du kleiner Hauf hieltest mir den Rücken frei; ich hatte mit den Kerls vor mir genug zu tun. Der Fall ihres Hauptmanns half mir sie schütteln, und sie flohen. Ich habe ihre Fahne und wenig Gefangene.

Selbitz. Der Hauptmann ist Euch entwischt?

Götz. Sie hatten ihn inzwischen gerettet. Kommt, Kinder! kommt, Selbitz!—Macht eine Bahre von ästen;—du kannst nicht aufs Pferd. Kommt in mein Schloß. Sie sind zerstreut. Aber unser sind wenig, und ich weiß nicht, ob sie Truppen nachzuschicken haben. Ich will euch bewirten, meine Freunde. Ein Glas Wein schmeckt auf so einen Strauß.

Lager

Hauptmann.

Hauptmann. Ich möcht euch alle mit eigner Hand umbringen! Was, fortlaufen! Er hatte keine Handvoll Leute mehr! Fortzulaufen, vor einem Mann! Es wird's niemand glauben, als wer über uns zu lachen Lust hat.—Reit herum, Ihr, und Ihr, und Ihr. Wo ihr von unsern zerstreuten Knechten findt, bringt sie zurück oder stecht sie nieder. Wir müssen diese Scharten auswetzen, und wenn die Klingen drüber zugrunde gehen sollten.

Jagsthausen

Götz. Lerse. Georg.

Götz. Wir dürfen keinen Augenblick säumen! Arme Jungen, ich darf euch keine Rast gönnen. Jagt geschwind herum und sucht noch Reiter aufzutreiben. Bestellt sie alle nach Weilern, da sind sie am sichersten. Wenn wir zögern, so ziehen sie mir vors Schloß. (Die zwei ab.) Ich muß einen auf Kundschaft ausjagen. Es fängt an heiß zu werden. Und wenn es nur noch brave Kerls wären! Aber so ist's die Menge. (Ab.)

(Sickingen. Maria.)

Maria. Ich bitte Euch, lieber Sickingen, geht nicht von meinem Bruder!
Seine Reiter, Selbitzens, Eure sind zerstreut; er ist allein,
Selbitz ist verwundet auf sein Schloß gebracht, und ich fürchte alles.

Sickingen. Seid ruhig, ich gehe nicht weg.

(Götz kommt.)

Götz. Kommt in die Kirch, der Pater wartet. Ihr sollt mir in einer
Viertelstund ein Paar sein.

Sickingen. Laßt mich hier.

Götz. In die Kirch sollt Ihr jetzt.

Sickingen. Gern—und darnach?

Götz. Darnach sollt Ihr Eurer Wege gehn.

Sickingen. Götz!

Götz. Wollt Ihr nicht in die Kirche?

Sickingen. Kommt, kommt!

Lager

Hauptmann. Ritter.

Hauptmann. Wie viel sind's in allem?

Ritter. Hundertundfunfzig.

Hauptmann. Von vierhunderten! Das ist arg. Jetzt gleich auf und grad gegen Jagsthausen zu, eh er sich erholt und sich uns wieder in Weg stellt.

III. Akt, Szene 3

Jagsthausen

Götz. Elisabeth. Maria. Sickingen.

Götz. Gott segne euch, geb euch glückliche Tage, und behalte die, die er euch abzieht, für eure Kinder.

Elisabeth. Und die laß er sein, wie ihr seid: rechtschaffen! Und dann laßt sie werden, was sie wollen.

Sickingen. Ich dank euch. Und dank Euch, Maria. Ich führte Euch an den Altar, und Ihr sollt mich zur Glückseligkeit führen.

Maria. Wir wollen zusammen eine Pilgrimschaft nach diesem fremden gelobten Lande antreten.

Götz. Glück auf die Reise!

Maria. So ist's nicht gemeint, wir verlassen Euch nicht.

Götz. Ihr sollt, Schwester.

Maria. Du bist sehr unbarmherzig, Bruder!

Götz. Und Ihr zärtlicher als vorsehend.

(Georg kommt.)

Georg (heimlich). Ich kann niemand auftreiben. Ein einziger war geneigt; darnach veränderte er sich und wollte nicht.

Götz. Gut, Georg. Das Glück fängt mir an wetterwendisch zu werden.
Ich ahnt's aber. (Laut.) Sickingen, ich bitt Euch, geht noch diesen
Abend. Beredet Marie. Sie ist Eure Frau. Laßt sie's fühlen. Wenn
Weiber quer in unsere Unternehmung treten, ist unser Feind im freien
Feld sichrer als sonst in der Burg.

(Knecht kommt.)

Knecht (leise). Herr, das Reichsfähnlein ist auf dem Marsch, grad hieher, sehr schnell.

Götz. Ich hab sie mit Rutenstreichen geweckt! Wieviel sind ihrer?

Knecht. Ungefähr zweihundert. Sie können nicht zwei Stunden mehr von hier sein.

Götz. Noch überm Fluß?

Knecht. Ja, Herr.

Götz. Wenn ich nur funfzig Mann hätte, sie sollten mir nicht herüber.
Hast du Lersen nicht gesehen?

Knecht. Nein, Herr.

Götz. Biet allen, sie sollen sich bereit halten.—Es muß geschieden sein, meine Lieben. Weine, meine gute Marie, es werden Augenblicke kommen, wo du dich freuen wirst. Es ist besser, du weinst an deinem Hochzeittag, als daß übergroße Freude der Vorbote künftigen Elends wäre. Lebt wohl, Marie. Lebt wohl, Bruder.

Maria. Ich kann nicht von Euch, Schwester. Lieber Bruder, laß uns.
Achtest du meinen Mann so wenig, daß du in dieser Extremität seine
Hülfe verschmähst?

Götz. Ja, es ist weit mit mir gekommen. Vielleicht bin ich meinem
Sturz nahe. Ihr beginnt zu leben, und ihr sollt euch von meinem
Schicksal trennen. Ich hab eure Pferde zu satteln befohlen. Ihr müßt
gleich fort.

Maria. Bruder! Bruder!

Elisabeth (zu Sickingen). Gebt ihm nach! Geht!

Sickingen. Liebe Marie, laßt uns gehen.

Maria. Du auch? Mein Herz wird brechen.

Götz. So bleib denn. In wenigen Stunden wird meine Burg umringt sein.

Maria. Weh! Weh!

Götz. Wir werden uns verteidigen, so gut wir können.

Maria. Mutter Gottes, hab Erbarmen mit uns!

Götz. Und am Ende werden wir sterben, oder uns ergeben.—Du wirst deinen edeln Mann mit mir in ein Schicksal geweint haben.

Maria. Du marterst mich.

Götz. Bleib! Bleib! Wir werden zusammen gefangen werden. Sickingen, du wirst mit mir in die Grube fallen! Ich hoffte, du solltest mir heraushelfen.

Maria. Wir wollen fort. Schwester, Schwester!

Götz. Bringt sie in Sicherheit, und dann erinnert Euch meiner.

Sickingen. Ich will ihr Bette nicht besteigen, bis ich Euch außer
Gefahr weiß.

Götz. Schwester—liebe Schwester! (Küßt sie.)

Sickingen. Fort, fort!

Götz. Noch einen Augenblick—Ich seh Euch wieder. Tröstet Euch. Wir sehn uns wieder.

(Sickingen, Maria ab.)

Götz. Ich trieb sie, und da sie geht, möcht ich sie halten.
Elisabeth, du bleibst bei mir!

Elisabeth. Bis in den Tod. (Ab.)

Götz. Wen Gott lieb hat, dem geb er so eine Frau!

(Georg kommt.)

Georg. Sie sind in der Nähe, ich habe sie vom Turn gesehen. Die
Sonne ging auf, und ich sah ihre Piken blinken. Wie ich sie sah,
wollt mir's nicht bänger werden, als einer Katze vor einer Armee Mäuse.
Zwar wir spielen die Ratten.

Götz. Seht nach den Torriegeln. Verrammelt's inwendig mit Balken und Steinen. (Georg ab.) Wir wollen ihre Geduld für'n Narren halten, und ihre Tapferkeit sollen sie mir an ihren eigenen Nägeln verkäuen. (Trompeter von außen.) Aha! ein rotröckiger Schurke, der uns die Frage vorlegen wird, ob wir Hundsfötter sein wollen. (Er geht ans Fenster.) Was soll's?

(Man hört in der Ferne reden.)

Götz (in seinen Bart). Einen Strick um deinen Hals.

(Trompeter redet fort.)

Götz. "Beleidiger der Majestät!"—Die Aufforderung hat ein Pfaff gemacht.

(Trompeter endet.)

Götz (antwortet). Mich ergeben! Auf Gnad und Ungnad! Mit wem redet
Ihr! Bin ich ein Räuber! Sag deinem Hauptmann: Vor Ihro Kaiserliche
Majestät hab ich, wie immer, schuldigen Respekt. Er aber, sag's ihm,
er kann mich—(Schmeißt das Fenster zu.)

Belagerung. Küche

Elisabeth. Götz zu ihr.

Götz. Du hast viel Arbeit, arme Frau.

Elisabeth. Ich wollt, ich hätte sie lang. Wir werden schwerlich lang aushalten können.

Götz. Wir hatten nicht Zeit, uns zu versehen.

Elisabeth. Und die vielen Leute, die Ihr zeither gespeist habt. Mit dem Wein sind wir auch schon auf der Neige.

Götz. Wenn wir nur auf einen gewissen Punkt halten, daß sie Kapitulation vorschlagen. Wir tun ihnen brav Abbruch. Sie schießen den ganzen Tag und verwunden unsere Mauern und knicken unsere Scheiben. Lerse ist ein braver Kerl; er schleicht mit seiner Büchse herum; wo sich einer zu nahe wagt, blaff, liegt er.

Knecht. Kohlen, gnädige Frau.

Götz. Was gibt's?

Knecht. Die Kugeln sind alle, wir wollen neue gießen.

Götz. Wie steht's Pulver?

Knecht. So ziemlich. Wir sparen unsere Schüsse wohl aus.

Saal

Lerse mit einer Kugelform. Knecht mit Kohlen.

Lerse. Stell sie daher, und seht, wo ihr im Hause Blei kriegt. Inzwischen will ich hier zugreifen. (Hebt ein Fenster aus und schlägt die Scheiben ein.) Alle Vorteile gelten.—So geht's in der Welt, weiß kein Mensch, was aus den Dingen werden kann. Der Glaser, der die Scheiben faßte, dachte gewiß nicht, daß das Blei einem seiner Urenkel garstiges Kopfweh machen könnte! Und da mich mein Vater zeugte, dachte er nicht, welcher Vogel unter dem Himmel, welcher Wurm auf der Erde mich fressen möchte.

(Georg kommt mit einer Dachrinne.)

Georg. Da hast du Blei. Wenn du nur mit der Hälfte triffst, so entgeht keiner, der Ihro Majestät ansagen kann: "Herr, wir haben schlecht bestanden."

Lerse (haut davon). Ein brav Stück.

Georg. Der Regen mag sich einen andern Weg suchen! Ich bin nicht bang davor; ein braver Reiter und ein rechter Regen kommen überall durch.

Lerse. (Er gießt.) Halt den Löffel. (Geht ans Fenster.) Da zieht so ein Reichsknappe mit der Büchse herum; sie denken, wir haben uns verschossen. Er soll die Kugel versuchen, warm wie sie aus der Pfanne kommt. (Lädt.)

Georg (lehnt den Löffel an). Laß mich sehn.

Lerse (schießt). Da liegt der Spatz.

Georg. Der schoß vorhin nach mir (sie gießen), wie ich zum
Dachfenster hinausstieg und die Rinne holen wollte. Er traf eine
Taube, die nicht weit von mir saß, sie stürzt' in die Rinne; ich dankt
ihm für den Braten und stieg mit der doppelten Beute wieder herein.

Lerse. Nun wollen wir wohl laden und im ganzen Schloß herumgehen, unser Mittagessen verdienen.

(Götz kommt.)

Götz. Bleib, Lerse! Ich habe mit dir zu reden! Dich, Georg, will ich nicht von der Jagd abhalten.

(Georg ab.)

Götz. Sie entbieten mir einen Vertrag.

Lerse. Ich will zu ihnen hinaus und hören, was es soll.

Götz. Es wird sein: ich soll mich auf Bedingungen in ritterlich
Gefängnis stellen.

Lerse. Das ist nichts. Wie wär's, wenn sie uns freien Abzug eingestünden, da Ihr doch von Sickingen keinen Entsatz erwartet? Wir vergrüben Geld und Silber, wo sie's mit keiner Wünschelrute finden sollten, überließen ihnen das Schloß, und kämen mit Manier davon.

Götz. Sie lassen uns nicht.

Lerse. Es kommt auf eine Prob an. Wir wollen um sicher Geleit rufen, und ich will hinaus. (Ab.)

Saal

Götz, Elisabeth, Georg, Knechte bei Tische.

Götz. So bringt uns die Gefahr zusammen. Laßt's euch schmecken, meine Freunde! Vergeßt das Trinken nicht. Die Flasche ist leer. Noch eine, liebe Frau. (Elisabeth zuckt die Achsel.) Ist keine mehr da?

Elisabeth (leise). Noch eine; ich hab sie für dich beiseite gesetzt.

Götz. Nicht doch, Liebe! Gib sie heraus. Sie brauchen Stärkung, nicht ich; es ist ja meine Sache.

Elisabeth. Holt sie draußen im Schrank!

Götz. Es ist die letzte. Und mir ist's, als ob wir nicht zu sparen
Ursach hätten. Ich bin lange nicht so vergnügt gewesen. (Schenkt ein.
) Es lebe der Kaiser!

Alle. Er lebe!

Götz. Das soll unser vorletztes Wort sein, wenn wir sterben! Ich lieb ihn, denn wir haben einerlei Schicksal. Und ich bin noch glücklicher als er. Er muß den Reichsständen die Mäuse fangen, inzwischen die Ratten seine Besitztümer annagen. Ich weiß, er wünscht sich manchmal lieber tot, als länger die Seele eines so krüppligen Körpers zu sein. (Schenkt ein.) Es geht just noch ein mal herum. Und wenn unser Blut anfängt, auf die Neige zu gehen, wie der Wein in dieser Flasche erst schwach, dann tropfenweise rinnt (tröpfelt das Letzte in sein Glas), was soll unser letztes Wort sein?

Georg. Es lebe die Freiheit!

Götz. Es lebe die Freiheit!

Alle. Es lebe die Freiheit!

Götz. Und wenn die uns überlebt, können wir ruhig sterben. Denn wir sehen im Geist unsere Enkel glücklich und die Kaiser unsrer Enkel glücklich. Wenn die Diener der Fürsten so edel und frei dienen wie ihr mir, wenn die Fürsten dem Kaiser dienen, wie ich ihm dienen möchte-Georg. Da müßt's viel anders werden.

Götz. So viel nicht, als es scheinen möchte. Hab ich nicht unter den Fürsten treffliche Menschen gekannt, und sollte das Geschlecht ausgestorben sein? Gute Menschen, die in sich und ihren Untertanen glücklich waren; die einen edeln freien Nachbar neben sich leiden konnten und ihn weder fürchteten noch beneideten; denen das Herz aufging, wenn sie viel ihresgleichen bei sich zu Tisch sahen und nicht erst die Ritter zu Hofschranzen umzuschaffen brauchten, um mit ihnen zu leben.

Georg. Habt Ihr solche Herrn gekannt?,

Götz. Wohl. Ich erinnere mich zeitlebens, wie der Landgraf von Hanau eine Jagd gab und die Fürsten und Herrn, die zugegen waren, unter freiem Himmel speisten und das Landvolk all herbeilief, sie zu sehen. Das war keine Maskerade, die er sich selbst zu Ehren angestellt hatte. Aber die vollen runden Köpfe der Bursche und Mädel, die roten Backen alle, und die wohlhäbigen Männer und stattlichen Greise, und alles fröhliche Gesichter, und wie sie teilnahmen an der Herrlichkeit ihres Herrn, der auf Gottes Boden unter ihnen sich ergetzte!

Georg. Das war ein Herr, vollkommen wie Ihr.

Götz. Sollten wir nicht hoffen, daß mehr solcher Fürsten auf einmal herrschen können? Daß Verehrung des Kaisers, Fried und Freundschaft der Nachbarn und Lieb der Untertanen der kostbarste Familienschatz sein wird, der auf Enkel und Urenkel erbt? Jeder würde das Seinige erhalten und in sich selbst vermehren, statt daß sie jetzo nicht zuzunehmen glauben, wenn sie nicht andere verderben.

Georg. Würden wir hernach auch reiten?

Götz. Wollte Gott, es gäbe keine unruhige Köpfe in ganz Deutschland! Wir würden noch immer zu tun genug finden. Wir wollten die Gebirge von Wölfen säubern, wollten unserm ruhig ackernden Nachbar einen Braten aus dem Wald holen und dafür die Suppe mit ihm essen. Wär uns das nicht genug, wir wollten uns mit unsern Brüdern, wie Cherubim mit flammenden Schwertern, vor die Grenzen des Reichs gegen die Wölfe die Türken, gegen die Füchse die Franzosen lagern und zugleich unsers teuern Kaisers sehr ausgesetzte Länder und die Ruhe des Reichs beschützen. Das wäre ein Leben! Georg! wenn man seine Haut für die allgemeine Glückseligkeit dransetzte. (Georg springt auf.) Wo willst du hin?

Georg. Ach ich vergaß, daß wir eingesperrt sind—und der Kaiser hat uns eingesperrt—und unsere Haut davonzubringen, setzen wir unsere Haut dran?

Götz. Sei gutes Muts.

(Lerse kommt.)

Lerse. Freiheit! Freiheit! Das sind schlechte Menschen, unschlüssige bedächtige Esel. Ihr sollt abziehen mit Gewehr, Pferden und Rüstung. Proviant sollt Ihr dahintenlassen.

Götz. Sie werden sich kein Zahnweh dran kauen.

Lerse (heimlich). Habt Ihr das Silber versteckt?

Götz. Nein! Frau, geh mit Franzen, er hat dir was zu sagen.

(Alle ab.)

Schloßhof

Georg (im Stall, singt).

Es fing ein Knab ein Vögelein,

Hm! Hm! Da lacht' er in den Käfig 'nein,

Hm! Hm!

So! So!

Hm! Hm!

Der freut' sich traun so läppisch,

Hm! Hm! Und griff hinein so täppisch,

Hm! Hm!

So! So!

Hm! Hm!

Da flog das Meislein auf ein Haus,

Hm! Hm! Und lacht' den dummen Buben aus,

Hm! Hm!

So! So!

Hm! Hm!

Götz. Wie steht's?

Georg (führt sein Pferd heraus). Sie sind gesattelt.

Götz. Du bist fix.

Georg. Wie der Vogel aus dem Käfig.

(Alle die Belagerten.)

Götz. Ihr habt eure Büchsen? Nicht doch! Geht hinauf und nehmt die besten aus dem Rüstschrank, es geht in einem hin. Wir wollen vorausreiten.

Georg.

Hm! Hm!

So! So!

Hm! Hm! (Ab.)

Saal

Zwei Knechte am Rüstschrank.

Erster Knecht. Ich nehm die.

Zweiter Knecht. Ich die. Da ist noch eine schönere.

Erster Knecht. Nicht doch! Mach, daß du fortkommst.

Zweiter Knecht. Horch!

Erster Knecht (springt ans Fenster). Hilf, heiliger Gott! sie ermorden unsern Herrn. Er liegt vom Pferd! Georg stürzt!

Zweiter Knecht. Wo retten wir uns! An der Mauer den Nußbaum hinunter ins Feld. (Ab.)

Erster Knecht. Franz hält sich noch, ich will zu ihm. Wenn sie sterben, mag ich nicht leben. (Ab.)

Vierter Akt

IV. Akt

Wirtshaus zu Heilbronn

Götz.

Götz. Ich komme mir vor wie der böse Geist, den der Kapuziner in einen Sack beschwur. Ich arbeite mich ab und fruchte mir nichts. Die Meineidigen!

(Elisabeth kommt.)

Götz. Was für Nachrichten, Elisabeth, von meinen lieben Getreuen?

Elisabeth. Nichts Gewisses. Einige sind erstochen, einige liegen im
Turn. Es konnte oder wollte niemand mir sie näher bezeichnen.

Götz. Ist das Belohnung der Treue? des kindlichen Gehorsams?—Auf daß dir's wohl gehe und du lange lebest auf Erden!

Elisabeth. Lieber Mann, schilt unsern himmlischen Vater nicht. Sie haben ihren Lohn, er ward mit ihnen geboren, ein freies edles Herz. Laß sie gefangen sein, sie sind frei! Gib auf die deputierten Räte acht, die großen goldnen Ketten stehen ihnen zu Gesicht-Götz. Wie dem Schwein das Halsband. Ich möchte Georgen und Franzen geschlossen sehn!

Elisabeth. Es wäre ein Anblick, um Engel weinen zu machen.

Götz. Ich wollt nicht weinen. Ich wollte die Zähne zusammenbeißen und an meinem Grimm kauen. In Ketten meine Augäpfel! Ihr lieben Jungen, hättet ihr mich nicht geliebt!—Ich würde mich nicht satt an ihnen sehen können.—Im Namen des Kaisers ihr Wort nicht zu halten!

Elisabeth. Entschlagt Euch dieser Gedanken. Bedenkt, daß Ihr vor den Räten erscheinen sollt. Ihr seid nicht gestellt, ihnen wohl zu begegnen, und ich fürchte alles.

Götz. Was wollen sie mir anhaben?

Elisabeth. Der Gerichtsbote!

Götz. Esel der Gerechtigkeit! Schleppt ihre Säcke zur Mühle, und ihren Kehrig aufs Feld. Was gibt's?

(Gerichtsdiener kommt.)

Gerichtsdiener. Die Herren Kommissarii sind auf dem Rathause versammelt und schicken nach Euch.

Götz. Ich komme.

Gerichtsdiener. Ich werde Euch begleiten.

Götz. Viel Ehre.

Elisabeth. Mäßigt Euch.

Götz. Sei außer Sorgen. (Ab.)

Rathaus

Kaiserliche Räte. Hauptmann. Ratsherren von Heilbronn.

Ratsherr. Wir haben auf Euern Befehl die stärksten und tapfersten
Bürger versammelt; sie warten hier in der Nähe auf Euern Wink, um sich
Berlichingens zu bemeistern.

Erster Rat. Wir werden Ihro Kaiserlichen Majestät Eure
Bereitwilligkeit, Ihrem höchsten Befehl zu gehorchen, mit vielem
Vergnügen zu rühmen wissen.—Es sind Handwerker?

Ratsherr. Schmiede, Weinschröter, Zimmerleute, Männer mit geübten
Fäusten und hier wohl beschlagen (auf die Brust deutend).

Rat. Wohl.

(Gerichtsdiener kommt.)

Gerichtsdiener. Götz von Berlichingen wartet vor der Tür.

Rat. Laßt ihn herein.

(Götz kommt.)

Götz. Gott grüß euch, ihr Herrn, was wollt ihr mit mir?

Rat. Zuerst, daß Ihr bedenkt: wo Ihr seid? und vor wem?

Götz. Bei meinem Eid, ich verkenn euch nicht, meine Herrn.

Rat. Ihr tut Eure Schuldigkeit.

Götz. Von ganzem Herzen.

Rat. Setzt Euch.

Götz. Da unten hin? Ich kann stehn. Das Stühlchen riecht so nach armen Sündern, wie überhaupt die ganze Stube.

Rat. So steht!

Götz. Zur Sache, wenn's gefällig ist.

Rat. Wir werden in der Ordnung verfahren.

Götz. Bin's wohl zufrieden, wollt, es wär von jeher geschehen.

Rat. Ihr wißt, wie Ihr auf Gnad und Ungnad in unsere Hände kamt.

Götz. Was gebt Ihr mir, wenn ich's vergesse?

Rat. Wenn ich Euch Bescheidenheit geben könnte, würd ich Eure Sache gut machen.

Götz. Gut machen! Wenn Ihr das könntet! Dazu gehört freilich mehr als zum Verderben.

Schreiber. Soll ich das alles protokollieren?

Rat. Was zur Handlung gehört.

Götz. Meinetwegen dürft Ihr's drucken lassen.

Rat. Ihr wart in der Gewalt des Kaisers, dessen väterliche Gnade an den Platz der majestätischen Gerechtigkeit trat, Euch anstatt eines Kerkers Heilbronn, eine seiner geliebten Städte, zum Aufenthalt anwies. Ihr verspracht mit einem Eid, Euch, wie es einem Ritter geziemt, zu stellen und das Weitere demütig zu erwarten.

Götz. Wohl, und ich bin hier und warte.

Rat. Und wir sind hier, Euch Ihro Kaiserlichen Majestät Gnade und Huld zu verkündigen. Sie verzeiht Euch Eure übertretungen, spricht Euch von der Acht und aller wohlverdienten Strafe los, welches Ihr mit untertänigem Dank erkennen und dagegen die Urfehde abschwören werdet, welche Euch hiermit vorgelesen werden soll.

Götz. Ich bin Ihro Majestät treuer Knecht wie immer. Noch ein Wort, eh Ihr weitergeht: Meine Leute, wo sind die? Was soll mit ihnen werden?

Rat. Das geht Euch nichts an.

Götz. So wende der Kaiser sein Angesicht von Euch, wenn Ihr in Not steckt! Sie waren meine Gesellen, und sind's. Wo habt Ihr sie hingebracht?

Rat. Wir sind Euch davon keine Rechnung schuldig.

Götz. Ah! Ich dachte nicht, daß Ihr nicht einmal zu dem verbunden seid, was Ihr versprecht, geschweige-Rat. Unsere Kommission ist, Euch die Urfehde vorzulegen. Unterwerft Euch dem Kaiser, und Ihr werdet einen Weg finden, um Eurer Gesellen Leben und Freiheit zu flehen.

Götz. Euern Zettel.

Rat. Schreiber, leset!

Schreiber. "Ich Götz von Berlichingen bekenne öffentlich durch diesen Brief: Daß, da ich mich neulich gegen Kaiser und Reich rebellischerweise aufgelehnt"-Götz. Das ist nicht wahr. Ich bin kein Rebell, habe gegen Ihro Kaiserliche Majestät nichts verbrochen, und das Reich geht mich nichts an.

Rat. Mäßigt Euch und hört weiter.

Götz. Ich will nichts weiter hören. Tret einer auf und zeuge! Hab ich wider den Kaiser, wider das Haus österreich nur einen Schritt getan? Hab ich nicht von jeher durch alle Handlungen bewiesen, daß ich besser als einer fühle, was Deutschland seinen Regenten schuldig ist? und besonders was die Kleinen, die Ritter und Freien, ihrem Kaiser schuldig sind? Ich müßte ein Schurke sein, wenn ich mich könnte bereden lassen, das zu unterschreiben.

Rat. Und doch haben wir gemessene Ordre, Euch in der Güte zu überreden, oder im Entstehungsfall Euch in den Turn zu werfen.

Götz. In Turn? mich?

Rat. Und daselbst könnt Ihr Euer Schicksal von der Gerechtigkeit erwarten, wenn Ihr es nicht aus den Händen der Gnade empfangen wollt.

Götz. In Turn! Ihr mißbraucht die Kaiserliche Gewalt. In Turn! Das ist sein Befehl nicht. Was! mir erst, die Verräter! eine Falle zu stellen, und ihren Eid, ihr ritterlich Wort zum Speck drin aufzuhängen! Mir dann ritterlich Gefängnis zusagen, und die Zusage wieder brechen.

Rat. Einem Räuber sind wir keine Treue schuldig.

Götz. Trügst du nicht das Ebenbild des Kaisers, das ich in dem gesudeltsten Konterfei verehre, du solltest mir den Räuber fressen oder dran erwürgen! Ich bin in einer ehrlichen Fehd begriffen. Du könntest Gott danken und dich vor der Welt groß machen, wenn du in deinem Leben eine so edle Tat getan hättest, wie die ist, um welcher willen ich gefangen sitze.

Rat (winkt dem Ratsherrn, der zieht die Schelle).

Götz. Nicht um des leidigen Gewinsts willen, nicht um Land und Leute unbewehrten Kleinen wegzukapern, bin ich ausgezogen. Meinen Jungen zu befreien, und mich meiner Haut zu wehren! Seht Ihr was Unrechts dran? Kaiser und Reich hätten unsere Not nicht in ihrem Kopfkissen gefühlt. Ich habe Gott sei Dank noch eine Hand, und habe wohl getan, sie zu brauchen.

(Bürger treten herein, Stangen in der Hand, Wehren an der Seite.)

Götz. Was soll das?

Rat. Ihr wollt nicht hören. Fangt ihn!

Götz. Ist das die Meinung? Wer kein ungrischer Ochs ist, komm mir nicht zu nah! Er soll von dieser meiner rechten eisernen Hand eine solche Ohrfeige kriegen, die ihm Kopfweh, Zahnweh und alles Weh der Erden aus dem Grund kurieren soll. (Sie machen sich an ihn, er schlägt den einen zu Boden, und reißt einem andern die Wehre von der Seite, sie weichen.) Kommt! Kommt! Es wäre mir angenehm, den Tapfersten unter euch kennenzulernen.

Rat. Gebt Euch.

Götz. Mit dem Schwert in der Hand! Wißt Ihr, daß es jetzt nur an mir läge, mich durch alle diese Hasenjäger durchzuschlagen und das weite Feld zu gewinnen? Aber ich will Euch lehren, wie man Wort hält. Versprecht mir ritterlich Gefängnis, und ich gebe mein Schwert weg und bin wie vorher Euer Gefangener.

Rat. Mit dem Schwert in der Hand wollt Ihr mit dem Kaiser rechten?

Götz. Behüte Gott! Nur mit Euch und Eurer edlen Kompanie.—Ihr könnt nach Hause gehn, gute Leute. Für die Versäumnis kriegt ihr nichts, und zu holen ist hier nichts als Beulen.

Rat. Greift ihn. Gibt euch eure Liebe zu euerm Kaiser nicht mehr
Mut?

Götz. Nicht mehr, als ihnen der Kaiser Pflaster gibt, die Wunden zu heilen, die sich ihr Mut holen könnte.

(Gerichtsdiener kommt.)

Gerichtsdiener. Eben ruft der Türner: es zieht ein Trupp von mehr als zweihunderten nach der Stadt zu. Unversehens sind sie hinter der Weinhöhe hervorgedrungen und drohen unsern Mauern.

Ratsherr. Weh uns! was ist das?

(Wache kommt.)

Wache. Franz von Sickingen hält vor dem Schlag und läßt euch sagen: Er habe gehört, wie unwürdig man an seinem Schwager bundbrüchig geworden sei, wie die Herrn von Heilbronn allen Vorschub täten. Er verlange Rechenschaft, sonst wolle er binnen einer Stunde die Stadt an vier Ecken anzünden und sie der Plünderung preisgeben.

