Saturday, April 17:
Purchases of all sorts, calls with R.; our niece [Johanna] Jachmann comes too. In the evening, with Prof. Doepler, our costume designer, to see [Kleist’s] Die Hermannsschlacht, performed by the Meiningen company; the play very gripping in spite of many peculiarities, and the acting very remarkable. The work, very much of its own time, outstanding, modern, but the Thusnelda somewhat like those stupid German women who set out to please the French, and the historic realism of the costumes distorted it into a farce. All the same, very interesting to watch, and much of it even moving (Marbod with the children, the night scene).
While we were with the Meiningen company, the elegant world of Berlin was cheering Anton Rubinstein’s opera Die Maccabäer, our friend’s strange attitude toward that and us!