Saturday, November 9:
R. is disturbed by the night light, which was burning poorly, but he is in good shape all the same. When he comes from his bath he plays something on the piano which seems to me to be connected with Kundry’s awakening. He is a bit vexed over the visit of the Munich painters, fixed for today, since, as he tells me, he has just got everything nicely prepared and would have been able to do some composing. At noon we receive the two gentlemen; discussion about the scenery for Parsifal! Both with their heads full of frills and vistas, R. alone putting his finger on what would be right here; he says the cupola should not be visible, only the architrave supporting it.
When they have gone, R. asks me: “Did you look at Doll? There’s complete dissipation for you.” When I say I did not think much of Herr Jank, either: “Oh, the utter viciousness, disloyalty, wickedness of them all!” It was both curious and sad to see these creatures who once treated R. so badly, now standing embarrassed and humble before him! “No one is uninteresting when one looks at him closely,” R. says. When they spoke about the perseverance R. showed during the festival, which won him the admiration of all, R. said solemnly, “It was thanks to the application of the artists, which was extraordinary, all of them arriving at the right time, arranging their guest appearances to fit in — that’s something no Excellency could achieve.”
R. does not go out of doors today, and I am not very well, so he drinks his tea upstairs in my room and reads me some extracts from Dr. Busch’s book; he very much likes the story of the cigars, and especially the expression “malicious impotence” as applied to Varnhagen, but the assessment of N. Ill does not seem very thorough: the “sentimental, foolish, ignorant” may be correct, but there appears to have been more in him than that. R. is very interested in a picture of two natives of Nukaivan; he tells me about the downfall of this handsome, uncultivated race — one could imagine Heracles springing from such a stock, but such types have disappeared with cities and civilization. We have no barbarians left to bring new blood to our world, he says; if it had not been for them the Roman Empire in the West would have gone the same way as the empire in the East; we are collapsing in the same way, and the Jews will become our natural masters. The crisis will occur with the dissolution of the armies, and then the Anglo-American complex will assume dominance. Afterward I read to R. Herr Lipiner’s article on Art and Revolution, and we find little in it to please us; R. is completely disgusted.