(parts 1 & 2)
Part 1
3 January. “You,” I said, and then gave him a little shove with my knee, “I want to say good-bye.” At this sudden utterance some saliva flew from my mouth as an
evil omen.
“But you've been considering that for a long time,” he said, stepped away from the wall and stretched.
“No, I haven't been considering it at all.”
“Then what have you been thinking about?”
“For the last time I have been preparing myself a little more for the company. Try as you may, you won't understand that. I, an average man from the country, whom
at any moment one could exchange for one of those who wait together by the hundreds in railway stations for particular trains.”
4 January. Glaube und Heimat (Faith and Homeland) by Schφnherr.
The wet fingers of the balconyites beneath me who wipe their eyes.
6 January. “You,” I said, aimed, and gave him a little shove with my knee, “but now I'm going. If you want to see it too, open your eyes.”
“Really, then?” he asked, at the same time looking at me from wide-open eyes with a direct glance that nevertheless was so weak that I could have fended it off with a
wave of my arm. “You're really going, then? What shall I do? I cannot keep you. And if I could, I still wouldn't want to. By which I simply want to make clear to you
your feeling that you could still be held back by me.” And immediately he assumed that inferior servants' face by means of which they are permitted within an
otherwise regulated state to make the children of their masters obedient or afraid.
7 January. N.'s sister who is so in love with her fiancι that she maneuvers to speak with each visitor individually, since one can better express and repeat one's love to a
single person.
As though by magic, since neither external nor internal circumstances—which are now more friendly than they have been for a year—prevented me, I was kept from
writing the entire holiday, it is a Sunday. —Several new perceptions of the unfortunate creature that I am have dawned upon me consolingly.
12 January. I haven't written down a great deal about myself during these days, partly because of laziness (I now sleep so much and so soundly during the day, I have
greater weight while I sleep) but also partly because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception to be
established definitively in writing only when it can be done with the greatest completeness, with all the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness. For if
this does not happen—and in any event I am not capable of it—then what is written down will, in accordance with its own purpose and with the superior power of the
established, replace what has been felt only vaguely in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be
recognized too late.
A few days ago Leonie Frippon, cabaret girl, Stadt Wien. Hair dressed in a bound-up mass of curls. Bad girdle, very old dress, but very pretty with tragic gestures,
flutterings of the eyelids, thrusts of the long legs, skillful stretching of the arms along the body, significance of the rigid throat during ambiguous passages. Sang: Button
Collection in the Louvre.
Schiller, as drawn by Schadow in 1804 in Berlin, where he had been greatly honored. One cannot grasp a face more firmly than by this nose. The partition of the nose
is a little pulled down as a result of the habit of pulling on his nose while working. A friendly, somewhat hollow-cheeked person whom the shaven face has probably
made senile.
14 January. Novel, Eheleute (Married People), by Beradt. A lot of bad Jewishness. A sudden, monotonous, coy appearance of the author; for instance: All were
gay, but one was present who was not gay. Or: Here comes a Mr. Stern (whom we already know to the marrow of his novelistic bones). In Hamsun too there is
something like this, but there it is as natural as the knots in wood, here, however, it drips into the plot like a fashionable medicine on to sugar. Odd turns of expression
are clung to interminably, for instance: He was busy about her hair, busy and again busy. Individual characters, without being shown in a new light, are brought out well,
so well that even faults here and there do not matter. Minor characters mostly wretched.
17 January. Max read me the first act of Abschied von der Jugend (Parting of the Young People). How can I, as I am today, come up to this? I should have to
look for a year before I found a true emotion in me, and am supposed, in the face of so great a work, in some way to have a right to remain seated in my chair in the
coffeehouse late in the evening, plagued by the passing flatulence of a digestion which is bad in spite of everything.