Götz. Braver Schwager!

Rat. Tretet ab, Götz!—Was ist zu tun?

Ratsherr. Habt Mitleiden mit uns und unserer Bürgerschaft! Sickingen ist unbändig in seinem Zorn, er ist Mann, es zu halten.

Rat. Sollen wir uns und dem Kaiser die Gerechtsame vergeben?

Hauptmann. Wenn wir nur Leute hätten, sie zu behaupten. So aber könnten wir umkommen, und die Sache wäre nur desto schlimmer. Wir gewinnen im Nachgeben.

Ratsherr. Wir wollen Götzen ansprechen, für uns ein gut Wort einzulegen. Mir ist's, als wenn ich die Stadt schon in Flammen sähe.

Rat. Laßt Götzen herein.

Götz. Was soll's?

Rat. Du würdest wohl tun, deinen Schwager von seinem rebellischen Vorhaben abzumahnen. Anstatt dich vom Verderben zu retten, stürzt er dich tiefer hinein, indem er sich zu deinem Falle gesellt.

Götz (sieht Elisabeth an der Tür, heimlich zu ihr). Geh hin! Sag ihm: er soll unverzüglich hereinbrechen, soll hieher kommen, nur der Stadt kein Leids tun. Wenn sich die Schurken hier widersetzen, soll er Gewalt brauchen. Es liegt mir nichts dran umzukommen, wenn sie nur alle mit erstochen werden.

Ein großer Saal auf dem Rathaus

Sickingen. Götz. Das ganze Rathaus ist mit Sickingens Reitern besetzt.

Götz. Das war Hülfe vom Himmel! Wie kommst du so erwünscht und unvermutet, Schwager?

Sickingen. Ohne Zauberei. Ich hatte zwei, drei Boten ausgeschickt, zu hören, wie dir's ginge? Auf die Nachricht von ihrem Meineid macht ich mich auf den Weg. Nun haben wir sie.

Götz. Ich verlange nichts als ritterliche Haft.

Sickingen. Du bist zu ehrlich. Dich nicht einmal des Vorteils zu bedienen, den der Rechtschaffene über den Meineidigen hat! Sie sitzen im Unrecht, wir wollen ihnen keine Kissen unterlegen. Sie haben die Befehle des Kaisers schändlich mißbraucht. Und wie ich Ihro Majestät kenne, darfst du sicher auf mehr dringen. Es ist zu wenig.

Götz. Ich bin von jeher mit wenigem zufrieden gewesen.

Sickingen. Und bist von jeher zu kurz gekommen. Meine Meinung ist: sie sollen deine Knechte aus dem Gefängnis und dich zusamt ihnen auf deinen Eid nach deiner Burg ziehen lassen. Du magst versprechen, nicht aus deiner Terminei zu gehen, und wirst immer besser sein als hier.

Götz. Sie werden sagen: Meine Güter seien dem Kaiser heimgefallen.

Sickingen. So sagen wir: Du wolltest zur Miete drin wohnen, bis sie dir der Kaiser wieder zu Lehn gäbe. Laß sie sich wenden wie Aale in der Reuse, sie sollen uns nicht entschlüpfen. Sie werden von Kaiserlicher Majestät reden, von ihrem Auftrag. Das kann uns einerlei sein. Ich kenne den Kaiser auch und gelte was bei ihm. Er hat immer gewünscht, dich unter seinem Heer zu haben. Du wirst nicht lang auf deinem Schlosse sitzen, so wirst du aufgerufen werden.

Götz. Wollte Gott bald, eh ich 's Fechten verlerne.

Sickingen. Der Mut verlernt sich nicht, wie er sich nicht lernt. Sorge für nichts! Wenn deine Sachen in der Ordnung sind, geh ich nach Hof, denn meine Unternehmung fängt an reif zu werden. Günstige Aspekten deuten mir: "Brich auf!" Es ist mir nichts übrig, als die Gesinnung des Kaisers zu sondieren. Trier und Pfalz vermuten eher des Himmels Einfall, als daß ich ihnen übern Kopf kommen werde. Und ich will kommen wie ein Hagelwetter! Und wenn wir unser Schicksal machen können, so sollst du bald der Schwager eines Kurfürsten sein. Ich hoffte auf deine Faust bei dieser Unternehmung.

Götz (besieht seine Hand). Oh! das deutete der Traum, den ich hatte, als ich tags darauf Marien an Weislingen versprach. Er sagte mir Treu zu, und hielt meine rechte Hand so fest, daß sie aus den Armschienen ging, wie abgebrochen. Ach! Ich bin in diesem Augenblick wehrloser, als ich war, da sie mir abgeschossen wurde. Weislingen! Weislingen!

Sickingen. Vergiß einen Verräter. Wir wollen seine Anschläge vernichten, sein Ansehn untergraben, und Gewissen und Schande sollen ihn zu Tode fressen. Ich seh, ich seh im Geist meine Feinde, deine Feinde niedergestürzt. Götz, nur noch ein halb Jahr!

Götz. Deine Seele fliegt hoch. Ich weiß nicht; seit einiger Zeit wollen sich in der meinigen keine fröhlichen Aussichten eröffnen.—Ich war schon mehr im Unglück, schon einmal gefangen, und so, wie mir's jetzt ist, war mir's niemals.

Sickingen. Glück macht Mut. Kommt zu den Perücken! Sie haben lang genug den Vortrag gehabt, laß uns einmal die Müh übernehmen. (Ab.)

Adelheidens Schloß

Adelheid. Weislingen.

Adelheid. Das ist verhaßt!

Weislingen. Ich hab die Zähne zusammengebissen. Ein so schöner Anschlag, so glücklich vollführt, und am Ende ihn auf sein Schloß zu lassen! Der verdammte Sickingen!

Adelheid. Sie hätten's nicht tun sollen.

Weislingen. Sie saßen fest. Was konnten sie machen? Sickingen drohte mit Feuer und Schwert, der hochmütige jähzornige Mann! Ich haß ihn. Sein Ansehn nimmt zu wie ein Strom, der nur einmal ein paar Bäche gefressen hat, die übrigen folgen von selbst.

Adelheid. Hatten sie keinen Kaiser?

Weislingen. Liebe Frau! Er ist nur der Schatten davon, er wird alt und mißmutig. Wie er hörte, was geschehen war, und ich nebst den übrigen Regimentsräten eiferte, sagte er: "Laßt ihnen Ruh! Ich kann dem alten Götz wohl das Plätzchen gönnen, und wenn er da still ist, was habt ihr über ihn zu klagen?" Wir redeten vom Wohl des Staats. "Oh!" sagt' er, "hätt' ich von jeher Räte gehabt, die meinen unruhigen Geist mehr auf das Glück einzelner Menschen gewiesen hätten!"

Adelheid. Er verliert den Geist eines Regenten.

Weislingen. Wir zogen auf Sickingen los.—"Er ist mein treuer Diener", sagt' er; "hat er's nicht auf meinen Befehl getan, so tat er doch besser meinen Willen als meine Bevollmächtigten, und ich kann's gutheißen, vor oder nach."

Adelheid. Man möchte sich zerreißen.

Weislingen. Ich habe deswegen noch nicht alle Hoffnung aufgegeben. Er ist auf sein ritterlich Wort auf sein Schloß gelassen, sich da still zu halten. Das ist ihm unmöglich; wir wollen bald eine Ursach wider ihn haben.

Adelheid. Und desto eher, da wir hoffen können, der Kaiser werde bald aus der Welt gehn, und Karl, sein trefflicher Nachfolger, majestätischere Gesinnungen verspricht.

Weislingen. Karl? Er ist noch weder gewählt noch gekrönt.

Adelheid. Wer wünscht und hofft es nicht?

Weislingen. Du hast einen großen Begriff von seinen Eigenschaften; fast sollte man denken, du sähest sie mit andern Augen.

Adelheid. Du beleidigst mich, Weislingen. Kennst du mich für das?

Weislingen. Ich sagte nichts dich zu beleidigen. Aber schweigen kann ich nicht dazu. Karls ungewöhnliche Aufmerksamkeit für dich beunruhigt mich.

Adelheid. Und mein Betragen?

Weislingen. Du bist ein Weib. Ihr haßt keinen, der euch hofiert.

Adelheid. Aber ihr?

Weislingen. Er frißt mir am Herzen, der fürchterliche Gedanke!
Adelheid!

Adelheid. Kann ich deine Torheit kurieren?

Weislingen. Wenn du wolltest! Du könntest dich vom Hof entfernen.

Adelheid. Sage Mittel und Art. Bist du nicht bei Hofe? Soll ich dich lassen und meine Freunde, um auf meinem Schloß mich mit den Uhus zu unterhalten? Nein, Weislingen, daraus wird nichts. Beruhige dich, du weißt, wie ich dich liebe.

Weislingen. Der heilige Anker in diesem Sturm, solang der Strick nicht reißt. (Ab.)

Adelheid. Fängst du's so an! Das fehlte noch. Die Unternehmungen meines Busens sind zu groß, als daß du ihnen im Wege stehen solltest. Karl! Großer trefflicher Mann, und Kaiser dereinst! Und sollte er der einzige sein unter den Männern, dem der Besitz meiner Gunst nicht schmeichelte? Weislingen, denke nicht mich zu hindern, sonst mußt du in den Boden, mein Weg geht über dich hin.

(Franz kommt mit einem Brief.)

Franz. Hier, gnädige Frau.

Adelheid. Gab dir Karl ihn selbst?

Franz. Ja.

Adelheid. Was hast du? Du siehst so kummervoll.

Franz. Es ist Euer Wille, daß ich mich totschmachten soll; in den
Jahren der Hoffnung macht Ihr mich verzweifeln.

Adelheid. Er dauert mich—und wie wenig kostet's mich, ihn glücklich zu machen! Sei gutes Muts, Junge. Ich fühle deine Lieb und Treu, und werde nie unerkenntlich sein.

Franz (beklemmt). Wenn Ihr das fähig wärt, ich müßte vergehn. Mein
Gott, ich habe keinen Blutstropfen in mir, der nicht Euer wäre, keinen
Sinn, als Euch zu lieben und zu tun, was Euch gefällt!

Adelheid. Lieber Junge!

Franz. Ihr schmeichelt mir. (In Tränen ausbrechend.) Wenn diese Ergebenheit nichts mehr verdient, als andere sich vorgezogen zu sehn, als Eure Gedanken alle nach dem Karl gerichtet zu sehn-Adelheid. Du weißt nicht, was du willst, noch weniger, was du redst.

Franz (vor Verdruß und Zorn mit dem Fuß stampfend). Ich will auch nicht mehr. Will nicht mehr den Unterhändler abgeben.

Adelheid. Franz! Du vergißt dich.

Franz. Mich aufzuopfern! Meinen lieben Herrn!

Adelheid. Geh mir aus dem Gesicht.

Franz. Gnädige Frau!

Adelheid. Geh, entdecke deinem lieben Herrn mein Geheimnis. Ich war die Närrin, dich für was zu halten, das du nicht bist.

Franz. Liebe gnädige Frau, Ihr wißt, daß ich Euch liebe.

Adelheid. Und du warst mein Freund, meinem Herzen so nahe. Geh, verrat mich.

Franz. Eher wollt ich mir das Herz aus dem Leibe reißen! Verzeiht mir, gnädige Frau. Mein Herz ist zu voll, meine Sinnen halten's nicht aus.

Adelheid. Lieber warmer Junge! (Faßt ihn bei den Händen, zieht ihn zu sich, und ihre Küsse begegnen einander; er fällt ihr weinend um den Hals.)

Adelheid. Laß mich!

Franz (erstickend in Tränen an ihrem Hals). Gott! Gott!

Adelheid. Laß mich, die Mauern sind Verräter. Laß mich. (Macht sich los.) Wanke nicht von deiner Lieb und Treu, und der schönste Lohn soll dir werden. (Ab.)

Franz. Der schönste Lohn! Nur bis dahin laß mich leben! Ich wollte meinen Vater ermorden, der mir diesen Platz streitig machte.

Jagsthausen

Götz an einem Tisch. Elisabeth bei ihm mit der Arbeit; es steht ein
Licht auf dem Tisch und Schreibzeug.

Götz. Der Müßiggang will mir gar nicht schmecken, und meine Beschränkung wird mir von Tag zu Tag enger; ich wollt, ich könnt schlafen, oder mir nur einbilden, die Ruhe sei was Angenehmes.

Elisabeth. So schreib doch deine Geschichte aus, die du angefangen hast. Gib deinen Freunden ein Zeugnis in die Hand, deine Feinde zu beschämen; verschaff einer edlen Nachkommenschaft die Freude, dich nicht zu verkennen.

Götz. Ach! Schreiben ist geschäftiger Müßiggang, es kommt mir sauer an. Indem ich schreibe, was ich getan, ärger ich mich über den Verlust der Zeit, in der ich etwas tun könnte.

Elisabeth (nimmt die Schrift). Sei nicht wunderlich. Du bist eben an deiner ersten Gefangenschaft in Heilbronn.

Götz. Das war mir von jeher ein fataler Ort.

Elisabeth (liest). "Da waren selbst einige von den Bündischen, die zu mir sagten: ich habe törig getan, mich meinen ärgsten Feinden zu stellen, da ich doch vermuten konnte, sie würden nicht glimpflich mit mir umgehn; da antwortet ich:" Nun, was antwortetest du? Schreibe weiter.

Götz. Ich sagte: "Setz ich so oft meine Haut an anderer Gut und Geld, sollt ich sie nicht an mein Wort setzen?"

Elisabeth. Diesen Ruf hast, du.

Götz. Den sollen sie mir nicht nehmen! Sie haben mir alles genommen, Gut, Freiheit-Elisabeth. Es fällt in die Zeiten, wie ich die von Miltenberg und Singlingen in der Wirtsstube fand, die mich nicht kannten. Da hatt' ich eine Freude, als wenn ich einen Sohn geboren hätte. Sie rühmten dich untereinander und sagten: "Er ist das Muster eines Ritters, tapfer und edel in seiner Freiheit" und gelassen und treu im Unglück."

Götz. Sie sollen mir einen stellen, dem ich mein Wort gebrochen! Und Gott weiß, daß ich mehr geschwitzt hab, meinem Nächsten zu dienen, als mir, daß ich um den Namen eines tapfern und treuen Ritters gearbeitet habe, nicht um hohe Reichtümer und Rang zu gewinnen. Und Gott sei Dank, worum ich warb, ist mir worden.

(Lerse. Georg mit Wildbret.)

Götz. Glück zu, brave Jäger!

Georg. Das sind wir aus braven Reitern geworden. Aus Stiefeln machen sich leicht Pantoffeln.

Lerse. Die Jagd ist doch immer was, und eine Art von Krieg.

Georg. Wenn man nur hierzulande nicht immer mit Reichsknechten zu tun hätte. Wißt Ihr, gnädiger Herr, wie Ihr uns prophezeitet: wenn sich die Welt umkehrte, würden wir Jäger werden. Da sind wir's ohne das.

Götz. Es kommt auf eins hinaus, wir sind aus unserm Kreise gerückt.

Georg. Es sind bedenkliche Zeiten. Schon seit acht Tagen läßt sich ein fürchterlicher Komet sehen, und ganz Deutschland ist in Angst, es bedeute den Tod des Kaisers, der sehr krank ist.

Götz. Sehr krank! Unsere Bahn geht zu Ende.

Lerse. Und hier in der Nähe gibt's noch schrecklichere Veränderungen.
Die Bauern haben einen entsetzlichen Aufstand erregt.

Götz. Wo?

Lerse. Im Herzen von Schwaben. Sie sengen, brennen und morden. Ich fürchte, sie verheeren das ganze Land.

Georg. Einen fürchterlichen Krieg gibt's. Es sind schon an die hundert Ortschaften aufgestanden, und täglich mehr. Der Sturmwind neulich hat ganze Wälder ausgerissen, und kurz darauf hat man in der Gegend, wo der Aufstand begonnen, zwei feurige Schwerter kreuzweis in der Luft gesehn.

Götz. Da leiden von meinen guten Herrn und Freunden gewiß unschuldig mit!

Georg. Schade, daß wir nicht reiten dürfen!

Fünfter Akt

V. Akt, Szene 1

Bauernkrieg. Tumult in einem Dorf und Plünderung

Weiber und Alte mit Kindern und Gepäcke. Flucht.

Alter. Fort! Fort! daß wir den Mordhunden entgehen.

Weib. Heiliger Gott, wie blutrot der Himmel ist, die untergehende
Sonne blutrot!

Mutter. Das bedeut Feuer.

Weib. Mein Mann! Mein Mann!

Alter. Fort! Fort! In Wald!

(Ziehen vorbei.—Link.)

Link. Was sich widersetzt, niedergestochen! Das Dorf ist unser. Daß von Früchten nichts umkommt, nichts zurückbleibt. Plündert rein aus und schnell! Wir zünden gleich an.

(Metzler vom Hügel heruntergelaufen.)

Metzler. Wie geht's Euch, Link?

Link. Drunter und drüber, siehst du, du kommst zum Kehraus. Woher?

Metzler. Von Weinsberg. Da war ein Fest.

Link. Wie?

Metzler. Wir haben sie zusammengestochen, daß eine Lust war.

Link. Wen alles?

Metzler. Dietrich von Weiler tanzte vor. Der Fratz! Wir waren mit hellem wütigem Hauf herum, und er oben auf'm Kirchturn wollt gütlich mit uns handeln. Paff! Schoß ihn einer vorn Kopf. Wir hinauf wie Wetter, und zum Fenster herunter mit dem Kerl.

Link. Ah!

Metzler (zu den Bauern). Ihr Hund', soll ich euch Bein' machen! Wie sie zaudern und trenteln, die Esel.

Link. Brennt an! sie mögen drin braten! Fort! Fahrt zu, ihr
Schlingel!

Metzler. Darnach führten wir heraus den Helfenstein, den Eltershofen, an die dreizehn von Adel, zusammen auf achtzig. Herausgeführt auf die Ebne gegen Heilbronn. Das war ein Jubilieren und ein Tumultuieren von den Unsrigen, wie die lange Reih arme reiche Sünder daherzog, einander anstarrten, und Erd und Himmel! Umringt waren sie, ehe sie sich's versahen, und alle mit Spießen niedergestochen.

Link. Daß ich nicht dabei war!

Metzler. Hab mein Tag so kein Gaudium gehabt.

Link. Fahrt zu! Heraus!

Bauer. Alles ist leer.

Link. So brennt an allen Ecken.

Metzler. Wird ein hübsch Feuerchen geben. Siehst du, wie die Kerls übereinanderpurzelten und quiekten wie die Frösche! Es lief mir so warm übers Herz wie ein Glas Branntwein! Da war ein Rixinger, wenn der Kerl sonst auf die Jagd ritt, mit dem Federbusch und weiten Naslöchern, und uns vor sich hertrieb mit den Hunden und wie die Hunde. Ich hatt' ihn die Zeit nicht gesehen, sein Fratzengesicht fiel mir recht auf. Hasch! den Spieß ihm zwischen die Rippen, da lag er, streckt' alle vier über seine Gesellen. Wie die Hasen beim Treibjagen zuckten die Kerls übereinander.

Link. Raucht schon brav.

Metzler. Dort hinten brennt's. Laß uns mit der Beute gelassen zu dem großen Haufen ziehen.

Link. Wo hält er?

Metzler. Von Heilbronn hieher zu. Sie sind um einen Hauptmann verlegen, vor dem alles Volk Respekt hätt'. Denn wir sind doch nur ihresgleichen, das fühlen sie und werden schwürig.

Link. Wen meinen sie?

Metzler. Max Stumpf oder Götz von Berlichingen.

Link. Das wär gut, gäb auch der Sache einen Schein, wenn's der Götz tät; er hat immer für einen rechtschaffnen Ritter gegolten. Auf! Auf! wir ziehen nach Heilbronn zu! Ruft's herum.

Metzler. Das Feuer leucht uns noch eine gute Strecke. Hast du den großen Kometen gesehen?

Link. Ja. Das ist ein grausam erschrecklich Zeichen! Wenn wir die Nacht durch ziehen, können wir ihn recht sehen. Er geht gegen eins auf.

Metzler. Und bleibt nur fünf Viertelstunden. Wie ein gebogner Arm mit einem Schwert sieht er aus, so blutgelbrot.

Link. Hast du die drei Stern gesehen an des Schwerts Spitze und
Seite?

Metzler. Und der breite wolkenfärbige Streif, mit tausend und tausend
Striemen wie Spieß', und dazwischen wie kleine Schwerter.

Link. Mir hat's gegraust. Wie das alles so bleichrot, und darunter viel feurige helle Flamme, und dazwischen die grausamen Gesichter mit rauchen Häuptern und Bärten!

Metzler. Hast du die auch gesehen? Und das zwitzert alles so durcheinander, als läg's in einem blutigen Meere, und arbeitet durcheinander, daß einem die Sinne vergehn!

Link. Auf! Auf! (Ab.)

Feld

Man sieht in der Ferne zwei Dörfer brennen und ein Kloster.

Kohl. Wild. Max Stumpf. Haufen.

Max Stumpf. Ihr könnt nicht verlangen, daß ich euer Hauptmann sein soll. Für mich und euch wär's nichts nütze. Ich bin Pfalzgräfischer Diener; wie sollt ich gegen meinen Herrn führen? Ihr würdet immer wähnen, ich rät nicht von Herzen.

Kohl. Wußten wohl, du würdest Entschuldigung finden.

(Götz, Lerse, Georg kommen.)

Götz. Was wollt ihr mit mir?

Kohl. Ihr sollt unser Hauptmann sein.

Götz. Soll ich mein ritterlich Wort dem Kaiser brechen und aus meinem
Bann gehen?

Wild. Das ist keine Entschuldigung.

Götz. Und wenn ich ganz frei wäre, und ihr wollt handeln wie bei Weinsberg an den Edeln und Herrn, und so forthausen, wie rings herum das Land brennt und blutet, und ich sollt euch behülflich sein zu euerm schändlichen rasenden Wesen—eher sollt ihr mich totschlagen wie einen wütigen Hund, als daß ich euer Haupt würde!

Kohl. Wäre das nicht geschehen, es geschähe vielleicht nimmermehr.

Stumpf. Das war eben das Unglück, daß sie keinen Führer hatten, den sie geehrt, und der ihrer Wut Einhalt tun können. Nimm die Hauptmannschaft an, ich bitte dich, Götz. Die Fürsten werden dir Dank wissen, ganz Deutschland. Es wird zum Besten und Frommen aller sein. Menschen und Länder werden geschont werden.

Götz. Warum übernimmst du's nicht?

Stumpf. Ich hab mich von ihnen losgesagt.

Kohl. Wir haben nicht Sattelhenkens Zeit, und langer unnötiger
Diskurse. Kurz und gut. Götz, sei unser Hauptmann, oder sieh zu
deinem Schloß und deiner Haut. Und hiermit zwei Stunden Bedenkzeit.
Bewacht ihn.

Götz. Was braucht's das! Ich bin so gut entschlossen—jetzt als darnach. Warum seid ihr ausgezogen? Eure Rechte und Freiheiten wiederzuerlangen? Was wütet ihr und verderbt das Land! Wollt ihr abstehen von allen übeltaten und handeln als wackre Leute, die wissen, was sie wollen, so will ich euch behülflich sein zu euern Forderungen und auf acht Tag euer Hauptmann sein.

Wild. Was geschehen ist, ist in der ersten Hitz geschehen, und braucht's deiner nicht, uns künftig zu hindern.

Kohl. Auf ein Vierteljahr wenigstens mußt du uns zusagen.

Stumpf. Macht vier Wochen, damit könnt ihr beide zufrieden sein.

Götz. Meinetwegen.

Kohl. Eure Hand!

Götz. Und gelobt mir, den Vertrag, den ihr mit mir gemacht, schriftlich an alle Haufen zu senden, ihm bei Strafe streng nachzukommen.

Wild. Nun ja! Soll geschehen.

Götz. So verbind ich mich euch auf vier Wochen.

Stumpf. Glück zu! Was du tust, schon unsern gnädigen Herrn den
Pfalzgrafen.

Kohl (leise). Bewacht ihn. Daß niemand mit ihm rede außer eurer
Gegenwart.

Götz. Lerse! Kehr zu meiner Frau. Steh ihr bei. Sie soll bald
Nachricht von mir haben.

(Götz, Stumpf, Georg, Lerse, einige Bauern ab.—Metzler, Link kommen.)

Metzler. Was hören wir von einem Vertrag? Was soll der Vertrag?

Link. Es ist schändlich, so einen Vertrag einzugehen.

Kohl. Wir wissen so gut, was wir wollen, als ihr, und haben zu tun und zu lassen.

Wild. Das Rasen und Brennen und Morden mußte doch einmal aufhören, heut oder morgen! so haben wir noch einen braven Hauptmann dazu gewonnen.

Metzler. Was aufhören! Du Verräter! Warum sind wir da? Uns an unsern Feinden zu rächen, uns emporzuhelfen!—Das hat euch ein Fürstenknecht geraten.

Kohl. Komm, Wild, er ist wie ein Vieh. (Ab.)

Metzler. Geht nur! Wird euch kein Haufen zustehn. Die Schurken!
Link, wir wollen die andern aufhetzen, Miltenberg dort drüben anzünden,
und wenn's Händel setzt wegen des Vertrags, schlagen wir den
Verträgern zusammen die Köpf ab.

Link. Wir haben doch den großen Haufen auf unsrer Seite.

Berg und Tal. Eine Mühle in der Tiefe

Ein Trupp Reiter. Weislingen kommt aus der Mühle mit Franzen und einem Boten.

Weislingen. Mein Pferd!—Ihr habt's den andern Herrn auch angesagt?

Bote. Wenigstens sieben Fähnlein werden mit Euch eintreffen, im Wald hinter Miltenberg. Die Bauern ziehen unten herum. Überall sind Boten ausgeschickt, der ganze Bund wird in kurzem zusammen sein. Fehlen kann's nicht; man sagt, es sei Zwist unter ihnen.

Weislingen. Desto besser!—Franz!

Franz. Gnädiger Herr?

Weislingen. Richt es pünktlich aus. Ich bind es dir auf deine Seele. Gib ihr den Brief. Sie soll vom Hof auf mein Schloß! Sogleich! Du sollst sie abreisen sehn, und mir's dann melden.

Franz. Soll geschehen, wie Ihr befehlt.

Weislingen. Sag ihr, sie soll wollen. (Zum Boten.) Führt uns nun den nächsten und besten Weg.

Bote. Wir müssen umziehen. Die Wasser sind von den entsetzlichen
Regen alle ausgetreten.

Jagsthausen

Elisabeth. Lerse.

Lerse. Tröstet Euch, gnädige Frau!

Elisabeth. Ach, Lerse, die Tränen stunden ihm in den Augen, wie er
Abschied von mir nahm. Es ist grausam, grausam!

Lerse. Er wird zurückkehren.

Elisabeth. Es ist nicht das. Wenn er auszog, rühmlichen Sieg zu erwerben, da war mir's nicht weh ums Herz. Ich freute mich auf seine Rückkunft, vor der mir jetzt bang ist.

Lerse. Ein so edler Mann-Elisabeth. Nenn ihn nicht so, das macht neu Elend. Die Bösewichter! Sie drohten, ihn zu ermorden, und sein Schloß anzuzünden.—Wenn er wiederkommen wird—ich seh ihn finster, finster. Seine Feinde werden lügenhafte Klagartikel schmieden, und er wird nicht sagen können: Nein!

Lerse. Er wird und kann.

Elisabeth. Er hat seinen Bann gebrochen. Sag Nein!

Lerse. Nein! Er ward gezwungen; wo ist der Grund, ihn zu verdammen?

Elisabeth. Die Bosheit sucht keine Gründe, nur Ursachen. Er hat sich zu Rebellen, Missetätern, Mördern gesellt, ist an ihrer Spitze gezogen. Sage Nein!

Lerse. Laßt ab, Euch zu quälen und mich. Haben sie ihm nicht feierlich zugesagt, keine Tathandlungen mehr zu unternehmen, wie die bei Weinsberg? Hört ich sie nicht selbst halbreuig sagen: Wenn's nicht geschehen wär, geschäh's vielleicht nie? Müßten nicht Fürsten und Herrn ihm Dank wissen, wenn er freiwillig Führer eines unbändigen Volks geworden wäre, um ihrer Raserei Einhalt zu tun und so viel Menschen und Besitztümer zu schonen?

Elisabeth. Du bist ein liebevoller Advokat.—Wenn sie ihn gefangennähmen, als Rebell behandelten, und sein graues Haupt—Lerse, ich möchte von Sinnen kommen.

Lerse. Sende ihrem Körper Schlaf, lieber Vater der Menschen, wenn du ihrer Seele keinen Trost geben willst!

Elisabeth. Georg hat versprochen, Nachricht zu bringen. Er wird auch nicht dürfen, wie er will. Sie sind ärger als gefangen. Ich weiß, man bewacht sie wie Feinde. Der gute Georg! Er wollte nicht von seinem Herrn weichen.

Lerse. Das Herz blutete mir, wie er mich von sich schickte. Wenn Ihr nicht meiner Hülfe bedürftet, alle Gefahren des schmählichsten Todes sollten mich nicht von ihm getrennt haben.

Elisabeth. Ich weiß nicht, wo Sickingen ist. Wenn ich nur Marien einen Boten schicken könnte.

Lerse. Schreibt nur, ich will dafür sorgen. (Ab.)

Bei einem Dorf

Götz. Georg.

Götz. Geschwind zu Pferde, Georg! Ich sehe Miltenberg brennen. Halten sie so den Vertrag? Reit hin, sag ihnen die Meinung. Die Mordbrenner! Ich sage mich von ihnen los. Sie sollen einen Zigeuner zum Hauptmann machen, nicht mich. Geschwind, Georg. (Georg ab.) Wollt, ich wäre tausend Meilen davon, und läg im tiefsten Turn, der in der Türkei steht. Könnt ich mit Ehren von ihnen kommen! Ich fahr ihnen alle Tag durch den Sinn, sag ihnen die bittersten Wahrheiten, daß sie mein müde werden und mich erlassen sollen.

(Ein Unbekannter.)

Unbekannter. Gott grüß Euch, sehr edler Herr.

Götz. Gott dank Euch. Was bringt Ihr? Euern Namen?

Unbekannter. Der tut nichts zur Sache. Ich komme, Euch zu sagen, daß Euer Kopf in Gefahr ist. Die Anführer sind müde, sich von Euch so harte Worte geben zu lassen, haben beschlossen, Euch aus dem Weg zu räumen. Mäßigt Euch oder seht zu entwischen, und Gott geleit Euch. (Ab.)

