ABSTRACT
When the boys from the four Württemberg ’Klosterschulen’ went on to the final stage of their training for Holy Orders in the ‘Stift’ (Seminary) at Tübingen, they can have had little of that sense of emancipation enjoyed by the average undergraduate. It is true that by the time Mörike matriculated in November 1822, the ‘Stiftler’ had been absolved from wearing the original monkish dress of the institution, though they were still condemned to decent black and to wearing a top hat for church on Sundays. Mörike and his friend, Mährlen, possessed only one of these badges of respectability between them, and got out of the difficulty by arranging that the young man who had first walked solemnly into church should quickly hand the hat through a window to his waiting friend. It was only in Mörike’s last year at Tübingen that drinking at inns was officially recognized, though, as he and his friends had always had their ‘Stammtisch’ at the tavern favoured by the students and seemed on the best of terms with the host of the Lamm, Tübingen’s leading inn, it seems as if authority must have turned a blind eye to these goings-on even before the seal of official approval had been set on them. There were, however, a host of petty regulations, the breach of which brought down on Mörike countless admonitions and deprivation of wine at dinner, as well as banishing him frequently to the ‘Karzer’ (student prison). A reprimand for such peccadilloes as ‘ob fumum in publico loco haustum’ did not trouble him unduly; he always kept his sense of proportion, though sometimes expressing his antipathy for the Stift. All petty tyrannies were, however, forgotten when the friends spent an uproarious evening over beer and tobacco, or in an impromptu concert of songs from Figaro. These grown-up young men even had to show a note from parents or guardians before they could get leave of absence. An amusing sidelight is cast on the ways and means used for a temporary escape from their bondage in a letter written by Mörike to his mother in December 1823. He asks her for a letter he can show to the Ephorus (the Principal of the Stift), inviting him to Stuttgart on some such pretext as that of having his clothing renewed and repaired: ‘The more incorrectly you write, the more genuine, natural and touching he will think it. That’s the normal thing with all the mothers, whose manuscripts (genuine, or forged!) are shown to the Ephorus.’ On another occasion Eduard complimented his mother on her epistolary skill, so we can assume that she was to affect illiteracy merely to soften the heart of the Ephorus.
