2 January.  As a result I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms at awkward angles, was afraid of mirrors because they showed in me an ugliness which in my opinion was inevitable, which moreover could not have been an entirely truthful reflection, for had I actually looked like that, I certainly would have attracted even more attention, suffered gentle pokes in the back from my mother on Sunday walks and admonitions and prophecies which were much too abstract for me to be able to relate them to the worries I then had.  In general I lacked principally the ability to provide even in the slightest detail for the real future.  I thought only of things in the present and their present condition, not because of thoroughness or any special, strong interest, but rather, to the extent that weakness in thinking was not the cause, because of sorrow and fear—sorrow, because the present was so sad for me that I thought I could not leave it before it resolved itself into happiness; fear, because, like my fear of the slightest action in the present, I also considered myself, in view of my contemptible, childish appearance, unworthy of forming a serious, responsible opinion of the great, manly future which usually seemed so impossible to me that every short step forward appeared to me to be counterfeit and the next step unattainable.
 

I admitted the possibility of miracles more readily than that of real progress, but was too detached not to keep the sphere of miracles and that of real progress sharply divided.  I was therefore able to spend a good deal of time before falling asleep in imagining that some day, a rich man in a coach and four I would drive into the Jewish quarter, with a magic word set free a beautiful maiden who was being beaten unjustly, and carry her off in my coach; but untouched by this silly make-believe, which probably fed only on an already unhealthy sexuality, I remained convinced that I would not pass my final examinations that year, and if I did, I would not get on in the next class, and if by some swindle I could avoid even that then I would certainly fail decisively in my graduation examination, convinced also that I would all at once—the precise moment did not matter—reveal some unheard-of inability and very definitely surprise my parents as well as the rest of the world, who had been lulled to sleep by my outwardly regular progress.  Since I always looked only to my inability as my guide into the future—only seldom to my feeble literary work—considering the future never did me any good; it was only a spinning out of my present grief.  If I chose to, I could of course walk erect, but it made me tired, nor could I see how a crooked back would hurt me in the future.  If I should have a future, then, I felt, everything will straighten itself out of its own accord.  I did not choose such a principle because it involved a confidence in a future in whose existence I did not believe, its purpose was only to make living easier for me, to walk, to dress, to wash, to read, above all to coop myself up at home in a way that took the least effort and required the least spirit.  If I went beyond that I could think only of ridiculous solutions.
 

Once it seemed impossible to get along without a black dress suit, especially as I also had to decide whether I would join a dancing class.  The tailor in Nusle was sent for and the cut of the suit discussed.  I was undecided, as I always was in such cases, they made me afraid that by a definite statement I would be swept away not only into an immediate unpleasantness, but beyond that into something even worse.  So at first I didn't want a dress suit, but when they shamed me before the stranger by pointing out that I had no dress suit, I put up with having a tail coat discussed; but since I regarded a tail coat as a fearful revolution one could forever talk about but on which one could never decide, we agreed on a tuxedo, which, because of its similarity to the usual sack coat, seemed to me at least bearable.  But when I heard that the vest of the tuxedo had to be cut low and I would therefore have to wear a stiff shirt as well, my determination almost exceeded my strength, since something like this had to be averted.  I did not want such a tuxedo, rather, if I had to have one, a tuxedo lined and trimmed with silk indeed, but one that could be buttoned high.  The tailor had never heard of such a tuxedo, but he remarked that no matter what I intended to do with such a jacket, it couldn't be worn for dancing.  Good, then it couldn't be worn for dancing, I didn't want to dance anyhow, that hadn't been decided on yet in any case, on the contrary, I wanted the jacket made for me as I had described it.  The tailor's stubbornness was increased by the fact that until now I had always submitted with shamed haste to being measured for new clothes and to having them tried on, without expressing any opinions or wishes.  So there was nothing else for me to do, and also since my mother insisted on it, but to go with him, painful as it was, across the Altstädster Ring to a second-hand clothing store in the window of which I had for quite some time seen displayed a simple tuxedo and had recognized it as suitable for me.  But unfortunately it had already been removed from the window, I could not see it inside the store even by looking my hardest, I did not dare to go into the store just to look at the tuxedo, so we returned, disagreeing as before.  I felt as though the future tuxedo was already cursed by the uselessness of this errand, at least I used my annoyance with the pros and cons of the argument as an excuse to send the tailor away with some small order or other and an indefinite promise about the tuxedo while I, under the reproaches of my mother, remained wearily behind, barred forever—everything happened to me forever—from girls, an elegant appearance, and dances.  The instantaneous cheerfulness that this induced in me made me miserable, and besides, I was afraid that I had made myself ridiculous before the tailor as none of his customers ever had before.
 
 

3 January.  Read a good deal in Die Neue Rundschau.  Beginning of the novel Der Nackte Mann [The Naked Man].  The clarity of the whole a little too thin, sureness in the details.  Gabriel Schillings Flucht {Gabriel Schilling's Flight] by Hauptmann.  Education of people.  Instructive in the bad and the good.
 

New Year's Eve I had planned to read to Max from the diaries in the afternoon, I looked forward to it, and it did not come off.  We were not in tune, I felt a calculating pettiness and haste in him that afternoon, he was almost not my friend but nevertheless still dominated me to the extent that through his eyes I saw myself uselessly leafing through the notebooks over and over again, and found this leafing back and forth, which continually showed the same pages flying by, disgusting.  It was naturally impossible to work together in this mutual tension, and the one page of Richard and Samuel that we finished amidst mutual resistance is simply proof of Max's energy, but otherwise bad.  New Year's Eve at Cada's.  Not so bad, because Weltsch, Kisch, and someone else added new blood so that finally, although only within the limits of that group, I again found my way back to Max.  I then pressed his hand on the crowded Graben, though without looking at him, and with my three notebooks pressed to me, as I remember, proudly went straight home.
 

The fern-shaped flames blazing up from a melting pot on the street in front of a building under construction.
 

It is easy to recognize a concentration in me of all my forces on writing.  When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music.  I atrophied in all these directions.  This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively could they even halfway serve the purpose of my writing.  Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself, and is now interfered with only by the office, but that interferes with it completely.  In any case I shouldn't complain that I can't put up with a sweetheart, that I understand almost exactly as much of love as I do of music and have to resign myself to the most superficial efforts I may pick up, that on New Year's Eve I dined on parsnips and spinach, washed down with a glass of Ceres, and that on Sunday I was unable to take part in Max's lecture on his philosophical work—the compensation for all this is clear as day.  My development is now complete and, so far as I can see, there is nothing left to sacrifice; I need only throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life in which, with the progress of my work, my face will finally be able to age in a natural way.
 

The sudden turn a conversation takes when in the discussion, which at first has dealt in detail with worries of the inner existence, the question is raised (not really breaking the conversation off, but naturally not growing out of it, either) of when and where one will meet the next time and the circumstances that must be considered in deciding this.  And if the conversation also ends with a shaking of hands, then one takes one's leave with momentary faith in the pure, firm structure of our life and with respect for it.
 

In an autobiography one cannot avoid writing “often” where truth would require that “once” be written.  For one always remains conscious that the word “once” explodes that darkness on which the memory draws; and though it is not altogether spared by the word “often,” either, it is at least preserved in the opinion of the writer, and he is carried across parts which perhaps never existed at all in his life but serve him as a substitute for those which his memory can no longer guess at.
 
 

4 January.  It is only because of my vanity that I like so much to read to my sisters (so that today, for instance, it is already too late to write).  Not that I am convinced that I shall achieve something significant in the reading, it is only that I am dominated by the passion to get so close to the good works I read that I merge with them, not through my own merit, indeed, but only through the attentiveness of my listening sisters, which has been excited by what is being read and is unresponsive to inessentials; and therefore too, under the concealment my vanity affords me, I can share as creator in the effect which the work alone has exercised.  That is why I really read admirably to my sisters and stress the accents with extreme exactness just as I feel them, because later I am abundantly rewarded not only by myself but also by my sisters.
 