19 January. Every day, since I seem to be completely finished—during the last year I did not wake up for more than five minutes at a time—I shall either have to wish
myself off the earth or else, without my being able to see even the most moderate hope in it, I shall have to start afresh like a baby. Externally, this will be easier for me
than before. For in those days I still strove with hardly a suspicion after a description in which every word would be linked to my life, which I would draw to my heart,
and which would transport me out of myself. With what misery (of course, not to be compared with the present) I began! What a chill pursued me all day long out of
what I had written! How great the danger was and how uninterruptedly it worked, that I did not feel that chill at all, which indeed on the whole did not lessen my
misfortune very much.
Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then
began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once. So once I wrote down something about my prison on a Sunday afternoon when we were visiting my grandparents and
had eaten an especially soft kind of bread, spread with butter, that was customary there. It is of course possible that I did it mostly out of vanity, and by shifting the
paper about on the tablecloth, tapping with my pencil, looking around under the lamp, wanted to tempt someone to take what I had written from me, look at it, and admire
me. It was chiefly the corridor of the prison that was described in the few lines, above all its silence and coldness; a sympathetic word was also said about the brother
who was left behind, because he was the good brother. Perhaps I had a momentary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but before that afternoon I never
paid much attention to such feelings when among relatives to whom I was accustomed (my timidity was so great that the accustomed was enough to make me halfway
happy), I sat at the round table in the familiar room and could not forget that I was young and called to great things out of this present tranquillity. An uncle who liked to
make fun of people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me, even without laughing, and only said to the others who
were following him with their eyes, “The usual stuff,” to me he said nothing. To be sure, I remained seated and bent as before over the now useless page of mine, but
with one thrust I had in fact been banished from society, the judgment of my uncle repeated itself in me with what amounted almost to real significance and even within
the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.
19 February. When I wanted to get out of bed this morning I simply folded up. This has a very simple cause, I am completely overworked. Not by the office but my
other work. The office has an innocent share in it only to the extent that, if I did not have to go there, I could live calmly for my own work and should not have to waste
these six hours a day which have tormented me to a degree that you cannot imagine, especially on Friday and Saturday, because I was full of my own things. In the
final analysis, I know, that is just talk, the fault is mine and the office has a right to make the most definite and justified demands on me. But for me in particular it is a
horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity. I write this in the good light of the morning and would certainly not write it if it were not so true
and if I did not love you like a son.
For the rest, I shall certainly be myself again by tomorrow and come to the office where the first thing I hear will be that you want to have me out of your department.
The special nature of my inspiration in which I, the most fortunate and unfortunate of men, now go to sleep at 2 a.m. (perhaps, if I can only bear the thought of it, it will
remain, for it is loftier than all before), is such that I can do everything, and not only what is directed to a definite piece of work. When I arbitrarily write a single
sentence, for instance, “He looked out of the window,” it already has perfection.
“Will you stay here for a long time?” I asked. At my sudden utterance some saliva dew from my mouth as an evil omen.
“Does it disturb you? If it disturbs you or perhaps keeps you from going up, I will go away at once, but otherwise I should still like to remain, because I'm tired.”
But finally he had every right to be satisfied too, and to become continually more satisfied the better I knew him. For he continually knew me even better, apparently,
and could certainly stick me, with all my perceptions, in his pocket. For how otherwise could it be explained that I still remained on the street as though no house but
rather a fire were before me. When one is invited into society, one simply steps into the house, climbs the stairs, and scarcely notices it, so engrossed is one in thought.
Only so does one act correctly towards oneself and towards society.
20 February. Mella Mars in the Cabaret Lucerna. A witty tragedienne who, so to speak, appears on a stage turned wrong side out in the way tragediennes sometimes
show themselves behind the scenes. When she makes her appearance she has a tired, indeed even flat, empty, old face, which constitutes for all famous actors a
natural beginning. She speaks very sharply, her movements are sharp too, beginning with the thumb bent backwards, which instead of bone seems to be made of stiff
fiber. Unusual changeability of her nose through the shifting highlights and hollows of the playing muscles around it. Despite the eternal flashing of her movements and
words she makes her points delicately.
