‘double, or even triple amount of effort’
i
Tschirnhaus watches.
Böttger runs away, is caught and brought back. He swears eternal fidelity to the king. He lies. He promises gold by this time next month, by Whitsun, ‘by next Peter and Paul Day a sum of 300,000 thalers’.
He is given chances and rooms near to the Goldhaus that open on to the Zwinger gardens. He is given assistants, books, materials, wine. Böttger receives 4,000 ducats from the king, and four days later another 2,800. He is allowed to play billiards and pray in the chapel and to dine with others. ‘Herr von Tschirnhaus would join us.’ He runs away again. He blames ‘bad people’ who have tricked him, lied to him.
Tschirnhaus sees a boy who has no experience and who lurches from idea to idea, who has no real sense of empirical method beyond that of an apothecary’s apprentice taught to compound pills for gout, lotions for bee stings. He sees arrogance. Dear God, Böttger is arrogant. I’m lucky, Böttger says to the other workers in the Goldhaus, I’m an orphan, he tells people. I’m not from around here. I have gifts. I know people. He is cool in responses. He blusters. He needs attention. He is solitary. Alchemy is donum Dei, a gift of God. It means he is elect.
It is frustrating to have this storied youth in the workshops, hear the swell and slap of excitement that follows in his wake, but Tschirnhaus is pragmatic. He has spent twenty years watching work in glass workshops and factories for faience, seen grinders of lenses, men building bridges, compounders and refiners and assayers. He is a mathematician and can see how patterns unfold, how you need time to follow an idea through all its possible permutations. And he senses another kind of quickness in Böttger, sees the runnels that allow his ideas to go there, or there, or there, separate and join up like quicksilver in a dish. The boy is intuitive with materials. He can cut corners.
Tschirnhaus explains his idea.
Tschirnhaus’s own trials go on and on, testing and compounding for porcelain. It must be hard, returning day after day to your tests, opening a kiln, opening a crucible to find another sintered, coagulated expensive morass of minerals, another good idea turned to a stony mess. He works very hard. He works those around him very hard: ‘Kohler and I had to stand nearly every day by the large burning glass to test the minerals. There I ruined my eyes, so that I now can perceive very little at a distance’, wrote one of his assistants of these years. Böttger works on other experiments – how to make silver from non-precious ores – alongside his goldmaking. And Tschirnhaus draws Böttger closer into the porcelain tests.
There are oaths sworn on both sides. And then more oaths. ‘I, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, hereby swear and promise that all of what Herr Johann Friedrich Böttger passes on to me for His Royal Majesty, I won’t reveal to anyone, and I will keep silent until my grave about all information I receive on the Arcanum.’ More documents are raised, considered, copied and signed and sealed. There is a series of guidelines for how the gold would be distributed from the Arcanum. Money is to go to miners and their widows and towards a Saxon Academy of science.
I realise that they are all scared about money. Each of them feels poor. They have every right to feel worried too, as money isn’t simple at court. I had imagined that the court functioned with the king paying wages or salaries, but it is more fragile than that, a series of binding ad hoc agreements, throwaway remarks and whimsy backed up by threat. There are ventures that Augustus invests in and ones he owns, but it is not clear how he regards protocols or documents. Sometimes bills pile up, tradesmen complain, courtiers are left with debts for wages, equipment, entertainments. It is possible to make things in the hope that Augustus will buy them, and then wait years to be paid. Augustus doesn’t clear the payment to the jeweller Dinglinger for a particularly sumptuous coffee pot for fifteen years. He is capricious. This means that sometimes money flows, and sometimes not. Huge sums beget huge expectations.
Tschirnhaus has spent a decade in pursuit of porcelain. He could throw it all over and just go home, but he needs to finish his idea, draw the curves into perfect tension, make a conclusion.
Augustus has had to pawn his jewels to fund the civil war in Poland.
Böttger is in chronic debt against the moment Zeus will spill gold in showers and ravish him like Danae.
ii
On 5 March 1705, exhilarated, Böttger sits down and writes to the king. ‘I can happily recognise that we expect within eight days to have the sum of two tons of gold if God gives us luck.’ This is the colossal sum of 2 million thalers, enough to win the war, conquer Sweden, build a palace for the latest mistress and the one after that.