But if I read to Brod or Baum or others, just because of my pretensions my reading must appear horribly bad to everyone, even if they know nothing of the usual quality of my reading; for here I know that the listener is fully aware of the separation between me and what is being read, here I cannot merge completely with what I read without becoming ridiculous in my own opinion, an opinion which can expect no support from the listener; with my voice I flutter around what is being read, try to force my way in here and there because they don’t expect that much from me at all; but what they really want me to do, to read without vanity, calmly and distantly, and to become passionate only when a genuine passion demands it, that I cannot do; but although I believe that I have resigned myself to reading badly to everyone except my sisters, my vanity, which this time has no justification, still shows itself: I feel offended if anyone finds fault with my reading, I become flushed and want to read on quickly, just as I usually strive, once I have begun, to read on endlessly, out of an unconscious yearning that during the course of the long reading there may be produced, at least in me, that vain, false feeling of integration with what I read which makes me forget that I shall never be strong enough at any one moment to impose my feelings on the clear vision of the listener and that at home it is always my sisters who initiate this longed-for substitution.
 
 

5 January.  For two days I have noticed, whenever I choose to, an inner coolness and indifference.  Yesterday evening, during my walk, every little street sound, every eye turned towards me, every picture in a showcase, was more important to me than myself.
 

Uniformity.  History.
 

When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and when you have already been sitting quietly at the table for so long that your departure must occasion not only paternal anger but surprise to everyone, when besides, the stairs are in darkness and the front door locked and in spite of all that you have started up in a sudden fit of restlessness, changed your jacket, abruptly dressed yourself for the street, explained that you must go out and with a few curt words of leave-taking actually gone out, banging the flat door more or less hastily according to the degree of displeasure you think you have left behind you and so cut off the general discussion of your departure, and when you find yourself once more in the street with limbs swinging extra freely in answer to the unexpected liberty you have procured for them, when as a result of this decisive action you feel aroused within yourself all the potentialities of decisive action, when you recognize with more than usual significance that your strength is greater than your need to accomplish effortlessly the swiftest of changes, that left alone you grow in understanding and calm, and in the enjoyment of them—then for that evening you have so completely got away from your family that the most distant journey could not take you farther and you have lived through what is for Europe so extreme an experience of solitude that one can only call it Russian.  All this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening you look up a friend to see how he is getting on.
 

Invited Weltsch to come to Mrs. Klug's benefit.  Löwy, with his severe headaches that probably indicate a serious head ailment, leaned against a wall down in the street where he was waiting for me, his right hand pressed in despair against his forehead.  I pointed him out to Weltsch who, from his sofa, leaned out of the window.  I thought it was the first time in my life that I had so easily observed from the window an incident down in the street that concerned me so closely.  In and of itself, this kind of observation is familiar to me from Sherlock Holmes.
 
 

6 January.  Yesterday Vizekönig [Vice-King] by Feimann.  My receptivity to the Jewishness in these plays deserts me because they are too monotonous and degenerate into a wailing that prides itself on isolated, violent outbreaks.  When I saw the first plays it was possible for me to think that I had come upon a Judaism on which the beginnings of my own rested, a Judaism that was developing in my direction and so would enlighten and carry me farther along in my own clumsy Judaism, instead, it moves farther away from me the more I hear of it.  The people remain, of course, and I hold fast to them.
 

Mrs. Klug was giving a benefit and therefore sang several new songs and made a few new jokes.  But only her opening song held me wholly under her influence, after that I had the strongest reaction to every detail of her appearance, to her arms, stretched out when she sings, and her snapping fingers, to the tightly twisted curls at her temples, to her thin shirt, flat and innocent under her vest, to her lower lip that she pursed once while she savored the effect of a joke (“Look, I speak every language, but in Yiddish”), to her fat little feet in their thick white stockings.  But when she sang new songs yesterday she spoiled the main effect she had on me, which lay in the fact that here was a person exhibiting herself who had discovered a few jokes and songs that revealed her temperament and all its strong points to the utmost perfection.  When this display is a success, everything is a success, and if we like to let this person affect us often, we will naturally—and in this, perhaps, all the audience agrees with me—not let ourselves be misled by the constant repetition of the songs, which are always the same, we will rather approve of it as an aid to concentration, like the darkening of the hall, for example, and, as far as the woman is concerned, recognize in her that fearlessness and self-awareness which are exactly what we are seeking.  So when the new songs came along, songs that could reveal nothing new in Mrs. Klug since the old ones had done their duty so completely, and when these songs, without any justification at all, claimed one's attention purely as songs, and when they in this way distracted one's attention from Mrs. Klug but at the same time showed that she herself was not at ease in them either, part of the time making a failure of them and part of the time exaggerating her grimaces and gestures, one had to become annoyed and was consoled only by the fact that the memory of her perfect performances in the past, resulting from her unshakeable integrity, was too firm to be disturbed by the present sight.
 
 

7 January.  Unfortunately Mrs. Tschissik always has parts which show only the essence of her character, she always plays women and girls who all at once are unhappy, despised, dishonored, wronged, but who are not allowed time to develop their characters in a natural sequence.  The explosive, natural strength with which she plays these roles makes them climactic only when she acts them, in the play as it is written, because of the wealth of acting they require, these roles are only suggestions, but this shows what she would be capable of.  One of her important gestures begins as a shudder in her trembling hips, which she holds somewhat stiffly.  Her little daughter seems to have one hip completely stiff.  When the actors embrace, they hold each other's wigs in place.
 

Recently, when I went up to Löwy's room with him so that he could read me the letter he had written to the Warsaw writer, Nomberg, we met the Tschissik couple on the landing.  They were carrying their costumes for Kol Nidre, wrapped in tissue paper like matzos, up to their room.  We stopped for a little while.  The railing supported my hands and the intonations of my sentences.  Her large mouth, so close in front of me, assumed surprising but natural shapes.  It was my fault that the conversation threatened to end hopelessly, for in my effort hurriedly to express all my love and devotion I only remarked that the affairs of the troupe were going wretchedly, that their repertoire was exhausted, that they could therefore not remain much longer and that the lack of interest that the Prague Jews took in them was incomprehensible.  Monday I must—she asked me—come to see Sedernacht [Seder Night], although I already know the play.  Then I shall hear her sing the song (“Hear, O Israel”) which, she remembers from a remark I once made, I love especially.
 

“Yeshivahs” are talmudic colleges supported by many communities in Poland and Russia.  The cost is not very great because these schools are usually housed in old, unusable buildings in which, besides the rooms where the students study and sleep, is found the apartment of the Rosh Yeshivah, who also performs other services in the community, and of his assistant.  The students pay no tuition and take their meals in turn with the various members of the community.  Although these schools are based on the most severely orthodox principles, it is precisely in them that apostate progress has its source: since young people from distant places come together here, precisely the poor, the energetic and those who want to get away from their homes; since the supervision is not very strict and the young people are entirely thrown upon one another, and since the most essential part of the instruction is common study and mutual explanation of difficult passages; since the orthodoxy in the various home towns of the students is always the same and therefore not much of a topic for conversation, while the suppressed progressive tendencies take the most varied forms, differing in strength according to the varying circumstances of the towns, so that there is always a lot to talk about; since, furthermore, one person always lays hands on only one or another copy of the forbidden progressive literature, while in the Yeshivah many such copies are brought together from everywhere and exercise a particularly telling effect because every possessor of a copy propagates not only the text but also his own zeal—because of all these reasons and their immediate consequences, in the recent past all the progressive writers, politicians, journalists, and scholars have come out of these schools.  The reputation of these schools among the orthodox has therefore deteriorated very much, while on the other hand young people of advanced inclinations stream to them more than ever.
 

One famous Yeshivah is in Ostro, a small place eight hours by train from Warsaw.  All Ostro is really only a bracket around a short stretch of the highway.  Löwy insists it's no longer than his stick.  Once, when a count stopped in Ostro with his four-horse travelling carriage, the two lead horses stood outside one end of the place and the rear of the carriage outside the other.
 

Löwy decided, about the age of fourteen when the constraint of life at home became unbearable for him, to go to Ostro.  His father had just slapped him on the shoulder as he was leaving the klaus towards evening and had casually told him to see him later, he had something to discuss with him.  Because he could obviously expect nothing but the usual reproaches, Löwy went directly from the klaus to the railway station, with no baggage, wearing a somewhat better caftan than usual because it was Saturday evening, and carrying all his money, which he always had with him.  He took the ten o'clock train to Ostro where he arrived at seven the next morning.  He went straight to the Yeshivah where he made no special stir, anyone can enter a Yeshivah, there are no special entrance requirements.  The only striking thing was his entering at this time—it was summer—which was not customary, and the good caftan he was wearing.  But all this was soon settled too, because very young people such as these were, bound to each other by their Jewishness in a degree unknown to us, get to know each other easily.  He distinguished himself in his studies, for he had acquired a good deal of knowledge at home.  He liked talking to the strange boys, especially as, when they found out about his money, they all crowded around him offering to sell him things.  One, who wanted to sell him “days,” astonished him especially.  Free board was called “days.”  They were a saleable commodity because the members of the community, who wanted to perform a deed pleasing to God by providing free board for no matter what student, did not care who sat at their tables.  If a student was unusually clever, it was possible for him to provide himself with two sets of free meals for one day.  He could bear up under these double meals so much the better because they were not very ample, after the first meal, one could still swallow down the second with great pleasure, and because it might also happen that one day was doubly provided for while other days were empty.  Nevertheless, everyone was happy, naturally, if he found an opportunity to sell such an additional set of free meals advantageously.  Now if someone arrived in summer, as Löwy did, at a time when the free board had long since been distributed, the only possible way to get any was to buy it, as the additional sets of free meals which had been available at first had all been reserved by speculators.
 