Small cities also have small places to stroll about in.
The young, clean, well-dressed youths near me on the promenade reminded me of my youth and therefore made an unappetizing impression on me.
Kleist's early letters, twenty-two years old. Gives up soldiering. They ask him at home: Well, how are you going to earn a living, for that was something they considered
a matter of course. You have a choice of jurisprudence or political economy. But then do you have connections at court? “I denied it at first in some embarrassment,
but then declared so much the more proudly that I, even if I had connections, should be ashamed, with my present ideas, to count on them. They smiled, I felt that I had
been too hasty. One must be wary of expressing such truths.”
21 February. My life here is just as if I were quite certain of a second life, in the same way, for example, I got over the pain of my unsuccessful visit to Paris with the
thought that I would try to go there again very soon. With this, the sight of the sharply divided light and shadows on the pavement of the street.
For the length of a moment I fell myself clad in steel.
How far from me are—for example—my arm muscles.
Marc Henry - Delvard. The tragic feeling bred in the audience by the empty hall increases the effect of the serious songs, detracts from that of the merry ones. Henry
does the prologue, while Delvard, behind a curtain that she doesn't know is translucent, fixes her hair. At poorly attended performances, W., the producer, seems to
wear his Assyrian beard—which is otherwise deep black—streaked with gray. Good to have oneself blown upon by such a temperament, it lasts for twenty-four hours,
no, not so long. Much display of costumes, Breton costumes, the undermost petticoat is the longest, so that one can count the wealth from a distance—Because they
want to save an accompanist, Delvard does the accompaniment first, in a very low-cut green dress, and freezes—Parisian street cries. Newsboys are omitted—
Someone speaks to me; before I draw a breath I have been dismissed—Delvard is ridiculous, she has the smile of an old maid, an old maid of the German cabaret. With
a red shawl that she fetches from behind the curtain, she plays revolution. Poems by Dauthendey in the same tough, unbreakable voice. She was charming only at the
start, when she sat in a feminine way at the piano. At the song “ΐ Batignolles” I felt Paris in my throat. Batignolles is supposed to live on its annuities, even its
Apaches. Bruant wrote a song for every section of the city.
THE URBAN WORLD
Oscar M., an older student—if one looked at him closely one was frightened by his eyes—stopped short in the middle of a snowstorm on an empty square one winter
afternoon, in his winter clothes with his winter coat, over it a shawl around his neck and a fur cap on his head. His eyes blinked reflectively. He was so lost in thought
that once he took off his cap and stroked his face with its curly fur. Finally he seemed to have come to a conclusion and turned with a dancing movement on to his
homeward path.
When he opened the door to his parental living room he saw his father, a smooth-shaven man with a heavy, fleshy face, seated at an empty table facing the door.
“At last,” said the latter, when Oscar had barely set foot in the room. “Please stay by the door, I am so furious with you that I don't know what I might do.”
“But father,” said Oscar, and became aware only when he spoke how he had been running.
“Silence,” shouted the father and stood up, blocking a window. “Silence, I say. And keep your ‘buts’ to yourself, do you understand?” At the same time he took the
table in both hands and carried it a step nearer to Oscar. “I simply won't put up with your good-for-nothing existence any longer. I'm an old man. I hoped you would be
the comfort of my old age, instead you are worse than all my illnesses. Shame on such a son, who through laziness, extravagance, wickedness, and—why shouldn't I
say so to your face—stupidity, drives his old father to his grave!” Here the father fell silent, but moved his face as though he were still speaking.
“Dear Father,” said Oscar, and cautiously approached the table, “calm yourself, everything will be all right. Today I have had an idea that will make an industrious
person out of me, beyond all your expectations.”
“How is that?” the father asked, and gazed towards a corner of the room.
“Just trust me, I'll explain everything to you at supper. Inwardly I was always a good son, but the fact that I could not show it outwardly embittered me so, that I
preferred to vex you if I couldn't make you happy. But now let me go for another short walk so that my thoughts may unfold more clearly.”