And again there is no gold. Augustus has tried fear and he has tried collegiate empathy. His patience is at an end. Böttger has ‘used three times the amount of time he initially asked for and has now revealed that despite all his studiousness, the processes haven’t worked’.
The king is returning to Poland. Böttger is to be brought, under guard, the fifteen miles from Dresden to a ‘secret laboratory’ at Albrechtsburg Castle in Meissen, 300 feet above the Elbe.
iii
Meissen is hell.
Hell means fire, of course, and that means the heat that makes you faint, knocks you at the back of your knees, fells you mid-sentence. But it is fumes that define hell. Before you are aware of the roar of the furnaces, the smells, the light and the dark, you get the fumes. The ‘secret laboratory’ is partly below ground, but the windows are almost completely bricked up to prevent onlookers, so that the ventilation is terrible. There are twenty-four kilns of different sizes, ‘running night and day’, and the fumes are appalling. ‘In summertime’, writes Böttger, ‘there is a cruel heat day and night.’ It is terrible ‘to eat, sleep and work in the same room … alongside the unbearable fumes from the coal and other unpleasant substances’. Some are noxious and they disorientate you, your eyes lose focus, you cannot feel your hands and you are nauseous. If you burn coal in a room like this, carbon monoxide creeps unknowingly into your lungs.
Albrechtsburg Castle, Meissen, 1891
The light is livid.
There are too many men for these spaces. Five Berg und Hüttenleuten, miners and smelting workers, are sent from Freiburg to help Böttger with the hard work of mixing and grinding materials and firing the furnaces, there’s a specialist in building and repairing them, and there’s someone who keeps the notes. In these confined rooms, with guards outside the doors and more guards outside the castle, they are to work on the ‘secret task’. Every visitor is recorded.
They are few. Tschirnhaus comes and Pabst von Ohain, but otherwise there is no one to release the pressure. Which increases week by week. There is an order from the king on 13 April 1706 that ‘all possible studiousness should be applied to speed up the works … it should be done with double, or even triple amount of effort’. Tschirnhaus replies on the workshop’s behalf, that they are at risk of danger to their health. How can they make more effort?
They are buried. They can hardly breathe. Sleep has disappeared. They are penned like animals in a peasant’s barn. They are in a castle high up above the Elbe with wooded hills unfolding softly in all directions and there is no air.
And Böttger spirals back into his manic behaviour.
He knows he is on the cusp of something. He is recording what happens when he mixes X with Y, Y with Z, and there are piles of rubble as Böttger orders kilns to be pulled down and rebuilt with different sized and shaped chambers for burning wood and coal. He is searching for ‘the inner nature of the fire’.
He writes to the king and his words are scattered, his sentences ending everywhere:
With huge joy and burning desire, I would like to have reported to His Majesty the lucky result of my work … with even bigger desperation and consternation of my mind, I have now to experience … that all the effort and hard work, which was connected to the aim of the life, was without result … I see disappearing all desire to live any longer.
Böttger wears no shoes. He worries those around him. He talks about Daniel and the lions’ den, St Paul, Job punished by Jehovah. His speech is rapid, slow, nowhere.
iv
Between 27 and 29 May 1706, Tschirnhaus and Pabst are at the castle for a kiln opening.
The kiln door is unbricked and the tests drawn and it is clear, immediately, that one test is different. This has been made from a combination of red clay and quartz. It is a simple vessel, a crucible for gold making, and it is unusually hard. It is also intact, it hasn’t cracked in the firing, and it hasn’t cracked when it was plunged into the bucket of cold water at the fire-mouth. It is dense, a red-brown, closer in feel to a stone picked up from a riverbed than to terracotta; stroke it with your fingers and it is cool.
It is also beautiful. Startlingly beautiful.
Because materials are queries – can we make glass, grind alabaster to dust and re-form it, create porcelain, melt and fuse gem stones – they need scrutiny. Tschirnhaus and Böttger look at each other. This test is a material that makes you think of cornelians, of alabaster, but it has the most kinship with the Chinese red pottery that the king has bought at great expense from his agents in Amsterdam. These wares don’t feel like clay objects so much as carved sculpture, they are unglazed with finely worked surfaces with relief decoration or engraving of adamantine precision. A tiger sits, bored, on the cover of a teapot. A vine trails languidly round and over becoming a handle for another, there are leaves and tendrils and grapes covering the vessel.
