Wednesday, November 2:
All Souls’ Day. Paris is to be bombarded—who has no ears to hear must feel it, to put it vulgarly.
I compose a prayer for the dead for the children. Yesterday R. said, with regard to the hymns our soldiers sing after their battles: “If someone were to ask me whether there is a God, I should reply: ‘Can you not hear him? At this moment in which thousands of human beings are singing to him, God is alive, he is there.’ To imagine him as someone watching and calling things good or bad is foolish; he exists in and for himself, but at certain moments in the life of nations or individuals, he is there, he awakes.”
Letter from my mother, who, banished from the Jura, is seeking a refuge. Discussion with R. as to whether, for her sake, I should offer it to her here, in view of the fact that our seclusion, our German outlook, and our whole way of life would not be congenial to her.
R. has received a letter from Herr van der Straeten with an article on the Weimar performances; the Catholic government in Brussels did not wish to see this published in the Moniteur, though the author had been sent to Brussels by the former Liberal regime. Letter from the theater director in Mannheim, reporting that Der Fl. Holländer enjoyed a success there greater than any other opera, and with it many friendly remarks. “What can I do,” says R., “if this compliment arrives 30 years too late?”
The red curtain is placed around my picture. Eva is given the rod, for the first and probably the last time in her life, because of her ineradicable dirtiness.