Tuesday, April 2:
My father’s name day. I get up again, only to hear sad things about the children: Lulu has taken to lying again; this pains me so deeply that I feel quite numbed. R. works.
At lunch he becomes heated about the Renaissance, which he maintains had an enormously damaging effect on German development; this period had understood and respected antiquity just as little as it did Christianity, and men of tremendous genius had worked in the service of a power which corrupted everything. As always, the naive Germans had let themselves be so awed by foreign culture that their own aesthetic sense had been almost ruined. But strangely enough, though everything had been directed toward destroying the German identity, they had not succeeded entirely.
First thunderstorm; spring is here; but R. is very run down and none of the children really well. He writes to the Stuttgart theater manager. In the evening we read the ninth Epistle of Plato and joke about the analogy of Plato’s relationship to Dionysius and Richard’s to the King of Bavaria. He is also still occupied with Menzel; he says one can feel a real disgust with religion when one thinks of all the mischief it has caused.