The father, who, becoming attentive at first, had sat down on the edge of the table, stood up. “I do not believe that what you just said makes much sense, I consider it
only idle talk. But after all you are my son. Come back early, we will have supper at home and you can tell me all about this matter then.”
“This small confidence is enough for me, I am grateful to you from my heart for it. But isn't it evident in my very appearance that I am completely occupied with a
serious matter?”
“At the moment, no, I can't see a thing,” said the father. “But that could be my fault too, for I have got out of the habit of looking at you at all.” With this, as was his
custom, he called attention to the passage of time by regularly tapping on the surface of the table. “The chief thing, however, is that I no longer have any confidence at
all in you, Oscar. If I sometimes yell at you—when you came in I really did yell at you, didn't I?—then I do it not in the hope that it will improve you, I do it only for the
sake of your poor, good mother who perhaps doesn't yet feel any immediate sorrow on your account, but is already slowly going to pieces under the strain of keeping off
such sorrow for she thinks she can help you in some way by this. But after all, these are really things which you know very well, and out of consideration for myself
alone I should not have mentioned them again if you had not provoked me into it by your promises.”
During these last words the maid entered to look after the fire in the stove. She had barely left the room when Oscar cried out, “But Father! I would never have
expected that. If in the past I had had only one little idea, an idea for my dissertation, let's say, which has been lying in my trunk now for ten years and needs ideas like
salt, then it is possible, even if not probable, that, as happened today, I would have come running from my walk and said: ‘Father, by good fortune I have such-and-such
an idea.’ If with your venerable voice you had then thrown into my face the reproaches you did, my idea would simply have been blown away and I should have had to
march off at once with some sort of apology or without one. Now just the contrary! Everything you say against me helps my ideas, they do not stop, becoming
stronger, they fill my head. I'll go, because only when I am alone can I bring them into order.” He gulped his breath in the warm room.
“It may be only a piece of rascality that you have in your head,” said the father with his eyes opened wide in surprise. “In that case I am ready to believe that it has got
hold of you. But if something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.”
Oscar turned his head as though someone had him by the throat, “Leave me alone now. You are worrying me more than is necessary. The bare possibility that you can
correctly predict my end should really not induce you to disturb me in my reflections. Perhaps my past gives you the right to do so, but you should not make use of it.”
“There you see best how great your uncertainty must be when it forces you to speak to me so.”
“Nothing forces me,” said Oscar, and his neck twitched. He also stepped up very close to the table so that one could no longer tell to whom it belonged. “What I said, I
said with respect and even out of love for you, as you will see later, too, for consideration for you and Mama plays the greatest part in my decisions.”
“Then I must thank you right now,” the father said, “as it is indeed very improbable that your mother and I will still be capable of it when the time comes.”
“Please, Father, just let tomorrow sleep on as it deserves. If you awaken it before its time, then you will have a sleepy day. But that your son must say this to you!
Besides, I really didn't intend to convince you yet, but only to break the news to you. And in that, at least, as you yourself must admit, I have succeeded.”
“Now, Oscar, there is only one thing more that really makes me wonder: why haven't you been coming to me often with something like this business of today. It
corresponds so well with your character up to now. No, really, I am being serious.”
“Yes, wouldn't you have thrashed me, then, instead of listening to me? I ran home, God knows, in a hurry to give you a little pleasure. But I can't tell you a thing as long
as my plan is not complete. Then why do you punish me for my good intentions and demand explanations from me that at this time might still injure the execution of my
plan?”
“Keep quiet, I don't want to know a thing. But I have to answer you very quickly because you are retreating towards the door and apparently have something very
urgent in hand: You have calmed my first anger with your trick, but now I am even sadder in spirit than before and therefore I beg you—if you insist, I can even fold my
hands—at least say nothing to your mother of your ideas. Be satisfied with me.”
