Saturday, July 24:
In the morning, while I am giving Lulu a piano lesson, R. comes up; he tells me that Prof. Braun has died. I am very upset by the news; of all people in Munich he and his wife were the friendliest toward me, and both were outstanding characters.
R. is also affected by it and says that, if I were not there to hold him between Earth and Heaven, he would no longer be able to exist. He said yesterday that he could never for a moment forget how happy I had made him. His whole past life remains in his memory only as a state of weariness.
Wrote to Rosalie Braun and showed the letter to R., asking him whether he can accuse me of an impertinence. R.: “All the better, then you will have learned something; it is like money which you have been swindled out of, that is a direct gain.”
In the afternoon the Serovs and the Mendès people, till late in the evening. R. plays and sings from Die Meistersinger and Siegfried. Braun’s death causes in R. a violent outburst against the German princes who lend their support to nothing, to neither talent nor natural gifts; they let everything truly German die of neglect.