The night in the Yeshivah was unbearable.  Of course, all the windows were open since it was warm, but the stench and the heat would not stir out of the rooms, the students, who had no real beds, lay down to sleep without undressing, in their sweaty clothes, wherever they happened to be sitting last.  Everything was full of fleas.  In the morning everyone hurriedly wet his hands and face with water and resumed his studies.  Most of the time they studied together, usually two from one book.  Debates would often draw a number into a circle.  The Rosh Yeshivah explained only the most difficult passages here and there.  Although Löwy later—he stayed in Ostro ten days, but slept and ate at the inn—found two like-minded friends (they didn't find one another so easily, because they always first had carefully to test the opinions and reliability of the other person), he nevertheless was very glad to return home because he was accustomed to an orderly life and couldn't stand the homesickness.
 

In the large room there was the clamor of card playing and later the usual conversation which Father carries on when he is well, as he is today, loudly if not coherently.  The words represented only small shapes in a formless clamor.  Little Felix slept in the girls' room, the door of which was wide open.  I slept across the way, in my own room.  The door of this room, in consideration of my age, was closed.  Besides, the open door indicated that they still wanted to lure Felix into the family while I was already excluded.
 

Yesterday at Baum's.  Strobl was supposed to be there, but was at the theater.  Baum read a column, “On the Folksong”; bad.  Then a chapter from Des Schicksals Spiele und Ernst; very good.  I was indifferent, in a bad mood, got no clear impression of the whole.  On the way home in the rain Max told me the present plan of “Irma Polak.”  I could not admit my mood, as Max never gives it proper recognition.  I therefore had to be insincere, which finally spoiled everything for me.  I was so sorry for myself that I preferred to speak to Max when his face was in the dark, although mine, in the light, could then betray itself more easily.  But then the mysterious end of the novel gripped me in spite of all the obstacles.  On the way home, after saying good night, regret because of my falsity and pain because of its inevitability.  Plan to start a special notebook on my relationship with Max.  What is not written down swims before one's eyes and optical accidents determine the total impression.
 

When I lay on the sofa the loud talking in the room on either side of me, by the women on the left, by the men on the right, gave me the impression that they were coarse, savage beings who could not be appeased, who did not know what they were saying and spoke only in order to set the air in motion, who lifted their faces while speaking and followed the spoken words with their eyes.
 

So passes my rainy, quiet Sunday, I sit in my bedroom and am at peace, but instead of making up my mind to do some writing, into which I could have poured my whole being the day before yesterday, I have been staring at my fingers for quite a while.  This week I think I have been completely influenced by Goethe, have really exhausted the strength of this influence and have therefore become useless.
 

From a poem by Rosenfeld describing a storm at sea: “The souls flutter, the bodies tremble.”  When he recites, Löwy clenches the skin on his forehead and the bridge of his nose the way one would think only hands could be clenched.  At the most gripping passages, which he wants to bring home to the listener, he himself comes close to us, or rather he enlarges himself by making his appearance more distinct.  He steps forward only a little, opens his eyes wide, plucks at his straight black coat with his absent-minded left hand and holds the right out to us, open and large.  And we are supposed, even if we are not gripped, to acknowledge that he is gripped and to explain to him how the misfortune which has been described was possible.
 

I am supposed to pose in the nude for the artist Ascher, as a model for a St. Sebastian.
 

If I should now, in the evening, return to my relatives, I shall, since I have written nothing that I could enjoy, not appear stranger, more despicable, more useless to them than I do to myself.  All this, naturally, only in my feelings (which cannot be deceived even by the most precise observation), for actually they all respect me and love me, too.
 
 

24 January.  Wednesday.  For the following reasons have not written for so long: I was angry with my boss and cleared it up only by means of a good letter; was in the factory several times; read, and indeed greedily, Pines's L'Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande [The History of Jewish-German Literature], 500 pages, with such thoroughness, haste, and joy as I have never yet shown in the case of similar books; now I am reading Fromer, Organismus des Judentums [The Jewish Organism]; finally I spent a lot of time with the Jewish actors, wrote letters for them, prevailed on the Zionist society to inquire of the Zionist societies of Bohemia whether they would like to have guest appearances of the troupe; I wrote the circular that was required and had it reproduced; saw Sulamith once more and Richter's Herzele Mejiches for the first time, was at the folksong evening of the Bar Kokhba Society, and day before yesterday saw Graf von Gleichen [Count of Equals] by Schmidtbonn.
 

Folksong evening: Dr. Nathan Birnbaum is the lecturer.  Jewish habit of inserting “my dear ladies and gentlemen” or just “my dear” at every pause in the talk.  Was repeated at the beginning of Birnbaum's talk to the point of being ridiculous.  But from what I know of Löwy I think that these recurrent expressions, which are frequently found in ordinary Yiddish conversations too, such as “Weh ist mir!” or “S'ist nischt,” or “S'ist viel zu reden,” are not intended to cover up embarrassment but are rather intended, like ever-fresh springs, to stir up the sluggish stream of speech that is never fluent enough for the Jewish temperament.
 
 

26 January.  The back of Mr. Weltsch and the silence of the entire hall while listening to the bad poems.  Birnbaum: his hair, worn somewhat longish, is cut off abruptly at his neck, which is very erect either in itself or because of its sudden nudity.  Large, crooked nose, not too narrow and yet with broad sides, which looks handsome chiefly because it is in proper proportion to his large beard—Gollanin, the singer.  Peaceful, sweetish, beatific patronizing face turned to the side and down, prolonged smile somewhat sharpened by his wrinkled nose, which may be only part of his breathing technique.
 

Pines: Histoire de la Lttérature Judeo-Allemande.  Paris 1911.

Soldiers' song: They cut off our beards and earlocks.  And they forbid us to keep the Sabbath and holy days.

Or: At the age of five I entered the "Hede" and now I must ride a horse.

                    Wos mir seinen, seinen mir
                    Ober jüden seinen mir.
                    [What we are, we are,
                    But Jews we are.]

Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment] movement introduced by Mendelssohn at the beginning of the nineteenth century, adherents are called Maskilim, are opposed to the popular Yiddish, tend towards Hebrew and the European sciences.  Before the pogroms of 1881 it was not nationalist, later strongly Zionist.  Principle formulated by Gordon: “Be a man on the street and a Jew at home.”  To spread its ideas the Haskalah must use Yiddish and, much as it hates the latter, lays the foundation of its literature.

Other aims are “la lutte contre le chassidisme, I'exaltation de l'instruction et des travaux manuels.” [the fight against Hasidism, the exaltation of education and manual labor.]

Badchan, the sad folk and wedding minstrel (Eliakum Zunser), talmudic trend of thought.

Le Roman populaire [The Popular Novel]: Eisik Meir Dick (1808-94) instructive, haskalic.  Schomer, still worse, title, for example, Der podriatechik (l’entrepreneur), ein höchst interessanter Roman [The Podriatist (the entrepreneur), an extremely interesting novel].  Ein richtiger fach fun leben, or Die eiserne Frau oder das verkaufte Kind.  Ein wunder-schöner Roman.  [The Iron Lady or the Sold Child, a very beautiful novel].   Further, in America serial novels, Zwischen Menschenfressern [Among Maneaters] , twenty-six volumes.

S. J. Abramowitsch (Mendele Mocher Sforim), lyric, subdued gaiety, confused arrangement.  Fishke der Krummer, Jewish habit of biting the lips.

End of Haskalah 1881.  New nationalism and democracy.  Flourishing of Yiddish literature.

