The Diaries of Franz Kafka (29 page)

‘And about Mrs Durège, you’ll do what I advised you to?’

‘Yes, but I forgot; what did you advise me to do?’ I repeat my advice.

‘Good, that’s what I’ll do.’ He turns into the Café Corso, I go home, having experienced how refreshing it is to speak with a perfect fool. I hardly laughed, but was just thoroughly awakened.

The melancholy ‘formerly’, used only on business plaques.

2 March. Who is to confirm for me the truth or probability of this, that it is only because of my literary mission that I am uninterested in all other things and therefore heartless.

3 March. 28 February to hear Moissi. Unnatural spectacle. He sits in apparent calm, whenever possible keeps his folded hands between his knees, his eyes on the book lying before him, and lets his voice pass over us with the breath of a runner.

The hall’s good acoustics. Not a word is lost, nor is there the whisper of an echo, instead everything grows gradually larger, as though the voice, already occupied with something else, continued to exercise a direct after-effect, it grows stronger after the initial impetus and swallows us up. The possibilities one sees here for one’s own voice. Just as the hall works to the advantage of Moissi’s voice, his voice works to the advantage of ours. Unashamed tricks and surprises at which one must look down at the floor and which one would never use oneself: singing individual verses at the very beginning, for instance, ‘Sleep, Miriam, my child’;
⁴³
wandering around of the voice in the melody; rapid utterance of the May song, it seems as if only the tip of the tongue were stuck between the words; dividing the phrase ‘November wind’ in order to push the ‘wind’ down and then let it whistle upwards. If one looks up at the ceiling of the hall, one is drawn upward by the verses.

Goethe’s poems unattainable for the reciter, but one cannot for that reason find fault with this recitation, for each poem moves towards the goal. Great effect later, when in reciting the encore, Shakespeare’s ‘Rain Song’, he stood erect, was free of the text, pulled at his handkerchief and then crushed it in his hands, and his eyes sparkled. Round cheeks and yet an angular face. Soft hair, stroked over and over again with soft movements of his hand. The enthusiastic reviews that one has read are a help to him, in our opinion, only until the first hearing, then he becomes entangled in them and cannot produce a pure impression.

This sort of reciting from a chair, with the book before one, reminds one a little of ventriloquism. The artist, seemingly not participating, sits there like us, in his bowed face we see only the mouth move from time to time, and instead of reading the verses himself, he lets them be read over his head. Despite the fact that so many melodies were to be heard, that the voice seemed as controlled as a light boat in the water, the melody of the verses could really not be heard. Many words were dissolved by the voice, they were taken hold of so gently that they shot
up into the air and had nothing more to do with the human voice until, out of sheer necessity, the voice spoke some sharp consonant or other, brought the word back to earth, and completed it.

Later, a walk with Ottla, Miss Taussig, the Baum couple, and Pick; the Elizabeth Bridge, the Quai, the Kleinseite, the Radetzky Café, the Stone Bridge, Karlsgasse. I still saw the prospect of a good mood, so that really there was not much fault to find with me.

5 March. These revolting doctors! Businesslike, determined and so ignorant of healing that, if this businesslike determination were to leave them, they would stand at sick-beds like schoolboys. I wished I had the strength to found a nature-cure society. By scratching around in my sister’s ear Dr K. turns an inflammation of the eardrum into an inflammation of the inner ear; the maid collapses while fixing the fire; with the quick diagnosis which is his custom in the case of maids, the doctor declares it to be an upset stomach and a resulting congestion of blood. The next day she takes to her bed again, has a high fever; the doctor turns her from side to side, affirms it is angina, and runs away so that the next moment will not refute him. Even dares to speak of the ‘vulgarly violent reaction of this girl’, which is true to this extent, that he is used to people whose physical condition is worthy of his curative power and is produced by it, and he feels insulted, more than he is aware, by the strong nature of this country girl.

Yesterday at Baum’s. Read
Der Damon
. Total impression unfriendly. Good, precise mood on the way up to Baum’s, died down immediately I got up there, embarrassment in the presence of the child.

Sunday: In the Continental, at the card-players’.
Journalisten
with Kramer first, one and a half acts. A good deal of forced merriment can be seen in Bolz, which produces, indeed, a little that is really delicate. Met Miss Taussig in front of the theatre 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 Theatre’. 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 theatre, the curtain is rising in every theatre 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 doll. Almost strained, serious face, sometimes like an old lady’s, sometimes like Napoleon’s. Fading colour 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 re-experience 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 offence 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
. 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 philosopher (v. Gone, a great genius), a Stoic philosopher (v. Kielmansegg) and a cross between the two (Dr König), and he really enjoyed himself’.