Götz. Auf diese Art dein Leben zu lassen, Götz, und so zu enden! Es sei drum! So ist mein Tod der Welt das sicherste Zeichen, daß ich nichts Gemeines mit den Hunden gehabt habe.

(Einige Bauern.)

Erster Bauer. Herr, Herr! Sie sind geschlagen, sie sind gefangen.

Götz. Wer?

Zweiter Bauer. Die Miltenberg verbrannt haben. Es zog sich ein
Bündischer Trupp hinter dem Berg hervor und überfiel sie auf einmal.

Götz. Sie erwartet ihr Lohn.—O Georg! Georg!—Sie haben ihn mit den
Bösewichtern gefangen—Mein Georg! Mein Georg!-(Anführer kommen.)

Link. Auf, Herr Hauptmann, auf! Es ist nicht Säumens Zeit. Der
Feind ist in der Nähe und mächtig.

Götz. Wer verbrannte Miltenberg?

Metzler. Wenn Ihr Umstände machen wollt, so wird man Euch weisen, wie man keine macht.

Kohl. Sorgt für unsere Haut und Eure. Auf! Auf!

Götz (zu Metzler). Drohst du mir! Du Nichtswürdiger! Glaubst du, daß du mir fürchterlicher bist, weil des Grafen von Helfenstein Blut an deinen Kleidern klebt?

Metzler. Berlichingen!

Götz. Du darfst meinen Namen nennen, und meine Kinder werden sich dessen nicht schämen.

Metzler. Mit dir feigem Kerl! Fürstendiener!

Götz (haut ihn über den Kopf, daß er stürzt. Die andern treten dazwischen).

Kohl. Ihr seid rasend. Der Feind bricht auf allen Seiten 'rein, und ihr hadert!

Link. Auf! Auf!

(Tumult und Schlacht.—Weislingen. Reiter.)

Weislingen. Nach! Nach! Sie fliehen. Laßt euch Regen und Nacht nicht abhalten. Götz ist unter ihnen, hör ich. Wendet Fleiß an, daß ihr ihn erwischt. Er ist schwer verwundet, sagen die Unsrigen. (Die Reiter ab.) Und wenn ich dich habe!—Es ist noch Gnade, wenn wir heimlich im Gefängnis dein Todesurteil vollstrecken.—So verlischt er vor dem Andenken der Menschen, und du kannst freier atmen, törichtes Herz. (Ab.)

Nacht, im wilden Wald. Zigeunerlager

Zigeunermutter am Feuer.

Mutter. Flick das Strohdach über der Grube, Tochter, gibt hint nacht noch Regen genug.

(Knab kommt.)

Knab. Ein Hamster, Mutter. Da! Zwei Feldmäus.

Mutter. Will sie dir abziehen und braten, und sollst eine Kapp haben von den Fellchen.—Du blutst?

Knab. Hamster hat mich bissen.

Mutter. Hol mir dürr Holz, daß das Feuer loh brennt wenn dein Vater kommt, wird naß sein durch und durch.

(Andre Zigeunerin, ein Kind auf dem Rücken.)

Erste Zigeunerin. Hast du brav geheischen?

Zweite Zigeunerin. Wenig genug. Das Land ist voll Tumult herum, daß man seins Lebens nicht sicher ist. Brennen zwei Dörfer lichterloh.

Erste Zigeunerin. Ist das dort drunten Brand, der Schein? Seh ihm schon lang zu. Man ist die Feuerzeichen am Himmel zeither so gewohnt worden.

(Zigeunerhauptmann, drei Gesellen kommen.)

Hauptmann. Hört ihr den wilden Jäger?

Erster Zigeuner. Er zieht grad über uns hin.

Hauptmann. Wie die Hunde bellen! Wau! Wau!

Zweiter Zigeuner. Die Peitschen knallen.

Dritter Zigeuner. Die Jäger jauchzen holla ho!

Mutter. Bringt ja des Teufels sein Gepäck!

Hauptmann. Haben im Trüben gefischt. Die Bauern rauben selbst, ist's uns wohl vergönnt.

Zweite Zigeunerin. Was hast du, Wolf?

Wolf. Einen Hasen, da, und einen Hahn; ein Bratspieß; ein Bündel
Leinwand; drei Kochlöffel und ein Pferdzaum.

Sticks. Ein wullen Deck hab ich, ein Paar Stiefeln, und Zunder und
Schwefel.

Mutter. Ist alles pudelnaß, wollen's trocknen, gebt her.

Hauptmann. Horch, ein Pferd! Geht! Seht, was ist. (Götz zu Pferd.)

Götz. Gott sei Dank! Dort seh ich Feuer, sind Zigeuner. Meine Wunden verbluten, die Feinde hinterher. Heiliger Gott, du endigst gräßlich mit mir!

Hauptmann. Ist's Friede daß du kommst?

Götz. Ich flehe Hülfe von euch. Meine Wunden ermatten mich. Helft mir vom Pferd!

Hauptmann. Helf ihm! Ein edler Mann, an Gestalt und Wort.

Wolf (leise). Es ist Götz von Berlichingen.

Hauptmann. Seid willkommen! Alles ist Euer, was wir haben.

Götz. Dank Euch.

Hauptmann. Kommt in mein Zelt.

V. Akt, Szene 2

Hauptmanns Zelt

Hauptmann. Götz.

Hauptmann. Ruft der Mutter, sie soll Blutwurzel bringen und Pflaster.

Götz (legt den Harnisch ab).

Hauptmann. Hier ist mein Feiertagswams.

Götz. Gott lohn's.

(Mutter verbindt ihn.)

Hauptmann. Ist mir herzlich lieb, Euch zu haben.

Götz. Kennt Ihr mich?

Hauptmann. Wer sollte Euch nicht kennen! Götz, unser Leben und Blut lassen wir für Euch.

(Schricks.)

Schricks. Kommen durch den Wald Reiter. Sind Bündische.

Hauptmann. Eure Verfolger! Sie sollen nit bis zu Euch kommen! Auf, Schricks! Biete den andern! Wir kennen die Schliche besser als sie, wir schießen sie nieder, eh sie uns gewahr werden.

Götz (allein). O Kaiser! Kaiser! Räuber beschützen deine Kinder.
(Man hört scharf schießen.) Die wilden Kerls, starr und treu!

(Zigeunerin.)

Zigeunerin. Rettet Euch! Die Feinde überwältigen.

Götz. Wo ist mein Pferd?

Zigeunerin. Hierbei.

Götz (gürtet sich und sitzt auf ohne Harnisch). Zum letztenmal sollen sie meinen Arm fühlen. Ich bin so schwach noch nicht. (Ab.)

Zigeunerin. Er sprengt zu den Unsrigen.

(Flucht.)

Wolf. Fort, fort! Alles verloren. Unser Hauptmann erschossen. Götz gefangen.

(Geheul der Weiber und Flucht.)

Adelheidens Schlafzimmer

Adelheid mit einem Brief.

Adelheid. Er, oder ich! Der übermütige! Mir drohen!—Wir wollen dir zuvorkommen. Was schleicht durch den Saal? (Es klopft.) Wer ist draußen?

(Franz leise.)

Franz. Macht mir auf, gnädige Frau.

Adelheid. Franz! Er verdient wohl, daß ich ihm aufmache. (Läßt ihn ein.)

Franz (fällt ihr um den Hals). Liebe gnädige Frau.

Adelheid. Unverschämter! Wenn dich jemand gehört hätte.

Franz. O es schläft alles, alles!

Adelheid. Was willst du?

Franz. Mich läßt's nicht ruhen. Die Drohungen meines Herrn, Euer
Schicksal, mein Herz.

Adelheid. Er war sehr zornig, als du Abschied nahmst?

Franz. Als ich ihn nie gesehen. Auf ihre Güter soll sie, sagt' er, sie soll wollen.

Adelheid. Und wir folgen?

Franz. Ich weiß nichts, gnädige Frau.

Adelheid. Betrogener törichter Junge, du siehst nicht, wo das hinaus will. Hier weiß er mich in Sicherheit. Denn lange steht's ihm schon nach meiner Freiheit. Er will mich auf seine Güter. Dort hat er Gewalt, mich zu behandeln, wie sein Haß ihm eingibt.

Franz. Er soll nicht!

Adelheid. Wirst du ihn hindern?

Franz. Er soll nicht!

Adelheid. Ich seh mein ganzes Elend voraus. Von seinem Schloß wird er mich mit Gewalt reißen, wird mich in ein Kloster sperren.

Franz. Hölle und Tod!

Adelheid. Wirst du mich retten?

Franz. Eh alles! alles!

Adelheid (die weinend ihn umhalst). Franz, ach uns zu retten!

Franz. Er soll nieder, ich will ihm den Fuß auf den Nacken setzen.

Adelheid. Keine Wut! Du sollst einen Brief an ihn haben, voll Demut, daß ich gehorche. Und dieses Fläschchen gieß ihm unter das Getränk.

Franz. Gebt. Ihr sollt frei sein!

Adelheid. Frei! Wenn du nicht mehr zitternd auf deinen Zehen zu mir schleichen wirst—nicht mehr ich ängstlich zu dir sage: "Brich auf, Franz, der Morgen kommt."

Heilbronn, vorm Turn

Elisabeth. Lerse.

Lerse. Gott nehm das Elend von Euch, gnädige Frau. Marie ist hier.

Elisabeth. Gott sei Dank! Lerse, wir sind in entsetzliches Elend versunken. Da ist's nun, wie mir alles ahnete! Gefangen, als Meuter, Missetäter in den tiefsten Turn geworfen

Lerse. Ich weiß alles.

Elisabeth. Nichts, nichts weißt du, der Jammer ist zu groß! Sein Alter, seine Wunden, ein schleichend Fieber und, mehr als alles das, die Finsternis seiner Seele, daß es so mit ihm enden soll.

Lerse. Auch, und daß der Weislingen Kommissar ist.

Elisabeth. Weislingen?

Lerse. Man hat mit unerhörten Exekutionen verfahren. Metzler ist lebendig verbrannt, zu Hunderten gerädert, gespießt, geköpft, geviertelt. Das Land umher gleicht einer Metzge, wo Menschenfleisch wohlfeil ist.

Elisabeth. Weislingen Kommissar! O Gott! Ein Strahl von Hoffnung. Marie soll mir zu ihm, er kann ihr nichts abschlagen. Er hatte immer ein weiches Herz, und wenn er sie sehen wird, die er so liebte, die so elend durch ihn ist—Wo ist sie?

Lerse. Noch im Wirtshaus.

Elisabeth. Führe mich zu ihr. Sie muß gleich fort. Ich fürchte alles.

Weislingens Schloß

Weislingen.

Weislingen. Ich bin so krank, so schwach. Alle meine Gebeine sind hohl. Ein elendes Fieber hat das Mark ausgefressen. Keine Ruh und Rast, weder Tag noch Nacht. Im halben Schlummer giftige Träume. Die vorige Nacht begegnete ich Götzen im Wald. Er zog sein Schwert und forderte mich heraus. Ich faßte nach meinem, die Hand versagte mir. Da stieß er's in die Scheide, sah mich verächtlich an und ging hinter mich.—Er ist gefangen, und ich zittre vor ihm. Elender Mensch! Dein Wort hat ihn zum Tode verurteilt, und du bebst vor seiner Traumgestalt wie ein Missetäter!—Und soll er sterben?—Götz! Götz!—Wir Menschen führen uns nicht selbst; bösen Geistern ist Macht über uns gelassen, daß sie ihren höllischen Mutwillen an unserm Verderben üben. (Setzt sich.)—Matt! Matt! Wie sind meine Nägel so blau!—Ein kalter, kalter, verzehrender Schweiß lähmt mir jedes Glied. Es dreht mir alles vorm Gesicht. Könnt ich schlafen. Ach-(Maria tritt auf.)

Weislingen. Jesus Marie!—Laß mir Ruh! Laß mir Ruh!—Die Gestalt fehlte noch! Sie stirbt, Marie stirbt, und zeigt sich mir an.—Verlaß mich, seliger Geist, ich bin elend genug.

Maria. Weislingen, ich bin kein Geist. Ich bin Marie.

Weislingen. Das ist ihre Stimme.

Maria. Ich komme, meines Bruders Leben von dir zu erflehen. Er ist unschuldig, so strafbar er scheint.

Weisling. Still, Marie! Du Engel des Himmels bringst die Qualen der
Hölle mit dir. Rede nicht fort.

Maria. Und mein Bruder soll sterben? Weislingen, es ist entsetzlich, daß ich dir zu sagen brauche: er ist unschuldig; daß ich jammern muß, dich von dem abscheulichsten Morde zurückzuhalten. Deine Seele ist bis in ihre innersten Tiefen von feindseligen Mächten besessen. Das ist Adelbert!

Weislingen. Du siehst, der verzehrende Atem des Todes hat mich angehaucht, meine Kraft sinkt nach dem Grabe. Ich stürbe als ein Elender, und du kommst, mich in Verzweiflung zu stürzen. Wenn ich reden könnte, dein höchster Haß würde in Mitleid und Jammer zerschmelzen. O Marie! Marie!

Maria. Weislingen, mein Bruder verkranket im Gefängnis. Seine schweren Wunden, sein Alter. Und wenn du fähig wärst, sein graues Haupt—Weislingen, wir würden verzweifeln.

Weislingen. Genug. (Zieht die Schelle.)

(Franz in äußerster Bewegung.)

Franz. Gnädiger Herr.

Weislingen. Die Papiere dort, Franz!

Franz (bringt sie).

Weislingen (reißt ein Paket auf und zeigt Marien ein Papier). Hier ist deines Bruders Todesurteil unterschrieben.

Maria. Gott im Himmel!

Weislingen. Und so zerreiß ich's! Er lebt. Aber kann ich wieder schaffen, was ich zerstört habe? Weine nicht so, Franz! Guter Junge, dir geht mein Elend tief zu Herzen.

Franz (wirft sich vor ihm nieder und faßt seine Knie).

Maria (vor sich). Er ist sehr krank. Sein Anblick zerreißt mir das
Herz. Wie liebt ich ihn! und nun ich ihm nahe, fühl ich, wie lebhaft.

Weislingen. Franz, steh auf und laß das Weinen! Ich kann wieder aufkommen. Hoffnung ist bei den Lebenden.

Franz. Ihr werdet nicht. Ihr müßt sterben.

Weislingen. Ich muß?

Franz (außer sich). Gift! Gift! Von Euerm Weibe!—Ich! Ich!
(Rennt davon.)

Weislingen. Marie, geh ihm nach. Er verzweifelt. (Maria ab.) Gift von meinem Weibe! Weh! Weh! Ich fühl's. Marter und Tod!

Maria (inwendig). Hülfe! Hülfe!

Weislingen (will aufstehn). Gott, vermag ich das nicht!

Maria (kommt). Er ist hin. Zum Saalfenster hinaus stürzt' er wütend in den Main hinunter.

Weislingen. Ihm ist wohl.—Dein Bruder ist außer Gefahr. Die übrigen
Kommissarien, Seckendorf besonders, sind seine Freunde. Ritterlich
Gefängnis werden sie ihm auf sein Wort gleich gewähren. Leb wohl,
Maria, und geh.

Maria. Ich will bei dir bleiben, armer Verlaßner.

Weislingen. Wohl verlassen und arm! Du bist ein furchtbarer Rächer,
Gott!—Mein Weib-Maria. Entschlage dich dieser Gedanken. Kehre dein
Herz zu dem Barmherzigen.

Weislingen. Geh, liebe Seele, überlaß mich meinem Elend.—Entsetzlich!
Auch deine Gegenwart, Marie, der letzte Trost, ist Qual.

Maria (vor sich). Stärke mich, o Gott! Meine Seele erliegt mit der seinigen.

Weislingen. Weh! Weh! Gift von meinem Weibe!—Mein Franz verführt durch die Abscheuliche! Wie sie wartet, horcht auf den Boten, der ihr die Nachricht bringe: er ist tot. Und du, Marie! Marie, warum bist du gekommen, daß du jede schlafende Erinnerung meiner Sünden wecktest! Verlaß mich! Verlaß mich, daß ich sterbe.

Maria. Laß mich bleiben. Du bist allein. Denk, ich sei deine Wärterin. Vergiß alles. Vergesse dir Gott so alles, wie ich dir alles vergesse.

Weislingen. Du Seele voll Liebe, bete für mich, bete für mich! Mein
Herz ist verschlossen.

Maria. Er wird sich deiner erbarmen.—Du bist matt.

Weislingen. Ich sterbe, sterbe und kann nicht ersterben. Und in dem fürchterlichen Streit des Lebens und Todes sind die Qualen der Hölle.

Maria. Erbarmer, erbarme dich seiner! Nur einen Blick deiner Liebe an sein Herz, daß es sich zum Trost öffne, und sein Geist Hoffnung, Lebenshoffnung in den Tod hinüberbringe!

In einem finstern engen Gewölbe

Die Richter des heimlichen Gerichts. Alle vermummt.

ältester. Richter des heimlichen Gerichts, schwurt auf Strang und Schwert, unsträflich zu sein, zu richten im Verborgnen, zu strafen im Verborgnen Gott gleich! Sind eure Herzen rein und eure Hände, hebt die Arme empor, ruft über die Missetäter: "Wehe! Wehe!"

Alle. Wehe! Wehe!

ältester. Rufer, beginne das Gericht!

Rufer. Ich, Rufer, rufe die Klag gegen den Missetäter. Des Herz rein ist, dessen Händ rein sind zu schwören auf Strang und Schwert, der klage bei Strang und Schwert! klage! klage!

Kläger (tritt vor). Mein Herz ist rein von Missetat, meine Hände von unschuldigem Blut. Verzeih mir Gott böse Gedanken und hemme den Weg zum Willen! Ich hebe meine Hand auf und klage! klage! klage!

ältester. Wen klagst du an?

Kläger. Klage an auf Strang und Schwert Adelheiden von Weislingen. Sie hat Ehebruchs sich schuldig gemacht, ihren Mann vergiftet durch ihren Knaben. Der Knab hat sich selbst gerichtet, der Mann ist tot.

ältester. Schwörst du zu dem Gott der Wahrheit, daß du Wahrheit klagst?

Kläger. Ich schwöre.

ältester. Würd es falsch befunden, beutst du deinen Hals der Strafe des Mords und des Ehebruchs?

Kläger. Ich biete.

ältester. Eure Stimmen.

(Sie reden heimlich zu ihm.)

Kläger. Richter des heimlichen Gerichts, was ist euer Urteil über
Adelheiden von Weislingen, bezüchtigt des Ehebruchs und Mords?

ältester. Sterben soll sie! sterben des bittern doppelten Todes; mit Strang und Dolch büßen doppelt doppelte Missetat. Streckt eure Hände empor, und rufet Weh über sie! Weh! Weh! In die Hände des Rächers.

Alle. Weh! Weh! Weh!

ältester. Rächer! Rächer, tritt auf.

Rächer (tritt vor).

ältester. Faß hier Strang und Schwert, sie zu tilgen von dem Angesicht des Himmels, binnen acht Tage Zeit. Wo du sie findest, nieder mit ihr in Staub!—Richter, die ihr richtet im Verborgenen und strafet im Verborgenen Gott gleich, bewahrt euer Herz vor Missetat und eure Hände vor unschuldigem Blut.

Hof einer Herberge

Maria. Lerse.

Maria. Die Pferde haben genug gerastet. Wir wollen fort, Lerse.

Lerse. Ruht doch bis an Morgen. Die Nacht ist gar zu unfreundlich.

Maria. Lerse, ich habe keine Ruhe, bis ich meinen Bruder gesehen habe.
Laß uns fort. Das Wetter hellt sich aus, wir haben einen schönen
Tag zu gewarten.

Lerse. Wie Ihr befehlt.

Heilbronn, im Turn

Götz. Elisabeth.

Elisabeth. Ich bitte dich, lieber Mann, rede mit mir. Dein Stillschweigen ängstet mich. Du verglühst in dir selbst. Komm, laß uns nach deinen Wunden sehen; sie bessern sich um vieles. In der mutlosen Finsternis erkenn ich dich nicht mehr.

Götz. Suchtest du den Götz? Der ist lang hin. Sie haben mich nach
und nach verstümmelt, meine Hand, meine Freiheit, Güter und guten
Namen. Mein Kopf, was ist an dem?—Was hört Ihr von Georgen? Ist
Lerse nach Georgen?

Elisabeth. Ja, Lieber! Richtet Euch auf, es kann sich vieles wenden.

Götz. Wen Gott niederschlägt, der richtet sich selbst nicht auf. Ich weiß am besten, was auf meinen Schultern liegt. Unglück bin ich gewohnt zu dulden. Und jetzt ist's nicht Weislingen allein, nicht die Bauern allein, nicht der Tod des Kaisers und meine Wunden—Es ist alles zusammen. Meine Stunde ist kommen. Ich hoffte, sie sollte sein wie mein Leben. Sein Wille geschehe.

Elisabeth. Willt du nicht was essen?

Götz. Nichts, meine Frau. Sieh, wie die Sonne draußen scheint.

Elisabeth. Ein schöner Frühlingstag.

Götz. Meine Liebe, wenn du den Wächter bereden könntest, mich in sein klein Gärtchen zu lassen auf eine halbe Stunde, daß ich der lieben Sonne genösse, des heitern Himmels und der reinen Luft.

Elisabeth. Gleich! und er wird's wohl tun.

Gärtchen am Turn

Maria. Lerse.

Maria. Geh hinein und sieh, wie's steht.

(Lerse ab.—Elisabeth. Wächter.)

Elisabeth. Gott vergelt Euch die Lieb und Treu an meinem Herrn.
(Wächter ab.) Maria, was bringst du?

Maria. Meines Bruders Sicherheit. Ach, aber mein Herz ist zerrissen.
Weislingen ist tot, vergiftet von seinem Weibe. Mein Mann ist in
Gefahr. Die Fürsten werden ihm zu mächtig, man sagt, er sei
eingeschlossen und belagert.

Elisabeth. Glaubt dem Gerüchte nicht. Und laßt Götzen nichts merken.

Maria. Wie steht's um ihn?

Elisabeth. Ich fürchtete, er würde deine Rückkunft nicht erleben.
Die Hand des Herrn liegt schwer auf ihm. Und Georg ist tot.

Maria. Georg! der goldne Junge!

Elisabeth. Als die Nichtswürdigen Miltenberg verbrannten, sandte ihn sein Herr, ihnen Einhalt zu tun. Da fiel ein Trupp Bündischer auf sie los.—Georg! hätten sie sich alle gehalten wie er, sie hätten alle das gute Gewissen haben müssen. Viel wurden erstochen, und Georg mit: er starb einen Reiterstod.

Maria. Weiß es Götz?

Elisabeth. Wir verbergen's vor ihm. Er fragt mich zehnmal des Tags, und schickt mich zehnmal des Tags zu forschen, was Georg macht. Ich fürchte seinem Herzen diesen letzten Stoß zu geben.

Maria. O Gott, was sind die Hoffnungen dieser Erden!

(Götz. Lerse. Wächter.)

Götz. Allmächtiger Gott! Wie wohl ist's einem unter deinem Himmel!
Wie frei!—Die Bäume treiben Knospen, und alle Welt hofft. Lebt wohl,
meine Lieben; meine Wurzeln sind abgehauen, meine Kraft sinkt nach dem
Grabe.

Elisabeth. Darf ich Lersen nach deinem Sohn ins Kloster schicken, daß du ihn noch einmal siehst und segnest?

Götz. Laß ihn, er ist heiliger als ich, er braucht meinen Segen nicht. —An unsrem Hochzeittag, Elisabeth, ahnte mir's nicht, daß ich so sterben würde.—Mein alter Vater segnete uns, und eine Nachkommenschaft von edeln tapfern Söhnen quoll aus seinem Gebet.—Du hast ihn nicht erhört, und ich bin der Letzte.—Lerse, dein Angesicht freut mich in der Stunde des Todes mehr als im mutigsten Gefecht. Damals führte mein Geist den eurigen; jetzt hältst du mich aufrecht. Ach daß ich Georgen noch einmal sähe, mich an seinem Blick wärmte! —Ihr seht zur Erden und weint—Er ist tot—Georg ist tot.—Stirb, Götz—Du hast dich selbst überlebt, die Edeln überlebt.—Wie starb er?—Ach fingen sie ihn unter den Mordbrennern, und er ist hingerichtet?

Elisabeth. Nein, er wurde bei Miltenberg erstochen. Er wehrte sich wie ein Löw um seine Freiheit.

Götz. Gott sei Dank!—Er war der beste Junge unter der Sonne und tapfer.—Löse meine Seele nun!—Arme Frau! Ich lasse dich in einer verderbten Welt. Lerse, verlaß sie nicht.—Schließt eure Herzen sorgfältiger als eure Tore. Es kommen die Zeiten des Betrugs, es ist ihm Freiheit gegeben. Die Nichtswürdigen werden regieren mit List, und der Edle wird in ihre Netze fallen. Maria, gebe dir Gott deinen Mann wieder. Möge er nicht so tief fallen, als er hoch gestiegen ist! Selbitz starb, und der gute Kaiser, und mein Georg.—Gebt mir einen Trunk Wasser.—Himmlische Luft—Freiheit! Freiheit! (Er stirbt.)

Elisabeth. Nur droben, droben bei dir. Die Welt ist ein Gefängnis.

Maria. Edler Mann! Edler Mann! Wehe dem Jahrhundert, das dich von sich stieß!

Lerse. Wehe der Nachkommenschaft, die dich verkennt!

Ende dieses Project Gutenberg Etextes "Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand" von Johann Wolfgang Goethe

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After a Century of Searching, Scientists Finally Found A Virtual Magnetic Monopole

© 2024 Microsoft Story by Darren Orf

Now an international team of scientists from the U.K. and China have found emergent magnetic monopole behavior in a hematite, an iron-oxide component of rust.

• While this doesn’t prove whether or not magnetic poles can be truly separated, it could open the door to new data storage and computing technologies.

Magnetic monopoles are a complicated concept with a deceptively simple name. At their most basic, these theoretical elemental particles are exactly what they sound like—magnets with only one pole instead of the usual two. But that simple moniker falls short of conveying the century-long search for this ever-elusive particle.

Usually, when you split a bar magnet in two, the new pieces form new poles and exhibit magnetic field lines the same way as before. In classical physics, it’s impossible to actually create a magnetic monopole, but the revolution of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century began to unravel that long-established assumption. However, nearly a century after English physicist Paul Dirac (who also correctly hypothesized the presence of antimatter) first theorized their existence, scientists still haven’t found magnetic monopoles in the observable universe.

This search for a hypothetical object has instead led some physicists down different exploratory paths to find electromagnetic phenomena that appear to act like monopoles— some kind of virtual magnetic monopole. In a new study published in the journal Nature Materials, scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the National University of Singapore captured the first naturally occurring magnetic monopoles emerging from collective electron behavior in flecks of hematite, a type of iron oxide (a.k.a. rust).

“These monopoles are a collective state of many spins that twirl around a singularity rather than a single fixed particle, so they emerge through many-body interactions,” University of Oxford’s Hariom Jani, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “The result is a tiny, localized stable particle with diverging magnetic field coming out of it.”

The discovery of this new class of magnetic monopole can be attributed to two ideas. The first is a concept known as “emergence,” which was first popularized by Nobel laureate Philip Anderson in 1972 in an essay titled “More Is Different.” That essay states that, in condensed matter physics, the sum of individual physical pieces could exhibit different properties from its parts.

The second idea involved the study of antiferromagnets with what’s called “diamond quantum magnetometry.” This technique allows for the examination of the spin of a single electron on the tip of a diamond needle, which in turn allows researchers to measure its magnetic field as its impacts (in this case) hematite. Crucially, the technique pulls this off without affecting the behavior of the electron itself.

“The challenge has always been direct imaging of these textures in antiferromagnets due to their weaker magnetic pull,” University of Cambridge’s Anthony Tan said in a press statement. “But now we’re able to do so, with a nice combination of diamonds and rust.”

Using these two techniques, the scientists discovered “hidden patterns of magnetic charges” that included expected dipoles and quadrupoles, but also monopoles. As Scientific American notes, this discovery doesn’t solve the quantum question of whether a magnet’s poles can be separated. But it could lead to the development of next-gen storage techniques, known as racetrack memory or ultra-efficient computing devices.

The next big thing in computing could be powered by the incredibly small quantum whirls of magnetic monopoles.

the New SAT

Here’s What It’s Like to Take the New SAT

By Dana GoldsteinMarch 8, 2024

New York Times

Students took a new SAT on Saturday. It's all digital, and the reading and writing sections do away with page-long reading excerpts with eight to 11 questions. Now, there are short passages followed by just one question each.

Try your hand at five sample questions.

1 of 5

The following text is from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.” The narrator is being driven in a carriage through a remote region at night.

“The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed; he kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.”

As used in the text, what does the word “disturbed” most nearly mean?

Disorganized

Alarmed

Offended

Interrupted

96% of 267,027 readers answered this correctly.

2 of 5

The field of study called affective neuroscience seeks instinctive, physiological causes for feelings such as pleasure or displeasure. Because these sensations are linked to a chemical component (for example, the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain when one receives or expects a reward), they can be said to have a partly physiological basis. These processes have been described in mammals, but Jingnan Huang and his colleagues have recently observed that some behaviors of honeybees (such as foraging) are also motivated by a dopamine-based signaling process.

What choice best describes the main purpose of the text?

It describes an experimental method of measuring the strength of physiological responses in humans.

It illustrates processes by which certain insects can express how they are feeling.

It summarizes a finding suggesting that some mechanisms in the brains of certain insects resemble mechanisms in mammalian brains.

It presents research showing that certain insects and mammals behave similarly when there is a possibility of a reward for their actions.

3 of 5

“An Ideal Husband” is an 1895 play by Oscar Wilde. In the play, which is a satire, Wilde suggests that a character named Lady Gertrude Chiltern is perceived as both extremely virtuous and unforgiving, as is evident when another character says

Which quotation from “An Ideal Husband” most effectively illustrates the claim?

“Lady Chiltern is a woman of the very highest principles, I am glad to say. I am a little too old now, myself, to trouble about setting a good example, but I always admire people who do.”

“Do you know, [Lady Chiltern], I don’t mind your talking morality a bit. Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

“[Lady Chiltern] does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men. She stands apart as good women do—pitiless in her perfection—cold and stern and without mercy.”

“Lady Chiltern, you are a sensible woman, the most sensible woman in London, the most sensible woman I know.”

4 of 5

Richard Spikes was a prolific African American inventor known for his contributions to automotive engineering. Between 1907 and 1946, he patented many inventions, an automobile turn signal, a safety brake, and — most famously — the first automatic gearshift.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of standard English?

included

includes

including

will include

5 of 5

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Planetary scientists classify asteroids based on their composition.

• C-type asteroids are composed primarily of carbon.

• They account for roughly 75 percent of known asteroids.

