Sunday, July 30:
Things look bad in Bavaria; the Archbishop acts as if he were the King, and the King remains what he is. Prince Hohenlohe is said to have left Munich in anger. God knows what will come of it all.
At breakfast R. asks me whether I know the epic about Walther and Hildgunde. I say yes, and he continues: “I find in that the features I call truly German, the composure, bordering on humor, like the fight of Walther with the Gibichungs and then with Hagen, whose eye he hacks out and who hacks off his hand, after which they joke together about it. I believe one could find such things in the Prussian army.”
Yesterday evening we talked again about Berlioz, “who heard visual things wonderfully, and these awoke his powers of invention. Otherwise pitifully thin, restricted in form.” Yesterday when I came up to R. on his walk, he said to me, “The way Fidi just smiled at me, so nicely and sweetly and lingeringly, I feel quite shattered.” Today he said: “How happy our children will still make us! You’ll see.”
R. is unwell, cannot work, and consequently very despondent. After lunch Herr von Gersdorff visits us; he is a friend of Prof. Nietzsche’s who went right through the war and has all the noble and earnest characteristics of the North German. Naturally the conversation revolves around the war. Letter from Frau Lucca: they want to do Lohengrin in Bologna.