S. Frug, lyric writer, life in the country by all means.  Délicieux est le sommeil du seigneur dans sa chambre.  Sur des oreillers doux, blancs comme la neige.  Mais plus délicieux encore est le repos dans le champ sur du foin frais à l'heure du soir, après le travail.  [Delicious is the lord’s sleep in his room.  On soft pillows, white like the snow.  But yet more delicious is the repose in the field on fresh hay at sunset, after work.]

Talmud: He who interrupts his study to say, “How beautiful is this tree,” deserves death.

Lamentations at the west wall of the Temple Poem: “La Fille du Shammes.”  The beloved rabbi is on his deathbed.  The burial of a shroud the size of the rabbi and other mystical measures are of no avail.  Therefore at night the elders of the congregation go from house to house with a list and collect from the members of the congregation renunciations of days or weeks of their lives in favor of the rabbi.  Deborah, la Fille du Shammes, gives “the rest of her life.”  She dies, the rabbi recovers.  At night, when he is studying alone in the synagogue, he hears the voice of Deborah's whole aborted life.  The singing at her wedding, her screams in childbed, her lullabies, the voice of her son studying the Torah, the music at her daughter's wedding.  While the songs of lamentation sound over her corpse the rabbi, too, dies.

Peretz: bad Heine lyrics and social poems.  Né 1851.  Rosenfeld: The poor Yiddish public took up a collection to assure him of a livelihood.

S. Rabinowitz (Sholom Aleichem), né 1859.  Custom of great jubilee celebrations in Yiddish literature.  Kasrilevke, Menachem Mendel, who emigrated and took his entire fortune with him; although previously he had only studied Talmud, he begins to speculate in the stock market in the big city, comes to a new decision every day and always reports it to his wife with great self-satisfaction; until finally he must beg for traveling expenses.

Peretz: The figure of the batlan frequent in the ghettos, lazy and grown clever through idling, lives in the circle of the pious and learned.  Many marks of misfortune on them, as they are young people who, although they enjoy idleness, also waste away in it, live in dreams, under the domination of the unrestrained force of unappeased desires.

Mitat neshika, death by a kiss: reserved only for the most pious.

Baal Shem: Before he became a rabbi in Miedzyboz he lived in the Carpathians as a vegetable gardener, later he was his brother-in-law's coachman.  His visions came to him on lonely walks.  Zohar, “Bible of the Kabbalists.”

Jewish theater.  Frankfurt Purim play, 1708.  Ein schön neu Achashverosh-spiel, Abraham and Goldfaden, 1876-7 Russo-Turkish War, Russian and Galician army contractors had gathered in Bucharest, Goldfaden had also come there in search of a living, heard the crowds in the stores singing Yiddish songs and was encouraged to found a theater.  He was not yet able to put women on the stage.  Yiddish performances were forbidden in Russia 1883.  They began in London and New York 1884.

J. Gordin 1897 in a jubilee publication of the Jewish theater in New York: “The Yiddish theater has an audience of hundreds of thousands, but it cannot expect to see a writer of great talent emerge as long as the majority of its authors are people like me who have become dramatic authors only by chance, who write plays only by force of circumstance, and remain isolated and see about them only ignorance, envy, enmity, and spite.”
 
 

31 January.  Wrote nothing.  Weltsch brings me books about Goethe that provoke in me a distracted excitement that can be put to no use.  Plan for an essay, “Goethe's Frightening Nature,” fear of the two hours' walk which I have now begun to take in the evening.
 
 

4 February.  Three days ago Wedekind: Erdgeist [Earth Spirit].  Wedekind and his wife, Tilly, act in it.  Clear, precise voice of the woman.  Narrow, crescent-shaped face.  The lower part of the leg branching off to the left when she stood quietly.  The play clear even in retrospect, so that one goes home peaceful and aware of oneself.  Contradictory impression of what is thoroughly well established and yet remains strange.
 

On my way to the theater I felt well.  I savored my innermost being as though it were honey.  Drank it in an uninterrupted draught.  In the theater this passed away at once.  Orpheus in the Underworld with Pallenberg.  The performance was so bad, applause and laughter around me in the standing room so great, that I could think of no way out but to run away after the second act and so silence it all.
 

Day before yesterday wrote a good letter to Trautenau about a guest appearance for Löwy.  Each fresh reading of the letter calmed and strengthened me, there was in it so much unspoken indication of everything good in me.
 

The zeal, permeating every part of me, with which I read about Goethe (Goethe's conversations, student days, hours with Goethe, a visit of Goethe's to Frankfurt) and which keeps me from all writing.
 

S., merchant, thirty-five years old, member of no religious community, educated in philosophy, interested in literature for the most part only to the extent that it pertains to his writing.  Round head, black eyes, small, energetic moustache, firm flesh on his cheeks, thickset body.  For years has been studying from nine to one o'clock at night.  Born in Stanislau, knows Hebrew and Yiddish.  Married to a woman who gives the impression of being limited only because of the quite round shape of her face.
 

For two days coolness towards Löwy.  He asks me about it.  I deny it.
 

Quiet, restrained conversation with Miss T. in the balcony between the acts of Erdgeist.  In order to achieve a good conversation one must, as it were, push one's hand more deeply, more lightly, more drowsily under the subject to be dealt with, then it can be lifted up astonishingly.  Otherwise one breaks one's fingers and thinks of nothing but one's pains.
 

Story: The evening walks, discovery of quick walking.  Introduction, a beautiful, dark room.
 

Miss T. told me about a scene in her new story where a girl with a bad reputation enters the sewing school.  The impression on the other girls.  I say that they, who feel clearly in themselves the capacity and desire to earn a bad reputation and who at the same time are able to see for themselves at first hand the kind of misfortune into which one hurls oneself by it, will pity her.
 

A week ago a lecture in the banquet room of the Jewish Town Hall by Dr Theilhaber on the decline of the German Jews.  It is unavoidable, for (1) if the Jews collect in the cities, the Jewish communities in the country disappear.  The pursuit of profit devours them.  Marriages are made only with regard to the bride's settlement.  Two-child system.  (2) Mixed marriages.  (3) Conversion.
 

Amusing scene when Prof. Ehrenfels, who grows more and more handsome and who—with his bald head sharply outlined against the light in a curve that is puffed out at the top, his hands pressed together, with his full voice, which he modulates like a musical instrument, and a confident smile at the meeting—declares himself in favor of mixed races.
 
 

5 February.  Monday.  Weary even of reading Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth].  I am hard on the outside, cold on the inside.  Today, when I came to Dr. F., although we approached each other slowly and deliberately, it was as though we had collided like balls that drive one another back and, themselves out of control, get lost.  I asked him whether he was tired.  He was not tired, why did I ask?  I am tired, I replied, and sat down.
 

To lift yourself out of such a mood, even if you have to do it by strength of will, should be easy.  I force myself out of my chair, circle the table in long strides, exercise my head and neck, make my eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them.  Defy my own feelings, welcome Löwy enthusiastically supposing he comes to see me, amiably tolerate my sister in the room while I write, swallow all that is said at Max's, whatever pain and trouble it may cost me, in long draughts.  Yet even if I managed fairly well in some of this, one obvious slip, and slips cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, the easy and the difficult alike, and I will have to turn backwards in the circle.  So the best resource is to meet everything as calmly as possible, to make yourself an inert mass, and, if you feel that you are carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, to yield to the non-conscious that you believe far away while it is precisely what is burning you, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard and let nothing survive save that.  A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your eyebrows.
 

Short spell of faintness yesterday in the Café City with Löwy.  How I bent down over a newspaper to hide it.
 

Goethe's beautiful silhouette.  Simultaneous impression of repugnance when looking at this perfect human body, since to surpass this degree of perfection is unimaginable and yet it looks only as though it had been put together by accident.  The erect posture, the dangling arms, the slender throat, the bend in the knees.
 

My impatience and grief because of my exhaustion are nourished especially on the prospect of the future that is thus prepared for me and which is never out of my sight.  What evenings, walks, despair in bed and on the sofa (7 February) are still before me, worse than those I have already endured!
 

