Sunday, July 20:
R. got up early and played the theme of the cantata that was played on his birthday. Then he came to me and said it aroused in him such cheerful, popular memories. He also tells me he had had a nice dream about me.
We come to the topic of the unveiling of the monument over Tausig’s grave, at which the clumsy people played the funeral march from the Eroica, than which nothing could have been more unsuitable; they would have done better to play Chopin’s march. “At our funeral,” R. says, “the concluding passage of Tristan und Isolde must be played.”
With the children to the photographer’s while R. is working. Family lunch; R. suddenly quotes, “Believe me, who the ancient leaven has digested,” etc., and says that one could link the whole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy to Faust’s “But I will,” which far transcends all reason or experience. R. exclaims, “I am glad that I have you, but you lead a wretched existence with me!”
(Putz, the dog from fairyland!) Received Daumer’s book on Kaspar Hauser and began it with interest. When I talk to R. about Daumer, he says, “Just as a certain Countess Poniatowski once told me that in Italy everything of significance is contained in the monasteries, so one might say that at a certain time in Germany everyone of a passionate nature, everyone in need of a community and nauseated by Protestant orthodoxy, became Catholic - though, of course, then they really did feel isolated!” I like Daumer’s style and the way he poses the question of belief or nonbelief.
The story of K. Hauser is itself very instructive; in it knavery once more makes use of puffed-up sobriety, of that stupid rationalism which some people think so clever, to spread a network of lies and deception, and with apparent success. But there is always somewhere a dropped stitch through which truth can slip and destroy it all!
We go for a walk with the children; the cornflowers in the fields remind R. of his first encounter with female devotion. When he was 12 years old, on a visit to his teacher Humann in Thale, a girl placed a wreath of cornflowers and poppies on his head, which he at once tore off.
Later on our walk we think of The Myth of Thor and of Olaf, the Christian King; how Thor says, “I should take my revenge,” and vanishes into the sea, so sad, so beautiful. R. says, “It is impressions like that which turned me right away from the modern world and made me seek the other.”
How fine the way the German people were so personally dependent on their gods, held on to them as long as they could, and then touchingly allowed them to vanish; the Tannhäuser saga, Wotan as Knecht Ruprecht, the water sprite which wept because it could not be redeemed!
R. read me an amusing, well-meaning article about my father: “Yes, yes,” he says, “recognition in Germany, it squirmed, grew large!”
In the evening with the children to the machines. (R. announces the roof-raising ceremony at the theater at the end of the week!)