Background
His father, Count Louis-Marie de Chamisso de Boncourt, was descended from established minor nobility with traditions of loyal military service to the crown; his mother, born Marie Anne Gargam, from wealthy bourgeois.
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(Dies ist die Geschichte von Peter Schlemihl, der im Garte...)
Dies ist die Geschichte von Peter Schlemihl, der im Garten des reichen Kaufmanns Thomas John einem mysteriösen Mann begegnet. Dieser macht ihm ein ungewöhnliches Angebot: ein Gold-Säckel, das niemals versiegt, im Tausch gegen seinen Schatten. Doch dieses Abkommen erweist sich als grausam: Jeder, der bemerkt, dass er ohne Schatten ist, bekommt Angst. Der zunehmend Vereinsamende versucht alles, seine Schattenfreiheit zu verbergen So reist er mit seinem Diener Bendel über das Gebirge und in ein Badeort. Dort verliebt er sich in die schöne Mina. Doch sein Geheimnis wird von seinem Diener Rascal verraten. Nur wenn er seinen Schatten zurückerhält, darf er Mina heiraten. Der Preis für seinen Schatten ist hoch.
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His father, Count Louis-Marie de Chamisso de Boncourt, was descended from established minor nobility with traditions of loyal military service to the crown; his mother, born Marie Anne Gargam, from wealthy bourgeois.
He had little formal education, but while in the Prussian military service in Berlin he assiduously studied natural science for three years. In collaboration with Varnhagen von Ense, in 1803 he founded the Berliner Musenalmanach, the publication in which his first verses appeared.
Adelbert von Chamisso is known –if at all– by most readers as the creator of Peter Schlemihl, the man who bartered away his shadow.
In Germany he is still a beloved poet whose verses were set to music by composers such as Schumann and Grieg.
The boy was christened Louis-Charles Adélaïde on 31 January 1781; in later life he always signed himself Adelbert.
His early years were spent at the Château de Boncourt. In 1792 the family abandoned Boncourt and dispersed northward.
Not until 1796 were they enabled, by courtesy of the Prussian crown, to reunite and settle in Berlin.
His regiment remained in Berlin until the campaign of 1805–1806, when it occupied Hameln and, after the defeat at Jena, was surrendered to the Dutch.
Chamisso, tortured by the possibility of fighting his own countrymen, was relieved to be released to France. Between 1806 and 1812, in the uneasy peace and subsequent rearming of Germany, Chamisso, more displaced than ever, unsuccessfully sought employment in France (1806–1807 and 1810–1811), before returning to Berlin.
Setting off via Plymouth, they crossed the Atlantic and rounded Cape Horn.
Despite very difficult conditions, Chamisso was able to collect and observe, notably in the Marshall and Hawaiian islands, Kamchatka, the Aleutians, and California.
Chamisso returned to Berlin with botanical collections and notebooks, received an honorary doctorate, and was appointed adjunct curator of the Royal Botanical Gardens in 1819.
The foregoing outline requires commentary.
In childhood his first interests had been those of the naturalist.
He was welcomed in literary circles, where he made warm friendships that attached him to Germany.
Most notable were a visit in 1810 with Alexander von Humboldt to Paris and the hospitality and stimulating conversation of Madame de Staël at Chaumont-sur-Loire and later in her exile at Coppet.
He once attributed his firm direction toward botany at Coppet to a chance remark in a friend’s letter.
In the summer of 1813, perhaps bored with unrelieved botany, he composed his masterpiece of fantasy and self-reconciliation, Peter Schlemihl’s wundersame Geschichte.
First published in 1814, the tale was an immediate success, and was widely translated.
The bulk of his technical publications were in botanical taxonomy, written jointly with Schlechtendal and to be found in Linnaea, the journal launched by the latter in 1826.
Of his equally few zoological publications, one contained a real discovery, that of alternation of generations in salps.
In the preface, tribute is paid to the collaboration of the zoologist J. F. Eschscholtz, ship’s doctor on the Rurik.
He was the first to propose floating fruits as agents for populating islands and to ascribe the coloration of seawater to pigmented microorganisms.
For scientists he is the naturalist who explored Pacific shores many years before Darwin, bringing back rich botanical collections, incidentally naming the California poppy and leaving his own name to an Alaskan island. Chamisso was a younger son in an aristocratic provincial French family of the Champagne, just west of the Argonne forest.
He was elected to the Berlin Society of Friends of Natural History, the Leopoldina, the Imperial Society of Naturalists of Moscow, and in 1835 to the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
(Dies ist die Geschichte von Peter Schlemihl, der im Garte...)
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On his return in 1818 he was made custodian of the botanical gardens in Berlin, and was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences.
He became a leading member of the Serapion Brethren, a literary circle around E. T. A. Hoffmann.