Sunday, November 10:
R. got out of bed only once: “I wanted to make a note of my dream, to tell it to you exactly, but now it’s all gone.” Telegrams from Vienna, the first of them from Herr Lipiner! The others come later; and so Siegfried has now conquered this stage! R. thinks it all the more remarkable since this is just a sort of intermezzo, the real tragedy is Götterdämmerung.
At lunch alone together in the children’s salon, we toast, firstly, Luther, then Schiller, and R. recalls our meals at Les Artichauts, where, “though all around us the skies were gray,” I could be cheerfully relaxed. I do not know why the thought of death should come to me at lunchtime, but I remark that I had heard that a dying person usually speaks an acquired, foreign language — and I was afraid I should speak in French. R.: “Oh, rubbish, we mean to commit euthanasia, we shall both nod off on a chair, asking each other, ‘What is going on?,’ and then we shall be dead!”
He tells me he has just reached the point where Kundry is arranging her hair: “I shall set it in a pleasant Rosenfeld style — or should I, rather, do it like Frau Ziegel, the very dignified ladies’ hairdresser here? But she will let out a little cry of alarm when she sees where she is.” A little later he says, “Shall I use triplets or quadruplets for my figure?” Friend Wolz. comes to see us, Lipiner is discussed and condemned by R., his right eye flashing fire, his left inwardly contemplative. He quotes Lecky, whom he likes very much, on the mendacious and slanderous nature of church literature. [Added in margin: “France is now a true idyll,” R. jokes.] Before that he said, “Shakespeare and Don Quixote — it’s to them we always have to return.” He adds with a laugh, “We can smash up the whole library.” I: “But take out Faust as well.” “Yes, but not the Court celebration and Helen. The marriage of Helen and Faust — it’s a good idea, but no more than that.” “I suppose you prefer Touchstone and Audrey,” I say jokingly, and he laughs at the thought of this marriage, considering how she treats him. Returning to the second part of Faust, he says one must go straight from the “Classical Walpurgis Night” to the scene where Mephisto takes off his seven-league boots, and from there to the end — that is the way to read it.
The meeting with Count Du Moulin at Angermann’s leads R. to the subject of his relations with Munich and the Society of Patrons: “Only a large legacy could rescue me from their clutches.” Then he adds: “And then I should be really miserable, for I have nobody, no singers, no conductors, no producers — I tremble at the thought that my little Fricke might not live to a ripe old age. It really is miserable! A legacy would also spoil Italy for me. The best thing would be for me to give these people their money back, but I am scared of the King and of Wolzogen.”
In the afternoon he reads me Lecky on Catholicism and says, “I come more and more to the conclusion that its continued existence is a scandal.” A glorious sunset lit up the skies today, R. went for a walk and told me the moon came up golden, like a sun, and he asked himself: “Where would you rather be now than here? In Berlin, perhaps, beside the Victory Column?!” In the evening R. reads to us excerpts from the Busch book in the newspaper; in connection with the judgment on Thiers he exclaims earnestly: “Oh, my friends, he did great things for his people.” He then summarizes his opinion of Bismarck, particularly in connection with the passage on the Jews: “Great superficiality! He sees the world through the eyes of a diplomat and cannot recognize a significant personality, only the miserable creatures with whom he has to deal.” When I emphasize his peculiar religious beliefs, R. says, “He is a man of the people and is guided by popular instinct, reflection is foreign to him; he creates German unity but doesn’t know what it is.” As we are reading these excerpts with enjoyment, R. says, “Any detailed account of any individual is interesting, I am interested in Bismarck here as I would be in a Shakespeare character; if someone gave me a photographically exact representation of our Georg, I should be captivated by him, too.”
After our friends, Wolz. and Du M., have gone and R. has stressed that he does not want any recruiting done for the Society and that everything must be left to find its own course, we talk about his triumph with Jager in Vienna. I tell him I have one particular superstition — that if we retire into ourselves, live only in and for ourselves, we shall succeed in the outside world in a way we would certainly not succeed if we joined in directly; and I also believe that things will turn out well for the children if they live a completely inward life along with us and we seek no advantages for them outside. R. agrees with me; we imagine what would have happened if we had gone to Vienna with Jager, how difficult things would have been, how unsatisfying for him. “For everything remains what it always was,” says R. “Set wigs of million curls upon your head, and there you are, the wig of million curls, and the situation remains what it always was.”
Sad feelings about Herr Kellermann: “They are all specialists nowadays,” R. says with a sigh. Once again we think of Luther and Schiller: “All ideas of Germany are just a dream which one links to individuals like them and to characteristics something like theirs, but one tends to exaggerate them: it all happens just in one’s own head.” “But it is true that they could not have been born anywhere except Germany,” I observe.