• S-type asteroids are primarily made up of silicate minerals.

• They account for roughly 17 percent of known asteroids.

The student wants to emphasize a difference between C-type and S-type asteroids. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Planetary scientists classify asteroids into types, two of which are the C-type and the S-type.

Planetary scientists consider an asteroid’s composition (such as whether the asteroid is composed mainly of silicate minerals or carbon) when classifying it.

Roughly 17 percent of known asteroids are classified as S-type asteroids; another percentage is classified as C-type asteroids.

C-type asteroids are mainly composed of carbon, whereas S-type asteroids are primarily made up of silicate minerals.

Answers:

In the context of this excerpt from Bram Stoker's "Dracula," the word "disturbed" most nearly means "alarmed." The narrator is describing a tense situation where the baying of wolves is getting closer, inducing fear in both the narrator and the horses. The driver's lack of reaction implies that he is not alarmed by the situation, despite the growing danger indicated by the approaching wolves.

The main purpose of the text is to summarize a finding suggesting that some mechanisms in the brains of certain insects, specifically honeybees, resemble mechanisms in mammalian brains. This is indicated by the mention of Jingnan Huang and colleagues' observations that behaviors in honeybees, like foraging, are motivated by a dopamine-based signaling process similar to that seen in mammals in response to pleasure or the expectation of a reward.

The choice that completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of standard English is "including." This choice correctly implies that the list that follows is a part of the many inventions patented by Richard Spikes, without suggesting that it is a complete list.

To emphasize a difference between C-type and S-type asteroids, using relevant information from the notes, the most effective choice is:

"C-type asteroids are mainly composed of carbon, whereas S-type asteroids are primarily made up of silicate minerals."

This choice directly contrasts the compositions of the two asteroid types, highlighting the primary difference between them as noted in the student's research.

Additional Reading Provided:

No More No. 2 Pencils: The SAT Goes Fully Digital

The new format cuts nearly an hour out of the exam and has shorter reading passages.

After 98 years of students scratching answers on paper, the SAT will now be fully digital.Credit...Alex Brandon/Associated Press

By Dana Goldstein

March 8, 2024

With adolescent anxiety surging and attention spans challenged, high school students will take a revamped version of the SAT on Saturday, which has been designed in part to reduce stress, according to the College Board, which administers the test.

The exam will be briefer — two hours and 14 minutes instead of three hours — and students will have more time for each question. The reading passages will be much shorter, and test-takers will now be able to use an online graphing calculator for the entire math section of the exam.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Listen 8:39

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

And after 98 years of students scratching answers on paper, the SAT will now be fully digital for the remote-learning generation.

The College Board said its piloting of the exam showed it was just as rigorous as the paper test, but less intimidating for students. And those with A.D.H.D. and dyslexia, as well as those learning English, reported that they were “better able to maintain their focus” on the digital test, compared with the earlier format, said Jaslee Carayol, director of communications for the College Board.

Delivering the test digitally will also reduce the possibility of cheating, the College Board said, because few students will receive the exact same exam. In both reading and math, test-takers who perform well early in the exam will receive harder questions as they go along. (The College Board says scores will be accurate, regardless of the difficulty of questions.)

The Science of Reading Movement

• What to Know: An effort to overhaul how children learn to read, known as the science of reading, is sweeping the United States. Here’s where it stands.

• In New York: Gov. Kathy Hochul, who wants to change the way schools in the state teach reading, proposed spending $10 million to retrain teachers in the science of reading.

• In California: A study found that California schools got positive results from a program that emphasized the science of reading — at a cost of about $1,000 per student annually.

• A Reading Revolt: Parents, civil rights activists, educators and lawmakers are taking on the education establishment over how children are taught to read. But can they get results?

There are critics, though. The switch to shorter reading passages has not been universally celebrated by English teachers, many of whom believe that in the face of constant distractions from technology, students need to develop greater reading stamina.

The latest overhaul of the exam comes at a fraught moment for the standardized testing industry, in which most colleges have dropped testing requirements.

According to data from Common App, the number of college applicants submitting SAT or ACT scores plummeted from 76 percent in the 2019-2020 admissions cycle to 45 percent this year.

Here’s What It’s Like to Take the New SAT

Students will take a new SAT on Saturday. It’s all digital, and the reading and writing sections do away with page-long reading excerpts with eight to 11 questions.

Even though Yale, Dartmouth and Brown recently made waves by reinstating standardized test requirements, saying the scores are the best predictor of academic success, it is unlikely that most colleges, which are far less selective, will follow suit, said Mary L. Churchill, associate dean at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.

The average acceptance rate among four-year institutions is 73 percent, and most colleges do not face the challenge of having to draw fine-grained distinctions between huge swaths of highly qualified students. Indeed, with some smaller colleges facing under-enrollment and at risk of shutting down, many admissions directors see test-optional policies as a way to encourage more applications, Dr. Churchill said.

Amid this changing landscape, the College Board has successfully promoted the SAT to state policymakers as an integral part of the high school experience, and 16 states now require or encourage students to take the test during the school day, regardless of their plans for life after high school.

In total, 1.9 million students took the SAT in the high school class of 2023, with two-thirds taking the exam during the school day, often for free. In the 2019 class, there were 2.2 million test-takers.

Students will take the exam on an app called Bluebook. In some ways, it tries to recreate the experience of working with paper. There are tools to make highlights and annotations, and to cross out multiple-choice responses students think are wrong.

Test-takers will no longer need to flip back and forth between long reading passages and pages of accompanying questions. Instead, they will tackle a string of much shorter passages — some just one paragraph — each associated with a single question.

Yoon S. Choi, chief executive of CollegeSpring, a nonprofit that provides in-school test prep to low-income students, said the new format was a boon to many, especially English language learners.

But others — including some educators who work with that same population of students — expressed skepticism about the College Board’s revision.

“It seems to me like they are maybe trying to cater to this generation that is doing a lot of reading on the internet, bouncing around from one place to the next,” said Ariel Sacks, a New York City public school English teacher and author of a book arguing for the importance of assigning full novels. “But I don’t think that’s setting a high or even effective expectation for what students should be doing as juniors in high school.”

Ms. Carayol of the College Board acknowledged that reading stamina was important, but said the paper SAT also had not been a good test of that skill.

“Long test passages force students to race through text hunting for answers instead of reading carefully,” she wrote in an email. “There’s a huge benefit for a student by having these shorter passages. If they get uncomfortable or disoriented by a passage, they can skip it and return, rather than having eight to 11 questions tied to each passage.”

At North Houston Early College High School, Adair Rivera, a 17-year-old junior, will take the SAT in the School Day program. He hopes to become the first member of his immediate family to attend college, to study computer science.

Adair said he is earning higher scores on digital practice tests than when he took the paper SAT. He hopes to attend M.I.T. or Yale, which require test scores, or the University of Pennsylvania, which does not.

“It’s a game changer,” he said of the shorter reading passages and shorter exam time. “It doesn’t wear out students as fast.”

Lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee would once again block the Air Force’s bid to retire older F-22 Raptor fighter jets

Despite confidence from the Air Force secretary that Congress would greenlight the F-22 divestments, lawmakers are once again inclined to keep the fighters around.

Forward: I am concerned that we hold these courts and lawmakers up simply so they can indulge their interests from lobbying $$. Lawyers and courts do not seem to server the citizens

By   MICHAEL MARROWon June 14, 2023 at 2:28 PM

An F-22 Raptor takes off from Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, Feb. 21, 2022. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Dan Heaton)

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee would once again block the Air Force’s bid to retire older F-22 Raptor fighter jets, a setback for service officials who sought to repurpose the fighter’s sustainment dollars to fund its next-generation successor.

Text of Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers’ markup [PDF] of the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill further indicates that the committee would cut all funding for the Air Force’s troubled Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW).  

The Air Force sought permission to retire 32 Block 20 Raptors in FY24 that service officials emphasized are not combat-coded, a move Congress blocked last year. Despite confidence from the service’s top civilian that the divestments would finallybe granted, House authorizers would still not permit them, according to a senior committee aide. 

The “FY23 prohibition on retirements for F-22’s still stands,” the aide told Breaking Defense. “Members view that the F-22 proposal is problematic because the Block 20 is combat capable depending on the threat environment; our most advanced F-22, the Block 30/25 aircraft, would then be required to absorb the training pipeline workload, adding unnecessary wear and tear to our most combat-capable fleet and very small fleet of remaining F-22s.” the aide explained.

Additionally, the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter that’s set to replace the Raptor “is still many years away from fielding and in its earliest stages of development,” the aide said. Last month, the Air Force kicked off the competition stage of that program, and has said it will select a contractor in calendar 2024.

According to a legislative proposal submitted by the Air Force [PDF], approximately $400 million could be saved annually between FY24 and FY27 and under $200 million in FY28 if the fighters are junked, money that the service instead repurposed for NGAD. Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, warned in April that if the divestments are blocked — and additional funds are not appropriated to maintain the fighters — “there’ll be a half-a-billion dollars of something that won’t get done.

“Perhaps it’ll be NGAD. Perhaps it’ll be munitions. Perhaps we’ll stand down the F-22 fleet,” he said. 

Providing political cover for the members opposing the F-22 retirements is the announcement today that F-22s from the 94th Fighter Squadron are being deployed to US Central Command, specifically as a deterrent to “unsafe” interactions with Russian pilots.

Quivering ARRW

After back-and-forth between Air Force officials on the fate of the ARRW program — with the service’s acquisition czar suggesting it would end in the upcoming fiscal year after finishing out planned testing, only for the service’s secretary to say a month later its future was still undecided — House authorizers would leave little doubt by zeroing its budget in FY24.

Specifically, the Air Force sought $150 million R&D funds in FY24 for ARRW to complete the program’s all-up-round testing, which service officials have described as critical to evaluate the fast-flying weapon’s performance. Denying those funds would truncate the testing and could effectively shutter the program after the current fiscal year, assuming the Air Force does not resume testing in a future budget cycle or go on to procure the ARRW from manufacturer Lockheed Martin. 

Provisions for the F-22 and ARRW could still change as the full committee debates the legislation, which must then be approved by the House and negotiated with their counterparts in the Senate. Appropriators in the House and Senate could also further alter the outcome, such as by appropriating extra funds for F-22 sustainment or continued testing for ARRW. (The appropriations committee is set for its markup of the defense spending bill on Thursday.)

But during a hearing in March, the chair of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee expressed skepticism about the ARRW program, raising doubts about its continued funding. 

“I don’t like to call it [research and development] welfare,” Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., said, “but it seems to go on forever.”

Millions of online papers have disappeared

Authors - Martin Paul Eve (Crossref and Birkbeck, University of London)

| ISSN: 2162-3309 | Published by Iowa State University Digital Press |

Research Article

Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

Abstract

Introduction: Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the digital object identifier (DOI) system. We do not currently know, at scale, the extent to which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved. 

Methods: We construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample. 

Results: Of the 7,438,037 works examined, there were 5.9 million copies spread over the archives used in this work. Furthermore, a total of 4,342,368 of the works that we studied (58.38%) were present in at least one archive. However, this left 2,056,492 works in our sample (27.64%) that are seemingly unpreserved. The remaining 13.98% of works in the sample were excluded either for being too recent (published in the current year), not being journal articles, or having insufficient date metadata for us to identify the source. 

Discussion: Our study is limited by design in several ways. Among these are the facts that it uses only a subset of archives, it only tracks articles with DOIs, and it does not account for institutional repository coverage. Nonetheless, as an initial attempt to gauge the landscape, our results will still be of interest to libraries, publishers, and researchers. 

Conclusion: This work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied. (Note that when, in this article, we write “preserved,” we mean “that we were able to confirm as preserved,” as per the specified limitations of this study.) A slightly larger proportion, i.e., 8.5% (n = 1,797), preserved over 50% of their content in two or more archives. However, many members, i.e., 57.7% (n = 12,257), only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n = 6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, which is against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

Keywords: digital preservation, persistent identifiers, scholarly communications

How to Cite:

Eve, M. P., (2024) “Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles”, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 12(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288

Rights: © 2024 The Author(s). License: CC BY 4.0

Air Force launches reorganization, as Kendall warns ‘We are out of time’ to match China

AIR WARFARE, CONGRESS, PENTAGON, SPACE

Under the "reoptimizing" effort, changes are coming across the Department of the Air Force, from new training approaches to the establishment of high-level offices.

By   MICHAEL MARROW and THERESA HITCHENSon February 12, 2024 at 9:07 PM

Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, center, listens as Scott Meredith, technical director of the Arnold Engineering Development Complex 716th Test Squadron, left, discusses the aerodynamic test capabilities of the 716TS. (U.S. Air Force photo by Keith Thornburgh)

AFA WARFARE SYMPOSIUM — Senior leaders of the Department of the Air Force (DAF) unveiled details of a sweeping reorganization of the Air Force and Space Force today, a long-awaited move that the department’s top civilian has said is needed to “reoptimize” the two branches for “great power competition” with China.

All told, a total of 24 organizational changes are expected across the Air Force, Space Force and its civilian leadership, senior officials said in a keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in Denver, Colo. Timelines for the changes were not defined and many specific details still need to be ironed out, though some could take effect immediately whereas others will need “over a year” to be implemented, according to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. 

Even though the revamp entails major changes across the organization, Kendall said today that no funds in the service’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, nor in the upcoming FY25 proposal, are being sought for the reoptimization drive. Officials will use budget reprogramming authorities to move funds around as needed, Kendall said, who noted some new money might be needed in FY26.

The Air Force is pursuing the bulk of these new efforts, with 15 major changes ranging from a different approach to nuclear weapons management to new warrant officer programs, according to Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin. 

Some major changes entail how the Air Force deploys its airmen by adjusting how its wings are structured. Others involve education, with plans to expand Air Education Training Command and rename it Airman Development Command. 

Additionally, the Air Force is looking to embark on more large-scale exercises to simulate the conditions of a fight with a peer adversary. The service is aiming to carry the first such exercise out in the Indo-Pacific region sometime in FY25, according to Allvin, who warned that it might present budgetary pressures.

One major change that had been widely expected does not appear to be happening.

After a senior Space Force official suggested in December that the Air Force might be doing away with its current major command (MAJCOM) structure, Allvin disputed that, emphasizing that the current MAJCOM structure will remain intact. However, some of their responsibilities like developing requirements will instead be transferred to the new Integrated Capabilities Command, he explained. 

The Air Force’s secretariat civilian leadership — which helps craft policy and budget decisions — has a much smaller list of changes. According to Kristyn Jones, who is performing the duties of the Air Force under secretary, the secretariat will stand up three new offices: an Integrated Capabilities Office, an Office of Competitive Activities and an Office for Program Analysis and Evaluation. (It was not immediately clear how the latter will work with the Pentagon-wide, service-independent Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, or CAPE.)

“These changes at the secretariat will help us to make the needed changes to stay ready and to be more effective,” Jones said. She did not specify where the staff for these offices might come from, or what other roles may be impacted as a result of creating them.

Among the planned changes for the Space Force elaborated by Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, perhaps most critical is a revamp of service readiness standards to reflect that space is now a contested domain, rather than a “benign environment,” according to the Air Force’s press release.

As it stands, Saltzman said, Guardians simply don’t have the right equipment, training and “operational concepts” necessary to deal with the new environment. To address the problem, the Space Force is creating a Futures Command — a name seemingly drawn from the Army’s Futures Command, which stood up in 2018 — to assess long-term needs, comprising three separate centers. 

The first, the Concepts and Technology Center, will be dedicated to looking at what will be needed as the threat environment changes, Saltzman said. The second will be focused on wargaming, and the third will build on the current Space Warfighting Analysis Center (SWAC) to develop force designs to meet those future needs. 

Finally, the Space Force will designate Space Force Combat Squadrons as “units of action” that undertake day-to-day missions for combatant commands, he said. Meanwhile, the service will “retain some capacity in our mission squadrons to do the high-end advanced readiness activities,” he added, but provided little detail about how that would work operationally. 

One of the first efforts to be able to address the new threats detailed by Saltzman will be a new officer training regime, which eventually will be expanded. That will involve not just training on how to operate systems, but also how to handle adversary actions. This will include changing training infrastructure, he noted.

“We have to rewrite the standards for readiness centered around a contested domain,” Saltzman said.

For his tenure as secretary, Kendall has stressed that the DAF is not prepared for a conflict with a peer adversary, namely China. To that end, at this same AFA conference in 2022, Kendall spelled out a list of seven “operational imperatives” that are aimed at tackling big initiatives like fielding all-domain command and control. 

The reoptimization, which Kendall first announced in September 2023, adds on to those imperatives and others like a separate effort known as cross-cutting operational enablers. Whereas those initiatives are more closely tied to specific modernization challenges, today’s announcements are aimed at taking a broader look at how the Air Force itself is structured. 

“We are out of time,” Kendall said today of the pacing challenge posed by China. “We can no longer regard conflict as a distant possibility or a future problem that we might have to confront. The risk of conflict is here now and that risk will increase with time.” 

Many of the Air Force’s plans will need congressional buy-in, though it’s not clear how lawmakers might respond. JJ Gertler, a senior analyst with the Teal Group consultancy, told Breaking Defense ahead of the announcement that lawmakers’ interest, and potential opposition, is often shaped by major decisions for platforms and personnel. 

“Congress is traditionally more interested in hardware and personnel than force design or organization. So it depends on how the Air Force sells the plan, and whether this is likely to mean a rethinking of either the types of platforms the Air Force is buying or if it will involve major personnel movements,” Gertler said.

“If the answer to either of those is ‘no,’ Congress is liable to let it go ahead after a couple of hearings,” he added. “But if the reorientation includes significant personnel movements or other changes to basing or what kind of aircraft will be stationed where, Congress will be much more interested.”

U.N. Chief’s Test: Shaming Without Naming the World’s Climate Delinquents

António Guterres told world leaders gathered in New York that their efforts to address the climate crisis had come up “abysmally short.”

Source: The New York Times | by Somini Sengupta

Sept 19, 2023 | updated 2:57 pm ET

The world’s top diplomat, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, on Tuesday told world leaders their efforts to address the climate crisis had come up “abysmally short” and called on them to do what even climate-ambitious countries have been reluctant to do: stop expanding coal, oil and gas production.

“Every continent, every region and every country is feeling the heat, but I’m not sure all leaders are feeling that heat,” he said in his opening remarks to presidents and prime ministers assembled for their annual gathering in the General Assembly. “The fossil fuel age has failed.”

Mr. Guterres, now in his second and last term, has made climate action his centerpiece issue and has become unusually blunt in his language about the need to rein in the production of fossil fuels and not just focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their use.

As always, he pointed to the world’s 20 largest economies for not moving fast enough. As always, he stopped short of calling on specific countries.

The 2015 Paris climate accord asks only that countries set voluntary targets to address climate pollution. The agreements that come out of annual climate negotiations routinely get watered down, because every country, including champions of coal, oil and gas, must agree on every word and comma.

The secretary general can cajole but not command, urge but not enforce. He doesn’t name specific countries, though nothing in the United Nations Charter prevents him from doing so.

Despite his exhortations, governments have only increased their fossil fuel subsidies, to a record $7 trillion in 2022. Few nations have concrete plans to move their economies away from fossil fuels, and many depend directly or indirectly on revenues from coal, oil and gas. The human toll of climate change continues to mount.

“He has interpreted his role as a sort of truth teller,” said Rachel Kyte, a former United Nations climate diplomat and a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “The powers available to him as secretary general are awesome but limited.”

A coal plant in Poland. More than 100 countries have asked to speak at the climate summit Mr. Guterres is hosting Wednesday.Credit...Kuba Stezycki/Reuters

On Wednesday, he is deploying a bit of a diplomatic wink-nod. At a Climate Ambition Summit he is hosting , he is giving the mic only to those countries that have done as he has urged, and only if they send a high-level leader, to show that they take the summit seriously. “A naming and shaming device that doesn’t actually require naming and shaming anyone,” Mr. Gowan said.

Diplomatic jockeying around who will get on the list has been intense. More than 100 countries sent in requests to speak, and Mr. Guterres’s aides have in turn requested more information to prove they deserve to be on the list. What have you done on coal phaseout, some have been asked. How much climate funding have you offered? Are you still issuing new oil and gas permits? And so on.

“It’s good to see Guterres trying to hold their feet to the fire,” said Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan activist.

U.N. General Assembly: Live Updates

Updated 

Sept. 19, 2023, 6:26 p.m. ET31 minutes ago

Mr. Guterres has waited until the last possible minute to make public the list of speakers.

Expect the awkward.

John Kerry, the United States climate envoy, is expected to attend but not speak. (Mr. Guterres is giving the mic only to high-level national leaders.) It’s unclear whether the head of the Chinese delegation this year, Vice President Han Zheng, will have a speaking role. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has secured the mic. Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, isn’t coming to the General Assembly conclave at all. Sultan al-Jaber, the head of the Emirati oil company, and host of the next climate talks, is scheduled to speak.

Mr. Guterres will also invite companies with what he calls “credible” targets to reduce their climate emissions to participate. Expect to count them with the fingers of one hand.

“If fossil fuel companies want to be part of the solution, they must lead the transition to renewable energy,” he said Tuesday.

Mr. Guterres, who had led the United Nations refugee agency for 10 years before being selected for the top job, didn’t always make climate change his centerpiece issue.

“What are the most critical steps to take soon?”

In fact, he didn’t talk about it when he was chosen to head the United Nations in 2016. Climate was seen as the signature issue of his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, who shepherded through the Paris Agreement in 2015. Mr. Guterres spoke instead about the war in Syria, terrorism, and gender parity in the United Nations. (His choice disappointed those who had pressed for a woman to lead the world body for the first time in its 70-year history.)

In 2018 came a shift. At that year’s General Assembly, he called climate change “the defining issue of our time.” In 2019, he invited the climate activist Greta Thunberg to the General Assembly, whose raw anger at world leaders (“How dare you?” she railed at world leaders) spurred a social media clash with President Donald J. Trump, who was pulling the United States out of the Paris Accord.

Mr. Guterres, for his part, studiously avoided criticism of the United States by name.

By 2022, as oil companies were raking in record profits in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he amped up his language. “We need to hold fossil fuel companies and their enablers to account,” he told world leaders at the General Assembly. He called for a windfall-profit tax, urged countries to suspend subsidies for fossil fuels and appointed a committee to issue guidelines for private companies on what counts as “greenwashing.”

This year, he stepped into the contentious debate between those who want greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas projects captured and stored away, or “abated,” and those who want to keep oil and gas tucked in the ground altogether. “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels, period,” Mr. Guterres said in June.

The reactions from the private sector are mixed, said Paul Simpson, a founder and former head of CDP, a nongovernmental group that works with companies to address their climate pollution. Some executives privately say Mr. Guterres is right to call for a swift phaseout of fossil fuels, while others note that most national governments still lack concrete energy transition plans, no matter what he says.

“The question really is, how effective is the United Nations?” Mr. Simpson said. “It has the ability to get governments to focus and plan. But the U.N. itself doesn’t have any teeth, so national governments and companies must act.”

Somini Sengupta is The Times’s international climate correspondent. She has also covered the Middle East, West Africa and South Asia and is the author of the book, “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young”

Sodium comes to the battery world

Sodium-ion technology is ready, cheap, and safe, but can it oust lithium ion?

Source: Chemical & Engineering News | by Alex Scott

May 24, 2022 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 100, Issue 19

“What a time it is to be a battery chemist—on paper, some are even multimillionaires,” says Jerry Barker, chief scientist and founder of the battery firm Faradion and a chemist who has been discovering battery materials for decades.

Breakthroughs in lithium-ion battery technology are being registered almost daily. “I can’t keep up with it all,” Barker says. Gigafactories for making lithium-ion batteries are appearing with increasing frequency. It would take something extraordinary to knock Li-ion battery technology off its perch.

And yet lithium has a fundamental problem. Demand for the element is so great for applications including electric vehicles, portable electronic devices, and stationary energy units that lithium mining companies are struggling to keep up. “The price of lithium will stay high,” says Michael Sanders, senior adviser at the consulting firm Avicenne Energy, speaking at the International Battery Seminar & Exhibit in March. In addition, about 90% of the world’s supply of lithium is controlled by Chinese companies.

As a result, batteries based on sodium are gaining attention, especially from Western companies seeking a secure supply chain for battery materials. The Achilles’ heel of sodium-ion batteries is that they can store only about two-thirds of the energy of Li-ion batteries of equivalent size. Developers of Na-ion batteries say they are steadily increasing the energy density of their prototypes. None are commercial yet, but serious competition for lithium could soon be on the way.

“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels!” Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted April 8. “Tesla might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale, unless costs improve. There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow.” Musk pointed to data from the information service World of Statistics showing that the price of lithium hydroxide had risen to $78,032 per metric ton (t) from $6,800 in 2019.

“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels!”

Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla

Meanwhile, the price of sodium hydroxide, a common sodium-ion battery precursor, is below $800 per metric ton. While lithium must be extracted from rocks or brine, battery-grade sodium hydroxide is readily produced during the electrolytic conversion of salt into chlorine.

Cost is indeed a key differentiator between lithium and sodium ion, according to Chris Wright, executive chairman of Faradion, which is developing sodium-ion batteries.

“The bill of materials for a sodium-ion cell is about one-third cheaper than for an equivalent one made from lithium ion,” Wright says. Na-ion batteries also perform well at as low as –20 °C and are not at risk of thermal runaway, “unlike some Li-ion batteries, which have been known to catch fire,” he adds.

Rechargeable sodium-ion batteries are similar in construction to lithium-ion ones. During charging, Na ions move from a sodium- and iron-containing cathode through a liquid electrolyte and across a polymer barrier to a hard carbon anode. On discharge, the sodium ions return from the anode to the cathode.

Faradion’s batteries have an energy density of about 160 W h/kg, similar to that of older Li-ion batteries featuring a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode. At least for now, sodium ion’s relatively poor energy density precludes its use in fast electric vehicles and limits its applications largely to stationary energy markets.

Still, the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie forecast in a 2021 report that Na-ion batteries have the potential to mitigate some of the supply chain pressure on LFP and newer Li-ion batteries containing nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The firm forecast that production of Na-ion batteries will reach 20 GW h by 2030, up from pilot-scale production quantities today. Total battery production capacity in 2030 will be about 2,800 GW h, according to Avicenne’s Sanders.

Sodium ion’s lower energy density, which previously held back its use in batteries, may not be such an issue after all, Wright says. “People have realized that for many applications, a slightly lower energy density is not as commercially significant as was once thought,” he says.

LFP-based batteries, which were almost written off 8 or 9 years ago, are taking an increasingly large share of the market, Wright says. One reason is that newer, more energy-dense Li-ion cells have high heat output, which means they require more space for cooling, he says.

Through improvements in cell architecture and component engineering, Faradion and other developers of Na-ion batteries expect to improve the energy density of their batteries in the next few years. Faradion is targeting 190 W h/kg. “Our latest understanding shows sodium-ion’s performance in batteries could become better than we thought,” Barker says.

Executives at India’s Reliance Industries certainly think sodium-ion technology is well positioned to carve out a niche in the battery market. The industrial giant acquired Faradion in January for $135 million and has pledged to invest $35 million in the British firm to commercialize its technology. Reliance plans to build a Na-ion battery factory in Jamnagar, India, for applications such as slower electric vehicles, like rickshaws, and stationary power storage.

Faradion is not the only Na-ion company with near-term plans for commercial production. The California-based start-up Natron Energy unveiled plans earlier this month to open a facility in 2023 to produce 0.6 GW h of Na-ion batteries annually. Rather than build a plant from scratch, Natron has partnered with Clarios to convert a portion of that firm’s Li-ion battery plant in Michigan to sodium-ion technology.

Natron uses a sodium material based on the pigment Prussian blue for both its anode and cathode. The cathode is rich in iron, while the anode is rich in manganese. “The materials and the chemistry are where Natron innovates; the manufacturing techniques are all standard,” says Rob Rogan, Natron’s chief business officer.

The company has outsourced production of its Prussian blue compound to Arxada, Lonza’s former specialty chemical business. Arxada will make the material, including the precursor hydrogen cyanide, in Visp, Switzerland.

Natron batteries have an energy density of about 70 W h/kg—similar to that of lead-acid batteries and too low for most electric vehicles. “We have relatively low energy density but extremely high power density,” Rogan says. “What we’re finding is that as the world’s energy transitions, there are different battery technologies that are suited for certain applications. Our batteries are designed to deliver huge amounts of power over short durations.”

As a result, Rogan says, the batteries are suitable as auxiliary power for industrial applications such as data centers, a market that could be worth $30 billion annually by 2027.

Natron’s transition from lab to mass production has been a long time coming. The company was founded in 2012 on technology developed by CEO and cofounder Colin Wessells while earning his PhD at Stanford University. The company has raised about $120 million in funding and received $25 million in grants and support from Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, a US government agency.

Altris Energy also recently announced plans to build its first commercial Na-ion battery plant. The Swedish start-up secured $10.5 million in February, bringing its total funding to about $12 million.

Uppsala University postdoc Ronnie Mogensen and associate professors William Brant and Reza Younesi founded Altris in 2017. Their interest in sodium-ion technology was sparked by a study by Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough and colleagues about Prussian white’s potential as a cathode material in Na-ion batteries (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/ja510347s).

Altris’s Prussian white compound, an analog of Prussian blue that the firm has named Fennac, is composed primarily of iron and sodium. The company’s anode is made from hard carbon sourced from biomass, its electrolyte is fluorine-free, and its separator is derived from cellulose fiber. “Beyond the Fennac-based cathode, each and every one of the cell’s components are drastically improved compared to rival lithium-ion cells with regards to the sustainability of the materials used,” Altris says.

Altris has developed a Prussian white cathode material that contains sodium and iron.Before founding the firm, Mogensen and Younesi had selected Prussian white as a cathode material to suit a polymer electrolyte they had been developing. At the time, the only way to make Prussian white was in a pressurized boiler via a process that involved the formation of cyanide. “It was a potential cyanide bomb, so the university would not allow them to make it in any volume,” says Altris chief technology officer Tim Nordh. The two eventually developed a safer process that became the basis of the company, he says.

Altris’s battery cell has an energy density of about 150 W h/kg. “With this we are already in the LFP space.” With tweaks such as reducing the volume of electrolyte, increasing its energy density to 200 W h/kg “is not unreasonable,” Nordh says. Altris’s Fennac could still be years away from powering electric vehicles, Nordh says, as the qualifying tests for automotive batteries are extensive. The company is therefore initially seeking to market Fennac for use in stationary batteries.

In addition to using inexpensive starting materials, Altris expects to save money on solvent costs. Lithium-ion cathode production typically requires use of the solvent N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone, which the European Chemicals Agency classifies as a substance of very high concern. As a result, Li-ion cathode plants need sophisticated and costly drying rooms to recover solvents. Altris uses a water-based solvent to make its sodium-ion cathodes, Nordh says.Nordh is also happy to see that the energy density of a sodium-ion battery being developed by China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology, the world’s largest lithium-ion battery producer, “is about the same,” he says.