Yesterday in the factory.  The girls, in their unbearably dirty and untidy clothes, their hair disheveled as though they had just got up, the expressions on their faces fixed by the incessant noise of the transmission belts and by the individual machines, automatic ones, of course, but unpredictably breaking down, they aren't people, you don't greet them, you don't apologize when you bump into them, if you call them over to do something, they do it but return to their machine at once, with a nod of the head you show them what to do, they stand there in petticoats, they are at the mercy of the pettiest power and haven't enough calm understanding to recognize this power and placate it by a glance, a bow.  But when six o'clock comes and they call it out to one another, when they untie the kerchiefs from around their throats and their hair, dust themselves with a brush that passes around and is constantly called for by the impatient, when they pull their skirts on over their heads and clean their hands as well as they can—then at last they are women again, despite pallor and bad teeth they can smile, shake their stiff bodies, you can no longer bump into them, stare at them, or overlook them, you move back against the greasy crates to make room for them, hold your hat in your hand when they say good evening, and do not know how to behave when one of them holds your winter coat for you to put on.
 
 

8 February.  Goethe: “My delight in creating was infinite.”
 

I have become more nervous, weaker, and have lost a large part of the calm on which I prided myself years ago.  Today, when I received the card from Baum in which he writes that he cannot give the talk at the evening for the Eastern Jews after all, and when I was therefore compelled to think that I should have to take it over, I was overpowered by uncontrollable twitchings, the pulsing of my arteries sprang along my body like little flames; if I sat down, my knees trembled under the table and I had to press my hands together.  I shall, of course, give a good lecture, that is certain, besides, the restlessness itself, heightened to an extreme on that evening, will pull me together in such a way that there will not be room for restlessness and the talk will come straight out of me as though out of a gun barrel.  But it is possible that I shall collapse after it, in any event I shall not be able to get over it for a long time.  So little physical strength!  Even these few words are written under the influence of weakness.
 

Yesterday evening with Löwy at Baum's.  My liveliness.  Recently Löwy translated a bad Hebrew story, “The Eye,” at Baum's.
 
 

13 February.  I am beginning to write the lecture for Löwy's performance.  It is on Sunday, the 18th.  I shall not have much time to prepare and am really striking up a kind of recitative here as though in an opera.  The reason is only that an incessant excitement has been oppressing me for days and that, somewhat hesitant in the face of the actual beginning of the lecture, I want to write down a few words only for myself; in that way, given a little momentum, I shall be able to stand up before the audience.  Cold and heat alternate in me with the successive words of the sentence, I dream melodic rises and falls, I read sentences of Goethe's as though my whole body were running down the stresses.
 
 

25 February.  Hold fast to the diary from today on!  Write regularly!  Don't surrender!  Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.  I spent this evening at the family table in complete indifference, my right hand on the arm of the chair in which my sister sat playing cards, my left hand weak in my lap.  From time to time I tried to realize my unhappiness, I barely succeeded.
 

I have written nothing for so long because of having arranged an evening for Löwy in the banquet room of the Jewish Town Hall on 18 February, at which I delivered a little introductory lecture on Yiddish.  For two weeks I worried for fear that I could not produce the lecture.  On the evening before the lecture I suddenly succeeded.
 

Preparations for the lecture: Conferences with the Bar Kokhba Society, getting up the program, tickets, hall, numbering the seats, key to the piano (Toynbee Hall), setting up the stage, pianist, costumes, selling tickets, newspaper notices, censorship by the police and the religious community.
 

Places in which I was and people with whom I spoke or to whom I wrote.  In general: with Max, with Schmerler, who visited me, with Baum, who at first assumed the responsibility for the lecture but then refused it, whose mind I changed again in the course of an evening devoted to that purpose and who the next day again notified me of his refusal by special delivery, with Dr. Hugo Hermann and Leo Hermann in the Café Arco, often with Robert Weltsch at his home; about selling tickets with Dr. Bl. (in vain), Dr. H. Dr. Fl., visit to Miss T., lecture at Afike Jehuda (by Rabb. Ehrentreu on Jeremiah and his time, during the social part of the evening that followed, a short, abortive talk about Löwy), at the teacher W.'s place (then in the Cafe, then for a walk, from twelve to one he stood in front of my door as large as life and would not let me go in).  About the hall, at Dr. Karl B.'s, twice at L.'s house on Heuwagsplatz, several times at Otto Pick's, in the bank; about the key to the piano for the Toynbee lecture, with Mr. R. and the teacher S., then to the latter's home to get the key and to return it; about the stage, with the custodian and the porter of the town hall; about payment, in the town hall office (twice); about the sale, with Mrs. Fr. at the exposition, “The Set Table.”  Wrote to Miss T., to one Otto Kl. (in vain), for the Tagblatt (in vain), to Löwy (“I won't be able to give the talk, save me!”).
 

Excitements: About the lecture, one night twisted up in bed, hot and sleepless, hatred of Dr. B., fear of Weltsch (he will not be able to sell anything), Afike Jehuda, the notices are not published in the papers the way in which they were expected to be, distraction in the office, the stage does not come, not enough tickets are sold, the color of the tickets upsets me, the lecture has to be interrupted because the pianist forgot his music at home in Kosir, a great deal of indifference towards Löwy, almost disgust.
 

Benefits: Joy in Löwy and confidence in him, proud, unearthly consciousness during my lecture (coolness in the presence of the audience, only the lack of practice kept me from using enthusiastic gestures freely), strong voice, effortless memory, recognition, but above all the power with which I loudly, decisively, determinedly, faultlessly, irresistibly, with clear eyes, almost casually, put down the impudence of the three town hall porters and gave them, instead of the twelve kronen they demanded, only six kronen, and even these with a grand air.  In all this are revealed powers to which I would gladly entrust myself if they would remain.  (My parents were not there.)
 

Also: Academy of the Herder Association on the Sophien Island.  Bie shoves his hand in his trouser pocket at the beginning of the lecture.  This face, satisfied despite all disappointment, of people who work as they please.  Hofmannsthal reads with a false ring in his voice.  A close-knit figure, beginning with the ears pressed close to his head.  Wiesenthal.  The beautiful parts of the dance, for example, when in sinking to the ground the natural heaviness of the body is revealed.
 

Impression of Toynbee Hall.
 

Zionist meeting.  Blumenfeld.  Secretary of the World Zionist Organization.
 

A new stabilizing force has recently appeared in my deliberations about myself which I can recognize now for the first time and only now, since during the last week I have been literally disintegrating because of sadness and uselessness.
 

Changing emotions among the young people in the Café Arco.
 
 

26 February.  Better consciousness of myself.  The beating of my heart more as I would wish it.  The hissing of the gaslight above me.
 

I opened the front door to see whether the weather would tempt me to take a walk.  The blue sky could not be denied, but large gray clouds through which the blue shimmered, with flap-shaped, curved edges, hovered low, one could see them against the nearby wooded hills.  Nevertheless the street was full of people out for a walk.  Baby carriages were guided by the firm hands of mothers.  Here and there in the crowd a vehicle came to a stop until the people made way for the prancing horses.  Meanwhile the driver, quietly holding the quivering reins, looked ahead, missed no details, examined everything several times and at the right moment set the carriage in motion.  Children were able to run about, little room as there was.  Girls in light clothes with hats as emphatically colored as postage stamps walked arm in arm with young men, and a song, suppressed in their throats, revealed itself in their dancing pace.  Families stayed close together, and even if sometimes they were shaken out into a single file, there were still arms stretched back, hands waving, pet names called, to join together those who had strayed.  Men who had no part in this tried to shut themselves off even more by sticking their hands in their pockets.  That was petty nonsense.  First I stood m the doorway, then I leaned against the doorpost in order to look on more comfortably.  Clothes brushed against me, once I seized a ribbon that ornamented the back of a girl's skin and let her draw it out of my hand as she walked away; once, when I stroked the shoulder of a girl, just to flatter her, the passer-by behind her struck me over the fingers.  But I pulled him behind the bolted half of the door, I reproached him with raised hands, with looks out of the corners of my eyes, a step towards him, a step away from him, he was happy when I let go of him with a shove.  From then on, naturally, I often called people to me, a crook of my finger was enough, or a quick, unhesitating glance.
 

How sleepily and without effort I wrote this useless, unfinished thing.
 

Today I am writing to Löwy.  I am copying down the letters to him here because I hope to do something with them:

Dear friend—
 

 
27 February.  I have no time to write letters in duplicate.
 

Yesterday evening, at ten o'clock, I was walking at my sad pace down the Zeltnergasse.  Near the Hess hat store a young man stops three steps in front of me, so forces me to stop too, removes his hat, and then runs at me.  In my first fright I step back, think at first that someone wants to know how to get to the station, but why in this way?—then think, since he approaches me confidentially and looks up into my face because I am taller: Perhaps he wants money, or something worse.  My confused attention and his confused speech mingle.
 