“This can't be my father speaking to me,” cried Oscar, who already had his arm on the door latch. “Something has happened to you since noon, or I'm meeting a
stranger now for the first time in my father's room. My real father”—Oscar was silent for a moment with his mouth open—“he would certainly have had to embrace
me, he would have called my mother. What is wrong with you, Father?”
“Then you ought to have supper with your real father, I think. It would be more fun.”
“He will come, you can be sure of that. In the end he can't stay away. And my mother must be there. And Franz, whom I am now going to fetch. All.” Thereupon
Oscar pressed his shoulder against the door—it opened easily—as though he were trying to break it down.
Having arrived in Franz's home, he bowed to the little landlady and said, “The Herr Engineer is asleep, I know, it doesn't matter.” And without bothering about the
woman, who because she was displeased by the visit walked aimlessly up and down in the anteroom, he opened the glass door—it quivered under his hand as though it
had been touched in a sensitive spot—and called, paying no heed to the interior of the room into which he could scarcely see, “Franz, get up. I need your expert advice.
But I can't stand it here in the room, we must go for a lithe walk, you must also have supper with us. Quick, then.”
“Gladly,” said the engineer from his leather sofa, “but which first? Get up, have supper, go for a walk, give advice? And some of it I probably haven't caught.”
“Most important, Franz, don't joke. That's the most important thing, I forgot that.”
“I'll do you that favor at once. But to get up! I would rather have supper for you twice than get up once.”
“Get up now! No arguments.” Oscar grabbed the weak man by the front of his coat and sat him up.
“You're mad, you know. With all due respect. Have I ever pulled you off a sofa like that?” He wiped his closed eyes with his two little fingers.
“But Franz,” said Oscar with a grimace. “Get dressed now. After all, I'm not a fool, to have waked you without a reason.”
“Just as I wasn't sleeping without a reason, either. Yesterday I worked the night shift, after that I'm done out of my afternoon nap, also because of you.”
“Why?”
“Oh, well, it annoys me how little consideration you have for me. It isn't the first time. Naturally, you are a free student and can do whatever you want. Not everyone
is so fortunate. So you really must have some consideration, damn it! Of course, I'm your friend, but they haven't taken my profession away yet because of that.” This
he indicated by shaking his hands up and down, palm to palm.
“But to judge by your present jabbering don't I have to believe that you've had more than your fill of sleep?” said Oscar, who had drawn himself up against a bedpost
whence he looked at the engineer as though he now had somewhat more time than before.
“Well, what is it you really want of me? Or rather, why did you wake me?” the engineer asked, and rubbed his neck hard under his goatee in that more intimate
relationship which one has to one's body after sleep.
“What I want of you,” said Oscar softly, and gave the bed a kick with the heel of his foot. “Very little. I already told you what I want while I was still in the anteroom:
that you get dressed.”
“If you want to point out by that, Oscar, that your news interests me very little, then you are quite right.”
“All the better. Then the interest my news will kindle in you will burn entirely on its own account, without our friendship adding to it. The information will be clearer
too. I need clear information, keep that in mind. But if you are perhaps looking for your collar and tie, they are lying there on the chair.”
“Thanks,” said the engineer, and started to fasten his collar and tie. “A person can really depend on you after all.”
26 March. Theosophical lectures by Dr Rudolf Steiner, Berlin. Rhetorical effect: Comfortable discussion of the objections of opponents, the listener is astonished at this
strong opposition, further development and praise of these objections, the listener becomes worried, complete immersion in these objections as though they were nothing
else, the listener now considers any refutation as completely impossible and is more than satisfied with a cursory description of the possibility of a defense.
Continual looking at the palm of the extended hand.—Omission of the period. In general, the spoken sentence starts off from the speaker with its initial capital letter,
curves in its course, as far as it can, out to the audience, and returns with the period to the speaker. But if the period is omitted then the sentence, no longer held in
check, falls upon the listener immediately with full force.