CATL declined to provide C&EN with information about its Na-ion battery technology, although the company disclosed last year that it expected to begin making commercial volumes in 2023. It reported previously that it had developed a Prussian white cathode with a porous hard-carbon anode.

The case for sodium would be even stronger if chemists could create a battery featuring a sodium metal anode. It would have an energy density beyond 230 W h/kg—enough to compete with today’s higher-performing Li-ion batteries.

One of the challenges of making such a battery is preventing the formation of the dendritic structures that can cause short circuits. Lithium metal battery developers such as QuantumScape and Factorial Energy say they have dendrites under control, but Nordh says the structures that can form in sodium metal batteries are bigger.

R&D for sodium metal batteries is in general far behind that for lithium metal batteries, but there is speculation that CATL is close to producing one. Success would constitute a major step forward in battery technology.

Meanwhile, sodium-ion battery developers are poised to begin moving from pilot- to commercial-scale production. Supply chain issues with lithium are the opening they have been waiting for. If sodium ion is going to steal market share from lithium ion, now is the time.

Wind Drives Growing Use of Batteries

Source: New York Times | By Matthew L. Wald

• July 27, 2010

The rapid growth of wind farms, whose output is hard to schedule reliably or even predict, has the nation’s electricity providers scrambling to develop energy storage to ensure stability and improve profits.

As the wind installations multiply, companies have found themselves dumping energy late at night, adjusting the blades so they do not catch the wind, because there is no demand for the power. And grid operators, accustomed to meeting demand by adjusting supplies, are now struggling to maintain stability as supplies fluctuate.

On the cutting edge of a potential solution is Hawaii, where state officials want 70 percent of energy needs to be met by renewable sources like the wind, sun or biomass by 2030. A major problem is that it is impossible for generators on the islands to export surpluses to neighboring companies or to import power when the wind towers are becalmed.

On Maui, for example, wind generating capacity over all will soon be equal to one-fourth of the island’s peak demand. But peak wind and peak demand times do not coincide, raising questions about how Hawaii can reach its 70 percent goal. For now, the best option seems to be storage batteries.

In New York and California, companies are exploring electrical storage that is big enough to allow for “arbitrage,” or buying power at a low price, such as in the middle of the night, and selling it hours later at a higher price. In the Midwest, a utility is demonstrating storage technology that can go from charge to discharge and back several times a minute, or even within a second, bracing the grid against the vicissitudes of wind and sun and transmission failure. And in Texas, companies are looking at ways of stabilizing voltage through battery storage in places served by just one transmission line.

Renewable goals can be met, many in the industry insist. But if the energy source is intermittent, “you can’t do that without batteries of some sort,” said Peter Rosegg, a spokesman for the Hawaiian Electric Company.

His company has agreed to buy electricity from a wind farm on the northern shore of Oahu, where the Boston-based power company First Wind has just broken ground.

The spot is one of Hawaii’s best wind sites, Mr. Rosegg said, but the supply is gusty and erratic. What is more, it is at the farthest point on the island from the company’s main load center, Honolulu, and does not even lie on its high-voltage transmission backbone.

So the 30-megawatt wind farm, which will have enough power to run about 30 Super Wal-Marts, will have Xtreme Power of Austin, Tex., install a 15-megawatt battery.

Computers will work to keep the battery exactly half-charged most hours of the day, said Carlos J. Coe, Xtreme Power’s chief executive. If the wind suddenly gets stronger or falls off, the batteries will smooth out the flow so that the grid sees only a more gradual increase or decrease, no more than one megawatt per minute at some hours of the day.

The Hawaii installation is designed to succeed at a crucial but obscure function: frequency regulation. The alternating-current power system has to run at a strict 60 cycles per second, and the battery system can give and take power on a micro scale, changing directions from charge to discharge or vice versa within that 60th of a second, to keep the pace steady.

The battery system can also be used for arbitrage, storing energy at times when prices are low and delivering it when prices are high. It can hold 10 megawatt-hours, which is as much energy as a 30-megawatt wind farm will produce in 20 minutes if it is running at full capacity. That is not much time, but it is huge in terms of storage capacity.

Neither First Wind nor Xtreme Power would say what the project cost, but publicly disclosed figures put the project in the range of $130 million, with about $10 million for the battery. The Energy Department has provided a $117 million loan guarantee.

Across the country, it is proving hard to predict the cost and the value of power storage to consumers. The electricity stored in off-peak hours could be quite low in cost, and prices at peak hours could be quite high. If the reliance on renewable energy reduces the need to burn coal and natural gas, that would yield an additional advantage.

A battery system in Presidio, Tex., is intended to improve reliability in the town, served by only one major transmission line.Credit...Larry Jones/Electric Transmission Texas

Mr. Coe estimated the battery system’s round-trip efficiency — that is, the amount of electricity the batteries could deliver per megawatt-hour stored in them — at over 90 percent. If that figure is borne out, it would be a significant advance from the largest form of energy storage now in general use, pumped hydropower, whose efficiency is put at 70 to 85 percent.

At a pumped hydro plant, off-peak electricity is used to pump water from a reservoir at a low elevation to one at a higher one. At hours of peak demand the water flows back down through a turbine, creating electricity.

Electric companies are using other strategies for storage and frequency regulation. In Stephentown, N.Y., near Albany, a Massachusetts company, Beacon Power, is building a bank of 200 one-ton flywheels that will store energy from the grid on a moment-to-moment basis to keep the alternating current system at a strict 60 cycles.

Atop each flywheel is a device that can be a motor at one moment and a generator the next, either taking energy and storing it in the flywheel or vice versa. The Energy Department provided a $43 million loan guarantee to assist in the $69 million project.

The Energy Department is also supporting storage projects that rely on compressed air. Surplus electricity is used to pump air into an underground cavity; when the electricity is needed, the air is injected into a gas turbine generator. In effect, it acts as a turbocharger that runs on wind energy captured the previous night, instead of natural gas burned at a peak hour.

The department is contributing to two projects explored by PSEG Global, an affiliate of Public Service Electric and Gas, based in New Jersey. It plans to provide $30 million of the $125 million estimated price of a 150-megawatt project envisaged in upstate New York, perhaps at an abandoned salt mine, and $25 million toward a $350 million, 300-megawatt project to be built in Northern California.

Both will be used to store power made in off-peak periods and deliver it in peak times, when prices are higher, said Paul H. Rosengren, a spokesman for P.S.E.G.

In Presidio, Tex., American Electric Power and MidAmerican Energy Holdings have just completed a four-megawatt battery system that is not tied to any particular wind farm but is intended to improve reliability in the town, served by only one major transmission line. American Electric Power already has smaller batteries working in Ohio and Indiana to provide more stability in its distribution systems there.

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2010, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wind Drives Growing Use Of Batteries. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Open Data Portal provides free and Open Access to +100 high-quality satellite-derived climate datasets.

ESA’s Climate Change Initiative

Link for the: Open Data Portal

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change leads international efforts to combat climate change and limit global temperature rise to less 2°C above what it was in pre-industrial times, as set out in the Paris Agreement. Robust scientific evidence of change is fundamental this challenging task.

Through its Climate Change Initiative (CCI), ESA develops a suite of satellite data records of key components of the climate system, known as Essential Climate Variables (ECVs). Scientists use ECVs to study climate drivers, interactions and feedbacks, as well as reservoirs, tipping points and fluxes of energy, water, and carbon. These climate-quality datasets are a major contribution to the evidence base used to understand climate change and to predict the future, which drives international action.

Information derived from satellite data can contribute to more than half of the 54 ECVs identified by the Global Climate Observing System.

Scientific excellence

Expert science teams drawn from ESA Member States undertake research to generate the CCI ECVs that track changes across the world’s oceans, atmosphere and land. All the CCI data products have fully characterised uncertainties and are validated using independent, traceable, in situ measurements. A growing body of climate data records are now available freely via the CCI Open Data Portal.

ESA’s Climate Office oversees additional research projects that use multiple ECVs to address complex science questions, including closing the global and regional carbon and sea-level budgets.

The Climate Modelling User Group is a dedicated forum links the climate modelling community to Earth observation experts, thereby fostering collaboration across the CCI programme.

Impact

Thanks to the CCI, around 650 peer-reviewed research papers have been published. This body of work supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's headline statements in both its 5th Assessment Report and Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.

The Climate Office works closely with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites and climate services such as the Copernicus Climate Change Service, to ensure coordination and complementarity.

Supporting researchers

The CCI supports over 450 scientists working in a myriad of institutes across ESA Member States to carry out the research and development the projects require.

A post-doctoral fellowship scheme supports early-career scientists to undertake research into the changing Earth system, exploiting the CCI data products in the process. The Climate Office hosts research fellows and young graduate trainees, and is also a partner on the UK Oxford Doctoral Training Programme, and the Steering Committee of the UK Earth Observation Centre for Doctoral Training.

Climate hub

Bringing together academia and industry, the Climate Office is the point of contact for organisations searching for global climate information, data, and new opportunities.

Working closely with specialist ESA teams, the Climate Office supports the preparation of upcoming satellite sensors and missions.

Through national, European and global networks, the Climate Office promotes opportunities arising from ESA projects relating to climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience. The team also coordinates on new methodologies for data quality and assurance, and on artificial intelligence for understanding the climate.

International outlook

The Climate Office represents ESA as an observer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a member of the Joint Committee for Earth Observation Satellites and the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites’ Working Group, as member of the Group on Earth Observations’ Working Group on Climate, and as part of the World Climate Research Programme’s Data Advisory Council. The team has strong links with other space agencies, and a partnership agreement with the global research network Future Earth.

Communicating climate

Through the Climate Office’s knowledge exchange project, a new online application is being developed to visualise the CCI datasets along with an online toolbox for data analysis and packs of education resources to help students and the wider public access datasets and learn more about climate change.

Get the data

The ESA Climate Change Initiative's Open Data Portal provides free and Open Access to +100 high-quality satellite-derived climate datasets. 

Hell on Two Wheels, Until the E-Bike’s Battery Runs Out

In 2020, Americans bought more than twice as many electric bikes as electric cars. I test-drove a fleet of them and lived to tell the tale—and make recommendations.

Source: The Newyorker | By Patricia Marx

December 26, 2022

You can learn a lot about what’s trending by reading T-shirts. A few months ago, I saw someone on the subway whose chest announced, “My other car is an eBike.” The tee was onto something: e-bikes are the top-selling electric vehicle in the United States. In 2020, Americans bought more than twice as many e-bikes as they did electric cars (score: an estimated 500,000 to 231,000). In China, e-bikes outnumber all cars, e- and not e-, Edward Benjamin, the chairman of the Light Electric Vehicle Association, told me over the phone from his house in Fort Myers, Florida. He went on, “Can Americans change from a four-wheel culture to a two-wheel culture in the next century? I say absolutely! There ain’t enough roadway, there ain’t enough materials to build cars, there ain’t enough wealth to sustain the car culture.”

As someone who is not an influencer but an influencee, I have had an urge lately to strap on a helmet, join the traffic, and e-go with the flow. “When the pandemic came, that pretty much ripped the cover off of the e-bike business,” Shane Hall, a senior buyer for Bicycles NYC, told me one afternoon at the company’s Upper East Side operation, which was crammed with bicycles and accessories. Several of the latter sounded vaguely pornographic, such as Muc-Off dry lube, Tannus Armour inserts, and a Mudguard Mounting Kit. “Our sales were huge, especially cargo bikes—gotta get the kids to school.” (Many private schools remained open during lockdown.) “Suddenly, biking became utilitarian,” Hall said. “Some of our e-bike customers had never even ridden a bike in New York before.” Post-lockdown, the e-bike momentum has continued. What’s bad for General Motors—rising fuel prices, concern for the environment, etc.—is good for e-bikes, sales of which rose two hundred and forty per cent between July, 2020, and July, 2021. K. C. Cohen, the owner of Joulvert E-Bikes SoHo, saw a similar surge in sales. “A lot of corporate types lost their jobs and started doing deliveries,” he said. “They needed bikes and we were the first responders and allowed to stay open.”

It was in the summer of 2020 that I joined Citi Bike, the bicycle-share program serving New York City and parts of New Jersey. In February, Citi Bike had rolled out only two hundred e-bikes. By the end of the year, Citi Bike had three thousand, and had logged six hundred thousand first-time riders. One humid day this past summer, when I was huffing up Murray Hill on my pedal bike, an old guy who, I flatter myself to think, looked as if he should be the tortoise to my hare whizzed by on a hey-look-at-me, red motorized bike. Cheater!, I thought, as if he were Lance Armstrong on extra steroids. Actually, studies have shown that riders using pedal-assists—a type of e-bike that amplifies your pedal power but does not take over entirely—get more exercise than those on regular bikes, because they cycle longer and more frequently.

E-bikers, even the ones who don’t have “Life Is Better with an E Bike” mugs, are so ardent about their new transports that you’d think they’d given birth to them. Ozzie Vilela, a cherubic-looking sixty-year-old I met on Fifty-seventh Street and First Avenue, as we waited at a red light—he on a peacock-blue folding Fly Wing-2 ($850), I on my legs—told me that he’d had his bike for only three months but had already persuaded two friends to buy one. “When I ride in the morning, there are lots of parents taking their kids to school,” he said. “I’m invisible to the parents, but I can see the kids’ eyes are big. They’re thinking, Hey, I want a toy like that!” Clarence Eckerson, a videographer who lives in Queens, borrowed his wife’s Tern HSD ($3,699) and promptly bought his own. He rides thirty or forty miles a week. Carol Sterling, an eighty-five-year-old puppeteer, who has had two knee replacements and a hip replacement, e-bikes in Central Park a few times a week. “As I got older, I realized I don’t have as much stamina,” she said. “And yet I love being outside, feeling the sun on my face.”

Motorized vehicles, including e-bikes, are not permitted in New York City parks, although plenty of pedal-assists clog the paths and the drives, which is technically a violation. Asked about how the city deals with scofflaws, Meghan Lalor, a Parks Department spokesperson, said, “When safely able to enforce, we do.” In Los Angeles, John Bailey Owen, a TV writer, bought his Cero One ($3,799) after he and his wife got rid of their second car. Now he considers errands “so, so fun,” he said in an e-mail, which closed, “My ebike is my favorite purchase of all time. I love it, dammit.”

Iweighed the pros and cons and concluded, “What’s wrong with cheating?” That there never seemed to be any electric Citi Bikes available made me want one desperately. They are the four-leaf clovers of the fleet. Among the total bicycle stock of 26,450, they number 4,450 but account for more than forty-five per cent of the rides. The most sought-after pedal-assists are the spiffy models that were released by Citi Bike last May. They are palest gray, whereas the old ones were scuffed Citibank blue. (Spooky coincidence: the color is similar to that of ghost bikes, a term that refers to the bicycles, usually freshly painted throwaways, that mark the site where a cyclist was killed in a road accident.) The new bikes have a mightier motor, so they accelerate faster, and a heavier-duty battery that enables the bike to be ridden sixty miles—more than twice as far as the old ones—before needing a charge. (An e-bike battery charges the same way as a phone: plug the charger into an outlet, connect your battery to the charger, and wait three to five hours on average. Many e-bikes don’t require you to remove the battery in order to charge it, but maybe you have a no-wheels-inside rule.) The downside is that the husky newcomers weigh around eighty-four pounds, which is fifteen per cent heavier than the blue ones, and can be cumbersome to maneuver when you’re not going fast. You know how it feels when you drive a First World War battle tank? Like that.

By the time I managed to snag a new model, I wasn’t so gung ho about getting on it. My trepidation was similar to how I feel about trying heroin: what if I like it? I begin pedalling. The motor kicks in. It’s not a jerky or a sudden sensation; it’s more like when I was five and learning to ride a bicycle, being helped along by a gentle push from behind by my father. On the other hand, the bike’s poor suspension makes me empathize with tennis sneakers put in clothes dryers. I tackle a hill, forty degrees upward. Easy peasy. Obviously, I have superhero legs—and a budding Icarus complex. Coasting downhill in a bike lane, the motor leaves me alone, knowing when it is wanted and when it is not. How does it know? E.S.P.?

Here we must break for a lesson on how e-bikes work. Every e-bike has a battery and a motor, and, if you don’t know that, may I recommend my class on the invention of the wheel? The motor delivers power to your crankset by one of two systems: the pedal-assist and the throttle control. (Crankset, n. 1. the metal arm and surrounding components that connect the pedal to the wheel 2. informal. your neighbors in 8-G.) The Citi Bike is a pedal-assist. It will help you, but only if you help yourself. Pedal daintily and the boost it supplies will be commensurately unenthusiastic; pedal with more vigor and it’ll send in the Marines. Cheaper pedal-assists have a cadence sensor, which, unlike the torque sensor on a Citi Bike, is binary and, when activated, can feel like a passive-aggressive shove. The motor shuts off when your speed hits eighteen miles per hour, a limit agreed on by Lyft (the operator of Citi Bike) and the Department of Transportation. Most e-bikes cut off at around that speed, the exact m.p.h. determined by the relevant state or municipality. In New York City, the speed limit for pedal-assist-only bikes (Class 1) is twenty m.p.h., and the same goes for Class 2, a pedal-assist with a throttle. Class 3 bikes, which are also pedal-assist and throttle, can travel up to twenty-eight m.p.h., but New York City law requires the rider to wear a helmet. If you find this interesting, you should join the City Council’s Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure while the rest of us talk about throttles.

Throttles provide power regardless of what the pedal is or isn’t doing. They are to regular bikes what Roombas are to brooms (pedal-assists being Dustbusters). A throttle control is functionally a gas pedal on your handlebars, operated either by twisting one of the grips or by pushing a thumb trigger. Now, if they just had air bags and a cup holder . . .

Time to scope out what’s available in the marketplace. By this point, I’d ridden only Citi Bikes, and I was a fan: no parking or maintenance, and they afford the possibility of a one-way ride, in case, for instance, it starts raining or you break your leg. They seemed great, but, having never sampled anything else, what did I know? “With a Citi Bike, you get a functional experience of a bike,” a Trek employee told me. “They are good at being not broken and moving people around. They are not as good at being bikes, so riding one will not give you the experience of a lighter, better-made, and more fun bike.” How much better could better-made be? Almost a thousand dollars better (which is approximately the least amount of cash you’d have to lay out for a decent e-bike)?

One of the oldest purveyors of electric bicycles in the city is Propel, situated at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This pedal-assist-only business was started by Chris Nolte, who returned from military duty in 2003, disabled with a back injury. Over Zoom, he said that he had built an e-bike in 2011, so that he could join friends on a bike trip. That year, he opened Propel. At the time, the legality of pedal-assists in New York was fuzzy, and he racked up a series of fines (to the tune of six thousand dollars). He took the case to court, hoping to codify a pro-pedal-assist law as a boon to the environment. He won.

I visited Propel’s Brooklyn showroom, which is open by appointment only, and was introduced to a few of the bikes on the floor by Roberto Jeanniton, who gestured to each with so much exuberance that his smartwatch kept reminding him to relax. Propel salespeople are called “matchmakers,” because their mission is not to sell you a product but to introduce you to a vehicular partner that you will love. “When you ride an e-bike, the last thing you want to do is get off,” Jeanniton said, touting the Tern cargo bikes, which allow you to tote a kid, an adult, and sometimes one of each, plus a bag or two of groceries from the Park Slope Food Co-op. O.K., but where in your New York apartment do you store this bulkitude? Most Terns can be stored vertically, and one model, the Vektron, folds into an origami-like configuration that can be rolled along like luggage, the handlebar becoming the handle. Terns range in price from $3,000 to $5,500, depending on add-ons, and many of the other brands are costlier still. The Benno eJoy ($3,799 and up), featuring wide tires and a comfortably ample seat, was inspired by the design of vintage Italian scooters. Jeanniton called it “a great date bike” and “great for an older crowd.” Another Benno model—the RemiDemi—has a cargo attachment that can “carry a surfboard.”

Jeanniton doesn’t have the space for an e-bike at home, and commutes via Citi Bike, but I asked which model he would get if he could. The Riese & Müller Homage, he said. “It is the most comfortable bike I’ve had the pleasure to ride,” he said. Ramon Hernandez, who had just finished adjusting a Tern GSD, also loves the brand. Because the bikes’ carbon belts don’t require constant degunking and lubricating, like traditional chains? Because their dual batteries let you go twice as far? No. It’s their panache. “If I’m sitting on a bike, I want to look a certain way,” he said of these small-wheeled vehicles, so Quakerishly unadorned that they look like a picture of a two-wheeler drawn by a child. But, Jeanniton said, they cost “rich-uncle money”—$5,779 to $11,549.

Pricier bikes, forged from high strength-to-weight materials like carbon fibre and aerospace aluminum, tend to be lighter and faster. They are loaded with deluxe features, such as heart-rate connectivity, sensors that measure barometric pressure and air quality, and, on one bike (the Greyp G6; $6,799-$13,999), a button that saves the last thirty seconds of video taken by front and rear wide-angle HD cameras on the handlebars and uploads the footage to the rider’s social-media feeds.

How much money is too much? “I don’t think anyone needs to spend thirty thousand dollars on an e-bike,” Christian Guaman, at the Specialized bike store in Long Island City, said. “It’s a want.” If what you want is to move around town encapsulated in a swish Kevlar-insulated cabin whose extras include stereo and temperature controls, then the Peraves MonoTracer MTE-150 is a must. Bonus: what look like training wheels pop out so you don’t have to put your feet on the ground when you stop. Price tag: $85,000, which is so much cheaper than a jet pack ($350,000-$450,000).

You want cheap? Let’s drop by Rollgood, in midtown. Crammed with bikes, scooters, and paraphernalia, this narrow storefront serves mostly delivery workers. Explaining that I was a journalist writing about e-bikes, I asked José, an older man, if I could take a floor model for a spin. “You buy one?” he asked, and said, “This is the one you should buy.” He pointed to a black bike that looked as if it’d been around the block—a BEK24 ($425), with a fifteen-mile range and a fifteen-m.p.h. capacity. “What if I buy one and don’t like it?” I asked, to which he replied, “You have fifteen or twenty minutes to bring it back and we’ll refund your money.” I eyed a sign on the counter:

no refund
no return
no exchange
no store credit

I moved on. What about a bargain online? “If you see an e-bike for a few hundred dollars on the Internet, it’s a piece of shit and will last a month, at most,” K. C. Cohen, at Joulvert, said. Or worse. If the bike’s lithium-ion batteries are defective (inexpensive ones are often not U.L. certified), they could explode and catch fire. (U.L. = Underwriters Laboratories, a century-old safety organization that tests and evaluates products, typically industrial equipment and home appliances.) NPR recently reported that an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City about four times a week. By mid-November, there’d been a hundred and ninety-one lithium-ion fires in 2022, almost double the figure in 2021. The increase mirrors a rise in the number of battery-powered devices used to deliver takeout food.

In early November, there was a fire in a Midtown East high-rise ignited by an e-bike battery in an apartment whose occupants fire marshals suspect were operating an illicit e-bike repair business. But most e-bike fires occur in lower-income areas. When the New York City Housing Authority proposed banning e-bikes in public housing, the plan was nixed, after workers’-rights activists protested that it would mainly affect poor and immigrant populations who rely on e-bikes for their livelihood. Before you curse delivery workers and the “Out of my way, I’m coming through, maybe even the wrong way!” attitude displayed by a handful of them, remember that the delivery apps punish the delivery guys who don’t arrive at their destinations lickety-split.

Another reason to buy from a reputable brick-and-mortar shop (like Propel, Bicycles NYC, Trek, Joulvert, Hilltop) is that if anything breaks—and it will—good luck getting it repaired at, say, Mike’s Fly-by-Night Bikes. Local shops take care of their customers as if they were family, putting them in “the fast lane,” as Cohen said. But some of these, such as Trek, Specialized, and Propel, tend not to work on bikes that aren’t theirs, because they don’t have the parts. Stay away from big-box stores, too; Consumer Reports warns that their service and support are poor.

New York is dense with bike shops, but, for those of you who live in the hinterlands, don’t despair. According to Shane Hall (of second-paragraph fame), some excellent brands are available online, among them Rad Power (the largest e-bike retailer in the U.S.), Aventon, Magnum, and Gocycle. I spoke to a real-estate developer named Ryan Johnson, who is building the first community designed to be car-free. (It is called Culdesac Tempe, near Phoenix, Arizona; rentals come with a thousand dollars’ worth of “mobility benefits” each year.) Johnson has been dubbed the Jay Leno of e-bikes, because he owns more than seventy specimens. He treats his collection as a “library,” loaning the devices to people who often end up buying one of their own. (Try borrowing Leno’s McLaren F1.)

Did Johnson have any tips for a novice? “Just buy one,” he said. “People are almost always happy with what they have. And e-bikes are the gateway drugs to more e-bikes.” The only e-bikes he’d stay away from are the ones sold on Amazon. Among those he especially recommends, the cheapest is the Lectric XP Lite ($799). He also likes the Dutch VanMoofs, citing the S3 and X3, and their anti-theft features, which include automatic rider recognition and a lock on the wheel that opens with your phone or by entering a code on the handlebars. If your VanMoof ($2,548) is stolen, there are onboard alarms and smart location tracking, and you can buy insurance ($348 for three years) that guarantees you a replacement if the company’s Bike Hunters can’t find it.

On second thought, if you live in the hinterlands, move. Unless, that is, assembling small vehicles in your garage is your passion. Yes, a few brands come ready-to-ride, but most want you to at least screw this thingy into that other doohickey with a type of wrench you’ve never heard of. The clincher, though, in buying an e-bike is a test drive—the quickest way to know if motorized micro-mobility is for you. Any establishment that doesn’t allow you this small indulgence is an establishment you might not want to patronize. Call ahead to arrange for a road test and bring a credit card and a driver’s license (hey, isn’t the point not to drive?). In many cases, you may be accompanied on your excursion by a shop employee. According to K. C. Cohen, there have been cases of fake customers who use fake credit cards and then ride a sample bike off into the sunset, one way.

Long Island City is a glorious place for a joyride. Once an industrial zone primarily populated by storage units, it now has three bike shops (the No. 1 sign of gentrification), while retaining plenty of space for freewheeling. The newest shop, and the only one with a café, and a banner that reads “Pedal the Planet Forward” (No. 2 sign), is Specialized, an expansive two-level store that carries its eponymous brand exclusively. Christian Guaman e-ushered me around Hunters Point South Park along a lovely bike path hugging the river. I rode a Turbo Como SL ($3,250-$4,250), capable of achieving a speed of twenty-eight m.p.h., but it didn’t have to try that hard with me. Never mind that the company’s e-bike slogan is “It’s You, Only Faster”; it turns out that I’m more scaredy cat than cheetah. While Guaman and I tool along the waterfront, the wind blowing so hard I feel like Miss Gulch cycling through the tornado, let’s talk taxonomy.

There are several ways to categorize e-bikes, and I’m not counting the one most meaningful to me, which is by color. Technically speaking, it matters whether the motor is a hub-drive or a mid-drive. A hub-drive motor, commonly found in cheaper bikes, lives in either the front or the back wheel, propelling the bike by pushing it; a mid-drive perches above the pedal and the surrounding chain kit and caboodle, where it amplifies your pedal exertion, energizing a more nuanced assist that reacts to gear shifts. Most e-bike outfits, however, organize their stock according to intended use. To make things confusing, the nomenclature varies from company to company. At Propel, the inventory is divided into Comfort and Cruising, Commuters, Kids and Cargo, and Adventure. Specialized uses the terms Road, Mountain, Commuter, Cruiser, and Cargo. Within each category are more categories. Among Specialized’s mountain bikes, you can select Cross Country, Trail, Downhill, and Dirt Jump. At Trek, there are Road Bikes and Hybrids, and also Mountain Bikes. If you intend to have adventurous fun on your commute in a mountainous city while carrying cargo, I guess any of the bikes would work.

Mid-excursion, Guaman and I trade bikes. When I tell him that his Vado SL 5.0 ($4,500) feels feistier than the Como, he explains that the Como may seem sluggish because it was designed to reproduce the vibe of a beach cruiser or a Citi Bike. At least, that’s what I think he said; a gust blew that page of notes out of my hand. We walk our bikes on the sidewalk the last half block back to Specialized, an exercise that introduced me to a nifty feature of many higher-end e-bikes—the Walk Mode—without which dragging an electric bike can be a drag. (The average mid-drive model weighs between forty and seventy pounds.) This mode, sometimes called the assist function, provides oomph without your having to touch the pedals, even on stairs. Although I appreciated the help, the bike’s brain was programmed to thrust my Vado SL 5.0 at two to four miles per hour. The thing felt overly pushy, as if I were trying to rein in a rambunctious Rottweiler on his leash.

At Bicycles NYC, Shane Hall selected a Gocycle G4i for me, because it’s easy to ride ($6,000). “It automatically shifts gears for you. You don’t have to know anything,” he said, judging me correctly. The Gocycle’s wheels are small, which makes them look farther apart than usual and makes the length of the seat tube (it connects the bottom of the bike’s seat to the pedals) seem longer than it is; the bike’s profile reminds me of a clown shoe. The shop’s top-selling collapsible brand, the bikes are engineered to be folded up in less than twenty seconds, which makes me wonder if there are more bike-folding contests than I thought. Hall adjusted a Gocycle to my height (when you sit on a bike, only your tippy toes should touch the ground) and off I went. While trying to navigate around construction and traffic and dogs, I mentally wrote the second paragraph of my obituary, the one that contains the cause of death. I’d have risked riding in the bus lane, but then I’d have to rewrite my obit. I decided to illegally scoot down the sidewalk, figuring that I’d rather endure the wrath of pedestrians than that of drivers. “Asshole!” a guy yelled right away. “Yes,” I muttered, “but not for the reason you think.”

Maybe word got out about me, because, when I tootled around the Upper East Side on my Trek FX+ 2 loaner, the streets were deserted. The FX+ 2 ($2,500) is a hybrid, meaning it’s good to go on the road and off-road (leaving out what? oceans?). It has a rear-wheel hub, which makes it lighter (forty pounds) and supposedly less balanced than a mid-drive, but it seemed as stable as any seat on two wheels could be. Maybe it’s the FX+ 2, or being king of the road, or maybe I’m finally getting the hang of these newfangled gizmos, but I felt so confident that I sped up and sailed through a yellow light.

Correction: not newfangled. In 1881, in Paris, Gustave Trouvé fastened a lead-acid battery and a motor to a British tricycle, et voilà, he puttered his contraption along the Rue de Valois. Fourteen years later, on the last day of 1895, Ogden Bolton, Jr., received United States patent No. 552,271 for a battery-powered electric bicycle with a “6-pole brush-and-commutator direct current (DC) hub motor mounted in the rear wheel.”