“You're a lawyer, aren't you?  A doctor?  Please, couldn't you give me some advice?  I have a case here for which I need a lawyer.”
 

Because of caution, general suspicion, and fear that I might make a fool of myself, I deny that I am a lawyer, but am ready to advise him, what is it?  He begins to talk, it interests me; to increase my confidence I ask him to talk while we walk, he wants to go my way, no, I would rather go with him, I have no place in particular to go.
 

He is a good reciter, he was not nearly as good in the past as he is now, now he can already imitate Kainz so that no one can tell the difference.  People may say he only imitates him, but he puts in a lot of his own too.  He is short, to be sure, but he has mimicry, memory, presence, everything, everything.  During his military service out there in Milowitz, in camp, he recited, a comrade sang, they really had a very good time.  It was a beautiful time.  He prefers to recite Dehmel most of all, the passionate, frivolous poems, for instance, about the bride who pictures her bridal night to herself, when he recites that it makes a huge impression, especially on the girls.  Well, that is really obvious.  He has Dehmel very beautifully bound in red leather.  (He describes it with dropping gestures of his hands.)  But the binding really doesn't matter.  Aside from this he likes very much to recite Rideamus.  No, they don't clash with one another at all, he sees to it that there's a transition, talks between them, whatever occurs to him, makes a fool of the public.  Then “Prometheus” is on his program too.  There he isn't afraid of anyone, not even of Moissi, Moissi drinks, he doesn't.  Finally, he likes very much to read from Swet Marten; he's a new Scandinavian writer.  Very good.  It's sort of epigrams and short sayings.  Those about Napoleon; especially, are excellent, but so are all the others about other great men.  No, he can't recite any of this yet, he hasn't learned it yet, not even read it all, but his aunt read it to him recently and he liked it so much.
 

So he wanted to appear in public with this program and therefore offered himself to the Women's Progress for an evening's appearance.  Really, at first he wanted to present Eine Gutsgeschichte [A Good Story] by Lagerlöf, and had even lent this story to the chairwoman of the Women's Progress, Mrs. Durège-Wodnanski, to look over.  She said the story was beautiful, of course, but too long to be read.  He saw that, it was really too long, especially as, according to the plan of the evening, his brother was supposed to play the piano too.  This brother, twenty-one years old, a very lovely boy, is a virtuoso, he was at the music college in Berlin for two years (four years ago, now).  But came home quite spoiled.  Not really spoiled, but the woman with whom he boarded fell in love with him.  Later he said that he was often too tired to play because he had to keep riding around on this boarding-bag.
 

So, since the Gutsgeschichte wouldn't do, they agreed on the other program: Dehmel, Rideamus, “Prometheus,” and Swet Marten.  But now, in order to show Mrs. Durège in advance the sort of person he really was, he brought her the manuscript of am essay, “The Joy of Life,” which he had written this summer.  He wrote it in a summer resort, wrote it in shorthand during the day, in the evening made a clean copy, polished, crossed out, but really it wasn't much work because it came off at once.  He'll lend it to me if I like, it's written in a popular style, of course, on purpose, but there are good ideas in it and it is betamt, as they say.  (Pointed laughter with chin raised.)  I may leaf through it here under the electric light.  (It is an appeal to youth not to be sad, for after all there is nature, freedom, Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, flowers, insects, etc.)  The Durège woman said she really didn't have time to read it just then, but he could lend it to her, she would return it in a few days.  He suspected something even then and didn't want to leave it there, evaded, said, for instance, “Look, Mrs. Durège, why should I leave it here, it's really just ordinary, it's well written, of course, but . . .”  None of it did any good, he had to leave it there. This was on Friday.
 
 

(28 February.)  Sunday morning, while washing, it occurs to him that he hadn't seen the Tagblatt yet.  He opens it by chance just at the first page of the magazine section.  The title of the first essay, “The Child as Creator,” strikes him.  He reads the first few lines—and begins to cry with joy.  It is his essay, word for word his essay.  So for the first time he is in print, he runs to his mother and tells her.  What joy!  The old woman, she has diabetes and is divorced from his father, who, by the way, is in the right, is so proud.  One son is already a virtuoso, now the other is becoming an author!
 

After the first excitement he thinks the matter over.  How did the essay get into the paper?  Without his consent?  Without the name of the author?  Without his being paid a fee?  This is really a breach of faith, a fraud.  This Mrs. Durège is really a devil.  And women have no souls, says Mohammed (often repeated).  It's really easy to see how the plagiarism came about.  Here was a beautiful essay, it's not easy to come across one like it.  So Mrs. D. therefore went to the Tagblatt, sat down with one of the editors, both of them overjoyed, and now they begin to rewrite it. Of course, it had to be rewritten, for in the first place the plagiarism should not be obvious at first sight and in the second place the thirty-two-page essay was too long for the paper.
 

In reply to my question whether he would not show me passages which correspond, because that would interest me especially and because only then could I advise him what to do, he begins to read his essay, turns to another passage, leafs through it without finding anything, and finally says that everything was copied.  Here, for instance, the paper says: The soul of the child is an unwritten page, and “unwritten page” occurs in his essay too.  Or the expression “surnamed” is copied too, because how else could they hit upon “surnamed.”  But he can't compare individual passages.  Of course, everything was copied, but in a disguised way, in a different sequence, abridged, and with small, foreign interpolations.
 

I read aloud a few of the more striking passages from the paper.  Is that in the essay?  No.  This?  No.  This?  No.  Yes, but these are just the interpolated passages.  In its spirit, the whole thing, the whole thing, is copied.  But proving it, I am afraid, will be difficult.  He'll prove it, all right, with the help of a clever lawyer, that's what lawyers are for, after all.  (He looks forward to this proof as an entirely new task, completely separate from this affair, and is proud of his confidence that he will be able to accomplish it.)
 

That it is his essay, moreover, can be seen from the very fact that it was printed within two days.  Usually it takes six weeks at the very least before a piece that is accepted is printed.  But here speed was necessary, of course, so that he would not be able to interfere.  That's why two days were enough.
 

Besides, the newspaper essay is called “The Child as Creator.”  That clearly refers to him, and besides, it is sarcasm.  By “child” they really mean him, because he used to be regarded as a “child,” as “dumb” (he really was so only during his military service, he served a year and a half), and they now mean to say with this title that he, a child, had accomplished something as good as this essay, that he had therefore proved himself as a creator, but at the same time remained dumb and a child in that he let himself be cheated like this.  The child who is referred to in the original essay is a cousin from the country who is at present living with his mother.
 

But the plagiarism is proved especially convincingly by a circumstance which he hit upon only after a considerable amount of deliberation: “The Child as Creator” is on the first page of the magazine section, but on the third there is a little story by a certain “Feldstein” woman.  The name is obviously a pseudonym.  Now one needn't read all of this story, a glance at the first few lines is enough to show one immediately that this is an unashamed imitation of Lagerlöf.  The whole story makes it even clearer.  What does this mean?  This means that this Feldstein or whatever her name is, is the Durège woman's tool, that she read the Gutsgeschichte, brought by him to the Durège woman, at her house, that in writing this story she made use of what she had read, and that therefore both women are exploiting him, one on the first page of the magazine section, the other on the third page.  Naturally anyone can read and imitate Lagerlöf on his own initiative, but in this cast, after all, his influence is too apparent.  (He keeps waving the page back and forth.)
 

Monday noon, right after the bank closed, he naturally went to see Mrs. Durège.  She opens her door only a crack, she is very nervous: “But, Mr. Reichmann, why have you come at noon?  My husband is asleep.  I can't let you in now”—“Mrs. Durège you must let me in by all means.  It's about an important matter.”  She sees I am in earnest and lets me come in.  Her husband, of course, was definitely not at home.  In the next room I see my manuscript on the table and this immediately starts me winking.  “Mrs. Durège, what have you done with my manuscript.  Without my consent you gave it to the Tagblatt.  How much did they pay you?”  She trembles, she knows nothing, has no idea how it could have got into the paper.  “J’accuse, Mrs. Durège,” I said, half jokingly, but still in such a way that she sees what I really mean, and I keep repeating this “J’accuse, Mrs. Durège” all the time I am there so that she can take note of it, and when I go I even say it several times at the door.  Indeed, I understand her nervousness well.  If I make it public or sue her, her position would really be impossible, she would have to leave the Women's Progress, etc.
 