Before that, lecture by Loos and Kraus.
In Western European stories, as soon as they even begin to include any groups of Jews, we are now almost used immediately to hunting for and finding under or over
the plot the solution to the Jewish question too. In the Jόdinnen, however, no such solution is indicated, indeed not even conjectured, for just those characters who busy
themselves with such questions stand farthest from the center of the story at a point where events are already revolving more rapidly, so that we can, to be sure, still
observe them closely, but no longer have an opportunity to get from them a calm report of their efforts. Offhand, we recognize in this a fault in the story, and feel
ourselves all the more entitled to such a criticism because today, since Zionism came into being, the possibilities for a solution stand so clearly marshaled about the
Jewish problem that the writer would have had to take only a few last steps in order to find the possibility of a solution suitable to his story.
This fault, however, has still another origin. The Jόdinnen lacks non-Jewish observers, the respectable contrasting persons who in other stories draw out the
Jewishness so that it advances towards them in amazement, doubt, envy, fear, and finally, finally is transformed into self-confidence, but in any event can draw itself up
to its full height only before them. That is just what we demand, no other principle for the organization of this Jewish material seems justified to us. Nor do we appeal to
this feeling in this case alone, it is universal in at least one respect. In the same way, too, the convulsive starting up of a lizard under our feet on a footpath in Italy
delights us greatly, again and again we are moved to bow down, but if we see them at a dealer's by hundreds crawling over one another in confusion in the large bottles
in which otherwise pickles are usually packed, then we don't know what to do.
Both faults unite into a third. The Jόdinnen can do without that most prominent youth who usually, within his story, attracts the best to himself and leads it nicely along a
radius to the borders of the Jewish circle. It is just this that we will not accept, that the story can do without this youth, here we sense a fault rather than see it.
28 March. P. Karlin the artist, his wife, two large, wide upper front teeth that gave a tapering shape to the large, rather flat face, Frau Hofrat B., mother of the
composer, in whom old age so brings out her heavy skeleton that she looks like a man, at least when she is seated.
Dr. Steiner is so very much taken up with his absent disciples. At the lecture the dead press so about him. Hunger for knowledge? But do they really need it?
Apparently, though—Sleeps two hours. Ever since someone once cut off his electric light he has always had a candle with him—He stood very close to Christ—He
produced his play in Munich (you can study it all year there and won't understand it), he designed the costumes, composed the music—He instructed a chemist. Lφwy
Simon, soap dealer on Quai Moncey, Paris, got the best business advice from him. He translated his works into French. The wife of the Hofrat therefore has in her
notebook, “How Does One Achieve Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? At S. Lφwy's in Paris.”
In the Vienna lodge there is a theosophist, sixty-five years old, strong as a giant, a great drinker formerly, and a blockhead, who constantly believes and constantly has
doubts. It is supposed to have been very funny when once, during a congress in Budapest, at a dinner on the Blocksberg one moonlit evening, Dr. Steiner unexpectedly
joined the company; in fear he hid behind a beer barrel with his beer mug (although Dr. Steiner would not have been angered by it).
He is, perhaps, not the greatest contemporary psychic scholar, but he alone has been assigned the task of uniting theosophy and science. And that is why he knows
everything too. Once a botanist came to his native village, a great master of the occult. He enlightened him.
That I would look up Dr. Steiner was interpreted to me by the lady as the beginning of recollection. The lady's doctor, when the first signs of influenza appeared in her,
asked Dr. Steiner for a remedy, prescribed this for the lady, and restored her to health with it immediately. A French woman said good-bye to him with “Au revoir.”
Behind her back he shook his head. In two months she died. A similar case in Munich. A Munich doctor cures people with colors decided upon by Dr. Steiner. He
also sends invalids to the picture gallery with instructions to concentrate for half an hour or longer before a certain painting.
End of the Atlantic world, lemuroid destruction, and now through egoism. We live in a period of decision. The efforts of Dr. Steiner will succeed if only the Ahrimanian
forces do not get the upper hand.