Doesn’t “throttle-propelled” sound scary? As if you and your e-bike would be shot into space? Nevertheless, I gave it a go. The most chic examples I tried were at Joulvert, which also sells scooters. (Scooters are essentially skateboards with handles and motors but no seats, so let’s leave them out of this.) Cohen opened Joulvert in 2016, about fifteen years after he emigrated from Israel. “It was the first serious e-bike shop in the city,” he told me over beverages at 19 Cleveland, a Mediterranean café he owns near Joulvert. At the time, e-bikes were not technically legal in New York, but, he said, “the law was inconsistently enforced.” Cohen started dabbling in the business in Israel in 2004, having enlisted his father to install cheap Chinese motors on standard bicycles. The business took off; he sold his share to his brother in 2012.

Cohen went to Burning Man for the next few years, each time bringing more e-bikes, which he distributed with the instruction “Go demolish them.” He explained, “I wanted a report on everything that could go wrong, so I could fix it.” The main problem was dust, so Cohen created a silicon-sealed electric system that was waterproof and dustproof. In the years since, his Burning Man clients have included Puff Daddy, Gerard Butler, and Paris Hilton. The bikes survived Burning Man, and their reputation was made.

Among the throttle models on display, I picked the Orbiter T1 ($3,000), because it did not look as if it belonged in “The Terminator.” To engage the accelerator, you push down on a spring-loaded thumb throttle on the right grip. Trying to summon the courage to press the throttle, I pedalled along the empty sidewalk of Broome Street. I turned onto Elizabeth Street, where there were some people on the sidewalk whom I preferred not to mow down. I switched to the street. Trembling, I pressed the throttle. Whoa! There was no jerk when the motor kicked in, as there can be with a pedal-assist. The throttle allows a more gradual acceleration than a pedal-assist does. It’s also useful in starting from a standstill on an upslope. By the time I reached the end of the block, I was ready to join the Hells Angels.

Let’s say you’d like an e-bike but don’t want to spend the money, or you already own a bike. One option is to buy an electric-bike conversion kit—essentially, a motor, a battery, and electric controls that you add to your analog bike. Most of these kits require you to swap out one of the wheels, a process that, according to instructions I’ve read, resembles performing a head transplant with a screwdriver.

If you think that sounds like a fun D.I.Y. challenge, I hate you. Luckily, there’s an alternative to this alternative. It is CLIP, an upgrade that you clamp onto one wheel of your bike which instantly electrifies it ($549). It’s bigger than a barrette but not as big as a breadbox, and as easy to use as both. No tools are required. If, later, you’re not in an e-bike mood, it takes a second to remove. This matte-white device weighs a little less than a cat (eight pounds) and looks like a sleek version of the boot that traffic cops stick on the wheel of your car if you’ve forgotten to pay your parking tickets. It contains a battery and a four-hundred-and-fifty-watt motor, and its two arms hug either side of the front wheel. A bike with CLIP installed can be ridden for fifteen to eighteen miles (or about forty-five minutes) on a single charge and travels up to fifteen miles per hour. CLIP can be preordered for shipping this spring, the initial run of a thousand having sold out.

I tried a prototype at the CLIP headquarters, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s New Lab building. Dating from 1902, the building was the machine shop for every significant ship launched during both World Wars. Now it is home to more than two hundred startups. At the ferry dock, I was greeted by Somnath Ray, CLIP’s C.E.O. and founder, a boyishly charming Indian architect whose résumé includes creating electric rickshaws, unfortunately at a time when the world wasn’t ready for them. Ray chaperoned me to the CLIP offices, on the second floor, passing one groovy venture after another. He explained that CLIP works via “friction drive”: “Think of it as a smaller gear driving a bigger wheel. CLIP is the smaller wheel and can deliver just the right amount of torque to the wheel.”

Because it was a weekend and the Yard was empty, I was able to take a test ride back and forth along the concrete floor in a corridor downstairs. I pedalled, felt a nudge, then pressed a red button on the handlebar and got a burst of juice. Whee!

Chances are that New York won’t be building a roof over the city, flattening its hills, and paving its streets with smooth poured concrete for my pleasure, at least not during the Adams administration. Short of that, what can be done to make life more bikeable in this city built by the car-loving Robert Moses under the guiding principle that “cities are created by and for traffic”? Other cities, particularly in Europe, have found ways of tackling the matter. Paris has committed to banning most cars from its city center by 2024. Utrecht has a three-story bike parking garage (the world’s largest) that can hold more than twelve thousand five hundred bikes. (The Netherlands has the highest number of bicycles per capita: twenty-three million for a little under eighteen million people.) Copenhagen synchronizes its traffic lights in favor of cyclists. It is a city in Norway, though—Trondheim—that has pioneered the invention most likely to be found in a children’s book. On a dreadfully steep slope, the Trondheimers constructed the Trampe CycloCable, the world’s first uphill moving sidewalk for cyclists. This cyclist-helper is four hundred and twenty-six feet long and not much wider than your foot, travels at three to four miles per hour, and is operated by an underground motorized cable. To use: While sitting on your bicycle, keep your left foot on the pedal, and place your right foot on the metal platform attached to the conveyor belt. Sit/stand tight and you will be raised to the summit. And it’s free!

In that spirit of innovation, I solicited pie-in-the-sky ideas about how to make the city more hospitable to cyclists. Most suggestions involved bike paths: roomier, safer, and more of them. Joulvert’s K. C. Cohen wants to make sliding doors on taxis mandatory, outlawing doors that open outward and garrote unsuspecting cyclists. Randy Cohen, an avid biker, who might switch to electric when his body parts are too old to continue pedalling, would like to see the elimination of free on-street parking, or, as he puts it, “the squandering of scarce public space to store private property.” CLIP’s Somnath Ray recommended that e-bikes have a tattletale button so that riders can report infrastructure problems and enforcement issues. Please, someone, get to work on realizing the dream of Roberto Jeanniton, from Propel: “I’d build bike lanes above the streets, like in ‘Blade Runner,’ or the High Line.” Nobody mentioned offering money to people who cycle to work, but European countries have devised tax-incentive and purchase-premium programs. France, for instance, will give up to four thousand dollars to anyone replacing a car with an e-bike; Belgium will pay you twenty-five cents per mile if you bike to work.

Winter was approaching, and I don’t like being outside when the temperature dips below eighty-three, but I was determined to find out what it was like to have access to an e-bike whenever I wanted. Zoomo is a worldwide business that rents e-bikes by the week or the month, servicing them and offering insurance ($49/week; $199/month). Most of the users are delivery people, for whom paying the Citi Bike surcharge on e-bikes for the long hours they work is prohibitive. I rode a Zoomo bike home, five blocks away. Designed in-house but made in Taiwan, the bike (there are two models) is a workhorse, meant to be comfortable and reliable for long stretches of time. I can confidently report that my two-minute ride was very pleasant. The rest of the week? Turns out I don’t go anywhere. After a week, I returned the bike—another lovely jaunt—and resumed my daily twenty-minute routine on a pre-Peloton stationary bicycle. Why can’t someone electrify that thing? ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 2 & 9, 2023, issue, with the headline “Uneasy Rider.”

The revolution is a case study in how much further we have to go

Source: New York Times | By David Wallace-Wells

 It is striking that in the same year that Tesla’s stock price dropped by about two-thirds, destroying more than $700 billion in market value, the global market for electric vehicles — which for so long the company seemed almost to embody — actually boomed.

Boom may not even adequately communicate what happened. Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, according to a BloombergNEF report prepared ahead of the 2022 U.N. climate conference COP27, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.

The pandemic years can feel a bit like a vacuum, but there are almost three times as many E.V.s on the world’s roads now as there were when Covid vaccines were first approved, and what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. This week, the Biden administration released a blueprint toward a net zero transportation sector by 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, especially for such a car-intoxicated culture as ours. But it’s also one that, thanks to trends elsewhere in the world, is beginning to seem more and more plausible, at least on the E.V. front.

In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. And growing, of course: Nearly twice as many electric vehicles were sold last year in China as in the year before. The country also exported $3.2 billion worth of E.V.s last November alone, more than double the exports of the previous November. Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share — so perhaps it should not be so surprising that Tesla’s stock is dimming while the global outlook is so sunny.

This is not just eye-popping growth, it is also dramatically faster than most analysts were projecting just a few years ago. In 2020, the International Energy Agency projected that the global share of electric vehicle sales would not top 10 percent before 2030. It appears we’ve already crossed that bar eight years early, and BloombergNEF now projects that the market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade. (The I.E.A. is less bullish but has still roughly doubled its 2030 projection in just two years.) The underlying production capacity is perhaps even more encouraging. In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021.

We’ve seen this phenomenon before, with many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition. It’s enough to make many optimistic observers giddy with anticipation of what’s to come.

What is to come?

It is tempting to believe that designing a future is as simple as drawing the right trajectory on a whiteboard. But as with everything else when it comes to climate, the challenge is bigger than pointing the trend line in the right direction — indeed, the fact that trend lines are beginning to point in the right direction can be a kind of false comfort, since technologies like these don’t just descend from the cloud onto the world’s phones. And the scientist Vaclav Smil’s gloomy comparisons to previous energy transitions aside, the world hasn’t undertaken a breakneck all over revolution like this ever before in its history. Do the familiar, S-shaped learning curves of technological adaptation mean that it should be very easy, and indeed remunerative, for the world to get on track to limit warming below two degrees Celsius, or even 1.5 degrees, as a much talked about paper produced by Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking has suggested? Or, as the scholar Jessica Jewell has argued in the journal Nature Energy and elsewhere, do the limitations of practical obstacles and political economy mean that, even assuming those encouraging learning curves, much more would have to be done to ensure technological adoption at that speed?

Here the E.V. revolution is an illuminating case study. To stabilize global temperatures, we have to get emissions basically all the way down to zero, not just reduce them — an interesting November paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests it might be better to aim for “approximately” net zero emissions, since it may be the case that global temperatures could stabilize even if emissions aren’t entirely eliminated. To do that, we need to stop burning fossil fuels in cars, not just supplement the existing fleet with slightly more green alternatives. A rapid growth in market share isn’t itself sufficient, in other words, because — like carbon itself, which hangs in the air for centuries at least — dirty cars stay on the road for a very long time, emitting all the while.

Economists call this a problem of stocks rather than flows. In this case, while the “flows” are indeed impressive, the “stock” of E.V.s on the road is probably only 2 percent of the global fleet, which still isn’t close to 100 percent at all.

Rapid growth also opens up a new landscape of challenges. We used to worry whether there would be sufficient demand for electric vehicles, particularly given their cost and range limitations. But demand already outstrips supply, which, in addition to driving up the cost of E.V.s and creating manufacturing and delivery delays, has given rise to anxiety over the next roadblock: the empire of mineral extraction, refinement and production that has to be built to meet that. That obstacle may be in some ways smaller than it appears, as Hannah Ritchie, among others, has emphasized: We are not yet mining enough lithium to meet demand, but it’s not exactly a scarce resource, and even Ritchie’s relatively conservative estimates suggest there is more than enough for a battery vehicle revolution. Those taking a broader view of the ecological costs of this project, like the activist Thea Riofrancos, worry over a different set of unresolved questions: Is it possible to design a system for extracting and producing these materials in anything close to a responsible way? (One possible approach, flagged by David Roberts, among others: actually recycling batteries, treating lithium as a “renewable” rather than endlessly extracted resource.)

Behind that challenge lies another: Will production of electric vehicles be interrupted by potential deglobalization in green industries or by America’s Inflation Reduction Act, which requires that a portion of E.V. batteries’ parts be sourced or manufactured domestically or by certain trading partners to qualify for tax credits? At the moment, China produces about 75 percent of all E.V. battery cells, manufactures roughly the same share of those cell components and does more refining of many of the biggest raw inputs than the rest of the world combined.

There are also problems of what the civil engineer Emily Grubert has memorably called the “mid-transition”: “this period in between kind of a stable fossil fuel dominated energy system and a future stable, clean energy dominated system.” It is easy enough to imagine the other side of any transition, particularly when so many forces are moving in the right direction. But you have to get to that other side, and that is not just a matter of building out the new system but also, crucially, of maintaining some of the old one too, and in proper balance.

If E.V.s and gas cars share the roads for a decade or two, how do you ensure or design the right mix of charging stations and gas pumps, and how do you map their locations? At what point do gas stations become unprofitable, and what happens then? These may seem like relatively technical questions, but the problems of the mid-transition extend to the matter of employment structures and pensions, the need for skilled labor to manage site cleanup and safety and the decline of funding from gas taxes for maintenance and infrastructure as gas consumption declines (if not all that rapidly to zero).

The vast majority of electric vehicles are now sold in the world’s richer economies, and mid-transition challenges like building out new charging infrastructure are potentially much larger in lower income countries. But there, at least for now, the electric vehicle revolution is taking a very different shape — often with two or three wheels rather than four. Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s. It’s been something of a secret revolution here, too: In 2020, Americans bought twice as many e-bikes as they did E.V.s. As with everything else on climate, it’s not one story unfolding but many, and all at once.

Has the Amazon Reached Its ‘Tipping Point’?

Some Brazilian scientists fear that the Amazon may become a grassy savanna — with profound effects on the climate worldwide.

Source: New York Times | By Alex Cuadros

• Jan. 4, 2023

One of the first times Luciana Vanni Gatti tried to collect Amazonian air she got so woozy that she couldn’t even operate the controls. An atmospheric chemist, she wanted to measure the concentration of carbon high above the rainforest. To obtain her samples she had to train bush pilots at obscure air-taxi businesses. The discomfort began as she waited on the tarmac, holding one door open against the wind to keep the tiny cockpit from turning into an oven in the equatorial sun. When at last they took off, they rose precipitously, and every time they plunged into a cloud, the plane seemed to be, in Gatti’s words, sambando — dancing the samba. Then the air temperature dipped below freezing, and her sweat turned cold.

Not that it was all bad. As the frenetic port of Manaus receded, the canopy spread out below like a shaggy carpet, immaculate green except for the pink and yellow blooms of ipê trees, and it was one of those moments — increasingly rare in Gatti’s experience — when you could pretend that nature had no final border, and the Amazon looked like what it somehow still was, the world’s largest rainforest.

This article was written with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The Amazon has been called “the lungs of the earth” because of the amount of carbon dioxide it absorbs — according to most estimates, around half a billion tons per year. The problem, scientifically speaking, is that these estimates have always depended on a series of extrapolations. Some researchers use satellites to detect changes that indicate the presence of greenhouse gases. But the method is indirect, and clouds can contaminate the results. Others start with individual tree measurements in plots scattered across the region, which allows them to calculate the so-called biomass in each trunk, which, in turn, allows them to work out how much carbon is being stored by the ecosystem as a whole. But it’s hard to know how representative small study areas are, because the Amazon is almost as large as the contiguous United States, with regional differences in rainfall, temperature, flora and the extent of logging and agriculture. (One study even warned of the risk of “majestic-forest selection bias.”)

Gatti’s solution was to measure the carbon in the air directly. Which led to the least pleasant part of the flight. The pilot had removed the plane’s back seats to make up for the weight of a special silver “suitcase” donated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Inside, a thick layer of foam cradled 17 glass flasks with valves that opened and closed at the flick of a switch. Each one was supposed to capture a liter and a half of air from a different altitude, starting at 14,500 feet and going down to 1,000. To ensure that collection always took place above the same point on the map, the pilot had to descend in tight spirals, banking so hard that the horizon went near-vertical.

In a healthy rainforest, the concentration of carbon should decline as you approach the canopy from above, because trees are drawing the element out of the atmosphere and turning it into wood through photosynthesis. In 2010, when Gatti started running two flights a month at each of four different spots in the Brazilian Amazon, she expected to confirm this. But her samples showed the opposite: At lower altitudes, the ratio of carbon increased. This suggested that emissions from the slashing and burning of trees — the preferred method for clearing fields in the Amazon — were actually exceeding the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon. At first Gatti was sure it was an anomaly caused by a passing drought. But the trend not only persisted into wetter years; it intensified.

For a while Gatti simply refused to believe her own data. She even became depressed. She had always felt a deep connection to nature. As a kid in a distant town called Cafelândia, she would climb a tree in front of her house, spending hours in a formation of branches that seemed custom-made to cradle her arms, legs and head. In later years, no matter how many times she flew over the Amazon, she never got used to the sight of freshly paved highways, new dirt roads always branching off them, forming a fish-bone pattern. Sometimes she soared past columns of beige smoke that rose all the way to the stratosphere.

Back at her laboratory, which is now housed at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Gatti ultimately spent two years refining her methodology. She wanted to know just how much carbon the rainforest was losing — and even more important, how representative these results were. The whole point of her project was that, by capturing air from such high altitudes, it could provide an empirical and comprehensive picture of the Amazon’s so-called carbon budget. So she worked up seven different ways to calculate the effect of wind flows and the composition of air from over the Atlantic Ocean, gradually perfecting her method for subtracting the background noise. Finally she felt confident that her “regions of influence” captured what was happening across 80 percent of the Amazon. The net emissions averaged nearly 300 million tons of carbon per year — roughly the emissions of the entire nation of France.

When Gatti published her findings in Nature in 2021, it sparked panicked headlines across the world: The lungs of the earth are exhaling greenhouse gases. But her discovery was actually much more alarming than that. Because burning trees release a high proportion of carbon monoxide, she could separate these emissions from the total. And in the southeastern Amazon, air samples still showed net emissions, suggesting that the ecosystem itself could be releasing more carbon than it absorbed, thanks in part to decomposing plant matter — or in Gatti’s words, “effectively dying more than growing.” The first time I spoke to Gatti, she repurposed a lyric by the Brazilian crooner Jorge Ben Jor. How could this be happening, she asked, in a “tropical country, blessed by God/and beautiful by nature”?

The Amazon is a labyrinth of a thousand rivers. They are born at 21,000 feet, with seasonal melts from the Sajama ice cap in Bolivia, and they are born in the dark rock of Peru’s Apacheta cliff, as glacial seepage spraying white from its pores. They are born less than 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean; they are born in the middle of the South American continent, in Brazil’s high plains, savannas and sandstone ridges. Most are just tributaries of tributaries, headwaters for much larger rivers — the Caquetá, the Madre de Dios, the Iriri, the Tapajós — any of which, on its own, would already be among the largest rivers in the world. Where these tributaries empty, just south of the Equator, they form the aorta of the Amazon proper, more than 10 miles wide at its widest point. From the Amazon’s farthest source to its mouth in the Atlantic, water flows for 4,000 miles, almost as long as the Nile. Measured by the volume it releases into the ocean — the equivalent of a dozen Mississippis, one-fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the world’s seas — the Amazon is the largest river in the world.

The consensus used to be that ecosystems are merely a product of prevailing weather patterns. But in the 1970s, the Brazilian researcher Eneas Salati proved that the Amazon, with its roughly 400 billion trees, also creates its own weather. On an average day, a single large tree releases more than 100 gallons of water as vapor. This not only lowers the air temperature through evaporative cooling; as Salati discovered by tracking oxygen isotopes in rainwater samples, it also gives rise to “flying rivers” — rain clouds that recycle the forest’s own moisture five or six times, ultimately generating as much as 45 percent of its total precipitation. By creating the conditions for a continental swath of evergreens, this process is crucial to the Amazon’s role as a global “sink” for carbon.

Many scientists now fear, however, that this virtuous cycle is breaking down. Just in the past half-century, 17 percent of the Amazon — an area larger than Texas — has been converted to croplands or cattle pasture. Less forest means less recycled rain, less vapor to cool the air, less of a canopy to shield against sunlight. Under drier, hotter conditions, even the lushest of Amazonian trees will shed leaves to save water, inhibiting photosynthesis — a feedback loop that is only exacerbated by global warming. According to the Brazilian Earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent of the original area, the flying rivers will weaken enough that a rainforest simply will not be able to survive in most of the Amazon Basin. Instead it will collapse into scrubby savanna, possibly in a matter of decades.

Much of the evidence for this theory — including Gatti’s air-​sample studies — emerged thanks to a groundbreaking initiative led by Nobre himself. When Nobre started trying to forecast the impact of deforestation back in 1988, he had to do it at the University of Maryland, because his home country lacked the computing power for serious climate modeling. Brazil was so strapped for resources that foreign researchers even dominated Amazon fieldwork. But Nobre spearheaded a program that, in the words of a Nature editorial, “revolutionized understanding of the Amazon rainforest and its role in the Earth system.” Established in 1999 and known as the Large-​Scale Biosphere-​Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, or L.B.A., it united disciplines that usually did not collaborate, bringing together chemists like Gatti with biologists and meteorologists. While funding mostly came from the United States and Europe, Nobre insisted that South Americans play leading roles, thus giving rise to a whole new generation of Brazilian climate scientists.

Until recently, Nobre was working under the assumption that the Amazon would not become a net source of carbon for at least another few decades. But Gatti’s research is not the only sign that, as he put it to me over Skype, “we are on the eve of this tipping point.” The rain machine is slowing. Droughts used to come once every couple of decades, with a megadrought every century or two. But just since 1998 there have been five, two of them extreme. The effect is particularly acute in the eastern Amazon, which has already lost a staggering 30 percent of its forest. The dry season there used to be three months long; now it lasts more than four. During the driest months, rainfall has declined by as much as a third in four decades, while average temperatures have risen by as much as 3.1 degrees Celsius — triple the annual increase for the world as a whole in the fossil-fuel era. In some parts, jungles are already being colonized by grasses.

Losing the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, would be catastrophic for the tens of thousands of species that make their home there. Rising temperatures could also drive millions of people in the region to become climate refugees. And it would represent a more symbolic death, too, as “saving the rainforest” has long been a kind of synecdoche for modern environmentalism as a whole. What scientists are most concerned about, though, is the potential for this regional, ecological tipping point to produce knock-on effects in the global climate. Because the Amazon’s flying rivers circulate back over the continent, the impact may already be reaching beyond the rainforest. In 2015, Brazil’s populous southeast was hit by historic water shortages; in 2021, quasi-biblical sandstorms swept the region. If the flying rivers peter out entirely, it could affect atmospheric circulation even beyond South America, possibly influencing the weather as far away as the western United States.

But even these consequences pale next to the fallout from putting the Amazon’s carbon back into the atmosphere. For all the slashing and burning of recent years, the ecosystem still stores about 120 billion tons of carbon in its trunks, branches, vines and soil — the equivalent of more than three years of human emissions. If all of that carbon is released, it could warm the planet by as much as 0.3 degrees Celsius. According to the Princeton ecologist Stephen Pacala, this alone would probably make the Paris Agreement — the international accord to limit warming since preindustrial times to 2 degrees — “impossible to achieve.” Which, in turn, may mean that other climate tipping points are breached around the world. As the British scientist Tim Lenton put it to me, “The Amazon feeds back to everything.”

In May I joined Gatti on a trip to the northeastern Amazon. Though it was not exactly part of her research, she wanted to visit the Tapajós National Forest, a 1.4-million-acre conservation area that held clues to the rainforest’s mysterious emissions, and to the transformation predicted by Nobre. First she flew from São Paulo 1,500 miles north to Belém, at the Amazon’s mouth in the Atlantic. From there she flew to Santarém, 400 miles upstream, where the Amazon’s muddy brown waters are met by the dark blue Tapajós River. In the dry season, tourists come from across Brazil to the Tapajós’s white-sand beaches. Now it was raining heavily, the beaches under water. The river lapped at Santarém’s sidewalks.

Santarém is one of Brazil’s oldest cities, founded by Jesuit missionaries at a time when the only local commodity was Indigenous souls. Its fortunes rose with the rubber boom of the 19th century, and fell with the bust of the 20th. More recently, it has been transformed by China’s growing demand for soybeans, which are used as livestock feed and cooking oil. Gatti pointed out the long narrow barges docking at a terminal run by Cargill, the American commodities-trading giant. It began operating in 2003, the year before Gatti started running flights from Santarém’s tiny airport. As we drove south on the BR-163, also known as Brazil’s “grain corridor,” Gatti recalled how, back then, so many of the fields were grass for grazing cattle. Of all the deforested land in the Amazon, more than two-thirds is pasture. Here, though, Gatti watched as the grass gave way to a “sea of soy.”

Before our trip, Nobre had warned me to keep a low profile, because Gatti had become a public face amid the buzz around her discoveries. Just a few weeks later, the Indigenous-rights advocate Bruno Pereira and the environmental journalist Dom Phillips would be murdered. Profit makes its own law in the Amazon. In the Tapajós region, landowners must preserve 50 percent of their property as rainforest. But Gatti noticed how farmers and ranchers continued to expand their fields, ever so gradually, in long, thin strips meant to evade detection by the satellites of her own employer, INPE. In 2006 the soy industry agreed not to plant in newly deforested areas. But there are ways around this, too. Some farmers bribe local officials for falsified documents. Others transfer land to front men so that they can violate the moratorium without sullying their name. As we drove, Gatti noted violations to report, even though one of her own former colleagues once received death threats for this. She did not hide her affinities, favoring T-shirts with toucans and macaws on florid backgrounds.

Gatti, now 62, has always had a rebellious streak. When she was in college in the late 1970s, some fellow students were arrested for protesting the dictatorship. Outraged, she joined an underground political party and stopped attending classes for a while. Though she was scarcely aware of this at the time, it was the military regime that oversaw the first modern effort to colonize the rainforest. One of its most ambitious projects was the Trans-Amazonian Highway, which pierced 2,600 miles west from the coast and now forms the southern border of the Tapajós National Forest. The goal was partly to fill what the generals saw as a “demographic void,” keeping foreign powers like the United States from moving in. They also hoped to relieve pressure on ballooning cities by uniting “men without land in the northeast and land without men in the Amazon.” Never mind that the forest was already occupied by a multitude of Indigenous groups; they, too, would be made into productive citizens.

The military regime had also built the BR-163, which branches off from the Trans-Amazonian, forming the Tapajós’s eastern border. As we sped along it, signs advertised land for sale, a store called House of Seeds, a World Church of the Power of God. To our right, the Tapajós was a looming wall of green. To our left were private lands where forests were interspersed with croplands. It was the tail end of the soy harvest now, when many landowners started a rotation of corn; tractors rolled through, long metal wings spraying pesticides. Gatti pointed out a freshly cleared area; the trunks lay scattered like a game of pickup sticks. Even when landowners followed the law, what was once a seamless ecosystem became an archipelago, fragments of forest hemmed in by flat expanses. At one point we passed a lone Brazil nut tree, inanely protected by Brazilian law even amid the monoculture. “Here lies the forest,” Gatti declared.

As she spoke, Gatti gesticulated so vehemently that both hands sometimes came off the steering wheel. She betrayed no affection for Jair Bolsonaro, the former army officer who spent four years as president pushing to develop the Amazon. Claiming (baselessly) that his own government’s deforestation numbers were a lie, he strangled INPE’s funding to the point that it reportedly had to shut off its supercomputer. He also slashed budgets for protecting Indigenous people and the environment. Predictably, deforestation accelerated; in 2021, a thousand trees were cut down every minute. Gatti sometimes thought about quitting, moving with her German shepherd to an eco-villa in the countryside. With Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva back in the presidency, though, she is feeling hopeful for the first time in years. The last time he was in office, from 2003 to 2011, deforestation fell by two-thirds — and now he has promised to halt deforestation entirely. The question is whether that will be enough to halt a process that may now have a momentum of its own.

Eventually Gatti pulled off to the right, through a tunnel of overhanging branches and into an open area where tall trees shaded a research base built as part of Nobre’s L.B.A. The base resembled an eco-lodge, with low-slung wooden buildings topped by clay-tiled roofs. Night was falling, the roar of frogs competing with the distant howl of monkeys. We were met by a 39-year-old biologist, Erika Berenguer, who wore an old white T-shirt, overlarge and dirty. Her specialty, she said, was desgraça — calamity. It turns out that deforestation numbers actually understate the problem of the Amazon, because a fifth of the standing forest has been “degraded” by logging, burning and fragmentation. Now based in Oxford, Berenguer has spent the last 12 years studying how these ills affect the Amazon’s ability to store carbon. As she would explain, though, even she was shocked by what happened in 2015, a critical turning point in the health of the ecosystem.

At the time Berenguer’s project was to measure every single tree in a few dozen plots in and around the Tapajós National Forest, at regular intervals, to calculate the weight of all the organic matter, or biomass, which serves as a proxy for carbon. At first, when she noticed flames inside the conservation area, she just kept doing her work — gathering up leaf litter, fixing tape around centuries-old trunks, tagging each one with numbered scraps of metal sliced from beer cans. As Berenguer’s colleague Jos Barlow likes to point out, outside observers usually fail to distinguish between deforestation fires (intentionally set to clear freshly clear-cut areas) and wildfires (when the flames accidentally spread to standing forests). Now it was August, the height of the dry season, when ranchers and farmers in the Amazon clear fields with fire. Almost every year, embers floated across the BR-163 highway, igniting leaves on the forest floor. But the forest itself remained so damp that the flames could not spread far.

Berenguer, a native of cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro, made a point of sweating alongside her assistants, local men with nicknames like Xarope (Syrup) and Graveto (Stick), whose families had settled by the BR-163 as part of the colonization push of the 1970s. They were not too concerned, either. As subsistence farmers, they also used fire to maintain their lands. It is a tradition that dates back to the region’s oldest inhabitants, Indigenous people who discovered that ash fertilizes the nutrient-poor soils. Outside the rarest of megadroughts, they never had to worry about losing control of the flames. Researchers have found areas of the Amazon that, according to sediment core samples, went 4,000 years without a single burn.

As Berenguer worked through September, however, the smoke from disparate fires coagulated into a permanent, indistinguishable haze. It permeated everything — their truck, their clothes, even Berenguer’s bra. When they kicked away dead leaves, they noticed that the soil beneath was cracking. The little plants of the understory wilted. Soon everyone was coughing; people took turns breathing mist from a nebulizer, and her own snot turned black. Each morning, she and her assistants had to clean a layer of fresh soot from the windshield of their truck. They turned the brights on, turned the emergency lights on and edged onto the highway. They drove slowly but couldn’t see vehicles ahead until they were nearly colliding with them. The sky was hidden. The sun was a red suggestion. Ash fell like alien snow.

The fires were escaping to crop gardens, to pastureland where cattle grazed, to the thatched roofs of houses. And the fires were doing what they should not: spreading inside the rainforest. Splitting her time between Britain and the Amazon, Berenguer had come to know her research plots as intimately as her old neighborhood in Rio. She thought of her favorite places as rainforest versions of her local coffee shop, her local bakery. There were the fallen logs where she and her assistants returned day after day so they could sit and eat lunch. There were the tall, thin buttress roots that acted as a makeshift bathroom stall, hiding her from view when necessary. In one plot, a thick loop of liana hung from the canopy, making for the perfect swing. Now she wanted to save these places.