From her house I go straight to the office of the Tagblatt and have the editor, Löw, fetched.  He comes out quite pale, naturally, is hardly able to walk.  Nevertheless I do not want to begin with my business at once and I want to test him first too.  So I ask him: “Mr. Löw, are you a Zionist?”  (For I know he used to be a Zionist.)  “No,” he says.  I know enough, he must be acting a part in front of me.  Now I ask about the essay.  Once more incoherent talk.  He knows nothing, has nothing to do with the magazine section, will, if I wish, get the editor who is in charge of it.  “Mr. Wittmann, come here,” he calls, and is happy that he can leave.  Wittmann comes, also very pale.  I ask: “Are you the editor of the magazine section?”  He: “Yes.”  I just say, “J’accuse,” and leave.
 

In the bank I immediately telephone Bohemia.  I want to give them the story for publication.  But I can't get a good connection.  Do you know why?  The office of the Tagblatt is pretty close to the telephone exchange, so from the Tagblatt it's easy for them to control the connections as they please, to hold them up or put them through.  And as a matter of fact, I keep hearing indistinct whispering voices on the telephone, obviously the editors of the Tagblatt.  They have, of course, a good deal of interest in not letting this call go through.  Then I hear (naturally very indistinctly) some of them persuading the operator not to put the call through, while others are already connected with Bohemia and are trying to keep them from listening to my story.  “Operator,” I shout into the telephone, “if you don't put this call through at once, I'll complain to the management.”  My colleagues all around me in the bank laugh when they hear me talking to the telephone operator so violently.  Finally I get my party.  “Let me talk to Editor Kisch.  I have an extremely important piece of news for Bohemia.  If you don't take it, I'll give it to another paper at once.  It's high time.”  But since Kisch is not there I hang up without revealing anything.
 

In the evening I go to the office of Bohemia and get the editor, Kisch, called out.  I tell him the story but he doesn't want to publish it.  Bohemia, he says, can't do anything like that, it would cause a scandal and we can't risk it because we're dependent.  Hand it over to a lawyer, that would be best.
 

On my way from the Bohemia office I met you and so I am asking your advice.

“I advise you to settle the matter in a friendly way.”

“Indeed, I was thinking myself that would be best.  She's a woman, after all.  Women have no souls, says Mohammed, with good reason.  To forgive would be more humane, too, more Goethe-like.”

“Certainly.  And then you wouldn't have to give up the recitation evening, either, which would otherwise be lost, after all.”

“But what should I do now?”

“Go to them tomorrow and say that this one time you are willing to assume it was unconscious influence.”

“That's very good.  That's just what I'll do.”

“But because of this you needn't give up your revenge, either.  Simply have the essay published somewhere else and then send it to Mrs. Durège with a nice dedication.”

“That will be the best punishment.  I'll have it published in the Deutsces Abendblatt.  They'll take it; I'm not worried about that.  I'll just not ask for any payment.”

Then we speak about his talent as an actor, I am of the opinion that he should really have training.  “Yes, you're right about that.  But where?  Do you perhaps know where it can be studied?”  I say: “That's difficult.  I really don't know.”  He: “That doesn't really matter.  I'll ask Kisch.  He's a journalist and has a lot of connections.  He'll be able to give me good advice.  I'll just telephone him, spare him and myself the trip, and get all the information.”

“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 surprise, 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”; 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 bad 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 Dämon [The Demon].  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 [Journalists] 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 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 philosopher (v. Goné, 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 so 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 theater, 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 on 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 theater 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 analyze—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 mterrupting 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.  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 armchair.”  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 [new and corageous], that was wonderful, but it turned out that he had intended to say hardie [bold].
 

Was lockst Du meine Brut . . . herauf in Todesglut [What you lure my brood. . . up in  death glow].  Staël translated air brûlant [firey air].  Goethe said he meant the glow of coals.  She found that extremely maussade [gloomy] 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 neighbor.  A holy passage, he cried out with a degree of fervor 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 [Letters between Rahel and David Viet].
 
 

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 connection 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.
 

Only the billowing overcoat remains, everything else is made up.
 
 

16 March.  Saturday.  Again encouragement.  Again I catch hold of myself, as one catches hold of a ball in its fall.  Tomorrow, today, I'll begin an extensive work which, without being forced, will shape itself according to my abilities.  I will not give it up as long as I can hold out at all.  Rather be sleepless than live on in this way.
 

Cabaret Lucerna.  Several young people each sing a song.  Such a performance, if we are fresh and listen closely, more strongly impresses upon us the conclusions which the text offers for our own life than is possible by the performance of experienced artistes.  For the singer cannot increase the force of the poetry, it always retains an independent forcefulness which tyrannizes us through the singer, who doesn't even wear patent-leather shoes, whose hand sometimes will not leave his knee, and, if it must, still shows its reluctance, who throws himself quickly down on the bench in order to conceal as much as possible how many small, awkward movements he had needed.
 

Love scene in spring, the sort one finds on picture postcards.  Devotion, a portrayal which touches and shames the public—Fatinitza.  Viennese singer.  Sweet, significant laugh.  Reminds me of Hansi [one of his college girlfriends].  A face with meaningless details, mostly too sharp, held together and smoothed down by laughter.  Ineffective superiority over the audience which one must grant her when she stands on the stage and laughs out into the indifferent audience—The Degen's stupid dance, with dying will-o'-the-wisps, twigs, butterflies, death's head.
 

Four “Rocking Girls.”  One very pretty.  The program does not give her name.  She was on the audience's extreme right.  How busily she threw her arms about, in what unusually palpable, silent movement were her thin long legs and delicately playing little joints, the way she didn't keep time, but didn't let herself be frightened out of her business, what a soft smile she had in contrast to the distorted ones of the others, how almost voluptuous her face and hair were in comparison with the sparseness of her body, the way she called “slowly” to the musicians, for her sisters as well as for herself.  Their dancing master, a young, strikingly dressed, thin person, stood behind the musicians and waved one hand in rhythm, regarded neither by the musicians nor by the dancers and with his own eyes on the audience.
 

Warnebold, fiery nervousness of a powerful person.  In his movements there is sometimes a joke whose strength lifts one up.  How he hurries to the piano with long steps after the number is announced.
 

Read Aus dem Leben eines Schlachtenmalers [Battle painters who work from life.].  Read Flaubert aloud with satisfaction.
 

The necessity of speaking of dancers with exclamation marks.  Because in that way one imitates their motion, because one remains in the rhythm and the thought does not then interfere with the enjoyment, because then the action always comes at the end of the sentence and prolongs its effect better.
 
 

17 March.  During these days read Morgenrot [Morning Red] by Stössl.
 

Max's concert Sunday.  My almost unconscious listening.  From now on I can no longer be bored by music.  I no longer seek, as I did in vain in the past, to penetrate this impenetrable circle which immediately forms about me together with the music, I am also careful not to jump over it, which I probably could do, but instead I remain calmly in my thoughts that develop and subside in this narrowed space without it being possible for disturbing self-observations to step into their slow swarm.  The beautiful “magic circle” (by Max) that seems here and there to open the breast of the singer.
 

Goethe, “Trost in Tränen [Comfort in Tears].”  Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,/  Siren Lieblingen ganz:/  Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,/  Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz. [The gods give everything, the infinite ones, / Darling siren, all: / All joys, the infinite ones, / All hurts, the infinite ones, all.]
 

My incompetence in the presence of my mother, in the presence of Miss T., and in the presence of all those in the Continental at that time and later on the street.
 

Mam'zelle Nitouche on Monday.  The good effect of a French word in a dreary German performance.  Boarding-school girls in bright dresses, with their arms outstretched, run into the garden behind a fence.  Barracks-yard of the dragoon regiment at night.  Some officers in a barracks in the background are having a farewell celebration in a ball that is reached by going up a few steps.  Mam'zelle Nitouche enters and is persuaded by love and recklessness to take part in the celebration.  The sort of thing that can happen to a girl!  In the morning at the convent, in the evening a substitute for an operetta singer who couldn't come, and at night in the dragoons' barracks.
 

Today, painfully tired, spent the afternoon on the sofa.
 
 

18 March.  I was wise, if you like, because I was prepared for death at any moment, but not because I had taken care of everything that was given to me to do, rather because I had done none of it and could not even hope ever to do any of it.
 