He eats two liters of emulsion of almonds and fruits that grow in the air.
He communicates with his absent disciples by means of thought-forms which he transmits to them without bothering further about them after they are generated. But
they soon wear out and he must replace them.
Mrs. F.: “I have a poor memory.” Dr St.: “Eat no eggs.”
MY VISIT TO DR STEINER
A woman is already waiting (upstairs on the third floor of the Victoria Hotel on Jungmannstrasse) but urges me to go in before her. We wait. The secretary arrives and
gives us hope. I catch a glimpse of him down the hall. Immediately thereafter he comes toward us with arms half spread. The woman explains that I was there first.
So I walk behind him as he leads me into his room. His black Prince Albert which on those evenings when he lectures looks polished (not polished but just shining
because of its clean blackness) is now in the light of day (3 p.m.) dusty and even spotted, especially on the back and elbows.
In his room I try to show my humility, which I cannot feel, by seeking out a ridiculous place for my hat, I lay it down on a small wooden stand for lacing boots. Table in
the middle, I sit facing the window, he on the left side of the table. On the table papers with a few drawings which recall those of the lectures dealing with occult
physiology. An issue of the Annalen fόr Naturphilosophie (Annals of Natural Philosophy) topped a small pile of the books which seemed to be lying about in other
places as well. However, you cannot loook around because he keeps trying to hold you with his glance. But if for a moment he does not, then you must watch for the
return of his glance. He begins with a few disconnected sentences. So you are Dr. Kafka? Have you been interested in theosophy long?
But I push on with my prepared address: I feel that a great part of my being is striving toward theosophy, but at the same time I have the greatest fear of it. That is to
say, I am afraid it will result in a new confusion which would be very bad for me, because even my present unhappiness consists only of confusion. This confusion is as
follows: My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field. And here I have, to be sure, experienced
states (not many) which in my opinion correspond very closely to the clairvoyant states described by you, Herr Doktor, in which I completely dwelt in every idea, but
also filled every idea, and in which I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general. Only the calm of enthusiasm, which is probably
characteristic of the clairvoyant, was still lacking in those states, even if not completely. I conclude this from the fact that I did not write the best of my works in those
states. I cannot now devote myself completely to this literary field, as would be necessary and indeed for various reasons. Aside from my family relationships, I could
not live by literature if only, to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character; besides, I am prevented also by my health and my
character from devoting myself to what is, in the most favorable case, an uncertain life. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance agency. Now these
two professions can never be reconciled with one another and admit a common fortune. The smallest good fortune in one becomes a great misfortune in the other. If I
have written something good one evening, I am afire the next day in the office and can bring nothing to completion. This back and forth continually becomes worse.
Outwardly, I fulfil my duties satisfactorily in the office, not my inner duties, however, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never leaves. And to
these two never-to-be-reconciled endeavors shall I now add theosophy as a third? Will it not disturb both the others and itself be disturbed by both? Will I, at present
already so unhappy a person, be able to carry the three to completion? This is what I have come to ask you, Herr Doktor, for I have a presentiment that if you consider
me capable of this, then I can really take it upon myself.
He listened very attentively without apparently looking at me at all, entirely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to
strict concentration. At first a quiet head cold disturbed him, his nose ran, he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger at each nostril.
Since in contemporary Western European stories about Jews the reader has become used immediately to hunting for and finding under or over the story the solution to
the Jewish question too, and since in the Jόdinnen no such solution is indicated or even conjectured, there-fore it is possible that offhand the reader will recognize in this
a fault of the Jόdinnen, and will look on only unwillingly if Jews go about in the light of day without political encouragement from the past or the future. He must tell
himself in regard to this that, especially since the rise of Zionism, the possibilities for a solution stand marshaled so clearly about the Jewish problem that in the end all the
writer has to do is turn his body in order to find a definite solution, suitable to the part of the problem under discussion.