Among the great old trees of the Tapajós, the flames rose a mere foot from the ground. Berenguer and Xarope could stamp them out with their boots. But their efforts were in vain. The flames consolidated into a thin, uninterrupted arc that stretched for miles into the forest. It advanced slowly, a thousand feet per day; in its wake, the rich perennial green was left brown and gray and charcoal-black. Berenguer watched as animals fled from the fire line — butterflies, deer, thumbnail-size frogs. One day she surprised a snake. It leaped onto a smoldering trunk, accidentally immolating itself, and Berenguer heard a sizzling sound, like buttered bread hitting a griddle plate.

Across the Amazon, more forests ultimately burned than in the largest California wildfires in history, putting half a billion tons of carbon back into the atmosphere — the equivalent of more than one year of emissions by Mexico. It was the Amazon’s worst wildfire season on record. Subsequent years have not been as dry, but wildfires have mostly remained well above the average of previous seasons — yet another sign that the ecosystem is losing its natural resilience, entering an alternate feedback loop. In Gatti’s samples, the 2015-16 drought also marked the moment when, as she put it to me, “the southeastern Amazon went to pot,” and the forest itself started consistently releasing more carbon than it absorbed. Fire does more than destroy trees. It also accelerates the transformations predicted by Nobre’s tipping-​point theory.

Just about every researcher I spoke to for this article was careful to emphasize their deep respect for Nobre, who has done so much to advance Amazon climate science. But some have reservations about his theory. Partly this is because his earliest simulations showed that, with less rain, the Amazon would give way to the Cerrado, a savanna that covers much of central Brazil. The Cerrado, though, is a carbon-rich patchwork of grasslands, marshes and forests that is itself endangered by global warming and expanding agriculture. How could such a vibrant ecosystem represent ecological collapse? Other researchers, having studied the Amazon up close in mucky fieldwork, object to the use of computer models that apply uniform assumptions to this multifarious biome. Still others express a more pragmatic concern — that the way Nobre communicates his theory is demobilizing. “Carlos gives the impression that the entire forest is going to collapse at the same time, water will stop circulating and it will all become a big savanna,” Berenguer told me. Gatti’s article, she added, actually led to some misunderstanding, too. Attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021, she even heard people say that if the Amazon was now a net emitter, why bother saving it?

Nobre himself is aware of these qualms. Now he hastens to clarify that the transformation will take different forms in different regions, and that any end state will be more of an impoverished scrubland than a Cerrado-style savanna. He also predicts that the Amazon’s western forests, which are rainier throughout the year because of their proximity to the Andes Mountains, would survive a tipping point. His theory, though, is no longer confined to computer simulations; in the southeastern basin, it may already be playing out. In one study, a team led by the researcher Paulo Brando intentionally set a series of fires in swaths of forest abutted by an inactive soy plantation. After a second burn, coincidentally during a drought year, one plot lost nearly a third of its canopy cover, and African grasses — imported species commonly used in cattle pasture — moved in. Brando also participated in an observational study, led by his colleague Divino Silvério, of the region’s enormous Xingu Indigenous Park. Indigenous lands are home to much of Brazil’s best-preserved rainforest. But after repeated wildfires, the Xingu’s grasslands — traditionally maintained as a source of thatch — nearly tripled in size in less than two decades, to 8 percent of the total area. In the central Amazon, meanwhile, naturally occurring white-sand savannas are taking over seasonally flooded forests — again, largely thanks to fire.

It is tempting to think of climate change as a process that, absent human emissions, would only happen gradually. But as Tim Lenton points out, our planet is naturally prone to “threshold behavior.” In a widely cited 2008 paper, Lenton brought the catchy language of tipping points to the arcane revelations of Earth systems science and paleoclimatology. Throughout our planet’s history, in individual ecosystems as well as the wider climate, small, incremental changes have started to reinforce one another until — sometimes suddenly — one feedback loop was replaced with a radically different one. What Lenton calls the most “iconic” examples are the Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last glacial period, when temperatures in Greenland repeatedly shot up by as much as 15 degrees Celsius in the span of a few decades, before cooling again. The causes are intensely debated but most likely involved changes in ice-sheet coverage and the circulation of seawaters.

There is already evidence that our current era of global warming is shifting the borders of various biomes. In Alaska, for example, white spruce trees are moving into areas of tundra for the first time in thousands of years. But humans may have triggered ecological “regime shifts” even before the fossil-fuel era. The Australian Outback was probably lush and green until around 40,000 years ago, when people hunted grass-eating megafauna to extinction, leaving more fuel for fires, which apparently disrupted the continent’s own “flying rivers.” On Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, deforestation is thought to have amplified the drought that toppled the Maya. Then there is the Sahara. Ten thousand years ago, the area resembled temperate South Africa, but livestock grazing may have helped turn it into a desert. As the NOAA scientist Elena Shevliakova, who has modeled the global impacts of Amazon deforestation, put it to me, “If a green Sahara is possible, why not a savanna in the Amazon?”

The Amazon has survived ice ages. It may not survive humans. By hastening the demise of its flying rivers, cattle ranchers and soy farmers may be endangering their own livelihoods too. But thanks to what climatologists call teleconnections — weather anomalies linked across thousands of miles — they also threaten agriculture much farther afield. In the El Niño teleconnection, an unusually warm Pacific Ocean pulls the jet stream south, bringing drier conditions to Canada and the northern United States (as well as to the Amazon region). According to a study led by the Notre Dame researcher David Medvigy, a similar pattern could emerge if the Amazon stops recycling its own moisture, as the dry air would travel north in winter. This could halve the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, a crucial source of water for an already-drought-stricken California.

A growing number of scientists worry that one tipping point can trigger another. In some cases the influence is direct. If Greenland’s ice sheet disappears, the circulation of Atlantic seawaters could be drastically altered, which would, in turn, wreak havoc on weather patterns across the globe, making Scandinavia uninhabitably cold, warming the Southern Hemisphere, drying out forests. The impact of Amazon dieback would be to release tens of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere — which is more diffuse, but no less dangerous. When Lenton and his colleague David Armstrong McKay recently compiled the latest evidence on an array of global climate thresholds, they found that even a very optimistic 1.5 degrees of warming since preindustrial times may be enough to trigger the gradual but irreversible melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, and to thaw methane-trapping permafrost.

It is difficult to predict how all these shifts might interact, as most models assume, for example, that Atlantic seawaters will always circulate according to known patterns. But in a 2018 paper, Lenton and the American Earth system scientist Will Steffen warned that a dominolike “tipping cascade” could push the global climate itself beyond a critical threshold, into an alternate feedback loop called “hothouse Earth,” with hostile conditions not seen for millions of years. It can feel like doom-mongering to contemplate such a scenario. There is no way to put a number on it. Even if it is improbable, however, Lenton argues that the consequences would be so dire that it must be taken seriously. He sees it as a “profound risk-management problem”: If we focus only on the most likely outcomes, we will never predict anomalies like 2021’s unprecedented “heat dome” in the Pacific Northwest. Or last year’s winter heat wave in Antarctica, when temperatures jumped 70 degrees Fahrenheit above the average. Or, for that matter, the proliferation of wildfires in the world’s largest rainforest.

Berenguer wanted to show Gatti how the 2015 megafires had altered forests in the northeastern Amazon. So Xarope picked us up from the research base in the morning, and we got back onto the BR-163. Here and there along the highway, Berenguer pointed out “tree skeletons” — dead trees whose sun-bleached branches poked from the otherwise lush green canopy of the Tapajós. Fire did not always kill them right away. When Berenguer was back in Britain, her assistants would send her updates by WhatsApp. You know Tree 71? one message might say, referring to a centuries-old specimen in one of her plots. So, it just died. It could take a few years more for it to fall to the ground. Some of the carbon in Gatti’s air samples, then, could be a delayed consequence of past fires. But as we would see inside the living forest, something stranger was happening, too.

Eventually we exited the highway for an unmarked dirt track that ended in a wall of vegetation. Machete in hand, Berenguer led us onto a tight path. Just a few days earlier, she and her assistants spent hours clearing the way for us, but new vines were already reclaiming the space. “You can see it’s a mess,” Berenguer said. An impassable thicket of reedy bamboo hemmed us in on either side; the canopy was low above our heads. To me it looked normal enough, as far as jungle goes. In reality, though, a healthy rainforest should be easy to walk through, because the largest trees consume so much light and water that the understory lacks the resources to grow very dense.

We walked over fallen trunks. Unlike in the southeastern Amazon, Berenguer still saw no evidence of savannalike vegetation moving in. But the balance of native species was now out of whack, as opportunistic “pioneers” occupied the spaces left by dead giants. In some areas, fast-growing embaúba trees stood so uniformly that they resembled the stems of a wood-pulp plantation. In others, hundreds of newborn lianas formed a kind of snake nest. (Berenguer’s team had to measure each one individually, a hellish task.) She pointed to a tall, proud tree that had somehow survived the blaze. Because all of the other nearby individuals of its species had been killed, it was unlikely to reproduce; Berenguer called it a “zombie.”

A University of Birmingham researcher named Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert has found similar changes across the Amazon. Even in the absence of actual “savannization,” trees that can withstand drier conditions are proliferating, while those that need more water are dying in greater numbers. The dominance of embaúba is particularly worrisome because the trees are hollow, storing far less carbon than a slower-growing species like mahogany. Their life cycle is also relatively short, leaving more frequent gaps in the canopy. The end result of this transformation is unclear, but Gatti’s numbers have only continued to get worse. According to her latest five-year averages, the Brazilian Amazon is already giving off 50 percent more carbon than it was in the first five years of her project — and even the historically healthier western forests are sometimes emitting more than they absorb.

Eventually we came into a clearing. I began to sweat. The sun was searing hot; Berenguer said that unshaded ground can reach 176 degrees Fahrenheit here. Clearings are a natural part of the Amazonian cycle, as large trees inevitably die and other species gradually take their place. But even logging could not match the power of fire to turn the forest into “Swiss cheese.” Berenguer never used to need sunscreen because the canopy was so thick; now she gets sunburned here. And the profusion of holes sets off a vicious cycle. The sun dries out the vegetation; trees shed leaves to preserve water; the litter becomes fuel for the next fire. The gaps also create a “wind corridor,” allowing strong drafts to penetrate deep into the forest during storms. Perversely, with their heavy trunks, the largest, oldest trees are especially vulnerable to being knocked over.

“This used to be a beautiful forest,” Xarope said.

“Some days it makes me sad,” Berenguer said. “Other days it pisses me off. This is one of those days.”

Berenguer had hoped that the misfortune of the megafire would at least provide an opportunity to study how a rainforest recovers from such desgraça. But she worried that she would never find out, because it would never get the chance. Among scientists who study the Amazon, the notion of multiple tipping points, specific to each region’s ecology, has increasingly taken hold. And some now speak of an even more urgent “flammability tipping point,” past which an ecosystem that never evolved to burn starts burning regularly. During the drought of 2015, wildfires also ravaged another nearby conservation area, the Reserva Extrativista Tapajós-Arapiúns. Because it was left so degraded, with so much dried-out fuel on the floor, there was a much more intense conflagration in 2017, even though that was a wet year. This time the flames were not the foot-tall ones that are usually seen in the Amazon but reached all the way to the canopy.

Though her mainstay was ecological calamity, Berenguer also wanted us to see what well-preserved old-growth forest looks like. In strictly scientific terms, it was a control, a necessary point of comparison with the messed-up forests, as she called them (though she used a more colorful word that cannot be printed here). She also let on that she welcomed the rare excuse to traipse around a more “David Attenborough” setting. So we drove south on the BR-163 until we hit the 117th kilometer marker, where we re-entered the Tapajós.

We were walking for only a few minutes before the difference became obvious. It was cooler and darker. The flora was far more varied, forming distinct layers as you lifted your eyes to the sky. The canopy was far more closed, the understory far more open; Berenguer and Xarope didn’t even need to prune the trail for our visit. There were lianas here, too, but they were few and large. One was as thick as a tree; Berenguer said it was probably centuries old.

It’s hard to shake a popular image of scientists as rigorously rational, unemotional about their work. But Berenguer was not embarrassed to admit that, as she put it, she and her colleagues have their own personal tipping points, too. For a while after the 2015 fires, she lost her sense of purpose, the hope that her work could make a difference. The flames had even ravaged the plot where she used to swing on that perfect loop of liana. “Your whole reference system is being destroyed, and you’re powerless,” she said. “It’s hard to explain without sounding like a tree-hugger. Not to say I don’t hug trees, because I do.” Some trees were too big for that, though. Here was an urucurana, with its winglike buttress roots taller than my whole body. Here was a soaring strangler fig, which surrounds another tree’s trunk as it grows, eventually killing its host. “What a dirty trick!” Gatti exclaimed.

At one point we came upon a low tree bearing a yellow fruit that neither Berenguer nor Xarope could identify.

“Is it poisonous?” Gatti asked.

“I don’t know,” Xarope said. Then he plucked one from a branch and bit into it. We did the same. There was not much pulp around the stone but the flavor was sharp and rich.

Berenguer remembered a past research trip to track frugivores — fruit-eating creatures. She and her colleagues had to remain absolutely still and silent for hours to avoid spooking them. I suggested we try it out for a minute, just to hear what an old-growth forest sounds like without humans tramping around.

We stopped walking; Berenguer sat on a log. As our chitchat faded, the racket of birds swelled as if someone had suddenly turned the volume dial on a stereo. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I looked again, Berenguer’s eyes had narrowed to slits, her lips curled into a faint smile. Earlier, describing what she felt in this place, Berenguer used the word grandeza, which literally means greatness, but also bigness. The rainforest made her feel small, and she liked this.

Gatti had spoken about feeling, at least temporarily, not so separate from the natural world — almost as if she were a kid again, ensconced in that tree in front of her house. Now she stood with her eyes shut, palms open at her sides as if she were at a religious revival, as if she were receiving something.

I glanced over at Xarope; he looked amused. Then the spell was broken by the more familiar sound, distant but unmistakable, of a semi truck shifting gears.

This article was written with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Alex Cuadros is the author of “Brazillionaires.” He has been reporting from the Amazon since 2013 and is now working on a book about the Cinta Larga Indigenous group. Max Guther is a Berlin-based illustrator known for his work in a hyperreal isometric 3-D style, often with an unfamiliar perspective from above.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 8, 2023, Page 38 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Tipping Away. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Hunt for the ‘Blood Diamond of Batteries’ Impedes Green Energy Push

Dangerous mining conditions plague Congo, home to the world’s largest supply of cobalt, a key ingredient in electric cars. A leadership battle threatens reforms.

The Kasulo cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Source: New York Times | By Dionne Searcey and Eric Lipton

• Published Nov. 29, 2021Updated March 24, 2022

KASULO, Democratic Republic of Congo — A man in a pinstripe suit with a red pocket square walked around the edge of a giant pit one April afternoon where hundreds of workers often toil in flip-flops, burrowing deep into the ground with shovels and pickaxes.

His polished leather shoes crunched on dust the miners had spilled from nylon bags stuffed with cobalt-laden rocks.

The man, Albert Yuma Mulimbi, is a longtime power broker in the Democratic Republic of Congo and chairman of a government agency that works with international mining companies to tap the nation’s copper and cobalt reserves, used in the fight against global warming.

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Mr. Yuma’s professed goal is to turn Congo into a reliable supplier of cobalt, a critical metal in electric vehicles, and shed its anything-goes reputation for tolerating an underworld where children are put to work and unskilled and ill-equipped diggers of all ages get injured or killed.

“We have to reorganize the country and take control of the mining sector,” said Mr. Yuma, who had pulled up to the Kasulo site in a fleet of SUVs carrying a high-level delegation to observe the challenges there.

But to many in Congo and the United States, Mr. Yuma himself is a problem. As chairman of Gécamines, Congo’s state-owned mining enterprise, he has been accused of helping to divert billions of dollars in revenues, according to confidential State Department legal filings reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with a dozen current and former officials in both countries.

Top State Department officials have tried to force him out of the mining agency and pushed for him to be put on a sanctions list, arguing he has for years abused his position to enrich friends, family members and political allies.

Albert Yuma Mulimbi is a power broker in Congo and the chairman of Gécamines, the state-owned mining company.

Mr. Yuma denies any wrongdoing and is waging an elaborate lobbying and legal campaign to clear his name in Washington and Congo’s capital of Kinshasa, all while pushing ahead with his plans to overhaul cobalt mining.

Effectively operating his own foreign policy apparatus, Mr. Yuma has hired a roster of well-connected lobbyists, wired an undisclosed $1.5 million to a former White House official, offered the United States purported intelligence about Russia and critical minerals and made a visit to Trump Tower in New York, according to interviews and confidential documents.

Mr. Yuma met with Donald Trump Jr. there in 2018, a session the mining executive described as a quick meet-and-greet. Despite such high-level access during the Trump administration, he was barred just two months later from entering the United States.

His grip on the mining industry has complicated Congo’s effort to attract new Western investors and secure its place in the clean energy revolution, which it is already helping to fuel with its vast wealth of minerals and metals like cobalt.

Batteries containing cobalt reduce overheating in electric cars and extend their range, but the metal has become known as “the blood diamond of batteries” because of its high price and the perilous conditions in Congo, the largest producer of cobalt in the world. As a result, carmakers concerned about consumer blowback are rapidly moving to find alternatives to the element in electric vehicles, and they are increasingly looking to other nations with smaller reserves as possible suppliers.

There is a chance that Congo’s role in the emerging economy could be diminished if it fails to confront human-rights issues in its mines. And even if Mr. Yuma works to resolve those problems, as he has pledged to do, it still may not be enough for new American investors who want to be assured the country has taken steps to curb a history of mining-industry corruption.

Jose Bumba, pulled a 220-pound bag of cobalt from a 26-foot-deep hole in the makeshift Kasulo mine. Working conditions on such sites can be extremely dangerous.

Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, has tried to sideline Mr. Yuma by stacking Gécamines with his own appointees, but he has been unwilling to cross him further. During an interview at his hillside palace in Kinshasa, Mr. Tshisekedi said he had his own strategy for fixing the country’s dangerous mining conditions.

“It is not going to be up to Mr. Yuma,” he said. “It will be the government that will decide.”

The standoff between Mr. Yuma and the president echoes power struggles that have torn apart African countries rich with natural resources in the past. How this one plays out has implications that reach far beyond the continent, as the global battle against climate change calls for a stepped-up transition from gasoline-burning vehicles to battery-powered ones.

For Congo, the question boils down to this: Will Mr. Yuma help the country ride the global green wave into an era of new prosperity, or will he help condemn it to more strife and turmoil?

‘Tired of Digging’

Kasulo was once a thriving village. Then a resident discovered cobalt and a rush of independent miners tore up the land.

Statues greet motorists at the main roundabout in a mining hub in Congo’s Copperbelt. One depicts an industrial miner in hard hat, headlamp and boots; another a shoeless, shirtless man in ragged shorts holding a pickax. They tell the story of the country’s dual mining economies: industrial and artisanal.

High-tech, industrial mines run by global corporations like China Molybdenum employ thousands of people in Congo’s cobalt sector, and while they have their own problems, they are largely not responsible for the country’s tarnished reputation abroad.

Race to the Future

The Times is examining the global transition away from oil and the scramble for resources that will power the clean energy economy.

• Battery Recycling: Reusing lithium-ion batteries could lower costs for electrical cars in the future, but achieving that goal seems far away.

• Solving a Shortage: A lithium mine in northern Quebec may hold the key to bringing down the price of electric vehicles.

• Ocean Riches: Mining in the Pacific was meant to benefit poor countries, but a Canadian company was given access to sites with crucial metals.

• Tesla’s Ambitions: A mine in the South Pacific is a key testing ground for the electric vehicle maker’s ​​efforts to sustainably source minerals.

• Global Rivalries: The competition for cobalt, a key ingredient in electric cars, has set off a power struggle between China and the U.S. in Congo.

It’s a different story for the artisanal sector, where Mr. Yuma plans to focus the bulk of his stated reforms. Consisting of ordinary adults with no formal training, and sometimes even children, artisanal mining is mostly unregulated and often involves trespassers scavenging on land owned by the industrial mines. Along the main highway bisecting many of the mines, steady streams of diggers on motorbikes loaded down with bags of looted cobalt — each worth about $175 — dodge checkpoints by popping out of sunflower thickets.

Unable to find other jobs, thousands of parents send their children in search of cobalt. On a recent morning, a group of young boys were hunched over a road running through two industrial mines, collecting rocks that had dropped off large trucks.

Workers crushed cobalt-laden rocks to test their purity.

The work for other children is more dangerous — in makeshift mines where some have died after climbing dozens of feet into the earth through narrow tunnels that are prone to collapse.

Kasulo, where Mr. Yuma is showcasing his plans, illustrates the gold-rush-like fervor that can trigger the dangerous mining practices. The mine, authorized by Gécamines, is nothing more than a series of crude gashes the size of city blocks that have been carved into the earth.

Once a thriving rural village, Kasulo became a mining strip after a resident uncovered chunks of cobalt underneath a home. The discovery set off a frenzy, with hundreds of people digging up their yards.

Today, a mango tree and a few purple bougainvillea bushes, leftovers of residents’ gardens, are the only remnants of village life. Orange tarps tied down with frayed ropes block rainwater from flooding the hand-dug shafts where workers lower themselves and chip at the rock to extract chunks of cobalt.

Georges Punga is a regular at the mine. Now 41, Mr. Punga said he started working in diamond mines when he was 11. Ever since, he has traveled the country searching Congo’s unrivaled storehouse for treasures underfoot: first gold, then copper, and, for the past three years, cobalt.

Mr. Punga paused from his digging one afternoon and tugged his dusty blue trousers away from his sneakers. Scars crisscrossed his shins from years of injuries on the job. He earns less than $10 a day — just enough, he said, to support his family and keep his children in school instead of sending them to the mines.

“If I could find another job, I’d do it,” he said. “I’m tired of digging.”

What to Know About Mining in Congo

Dionne Searcey and Eric Lipton📍Reporting from Democratic Republic of Congo

Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

On most days, hundreds of men trudge into this mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo wearing plastic headlamps and hoisting shovels in search of treasure underground: cobalt.

Officials in Congo have begun taking corrective steps, including creating a subsidiary of Gécamines to try to curtail the haphazard methods used by the miners, improve safety and stop child labor, which is already illegal.

Under the plan, miners at sites like Kasulo will soon be issued hard hats and boots, tunneling will be forbidden and pit depths will be regulated to prevent collapses. Workers will also be paid more uniformly and electronically, rather than in cash, to prevent fraud.

As chairman of the board of directors, Mr. Yuma is at the center of these reforms. That leaves Western investors and mining companies that are already in Congo little choice but to work with him as the growing demand for cobalt makes the small-scale mines — which account for as much as 30 percent of the country’s output — all the more essential.

Once the cobalt is mined, a new agency will buy it from the miners and standardize pricing for diggers, ensuring the government can tax the sales. Mr. Yuma envisions a new fund to offer workers financial help if cobalt prices decline.

Right now, diggers often sell the cobalt at a mile-long stretch of tin shacks where the sound of sledgehammers smashing rocks drowns out all other noise. There, international traders crudely assess the metal’s purity before buying it, and miners complain of being cheated.

A buying house where diggers sell cobalt outside the city of Kolwezi.

Mr. Yuma led journalists from The Times on a tour of Kasulo and a nearby newly constructed warehouse and laboratory complex intended to replace the buying shacks.

“We are going through an economic transition, and cobalt is the key product,” said Mr. Yuma, who marched around the pristine but yet-to-be-occupied complex, showing it off like a proud father.

Seeking solutions for the artisanal mining problem is a better approach than simply turning away from Congo, argues the International Energy Agency, because that would create even more hardships for impoverished miners and their families.

But activists point out that Mr. Yuma’s plans, beyond spending money on new buildings, have yet to really get underway, or to substantially improve conditions for miners. And many senior government officials in both Congo and the United States question if Mr. Yuma is the right leader for the task — openly wondering if his efforts are mainly designed to enhance his reputation and further monetize the cobalt trade while doing little to curb the child labor and work hazards.

Millions Gone Missing

Workers crushed and packed cobalt into sacks at the Kasulo mine.

Bottles of Dom Pérignon were chilling on ice beside Mr. Yuma as he sat in his Gécamines office, where chunks of precious metals and minerals found in Congo’s soil were encased in glass. He downed an espresso before his interview with The Times, surrounded by contemporary Congolese art from his private collection. His lifestyle, on open display, was clear evidence, he said, that he need not scheme or steal to get ahead.

“I was 20 years old when I drove my first BMW in Belgium, so what are we talking about?” he said of allegations that he had pilfered money from the Congolese government.

Mr. Yuma is one of Congo’s richest businessmen. He secured a prime swath of riverside real estate in Kinshasa where his family set up a textile business that holds a contract to make the nation’s military uniforms. A perpetual flashy presence, he is known for his extravagance. People still talk about his daughter’s 2019 wedding, which had the aura of a Las Vegas show, with dancers wearing light-up costumes and large white giraffe statues as table centerpieces.

He has served on the board of Congo’s central bank and was re-elected this year as president of the country’s powerful trade association, the equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The huge mining agency where he is chairman was nationalized and renamed under President Mobutu Sese Seko after Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Gécamines once had a monopoly on copper and cobalt mining and, by the 1980s, was among the top copper producers in the world. Jobs there offered a good salary, health care and schooling for employees’ families.

But Mobutu, who ruled for 32 years, raided its funds to support himself and his cronies, a pattern followed by his successors, according to anti-corruption groups. By the 1990s, production from Gécamines had declined dramatically. Money wasn’t reinvested into operations, and the agency amassed debt of more than $1 billion. Eventually, half of its work force was laid off.

A Gécamines copper factory in Lubumbashi in 1977.

To survive, Gécamines was restructured, turning to joint ventures with private, mostly foreign, investors in which the agency had a minority stake.

Mr. Yuma took over in 2010, promising to return Gécamines to its former glory. But instead, according to anti-corruption groups, mining revenues soon disappeared. The Carter Center, a nonprofit, estimated that between 2011 and 2014 alone some $750 million vanished from Gécamines’ coffers, placing the blame in part on Mr. Yuma.

The winners of Gécamines’ partnership deals under Mr. Yuma included Dan Gertler, a billionaire diamond dealer from Israel. Mr. Gertler was later put under U.S. sanctions for “hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals,” according to the Treasury Department.

A confidential investigative report that was submitted to the State Department and Treasury and obtained by The Times accuses Mr. Yuma of nepotism, holding stakes in textile and food-importing businesses that got funding from a government agency he helped oversee, and steering work to a mining contractor in which he was alleged to have shares.

American authorities also believed that Mr. Yuma was using some of the mining-sector money to help prop up supporters of Joseph Kabila, the kleptocratic president of Congo for 18 years who had first put him in charge of Gécamines.

“Suspicious financial transactions appeared to coincide with the country’s electoral cycles,” said the State Department’s 2018 annual report on human rights in Congo, crediting the Carter Center for the research.

By his own tally, Mr. Yuma has been accused of cheating Congo out of some $8.8 billion, an amount he thinks is absurd, saying he has brought in billions of dollars in revenue to the country.

Mr. Yuma has launched a bombastic counterattack on watchdog groups and his critics, calling them “new colonialists.” He has claimed that they somehow conspired with mining companies to stymie his efforts to revamp the industry, which, in his assessment, has left “the Congolese population in a form of modern slavery.”

Mr. Yuma also sent The Times a 33-page document outlining his defense, noting the many “veritable smear campaigns that seek to sully his reputation and blur his major role in favor of the country through the reform of its mining policy.”

Washington Appeal

Mr. Yuma, now banned from the United States, has hired lobbyists to make his case in Washington.

The room was packed. Top White House and State Department officials, mining executives, Senate staffers and other Washington elites sat rapt one day in 2018 at the D.C. headquarters of a foreign policy group as the microphone was handed to the guest of honor: Mr. Yuma.

“We understand President Donald Trump’s desire to diversify and secure the U.S. supply chain,” he said, speaking to the Atlantic Council. “It would be of our best interests to consider partnerships with American companies to develop projects for the supply of these minerals.”

Accused at home of pillaging the country’s revenues, Mr. Yuma had taken his image-cleansing campaign abroad, seeking redemption by convincing Washington that he was a critical link to Congo’s minerals and metals.

Mr. Yuma’s team of lobbyists and lawyers included Joseph Szlavik, who had served in the White House under President George Bush, and Erich Ferrari, a prominent sanctions lawyer.

Lodging at the Four Seasons, he held meetings on two trips that spring with officials from the World Bank and the Departments of Defense, Energy and the Interior. He also traveled to New York, where he met with Donald Trump Jr.

There, he was accompanied by Gentry Beach, a Texas hedge fund manager who was a major campaign fund-raiser for the former president as well as a close friend and erstwhile business partner of the younger Mr. Trump. Mr. Beach has been trying to secure a mining deal in Congo, and was previously invested with Mr. Trump in a mining project there. He did not respond to requests for comment.

“Someone wanted to introduce me to say hello,” Mr. Yuma said, playing down the exchange with the president’s son.

Mr. Trump said he did not recall the meeting.

Through all the encounters, Mr. Yuma said, he recited the same message: American needed him, and he was ready to help.

In Washington, he even offered what he considered crucial intelligence about Russia’s efforts to acquire Congolese niobium, a shiny white metal that resists corrosion and can handle super-high temperatures like those found in fighter jet engines. Mr. Yuma said he had helped thwart the sale to benefit the United States, according to two American officials involved in the meeting.

Signs of trouble emerged during one of the trips. A member of his lobbying team was pulled aside by a State Department official and given a stark warning. Mr. Yuma was now a target of a corruption investigation by the United States, and he was about to be punished.

A few weeks later, in June 2018, the State Department formally prohibited him from returning to the United States.

“Today’s actions send a strong signal that the U.S. government is committed to fighting corruption,” the State Department said in a statement at the time that did not name Mr. Yuma, and instead said the actions involved “several senior” officials from Congo, which The Times confirmed included Mr. Yuma.

Mr. Yuma, center, visited the Kasulo artisanal mine. 

For Mr. Yuma, the action signaled that he needed even more muscle. He would hire Herman Cohen, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs under Mr. Bush, and George Denison, who had worked for President Gerald Ford.

A former Congolese airline and telephone executive named Joseph Gatt, who lives in Virginia and is close to Mr. Yuma, also took up his cause. Mr. Gatt stationed a personal aide at the Fairmont, a luxury hotel about a mile from the White House, who organized meetings with the lobbyists to push for permission for Mr. Yuma to visit the United States.

“He’s a very formidable person,” Mr. Gatt said of Mr. Yuma in an interview, insisting that the allegations against him were false and that he was “quite clean.”

At the same time, Mr. Yuma worked on elevating his standing in Congo. He hatched a plan with the exiting president, Mr. Kabila: Mr. Yuma would act as his proxy by becoming prime minister, State Department officials told The Times.

