Saturday, July 6:
R. interrupts his cure today, the weather is raw. However, he is looking well, and I go in good spirits to my work with house and children, also a little correspondence. Friend Feustel’s speech to his supporters brings R. back to the subject of the socialists, whom F. has described as easy to master. That they certainly are, says R., for the moment, but they will keep coming back; one should not be giving them votes in the Reichstag, but, rather, considering the problems, investigating the basic principles, and doing something to relieve the need. But they are all stupid, and the socialists themselves are both crude and stupid, for all they really want is to gain control of the state in order to impose impossible conditions. In this connection R. recalls Herr v. Trutzschler (shot in Baden), who, when R. once mentioned the state, replied: “I recognize no state, I recognize only society.”
R. goes off to his afternoon rest; as he leaves me, after figuring out that he would have to be 94 when I achieved my father’s present age, he says: “I shall stay with you. - But what shall we do with our lives? - Console each other.”
With friend Glasenapp I start the catalogue of the corner bureau (manuscripts), at 6 o’clock go for a walk with R., in our garden, then in the palace gardens. On our return we start a conversation about Don Giovanni and the new version of the text, which R. considers unfortunate; he observes that these works, as Semper once said about theaters, cannot be too baroque in style; of course Don Giovanni is a divine, an incomparable work, but it is that because it opened up vistas from a certain definite popular basis; to take these vistas as the starting point would be to destroy it, to make its lightness and informality incredible and turn it into something stiff and boring; he had been thinking only today about Don G.’s joke with Leporello, when he squeezes his fingers to see whether he will betray him - in a word, it is opera giocosa.
Supper with the Glasenapps, and afterward R. deals with the subject of the Jews, which he says nobody cares to notice, either out of fear or out of apathy. Either the Jews possess a past, he says, in which case they are connected with the Talmud, or they are finished: “How can such a person love my works, and what does it matter to me whether he loves them or not?” But whatever the Jews may be, the main blame lies with the Germans. “What are we?” he cries indignantly. “There’s not a single statesman who asks himself this question. They play with us as if we were sparrows, and the first point the Congress reaches agreement on is the emancipation of the Jews in Rumania; they let Bessarabia go, and all else besides, but the Jews are saved! Oh ... !”