Sunday, January 18:
R. slept well. Since I am still tired after last night’s events, to which I am not used, I do not attend the family breakfast. R. then comes to my bed and reports rain, which persists all day. He reads Düntzer and talks about Goethe’s life with his mistress in Weimar, saying it was incredible in its nonchalance, and it reminds him of my father. R. describes Karl August and says, “A talented dolt, who really cared for nothing except French literature.”
R. goes into the city by streetcar with our friend Stein and Siegfried; the former is causing us some concern. R. is looking for a barber, and he tells us very funny things about his experiences. A merry late lunch; I talk about what I have read in the newspaper, among other things that England now seems to be going through a great crisis. R. expresses his annoyance with the Queen, the silly old frump, for not abdicating, for she thereby condemns the Prince of Wales to an absurd life; in earlier times, he says, sons became their mothers’ guardians when they came of age.
Prof. Schron paid me a call, and while carrying on quite an interesting conversation with him, I thought of what R. had said recently: “I have put him in his place, and now I get on very well with him.” In the evening we are visited by Herr v. Joukowsky, and conversation flows in a pleasant and lively way, causing R. to observe later, “The Slavs are the people most closely related to us Germans.” Telling us of a remark made by V. Hugo to Turgenev about Goethe, “My attitude toward G. is the same as Joan of Arc’s toward Messalina,” R. says, “Such stupidities lurk in every Frenchman; with all of them one can expect a remark like that on some point or other.”
R. unfolds his views on Russia, beginning, “I know how to help Russia, but nobody is willing to buy.” The Emperor, he says, should set fire to St. Petersburg and, to start with, set up his residence in Odessa, moving on from there to Constantinople. That is the only way of showing what the Slavic race is capable of. But for this one would need a great man, and there are none left. It is just the same as in North America, where they will have to take over the central territories before they can show what they are. We Germans will never become a world power, having no sea, but our task is a different one, to spread culture by colonization; I was very pleased to hear that the workers most sought after and treasured in America are the Germans.
I am alarmed by R.’s appearance late in the evening.