But a top American diplomat was sent to meet with Mr. Yuma at his home in Kinshasa to make clear that the United States strongly objected to the plan, according to an interview with the diplomat, J. Peter Pham. After pulling out a bottle of Cristal Champagne, Mr. Yuma talked with Mr. Pham about political events in Congo, but things soon turned sour.

Congo’s outgoing president, Joseph Kabila, left, at the inauguration of his successor, Felix Tshisekedi, center, in 2019.Credit...Hugh Kinsella Cunningham/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Pham, then a special envoy to the region, told Mr. Yuma that the Americans were prepared to deport two of his daughters, who were completing graduate degrees in the United States, if he pursued Mr. Kabila’s scheme.

“If we revoked your visa, we could revoke theirs,” Mr. Pham recalled telling Mr. Yuma.

Mr. Yuma was undeterred, and his team recruited an aide to Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, to deliver an invitation for Mr. Yuma to visit the United States and discuss his work in Congo. The invitation was even shared with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, though the State Department shut it down. “We saw it for what it was: an attempt to get around the visa ban,” Mr. Pham said.

Still determined to get his way, Mr. Yuma bolstered his collection of influencers. Mr. Denison briefly joined the Washington lobbying team with instructions to ensure that Mr. Yuma could travel to the United States and that he “not face legal sanctions,” a June 2020 email shows. The United States was considering putting Mr. Yuma on a sanctions list, according to State Department officials, a move that could freeze money he had in international banks.

But a $3 million contract between the men did not mention that assignment, instead saying that Mr. Denison was to “promote the attractiveness of the business climate” in Congo, according to a copy of the document.

Shortly after he started the work, Mr. Denison received $1.5 million, emails show, with instructions to transfer most of it to an account belonging to an associate of Mr. Yuma’s. The transaction drew scrutiny from the bank — and alarm bells went off for Mr. Denison, who said he was concerned that he might be unknowingly participating in a money-laundering scheme.

Mr. Denison hired a lawyer, quit the job and ultimately returned all the funds.

“He’s a huge crook,” Mr. Denison said.

Mr. Yuma did not respond to a question on the matter.

President Tshisekedi and Mr. Yuma walked near a large terraced canyon at one of Glencore’s cobalt mines in the Copperbelt, a region so defined by mining that roadside markets sell steel-toed boots and hard hats alongside fresh eggs and spears of okra.

The outing in May was awkward for these two political rivals.

Mr. Tshisekedi, a longtime opposition member who took office in early 2019 in a disputed election, has been fully embraced by the Biden administration, which sees him as an ally in battling global warming. He is chairman of the African Union and has repeatedly appeared with Mr. Biden at international events, including a meeting in Rome last month and then again a few days later in Glasgow at the global climate conference.

Back home, Mr. Tshisekedi has announced that he intends to make Congo “the world capital for strategic minerals.” But some Congolese and American officials think that in order for that to happen, Mr. Yuma needs to be ousted.

“We have continuously tried to apply pressure” to have Mr. Yuma removed, said one State Department official. Yet Mr. Yuma “retains considerable influence,” the official said, baffling the State Department.

Meanwhile, Mr. Yuma is carrying on as usual, trailed by an entourage of aides who address him as President Yuma, as he is known throughout much of Congo for his business leadership. It is also a nod to his power base and ambitions.

He talks of installing seven new floors and a helipad at his office building in downtown Kinshasa. He even had one of his lobbyists track down Mr. Tshisekedi in September in New York, during the United Nations General Assembly meeting, to press him to stand by Mr. Yuma.

In Congo, Mr. Yuma also embarked on a nationwide tour this year that looked a lot like a campaign for public office. He set out to visit every province, strategically making his first stop in Mr. Tshisekedi’s hometown, where he met with a group of struggling pineapple juice sellers.

Before leaving, he handed the group $5,000 in cash to jump-start their business.

“Just to show them that I’m supportive,” he explained in an interview.

Like the president, Mr. Yuma is hoping to get credit for attracting more U.S. investors, convinced that his reform efforts will turn the tide.

“I’m a friend of America,” he said in the interview. “I always work in good will to protect and to help the U.S. invest in D.R.C. And I told you, I love America. My children were at university there. One of these days, people will understand I’m a real good friend of America and I will continue to help.”

If his success depends on transforming the mining sector, the task will be formidable.

All day long on a main highway that runs through dozens of industrial mines, trucks groan with loads of copper and tubs of chemicals used to extract metals from ore.

But snaking between them is motorcycle after motorcycle, with one man driving and one sitting backward, acting as a lookout, atop huge bags of stolen cobalt.

Dionne Searcey reported from Kasulo, and Eric Lipton from Washington. Michael Forsythe contributed reporting from New York.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

A Power Struggle Over Cobalt Rattles the Clean Energy Revolution

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On the Banks of the Furious Congo River, a 5-Star Emporium of Ambition

Dec. 7, 2021

How Hunter Biden’s Firm Helped Secure Cobalt for the Chinese

Nov. 20, 2021

Race to the Future: What to Know About the Frantic Quest for Cobalt

Nov. 20, 2021

Congo Ousts Mining Leader in a Cloud of Corruption Claims

Dec. 3, 2021

Dionne Searcey is part of a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and author of the book, "In Pursuit of Disobedient Women."  @dionnesearcey • Facebook

Eric Lipton is a Washington-based investigative reporter. A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Washington Post and The Hartford Courant. @EricLiptonNYT

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 30, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Battling Over the ‘Blood Diamond of Batteries’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Lithium ion batteries 'number one' cause of fire-related deaths in Vancouver, officials say

Source: CTV News | by Lisa Steacy

Updated June 13, 2022 6:59 p.m. PDT | Published June 13, 2022 5:26 p.m. PDT

Fires caused by lithium ion batteries have claimed the lives of five people in Vancouver so far this year, according to officials.

The most recent death occurred Saturday after an explosion and fire that are believed to have been caused by an e-bike battery at the Empress Hotel, an SRO on the Downtown Eastside.

“(The victim) just happened to be sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time and he fell out the window due to the explosion," Asst. Chief Walter Pereira told CTV News.

"Either he lost his footing or was sent out the window due to the subsequent explosion.”

Members of Vancouver Fire Rescue Services held a news conference Monday to draw attention to what they called an "alarming upward trend" in fires – both fatal and not – caused by these batteries.

Capt. Matthew Trudeau said the number of fires caused by these batteries has jumped 500 per cent since 2016. Lithium ion batteries are used to power electronic scooters and bikes but also laptops and cellphones.

"We have seen a couple fires where overcharging has been one of the problems in these batteries," he explained.

"Depending on the type of lithium ion, we're seeing a thermal runaway effect that can be caused chemically inside them, which makes it extremely dangerous and hard to extinguish, where simply putting water on them is not effective means of extinguishing."

While overcharging is one of the hazards, Trudeau said "modifying" the batteries is also something they have seen as a contributing factor in these fires. Damaged cords and chargers also make a fire more likely, he added.

The danger, according to Trudeau, is not necessarily the type of battery or the device it is used for.

"It's really around the safe handling and care," he noted.

Chief Karen Fry provided details about the other four people who have been killed this year. She confirmed that a fire in January that killed three members of one family -- a child under 10 years old, their mother, and grandfather – was caused by one of these batteries. An apartment fire the following day in the city's West End was also started by a lithium ion battery.

She said the number of people who have died so far in 2022 due to these battery-caused fires is the same as the total number of deaths in the city in all of 2021. That, according to Fry, is one of the reasons the warning is being issued now.

"With where we're sitting right now, we're in big trouble, right? We need to educate. We need to protect and we need to save lives," she said.

"This is something that we're seeing more and more use in our community and something that we really need to pay attention to."

Fry also estimated that crews are called to a blaze caused by one of these batteries "every couple of days."

There have been seven fire-related fatalities in the city this year, the two that were not caused by battery-related blazes occurred when the Winters Hotel burned down in April. Those two bodies were not found until demolition of the building began, 11 days after flamed engulfed the building.

Safety tips for the use and storage of lithium ion batteries can be found online. 

In Eastern and Southern Africa, droughts threaten the power system

Every day, electricity is cut off for several hours in Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia due to low water levels from hydraulic dams.

Source LeMonde Afrique | By Marion Douet (Nairobi, correspondence), translated by Google

Posted on December 23, 2022 at 7:00 pm, updated on December 25, 2022 at 8:12 pm

On the borders of Zimbabwe and Zambia, a huge concrete arch has risen since the late 1950s over the turbulent waters of the Zambezi River. The Kariba Dam, with a total capacity of around 2,000 megawatts (MW), is still today one of the largest hydropower plants in Africa and alone provides 70% of the electricity consumed in Zimbabwe. . But it is currently dry: its gigantic reservoir is only 3% full due to repeated droughts.

“Having no other choice” , Harare has been carrying out massive power cuts since the beginning of December, up to nineteen hours a day, in a country already in the grip of a dizzying economic crisis. Residents of the capital told Agence France-Presse that they got up in the middle of the night to take advantage of the rare hours of electricity available and thus charge their telephones, or iron a shirt. On the other side of the river, Zambia, which also operates Kariba, has also announced load shedding.

Further north, in Tanzania, the low water level of the dams, coupled with maintenance problems, led the authorities to the same drastic decisions. "Right now, they cut the power between six and eight hours a day, sometimes twelve ," testifies Aviti Thadei Mushi, professor in the department of electrical engineering at the University of Dar es Salaam.

cheapest resource

The economic capital, rather preserved from “rationing” in normal times, is particularly affected, says the university, sometimes unable to give his lessons in amphitheaters deprived of current. “In homes, if the fridge has no electricity for eight hours, all that food goes in the trash. People complain a lot,” he adds . More broadly, the whole economy is affected. “Take the barber who runs a small salon down the street. Without electricity, he can't do anything ,” observes Mr. Mushi.

“Recent scientific studies have shown that the variability between extremely wet and dry years will increase across East Africa”

David Mwangi, a Kenyan expert who worked for the Power Africa electricity access program, points out that such cuts heavily affect industries. Admittedly, large factories are equipped with generators, but they are diesel-intensive. Their prolonged use is much more expensive than grid electricity and drives up production costs. “Smaller industries, which do not necessarily have generators, will have to stop production or reduce the number of hours worked,” he adds.

Many countries in Eastern and Southern Africa are very dependent on hydroelectricity, sometimes over 90% of the electricity mix, as in Ethiopia or Lesotho. We took advantage of large rivers and a rugged topography, in particular by the fault of the Rift, to bet on this constant and reliable energy. "Historically, it has been the cheapest energy resource, so very attractive to countries in the region ," adds Sebastian Sterl, an energy expert based in Addis Ababa for the World Resources Institute, a think tank working on the environment.

But global warming and its recurring drought episodes are destabilizing this system. "Several recent scientific studies have shown that the variability between extremely wet and extremely dry years will increase across East Africa" ​​, he continues, adding that this observation is for the moment less "clear" in other regions . African. The expert pleads for a diversification of energy sources, “in order to take over if hydro turns out to be unavailable”.

This is the case in Kenya, where hydropower now represents only around 30% of installed capacity, thanks in particular to the massive expansion of geothermal energy. Water levels there are currently low, but the economic locomotive of East Africa is not currently suffering from cuts linked to drought, the intensity of which has not yet been seen for forty years. “We have optimized the use of dams by reducing their use and increasing that of geothermal energy, so that Kenyans are not affected” , welcomes a spokesperson for the national electrician, KenGen. Even the few – and expensive – oil-fired power stations in the country remain little used for the moment, he assures us, which avoids increasing the electricity bill in a context of record inflation.

national pride

For Sebastian Sterl, the consequences of global warming do not necessarily sound the death knell for hydroelectricity in the region. First of all, some areas like Uganda or eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remain very humid. Elsewhere, dams are complementary to other energies, particularly renewable ones: thus, in Ethiopia, sunshine and the blowing of the wind are at their peak during the dry season, when the hydrology is at its lowest. And vice versa in the rainy season.

The country is also completing the Renaissance megadam, the largest in Africa, after years of Herculean work on the Blue Nile. The work, a national pride at the heart of strong tensions with its neighbors, Sudan and Egypt, must exceed 5,000 MW, the equivalent of at least five standard nuclear reactors. The filling of its huge reservoir, which has already begun, will take two to three years to reach its maximum, notes Mr. Sterl. "Depending on the rainfall," he says.

Marion Douet (Nairobi, correspondence)

Lithium-Ion Batteries in E-Bikes and Other Devices Pose Fire Risks

The batteries, also found in phones, laptops, toothbrushes and other items, have caused about 200 fires and six deaths in New York City this year, fire officials say. Here’s what to know about safety.

Source: New York Times | By April Rubin

Published Nov. 14, 2022Updated Nov. 15, 2022

A lithium-ion battery in an apartment with at least five e-bikes caused a fire in Manhattan this month that injured almost 40 people. The fire, which was one of 188 caused by lithium-ion batteries in New York City this year, led to warnings about risks associated with the batteries and ways to minimize them.

Lithium-ion batteries power devices in every corner of our lives, including phones, laptops, toothbrushes, power tools and electric vehicles. But many don’t know how to handle them safely or that they might start fires.

How do lithium-ion batteries work?

Lithium-ion batteries are rechargeable, last a long time and store a lot of energy in a small space. That has made them the most popular power source in electronic devices and vehicles, said Victoria Hutchison, a research project manager at the Fire Protection Research Foundation.

When a failing battery overheats, it can violently eject gas, projectiles and flames, then spread like a chain reaction to the other cells, she said.

Battery fires are quick and destructive.

Fires involving lithium-ion batteries have become more common in New York City: Six people died and 139 have been injured as a result of battery-caused fires so far this year, according to the New York Fire Department. Last year, the batteries were connected to fires that resulted in four deaths and 79 injuries, the department said.

The battery that caused a Nov. 5 fire was charging near the front door of an apartment, blocking its only exit and prompting firefighters to conduct a rope rescue of two occupants. And in August, a fire caused by a lithium-ion battery killed a mother and daughter in Harlem.

These fires can occur without warning and spread quickly, the chief fire marshal, Daniel E. Flynn, said at a Nov. 7 news conference.

“We have a fully formed fire within a matter of seconds,” he said.

Take these simple steps to reduce the risk of batteries failing.

One out of every 10 million lithium-ion batteries fails, a condition that almost always leads to a fire, Ms. Hutchison said. While that is a relatively low rate, the batteries are being used in more devices, including cheaper, uncertified batteries with greater risk, she said. Customers should always buy batteries and devices that have been certified by UL or another safety testing lab.

Fires have also been started because people have used chargers incompatible with a battery, she said. They should only use the charging cables recommended by a manufacturer, she said. An incompatible one might continue to charge the battery to the point of overheating.

“Once it reaches its thermal threshold, it’s a pretty violent reaction,” Ms. Hutchison said.

Lithium-ion batteries show signs that they need to be replaced if they get hot, expand or take longer than usual to charge, Ms. Hutchison said. Immediately before failure, a battery will make a popping noise and then a hiss in which gas is released. Experts recommend storing them in fireproof containers.

Even a battery that complies with safety guidelines when it’s first purchased can become dangerous if it’s damaged, said William S. Lerner, a hydrogen expert and delegate for ISO, an organization for global standardization.

“These batteries can be of the highest quality, but if they are injured and dropped and severely beaten up, then the potential to fail is greater,” he said.

It’s a widespread problem but not well-regulated.

No large-scale database keeps track of battery-caused fires, Mr. Lerner said. But the fires have occurred around the world.

The popularity of e-bikes in New York City grew during the pandemic as people looked for alternatives to public transportation and ride-sharing services, Mr. Lerner said. But their use increased before the government could put guidelines in place.

The New York City Housing Authority had proposed a ban on storing e-bikes in buildings but faced pushback from people like food couriers whose jobs depend on them. The authority said it is still working on steps for a proposed new rule.

The issue remains top of mind for housing managers. A sign outside the Manhattan apartment complex where the fire this month occurred read, “No pedal or e-bikes allowed beyond this point.”

The City Council is considering several battery safety measures and held a hearing Monday night. Laws that would ban sales of noncertified batteries and require educating people about the risks of powered mobility devices are among the measures being considered.

Leny Feliu, a founder of Safer Charging, said her brother is a delivery person. “He makes his money that way and I want him to continue to make his money, but we need to provide a safe way of charging these items,” she said.

The property management companies Douglas Elliman and AKAM, which oversee about 700 apartment complexes in New York City, have begun to communicate with residents and managers about lithium-ion battery safety.

“We want to be proactive, not reactive,” said Chris Alker, the vice president of operations for AKAM. “We don’t want to wait for a fire in order to address situations like these.”

Proper care and recycling are crucial.

After the batteries have exhausted their life spans, which can vary, the next step is safe disposal — not throwing them in household trash, which is illegal in some states, including New York. Some companies like Home Depot and Best Buy accept used lithium-ion batteries. Some states require retailers to accept customers’ rechargeable batteries for recycling. Consumers can also contact battery manufacturers for disposal options.

Call2Recycle works with 52 brands and 75 bike shops to repurpose the batteries’ metal components, said Leo Raudys, the group’s chief executive. Since starting to accept lithium-ion batteries in March, it’s received 18,000 pounds of them.

“These batteries are phenomenal, and when people follow best practices and make good batteries, they’re safe, they’re reliable,” he said, adding, “The problem is we’re seeing bad actors out there that are marketing and selling batteries that are unsafe or not certified.”

The Lithium Gold Rush: Inside the Race to Power Electric Vehicles

A race is on to produce lithium in the United States, but competing projects are taking very different approaches to extracting the vital raw material. Some might not be very green.

The Salton Sea is one of numerous new mining proposals in a global gold rush to find new sources of metals and minerals needed for electric cars and renewable energy.

Source: New York Times | By Ivan Penn and Eric Lipton

• May 6, 2021

Atop a long-dormant volcano in northern Nevada, workers are preparing to start blasting and digging out a giant pit that will serve as the first new large-scale lithium mine in the United States in more than a decade — a new domestic supply of an essential ingredient in electric car batteries and renewable energy.

The mine, constructed on leased federal lands, could help address the near total reliance by the United States on foreign sources of lithium.

But the project, known as Lithium Americas, has drawn protests from members of a Native American tribe, ranchers and environmental groups because it is expected to use billions of gallons of precious ground water, potentially contaminating some of it for 300 years, while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.

“Blowing up a mountain isn’t green, no matter how much marketing spin people put on it,” said Max Wilbert, who has been living in a tent on the proposed mine site while two lawsuits seeking to block the project wend their way through federal courts.

The fight over the Nevada mine is emblematic of a fundamental tension surfacing around the world: Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.

That environmental toll has often been overlooked in part because there is a race underway among the United States, China, Europe and other major powers. Echoing past contests and wars over gold and oil, governments are fighting for supremacy over minerals that could help countries achieve economic and technological dominance for decades to come.

Developers and lawmakers see this Nevada project, given final approval in the last days of the Trump administration, as part of the opportunity for the United States to become a leader in producing some of these raw materials as President Biden moves aggressively to fight climate change. In addition to Nevada, businesses have proposed lithium production sites in California, Oregon, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina.

But traditional mining is one of the dirtiest businesses out there. That reality is not lost on automakers and renewable-energy businesses.

“Our new clean-energy demands could be creating greater harm, even though its intention is to do good,” said Aimee Boulanger, executive director for the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a group that vets mines for companies like BMW and Ford Motor. “We can’t allow that to happen.”

This friction helps explain why a contest of sorts has emerged in recent months across the United States about how best to extract and produce the large amounts of lithium in ways that are much less destructive than how mining has been done for decades.

Just in the first three months of 2021, U.S. lithium miners like those in Nevada raised nearly $3.5 billion from Wall Street — seven times the amount raised in the prior 36 months, according to data assembled by Bloomberg, and a hint of the frenzy underway.

Some of those investors are backing alternatives including a plan to extract lithium from briny water beneath California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea, about 600 miles south of the Lithium Americas site.

At the Salton Sea, investors plan to use specially coated beads to extract lithium salt from the hot liquid pumped up from an aquifer more than 4,000 feet below the surface. The self-contained systems will be connected to geothermal power plants generating emission-free electricity. And in the process, they hope to generate the revenue needed to restore the lake, which has been fouled by toxic runoff from area farms for decades.

Businesses are also hoping to extract lithium from brine in Arkansas, Nevada, North Dakota and at least one more location in the United States.

The Rise of Electric Vehicles

The United States needs to quickly find new supplies of lithium as automakers ramp up manufacturing of electric vehicles. Lithium is used in electric car batteries because it is lightweight, can store lots of energy and can be repeatedly recharged. Analysts estimate that lithium demand is going to increase tenfold before the end of this decade as Tesla, Volkswagen, General Motors and other automakers introduce dozens of electric models. Other ingredients like cobalt are needed to keep the battery stable.

Even though the United States has some of the world’s largest reserves, the country today has only one large-scale lithium mine, Silver Peak in Nevada, which first opened in the 1960s and is producing just 5,000 tons a year — less than 2 percent of the world’s annual supply. Most of the raw lithium used domestically comes from Latin America or Australia, and most of it is processed and turned into battery cells in China and other Asian countries.

“China just put out its next five-year plan,” Mr. Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, said in a recent interview. “They want to be the go-to place for the guts of the batteries, yet we have these minerals in the United States. We have not taken advantage of them, to mine them.”

In March, she announced grants to increase production of crucial minerals. “This is a race to the future that America is going to win,” she said.

So far, the Biden administration has not moved to help push more environmentally friendly options — like lithium brine extraction, instead of open pit mines. The Interior Department declined to say whether it would shift its stand on the Lithium Americas permit, which it is defending in court.

Mining companies and related businesses want to accelerate domestic production of lithium and are pressing the administration and key lawmakers to insert a $10 billion grant program into Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill, arguing that it is a matter of national security.

“Right now, if China decided to cut off the U.S. for a variety of reasons we’re in trouble,” said Ben Steinberg, an Obama administration official turned lobbyist. He was hired in January by ​Piedmont Lithium, which is working to build an open-pit mine in North Carolina and is one of several companies that have created a trade association for the industry.

Investors are rushing to get permits for new mines and begin production to secure contracts with battery companies and automakers.

Ultimately, federal and state officials will decide which of the two methods — traditional mining or brine extraction — is approved. Both could take hold. Much will depend on how successful environmentalists, tribes and local groups are in blocking projects.

A few miles from Edward Bartell’s ranch, work could soon begin on Lithium Americas’ open pit mine.

On a hillside, Edward Bartell or his ranch employees are out early every morning making sure that the nearly 500 cows and calves that roam his 50,000 acres in Nevada’s high desert have enough feed. It has been a routine for generations, but the family has never before faced a threat quite like this.

A few miles from his ranch, work could soon start on Lithium Americas’ open pit mine that will represent one of the largest lithium production sites in U.S. history, complete with a helicopter landing pad, a chemical processing plant and waste dumps. The mine will reach a depth of about 370 feet.

Mr. Bartell’s biggest fear is that the mine will consume the water that keeps his cattle alive. The company has said the mine will consume 3,224 gallons per minute. That could cause the water table to drop on land Mr. Bartell owns by an estimated 12 feet, according to a Lithium Americas consultant.

While producing 66,000 tons a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate, the mine may cause groundwater contamination with metals including antimony and arsenic, according to federal documents.

The lithium will be extracted by mixing clay dug out from the mountainside with as much as 5,800 tons a day of sulfuric acid. This whole process will also create 354 million cubic yards of mining waste that will be loaded with discharge from the sulfuric acid treatment, and may contain modestly radioactive uranium, permit documents disclose.

A December assessment by the Interior Department found that over its 41-year life, the mine would degrade nearly 5,000 acres of winter range used by pronghorn antelope and hurt the habitat of the sage grouse. It would probably also destroy a nesting area for a pair of golden eagles whose feathers are vital to the local tribe’s religious ceremonies.

“It is real frustrating that it is being pitched as an environmentally friendly project, when it is really a huge industrial site,” said Mr. Bartell, who filed a lawsuit to try to block the mine.

At the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, anger over the project has boiled over, even causing some fights between members as Lithium Americas has offered to hire tribal members in jobs that will pay an average annual wage of $62,675 — twice the county’s per capita income — but that will come with a big trade-off.

“Tell me, what water am I going to drink for 300 years?” Deland Hinkey, a member of the tribe, yelled as a federal official arrived at the reservation in March to brief tribal leaders on the mining plan. “Anybody, answer my question. After you contaminate my water, what I am going to drink for 300 years? You are lying!”

The reservation is nearly 50 miles from the mine site — and far beyond the area where groundwater may be contaminated — but tribe members fear the pollution could spread.

Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York Times

A member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, left, confronted Tildon Smart, a member of the tribe’s council, about meeting privately with the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management.

A Bureau of Indian Affairs officer escorted tribal members away from the community center after they tried to deliver a petition protesting the meeting.

Tribe members protested outside of the land management offices before beginning a prayer run to Thacker Pass, the site where the lithium mine would operate.

The tribe organized the 273-mile prayer run to raise awareness about the mine.

The prayer run traversed much of the state, culminating near the proposed mine site, which sits in an area historically controlled by the tribe before it was taken by the United States in 1863.

“It is really a David versus Goliath kind of a situation,” said Maxine Redstar, the leader of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, noting that there was limited consultation with the tribe before the Interior Department approved the project. “The mining companies are just major corporations.”

Tim Crowley, a vice president at Lithium Americas, said the company would operate responsibly — planning, for example, to use the steam from burning molten sulfur to generate the electricity it needs.

“We’re answering President Biden’s call to secure America’s supply chains and tackle the climate crisis,” Mr. Crowley said.

A spokesman noted that area ranchers also used a lot of water and that the company had purchased its allocation from another farmer to limit the increase in water use.

The company has moved aggressively to secure permits, hiring a lobbying team that includes a former Trump White House aide, Jonathan Slemrod.

Lithium Americas, which estimates there is $3.9 billion worth of recoverable lithium at the site, hopes to start mining operations next year. Its largest shareholder is the Chinese company Ganfeng Lithium.

“This is the most sustainable lithium in the world, made in America,” Rod Colwell, the chief executive of Controlled Thermal Resources, said. “Who would have thought it? We’ve got this massive opportunity.”

The desert sands surrounding the Salton Sea have drawn worldwide notice before. They have served as a location for Hollywood productions like the “Star Wars” franchise.

Created by flooding from the Colorado River more than a century ago, the lake once thrived. Frank Sinatra performed at its resorts. Over the years, drought and poor management turned it into a source of pollutants.

But a new wave of investors is promoting the lake as one of the most promising and environmentally friendly lithium prospects in the United States.

Lithium extraction from brine has long been used in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, where the sun is used over nearly two years to evaporate water from sprawling ponds. It is relatively inexpensive, but it uses lots of water in arid areas.

The approach planned at the Salton Sea is radically different from the one traditionally used in South America.

The lake sits atop the Salton Buttes, which, as in Nevada, are underground volcanoes.

For years, a company owned by Berkshire Hathaway, CalEnergy, and another business, Energy Source, have tapped the Buttes’ geothermal heat to produce electricity. The systems use naturally occurring underground steam. This same water is loaded with lithium.

Now, Berkshire Hathaway and two other companies — Controlled Thermal Resources and Materials Research — want to install equipment that will extract lithium after the water passes through the geothermal plants, in a process that will take only about two hours.

Rod Colwell, a burly Australian, has spent much of the last decade pitching investors and lawmakers on putting the brine to use. In February, a backhoe plowed dirt on a 7,000-acre site being developed by his company, Controlled Thermal Resources.

“This is the sweet spot,” Mr. Colwell said. “This is the most sustainable lithium in the world, made in America. Who would have thought it? We’ve got this massive opportunity.”

Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York Times

Companies are hoping to extract lithium from the briny water deep beneath the Salton Sea’s surface.

It is being promoted as one of the most promising and environmentally friendly lithium prospects in the United States.

Several companies are confident that they have the technology worked out and are ready to transform the way lithium is produced.

A Berkshire Hathaway executive told state officials recently that the company expected to complete its demonstration plant for lithium extraction by April 2022.

The backers of the Salton Sea lithium projects are also working with local groups and hope to offer good jobs in an area that has an unemployment rate of nearly 16 percent.

“Our region is very rich in natural resources and mineral resources,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, which represents area farm workers. “However, they’re very poorly distributed. The population has not been afforded a seat at the table.”

The state has given millions in grants to lithium extraction companies, and the Legislature is considering requiring carmakers by 2035 to use California sources for some of the lithium in vehicles they sell in the state, the country’s largest electric-car market.

But even these projects have raised some questions.

Geothermal plants produce energy without emissions, but they can require tens of billions of gallons of water annually for cooling. And lithium extraction from brine dredges up minerals like iron and salt that need to be removed before the brine is injected back into the ground.

Similar extraction efforts at the Salton Sea have previously failed. In 2000, CalEnergy proposed spending $200 million to extract zinc and to help restore the Salton Sea. The company gave up on the effort in 2004.

But several companies working on the direct lithium extraction technique — including Lilac Solutions, based in California, and Standard Lithium of Vancouver, British Columbia — are confident they have mastered the technology.

Both companies have opened demonstration projects using the brine extraction technology, with Standard Lithium tapping into a brine source already being extracted from the ground by an Arkansas chemical plant, meaning it did not need to take additional water from the ground.

“This green aspect is incredibly important,” said Robert Mintak, chief executive of Standard Lithium, who hopes the company will produce 21,000 tons a year of lithium in Arkansas within five years if it can raise $440 million in financing. “The Fred Flintstone approach is not the solution to the lithium challenge.”

Lilac Solutions, whose clients include Controlled Thermal Resources, is also working on direct lithium extraction in Nevada, North Dakota and at least one other U.S. location that it would not disclose. The company predicts that within five years, these projects could produce about 100,000 tons of lithium annually, or 20 times current domestic production.

Executives from companies like Lithium Americas question if these more innovative approaches can deliver all the lithium the world needs.

But automakers are keen to pursue approaches that have a much smaller impact on the environment.

“Indigenous tribes being pushed out or their water being poisoned or any of those types of issues, we just don’t want to be party to that,” said Sue Slaughter, Ford’s purchasing director for supply chain sustainability. “We really want to force the industries that we’re buying materials from to make sure that they’re doing it in a responsible way. As an industry, we are going to be buying so much of these materials that we do have significant power to leverage that situation very strongly. And we intend to do that.”

Gabriella Angotti-Jones contributed reporting.

Ivan Penn is a Los Angeles-based reporter covering alternative energy. Before coming to The Times in 2018 he covered utility and energy issues at The Tampa Bay Times and The Los Angeles Times. @ivanlpenn

Eric Lipton is a Washington-based investigative reporter. A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Washington Post and The Hartford Courant. @EricLiptonNYT

A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Dispute Exposes Dirty Secret About Green Cars. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe