Friday, June 9:
R. does not feel very well, and he takes medicine. But at lunch, for which our friends Gross and the mayor are present, he is very cheerful; he is very glad that there are no difficulties in Munich regarding Vogl. He prefers not to read a letter from Lusch, and a letter from M. Dönhoff produces an exclamation about “trivial” women - “penwipers,” as he calls them, in whom there is nothing genuine, whom one cannot pin down. Before that he told me that I would not believe how dead, dead everything seemed to him, lying around his feet like faded rose petals.
Toward evening we again touch on the subject of Normans and Saxons with the Count; R. agrees with our friend that the Normans were the last heroic race, but he disputes the assertion that they brought culture to all the countries they conquered; what they did, he says, was to utilize the energies already at hand, particularly in England; and he quotes the line in Faust about the companion who “must goad and tease and as a devil toil to serve creation,” saying that such were the Normans! The quotation leads us to the prologue, which he then reads to us.
Before the reading I mentioned what R. told me this morning at breakfast about Richard II’s boldly spirited behavior during Tyler’s Rebellion, and how he offered himself to the people as their leader. In the Normans R. recognizes these qualities of humor and courage, but he finds it reprehensible that they - alone among the German tribes - lost their language.