Friday, August 12:
In the Illustrirte Z. there is a horrifying picture of the Algerian rebel leader Abu Hema, which raises in us all kinds of reflections about mixed races, and a very moving article about Körner with Friesen, Lützow, and some others on the evening before his death. This magazine shows us a completely different epoch and different, joyfully inspired human beings. In Körner R. sees our friend Stein over again - “on the evening before his emigration,” I add.
Toward noon Jouk. brings along a picture which gives us pleasure; yesterday evening, when R. withdrew for a brief rest, Lusch had surrounded me in my chair with Oriental rugs, Jouk. brought out the globe, and, getting the children to work it, I asked Stein to name the places to which one might emigrate, pointing to them with a finger. Our friend has now charmingly recaptured this moment. R. is delighted with it. “That is how it should be,” he says, “always seeing and doing things.” Our climate, the weather being again raw, keeps bringing R. back to the question of emigration; he says Siegfried should be brought up with this in view, and then Stein would have two generations before him. Stein gives his second talk in the afternoon, in R.’s presence, about Sch.’s views on architecture; it is very good, and R. is very pleased with it, saying that Stein is our pride.
In the late afternoon I practice my part in the Götterdämmerung piano duet with Lusch. R. comes in, listens to me, praises me! Then I say to him, “The girls are gone now!” And he shows me the page of his score and again explains to me the problem of sextet or quartet. At supper he relates a nice children’s legend about Krishna from Jacolliot, and then talks about the divinity of the Gospels, due to their artlessness: “And then, suddenly, all the suffering!” he exclaims. The Greeks have also been in his mind, the connection between their history and their epics; the Battle of Marathon, the 1,000 Plataeans, the retreat of the 10,000 bring him to the Iliad, whose subject is little to his taste; he is repelled by the quarreling over Briseis, and “instead of Agamemnon’s being put to death, Hector is killed, for whom one has more sympathy than for Achilles.”
When he goes off for a short rest after supper, we look through Dürer’s Life of the Virgin Mary, which contains, among other things, one of R.’s favorites, a picture of Saint Joseph planing with the help of angels. I do not know why the verse “Es waren hochbedürftige Meister, von Lebensmüh bedrängte Geister” comes to my mind with such force that tears spring to my eyes. I recall my overwhelming feelings when I suddenly saw these masters, whom one likes to regard as joyfully triumphant conquerors, revealed in their Ecce homo. And it is Dürer who brings this back to me! R. comes to join us; he supports Jouk. against me in the feeling that the Pergamon reliefs are the work of a school, whereas the early Renaissance works in the same Berlin museum are the expression of a single idea. He talks about Actors and Singers, which he wants to read again in connection with “Herodom and Christianity”; he feels he did justice to singers and actors there. Later we play whist.