With Seidel [Goethe’s valet] in 1783: ‘Once he rang in the middle of the night, and when I came into his room he had rolled his iron trundle bed from the farthest end of the room up to the window and was watching the sky. “Haven’t you seen anything in the sky?” he asked me, and when I denied this, “Then just run to the guardroom and ask the sentry whether he saw anything.” I ran there; but the sentry
had seen nothing, which I reported to my master, who was still lying in the same position fixedly regarding the sky. “Listen,” he then said to me, “this is an important moment. Either we are having an earthquake at this very instant or we shall have one.” And now I had to sit down on his bed and he showed me what signs had led him to this conclusion.’ (Messina earthquake.)

A geological walk with von Trebra (September 1783) through underbrush and rocks. Goethe in front To Herder’s wife in 1788. Among other things he said also that before he left Rome he cried like a child every day for fourteen days. The way Herder’s wife watched him in order to report everything to her husband in Italy. Goethe shows great concern for Herder in the presence of his wife.

14 September, 1794, from eleven-thirty, when Schiller got dressed, until eleven o’clock, Goethe spent the time without interruption in literary consultation with Schiller, and often so.

David Veit, 19 October, 1794, Jewish kind of observation, therefore 90 easy to understand, as though it had happened yesterday.

In the evening in Weimar,
Der Diener zweier Herrn
was acted quite nicely, to my surprise. Goethe was also in the theatre, and indeed, as always, in the section reserved for the nobility. In the middle of the play he leaves this section – which he is supposed to do very seldom – sits down, as long as he could not speak to me, behind me (so the ladies beside me said) and as soon as the act is over comes forward, bows to me with extreme courtesy, and begins in a quite intimate tone … brief remarks and replies about the play.… Thereupon he falls silent for a moment; meanwhile I forget that he is the director of the theatre and say, ‘They’re acting it quite nicely too.’ He still keeps looking straight ahead, and so in my stupidity – but really in a frame of mind which I cannot analyse – I say once more, ‘They are acting quite nicely.’ At that moment he bows to me, but really as Courteously as the first time, and he is gone! Have I insulted him or not?… You really won’t believe how distressed I still am, regardless of the fact that I already have the assurance from Humboldt, who now knows him well, that he often leaves in this sudden manner, and Humboldt has undertaken to speak to him about me once again.

Another time they were speaking about Maimon: ‘I kept interrupting
a good deal and often came to his assistance; for usually there are many words he cannot recall and he keeps making faces.’

1796. Goethe recites Hermann’s conversations with his mother at the pear tree in first half of September.
⁴⁴
He wept. ‘Thus one melts over one’s own coals,’ he said, while drying his tears.

‘The wide wooden parapet of the old gentleman’s box.’ Goethe sometimes liked to have a supply of cold food and wine ready in his box, more for the other people – residents and friends of importance – whom he not infrequently received there.

Performance of Schlegel’s
Alarcos
in 1802. ‘In the middle of the orchestra Goethe, serious and solemn, throning in his tall arm-chair.’ The audience becomes restless, finally at one passage a roar of laughter, the whole house shakes. ‘But only for a moment, in a trice Goethe jumped up, with thunderous voice and threatening gestures shouted, Silence, Silence, and it worked like a charm. In an instant the tumult subsided and the unhappy
Alarcos
went on to the end with no further disturbance, but also without the slightest sign of applause.’

Staël: What the French apparently take for wit in foreigners is often only ignorance of French. Goethe called an idea of Schiller’s
neuve et courageuse
, that was wonderful, but it turned out that he had intended to say
hardie
.

Was lockst Du meine Brut … herauf in Todesglut.
⁴⁵
Staël translated
air brûlant
. Goethe said he meant the glow of coals. She found that extremely
maussade
and tasteless and said that the fine sense for the seemly is lacking in German poets.

1804. Love for Heinrich Voss – Goethe reads
Luise
together with the Sunday company.

To Goethe fell the passage about the marriage, which he read with the deepest emotion. But his voice grew dejected, he wept and gave the book to his neighbour. A holy passage, he cried out with a degree of fervour which shook us all to the depths.

We were sitting at lunch and had just consumed the last bit of food when Goethe ordered a bone ‘because Voss still looks so hungry’.
But never is he pleasanter and more lovable than in the evening in his room when he is undressed or is sitting on the sofa.

When I came to him I found everything quite comfortable there. He had lit a fire, had undressed down to a short woollen jacket, in which the man looks really splendid.

Books:
Stilling
,
Goethe Yearbook, Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit
.

12 March. In the tram-car rapidly passing by there sat in a corner, his cheek against the window, his left arm stretched along the back of the seat, a young man with an unbuttoned overcoat billowing around him, looking down the long, empty bench. Today he had become engaged and he could think of nothing else. His being engaged made him feel comfortable and with this feeling he sometimes looked casually up at the ceiling of the tram. When the conductor came to sell him his ticket, after some jingling, he easily found the right coin, with a single motion put it into the conductor’s hand, and seized the ticket between two fingers held open like a pair of scissors. There was no real connexion between him and the tram-car and it would not have been surprising if, without using the platform or steps, he had appeared on the street and gone his way on foot with the same look.