Saturday, March 2:
At breakfast R. told me that he had been reflecting on our whole life together, the torment of our separations; he had no idea how we had managed to bear it. “If we don’t thank Heaven every day for our having come as far as we have, we ought to be thrashed,” he says, laughing. I tell him I know why I love God and am grateful to him. R.: “Yes, not the God who created the world, but the one who leads us out of it.”
In spite of the bad weather these last two days, R. goes out of doors. Herr Kipke in Leipzig informs us that bankruptcy proceedings have been started against poor Herr Fritzsch. Of R.’s collected writings, 1,500 copies have been sold, 700 still remain; Herr K. wants R. Schott’s Söhne to buy them for 12,000 marks, and R. suggests it to Herr Strecker. Herr Seitz junior, the painter, has turned down my request for some sketches for the Parsifal costumes, which I wanted for R.’s birthday.
Waverley in the evening.
Comparison between Alberich and Klingsor; R. tells me that he once felt every sympathy for Alberich, who represents the ugly person’s longing for beauty. In Alberich the naivete of the non-Christian world, in Klingsor the peculiar quality which Christianity brought into the world; just like the Jesuits, he does not believe in goodness, and this is his strength but at the same time his downfall, for through the ages one good man does occasionally emerge!
R. gives me an extract from the Vossische Zeitung to read regarding the Bismarck legend; it says he is supposed to have very great plans but is held back by Court officials, scheming ladies in waiting; but nobody at all knows or has seen anything of these great ideas. R. compares him with Robespierre, to the extent that the latter had people beheaded right and left, and when there was nobody left to stand in his way, he could think up nothing better than to proclaim “la vertu!”
The clumsy organization of the German Reich, the destruction of the small states, the failure, in order to help them adapt to the new organization, to look into the damage done, the petty lies, a university in Strasbourg, a memorial in the Harz, etc. All of this is regrettable, for despite everything Bismarck is still one of the most significant men in our history.