27 May. Today is your birthday, but I'm not even sending you the usual book, for it would be only pretense; at bottom I am after all not even in a position to give you a
book. I am writing only because it is so necessary for me today to be near you for a moment, even though it be only by means of this card, and I have begun with the
complaint only so that you may recognize me at once.
15 August. The time which has just gone by and in which I haven't written a word has been so important for me because I have stopped being ashamed of my body in
the swimming pools in Prague, Kφnigssaal and Czernoschitz. How late I make up for my education now, at the age of twenty-eight, a delayed start they would call it at
the race track. And the harm of such a misfortune consists, perhaps, not in the fact that one does not win; this is indeed only the still visible, clear, healthy kernel of the
misfortune, progressively dissolving and losing its boundaries, that drives one into the interior of the circle, when after all the circle should be run around. Aside from that
I have also observed a great many other things in myself during this period which was to some extent also happy, and will try to write it down in the next few days.
20 August. I have the unhappy belief that I haven't the time for the least bit of good work, for I really don't have time for a story, time to expand myself in every
direction in the world, as I should have to do. But then I once more believe that my trip will turn out better, that I shall comprehend better if I am relaxed by a little
writing, and so try it again.
From his appearance I had a suspicion of the exertions which he had taken upon himself for my sake and which now, perhaps only because he was tired, gave him this
certainty. A little more effort might have sufficed and the deception would have succeeded, it succeeded perhaps even now. Did I defend myself, then? Indeed, I
stood stiff-necked here in front of the house, but—just as stiff-necked—I hesitated to go up. Was I waiting until the guests came to fetch me with a song?
I have been reading about Dickens. Is it so difficult and can an outsider understand that you experience a story within yourself from its beginning, from the distant point
up to the approaching locomotives of steel, coal, and steam, and you don't abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued
by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it.
I can't understand it and can't believe it. I live only here and there in a small word in whose vowel (“thrust” above, for instance) I lose my useless head for a moment.
The first and last letters are the beginning and end of my fishlike emotion.
24 August. Sitting with acquaintances at a coffeehouse table in the open air and looking at a woman at the next table who has just arrived, breathing heavily beneath her
heavy breasts, and who, with a heated, brownish, shining face, sits down. She leans her head back, a heavy down becomes visible, she turns her eyes up, almost in the
way in which she perhaps sometimes looks at her husband, who is now reading an illustrated paper beside her. If one could only persuade her that one may read at
most a newspaper but never a magazine beside one's wife in a coffeehouse. After a moment she becomes aware of the fullness of her body and moves back from the
table a little.
26 August. Tomorrow I am supposed to leave for Italy. Father has been unable to fall asleep these evenings because of excitement, since he has been completely
caught up in his worries about the business and in his illness, which they have aggravated. A wet cloth on his heart, vomiting, suffocation, walking back and forth to the
accompaniment of sighs. My mother in her anxiety finds new solace. He was always after all so energetic, he got over everything, and now . . . I say that all the
misery over the business could after all last only another three months, then everything will have to be all right. He walks up and down, sighing and shaking his head. It
is clear that from his point of view his worries will not be taken from his shoulders and will not even be made lighter by us, but even from our point of view they will not,
even in our best intentions there is something of the sad conviction that he must provide for his family—By his frequent yawning or his poking into his nose (on the whole
not disgusting) Father engenders a slight reassurance as to his condition, which scarcely enters his consciousness, despite the fact that when he is well he usually does
not do this. Ottla confirmed this for me—Poor Mother will go to the landlord tomorrow to beg.
It had already become a custom for the four friends, Robert, Samuel, Max, and Franz, to spend their short holidays every summer or autumn on a trip together. During
the rest of the year their friendship consisted mostly of the fact that they all four liked to come together one evening every week, usually at Samuel's, who, as the most
well-to-do, had a rather large room, to tell each other various things and to accompany it by drinking a moderate amount of beer.
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