Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl

Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl is a novel by Gert Hofmann, published in English by New Directions in 2004 and based on the life of the eighteenth-century German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

Lichtenberg was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession and an aphorist and satirist in private, and his writings drew praise from Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and Einstein. Hofmann takes the documented facts of his life and builds a fiction around his relationship with Maria Stechard, a flower seller he met one day near his laboratory in Gottingen and described as the model of beauty and sweetness. The novel follows the household the two of them made together, the differences in age and station between them, and the manner in which a man of enormous intellectual reputation conducts himself at home once the doors are closed.

Hofmann writes short, dry, closely observed fiction about historical subjects, and here the gap between Lichtenberg's public standing and his domestic arrangements is the subject of the book rather than its joke.