Bolz, which produces, indeed, a little that is really delicate. Met Miss Taussig in front of the theater in the Intermission after the second act. Ran to the cloakroom,
returned with cloak flying, and escorted her home.
8 March. Day before yesterday was blamed because of the factory. Then for an hour on the sofa thought about jumping out of the window.
Yesterday, Harden lecture on “The Theater.” Apparently entirely impromptu; I was in a fairly good mood and therefore did not find it as empty as did the others.
Began well: “At this hour in which we have met together here to discuss the theater, the curtain is rising in every theater of Europe and the other continents to reveal the
stage to the audience.” With an electric light attached to a stand in front of him at the level of his breast so that it can be moved about, he lights up the front of his shirt
as though it were on display, and during the course of the lecture he changes the lighting by moving the light. Toe-dancing to make himself taller, as well as to tighten up
his talent for improvisation. Trousers tight even around the groin. A short tail-coat like that tacked on to a dog. Almost strained, serious face, sometimes like an old
lady’s, sometimes like Napoleon’s. Fading color of his forehead as of a wig. Probably corseted.
Read through some old notebooks. It takes all my strength to last it out. The unhappiness one must suffer when one interrupts oneself in a task that can never succeed
except all at once, and this is what has always happened to me until now; in rereading one must reexperience this unhappiness in a more concentrated way though not as
strongly as before.
Today, while bathing, I thought I felt old powers, as though they had been untouched by the long interval.
10 March. Sunday. He seduced a girl in a small place in the Iser mountains where he spent a summer to restore his delicate lungs. After a brief effort to persuade her,
incomprehensibly, the way lung cases sometimes act, he threw the girl—his landlord’s daughter, who liked to walk with him in the evening after work—down in the
grass on the river bank and took her as she lay there unconscious with fright. Later he had to carry water from the river in his cupped hands and pour it over the girl’s
face to restore her. “Julie, but Julie,” he said countless times, bending over her. He was ready to accept complete responsibility for his offense and was only making an
effort to make himself realize how serious his situation was. Without thinking about it he could not have realized it. The simple girl who lay before him, now breathing
regularly again, her eyes still closed because of fear and embarrassment, could make no difficulty for him; with the tip of his toe, he, the great, strong person, could push
the girl aside. She was weak and plain, could what had happened to her have any significance that would last even until tomorrow? Would not anyone who compared
the two of them have to come to this conclusion? The river stretched calmly between the meadows and fields to the distant hills. There was still sunshine only on the
slope of the opposite shore. The last clouds were drifting out of that clear evening sky.
Nothing, nothing. This is the way I raise up ghosts before me. I was involved, even if only superficially, only in the passage, “Later he had….” mostly in the “pour.” For
a moment I thought I saw something real in the description of the landscape.
So deserted by myself, by everything. Noise in the next room.
11 March. Yesterday unendurable. Why doesn’t everyone join in the evening meal? That would really be so beautiful.
The reciter, Reichmann, landed in the lunatic asylum the day after our conversation.
Today burned many old, disgusting papers.
W., Baron von Biedermann, Gespräche mit Goethe [Conversations with Goethe]. The way the daughters of the Leipzig copperplate-engraver, Stock, comb his hair,
1767.
The way, in 1772, Kestner found him lying in the grass in Garbenheim and the way he “was conversing with several people who were standing around, an Epicurean