My dear Sir

Your heartily sympathising interest concerning my well-being is of much greater importance to me than all my pretended misfortune. The case alluded to by Mr. Dodel is as follows:¹

In this moment the party of bigot obscurants is favoured by our emperor and tries every possible experiment in order to remove our liberal minister of schools Dr. Falk, which, indeed, under these circumstances, occupies a somewhat balancing position. Now some weeks ago this party in our “Abgeordnetenhaus” had chosen my person as a mark of attacks against the Minister.² Sheltered by their privilege as representants some members of this party covered me during three sessions with outrageous accusations, as having teached to my scholars blasphemies, atheism, nihilism, socialism etc; the only fact they could lean upon being that I had read (two years ago) to my scholars some passage out of Carus Sterne’s work “Werden und Vergehen”, in which the words are met with: “Im Anfang war der Kohlenstoff”. Without respecting the connexion of the text, these words by my bigot aggressors were taken as a derision of the words of the evangely “Im Anfang war das Wort” and hence all the above accusations were deduced. The commissioner of the government on the one side praised myself as an excellent teacher, but on the other side defended myself against the attacks of the obscurants only in a very undecided manner. At last, in the third session one of the liberal members of the “Abgeordnetenhaus” having procured to himself the work of Carus Sterne, read the text hitherto unknown and nevertheless so much discussed about, and now suddenly it became evident that the words “Im Anfang war der Kohlenstoff” in their connexion were quite harmless ones.³ Thus the bigot obscurants had obtained no other effect than discredited themselves, and it was solely by the undecided behaviour of the government that some shadow of suspicion about the correctness of my teaching perhaps remained. But Carus Sterne (Dr. Ernst Krause, redacteur of the Kosmos), whose work had also been utterly calomniated, in order to be able of calomniating myself, has published two articles in one of our greater Journals in which he excellently defends his book and my person too. (I send you his articles.) I myself am just now about writing a justification of my method of teaching.⁴

With most hearty thanks for your friendly letter | yours | very sincerely | H Müller.