Thursday, November 17:
Dr. Wille returns the biography. R. recalls that first morning two years ago: “How touching that was!” he says. “That is what so impresses people like Wille about my life: you are the dot on the i, my life’s glory, what they envy me for.” I thought yesterday of how I arrived, trembling, with the two children, hardly capable of uttering a word; I had shut the door of the world behind me forever, I had cut myself off from him forever.
We learn through a musical periodical that our friend H. v. Bronsart, director of the theater in Hanover, had enlisted voluntarily as a soldier and has now been awarded the Iron Cross. That touches us deeply; it is the true Prussian spirit—God grant that it is not usurped by bigotry and military arrogance! Wrote letters, in the evening Ranke.
R. received a letter from a French prisoner of war in Erfurt (Mercier), who wants to perfect himself in harmony. R. laughs as he breaks the commandant’s seal, a rough, very cheap wafer, selected with Prussian thrift: “Oh, yes, music has affected everybody; it is a destroying, uplifting force—like Christianity when it first emerged.”