If this test is what it appears to be, this is possibly a new kind of material, a red Barcelin, porcelain. And if this mixture works with red clay there is the surmise that it could also work with white.
Tschirnhaus and Böttger call this new material, with some tenderness, jasper-porcelain, Jaspis-porzellan, ‘since it surely merited the name of a precious stone, one manufactured through art’.
It is not gold and it is not white gold but after years of grey and ashen vessels that need explication it is something extraordinary to show the king. He loves it.
v
And I love this jasper-porcelain, too. It is known and written about, but it should be loved. It has a strange quality of newness to it, even after 300 years.
This fine-grained clay is used for objects, bowls and jars of unimpeachable austerity, as clean as any Bauhaus vessel. It is perfect both for engraving and for casting, perfect for medals. And what doesn’t need commemoration in this busy kingdom? A return from war, a victory, some marriage.
These vessels leave the castle at Meissen for the workshops of the lapidarists, jewellers, decorators and gilders to be turned into objects that are perfect and rare, rich and strange. This red coffee pot has tendrils of painted foliage with a garnet gleaming in the centre of each flower. Vases and hexagonal tea caddies take oriental-style shapes and clothe them in a thick black glaze as slow as treacle. Some of these black wares are decorated to look like lacquer, each plane of a teapot carefully delineated with gold lines like braiding, the spout ending in a gilded griffon’s beak. Some are copied from Japanese models, plum blossom, girls with parasols, a scholar at his desk become a little more Saxon, a little heavier.
And they are wrong, in the way that footballers’ tattoos misquote a bit of Sanskrit, or a line of the Talmud entwined in roses on a bicep gets it wrong. But I’m serious is the message.
These red porcelains are the best new thing for only a handful of years. And then they get shelved, put higher and higher up in the Meissen warehouse. They are counted every year for stocktaking, each year a little dustier. Ten years after they open their kiln there are still 2,000 pieces left in Meissen, 1,000 in Dresden, thirty-six in Leipzig, all waiting for some margrave up from the country who has missed the fashion and wants to buy these beautiful, red-black-brown, new and gorgeous wares.
vi
There is a porcelain plaque celebrating the achievements of Böttger on the ramparts overlooking the Elbe, put up sometime in the 1950s. Early one morning I go off to see him, talk it through man to man. The memorial is stranded amongst some municipal planting. It is an arctic day, the wind whipping off the river, so I nod to him and keep going. A ginkgo has shed its leaves so gold drifts round the foot of the monument.
I find a café as near to it as I can and sit with my notebook, order coffee.
My coffee consumption is rising again. My kids monitor me. If I am snappy around clearing the table after supper, they ask me how much I’ve had. I’m now on lots. They ask for details. And I realise that I don’t count pots of cafetière coffee carried up to my desk in the studio, only espresso. When I started my journey I didn’t think that the flat white existed. I think of them as chasers.
By this point, feeling assailed by archivists and my need to check lists of inventory numbers of when porcelain entered the collections of Augustus the Strong, I realise that I am just coffee. My sentences are shorter by the day.
You want the details of who worked in Meissen, an experiment in the Goldhaus? The records are here in Dresden: lists and inventories, letter books, accounts, memoranda and edicts, the scraps on torn bits of paper next to the perfectly scripted. There are ‘secret files’ on Böttger archived here, but does that mean there are secret secret files that I am not allowed to see in these archives?
How can there have been so many documents from these weeks, 300 years ago? Reading Stasiland, Anna Funder’s exploration of the culture of informing and information in the GDR, it is striking how fear drives the compulsion to keep records. If you know that everyone around you is recording what you have said, who you said it to, then self-protection lies in the completeness of your notes, the reach for a pen as automatic as the tapping of a cigarette from a packet, lighting it, inhaling.
I assume this is how the court at Dresden works, the dispersed anxiety of Count Y briefing against Baron X who has the ear of Prince Z. But then I slowly realise that all this note taking is because the Arcanum is mythic, part of history, a kind of proximity to Events that no one could have anticipated. Were you there when the lame walked, the fig tree died, when mercury turned to gold, porcelain was created?
I order an Americano to follow my espresso macchiato and look at these beautiful black-brown hues of coffee with affection, raise my cup in the direction of Meissen and their dense and dark jasper-porcelain. My hand shakes, just a little.