 

22 March.  (The last few days I have been writing down the wrong dates.)  Baum's lecture in the lecture hall.  G. F., nineteen years old, getting married next week.  Dark, faultless, slender face.  Distended nostrils.  For years she has been wearing hats and clothes styled like a hunter's.  The same dark-green gleam on her face.  The strands of hair running along the cheeks, just as in general a slight down seems to cover all her face which she has bowed down into the darkness.  Points of her elbows resting lightly on the arms of her chair.  Then on the Wenzelsplatz a brisk bow, completed with little energy, a turn, and a drawing erect of the poorly dressed, slender body.  I looked at her much less often than I wanted to.
 
 

24 March.  Sunday, yesterday.  Die Sternenbraut [The Star Bride] by Christian von Ehrenfels—Lost in watching.  The sick officer in the play.  The sick body in the tight uniform that made health and decisiveness a duty.

In the morning in the bright sun at Max's for half an hour.
 

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple.  They are talking about vermin and corns.  (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.)  It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort.  It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.  But for the very reason that such conversations are unthinkable without absent-mindedness, they reveal empty spaces which, if one insists, can be filled only by thinking, or, better yet, by dreams.
 
 

25 March.  The broom sweeping the rug in the next room sounds like the train of a dress moving in jerks.
 
 

26 March.  Only not to overestimate what I have written, for in that way I make what is to be written unattainable.
 
 

27 March.  Monday, on the street.  The boy who, with several others, threw a large ball at a servant girl walking defenselessly in front of them; just as the ball was flying at the girl's behind I grabbed him by the throat, choked him in fury, thrust him aside, and swore.  Then walked on and didn't even look at the girl.  One quite forgets one's earthly existence because one is so entirely full of fury and is permitted to believe that, given the opportunity, one would in the same way fill oneself with even more beautiful emotions.
 
 

28 March.  From Mrs. Fanta's lecture, “Impressions of Berlin”: Grillparzer once didn't want to go to a party because he knew that Hebbel, with whom he was friendly, would also be there.  “He will question me again about my opinion on God, and when I don't know what to say, he will become rude”—My awkward behavior.
 
 

29 March.  Delighted with the bathroom.  Gradual understanding.  The afternoons I spent on my hair.
 
 

1 April.  For the first time in a week an almost complete failure in writing.  Why?  Last week too I lived through various moods and kept their influence away from my writing; but I am afraid to write about it.
 
 

3 April.  This is how a day passes—in the morning, the office, in the afternoon, the factory, now in the evening, shouting to the right and left of me at home, later brought my sister home from Hamlet—and I haven't been able to make use of a single moment.
 
 

8 April.  Saturday before Easter.  Complete knowledge of oneself.  To be able to seize the whole of one's abilities like a little ball.  To accept the greatest decline as something familiar and so still remain elastic in it.
 

Desire for a deeper sleep that dissolves more.  The metaphysical urge is only the urge toward death.
 

How affectedly I spoke today in Haas's presence because he praised Max's and my travel report, so that in this way, at least, I might make myself worthy of the praise that the report does not warrant, or so that I might continue by fraud the fraudulent or lying effect of the travel report, or in the spirit of Haas's amiable lie, which I tried to make easier for him.
 
 

6 May.  11 o'clock.  For the first time in a considerable while a complete failure in writing.  The feeling of a tried man.
 

Dreamed recently:

I was riding with my father through Berlin in a tram car.  The big-city quality was represented by countless striped toll bars standing upright, finished off bluntly at the ends.  Apart from that everything was almost empty, but there was a great forest of these toll bars.  We came to a gate, got out without any sense of getting out, stepped through the gate.  On the other side of the gate a sheer wall rose up, which my father ascended almost in a dance, his legs flew out as he climbed, so easy was it for him.  There was certainly also some inconsiderateness in the fact that he did not help me one bit, for I got to the top only with the utmost effort, on all fours, often sliding back again, as though the wall had become steeper under me.  At the same time it was also distressing that [the wall] was covered with human excrement so that flakes of it clung to me, chiefly to my breast.  I looked down at the flakes with bowed head and ran my hand over them.
 

When at last I reached the top, my father, who by this time was already coming out of a building, immediately fell on my neck and kissed and embraced me.  He was wearing an old-fashioned, short Prince Albert, padded on the inside like a sofa, which I remembered well.  “This Dr. von Leyden!  He is an excellent man,” he exclaimed over and over again.  But he had by no means visited him in his capacity as doctor, but rather only as a man worth knowing.  I was a little afraid that I should have to go in to see him too, but this wasn't required of me.  Behind me to the left I saw, sitting in a room literally surrounded by glass walls, a man who turned his back on me.  It turned out that this man was the professor's secretary, that my father had in fact spoken only with him and not with the professor himself, but that somehow or other, through the secretary, he had recognized the excellences of the professor in the flesh, so that in every respect he was as much entitled to an opinion on the professor as if he had spoken to him in person.
 

Lessing Theater: Die Rattern [The Clatter].
 

Letter to Pick because I haven't written to him.  Card to Max in joy over Arnold Beer.
 
 

9 May.  Yesterday evening in the coffeehouse with Pick.  How I hold fast to my novel [Amerika] against all restlessness, like a figure on a monument that looks into the distance and holds fast to its pedestal.
 

Hopeless evening with the family today.  My brother-in-law needs money for the factory, my father is upset because of my sister, because of the business, and because of his heart, my unhappy second sister, my mother unhappy about all of them, and I with my scribblings.
 
 

22 May.  Yesterday a wonderfully beautiful evening with Max.  If I love myself, I love him more.  Cabaret Lucerna.  Madame la mort [Madame Death] by Rachilde.  Dream of a Spring Morning.  The gay, fat girl in the box.  The wild one with the coarse nose, her face smudged with soot, her shoulders squeezed up out of her dress (which wasn't décolleté, however) and her back twisted to and fro, her simple, blue blouse with white polka dots, her fencer's glove, which was always visible since most of the time her right hand was either resting flat, or on its finger-tips, on the right thigh of her lively mother seated beside her.  Her braids twisted over her ears, a not-too-clean light-blue ribbon on the back of her head, the hair in front encircles her forehead in a thin but compact tuft that projects far out in front.  Her warm, wrinkled, light cloak carelessly falling in folds when she was negotiating at the box office.
 
 

23 May.  Yesterday, behind us, out of boredom, a man fell from his chair—Comparison by Rachilde: Those who rejoice in the sun and demand that others rejoice are like drunkards coming from a wedding at night who force those they meet to drink the health of the unknown bride.
 

Letter to Weltsch, proposed that we use “Du” to one another.  Yesterday a good letter to Uncle Alfred about the factory.  Day before yesterday letter to Löwy.
 

Now, in the evening, out of boredom, washed my hands in the bathroom three times in succession.
 

The child with the two little braids, bare head, loose little red dress with white dots, bare legs and feet, who, with a little basket in one hand, a little box in the other, hesitatingly walked across the street near the National Theater.
 

How the actors in the play, Madame la mort turn their backs to the audience, on the principle that the back of an amateur is, other things being equal, as beautiful as the back of a professional actor.  The conscientiousness of people!
 

A few days ago an excellent lecture by Davis Trietsch on colonization in Palestine.
 
 

25 May.  Weak tempo, little blood.
 
 

27 May.  Yesterday Whit Sunday, cold weather, a not very nice excursion with Max and Weltsch.  In the evening, coffeehouse, Werfel gives me Besuch aus dem Elysium [Visit to Elysium].
 

Part of Niklasstrasse and all the bridge turns around to look sentimentally at a dog who, loudly barking, is chasing an ambulance.  Until suddenly the dog stops, turns away and proves to be an ordinary, strange dog who meant nothing in particular by his pursuit of the vehicle.
 
 

1 June.  Wrote nothing.
 
 

2 June.  Wrote almost nothing.
 

Yesterday lecture on America by Dr. Soukup.  (The Czechs to Nebraska, all officials in America are elected, everyone must belong to one of the three parties—Republican, Democratic, Socialist—Roosevelt's election meeting, with his glass he threatened a farmer who had made an objection, street speakers who carry a small box with them to serve as a platform.)  Then spring festival, met Paul Kisch who talked about his dissertation, “Hebrew and the Czechs.”
 
 

6 June.  Thursday.  Corpus Christi.  Two horses in a race, how one lowers its head out of the race and shakes its mane vigorously, then raises its head and only now, apparently feeling better, resumes the race which it has never really interrupted.
 

I have just read in Flaubert's letters: “My novel is the cliff on which I are hanging, and I know nothing of what is going on in the world”—Like what I noted down about myself on 9 May.
 

Without weight, without bones, without body, walked through the streets for two hours considering what I overcame this afternoon while writing.
 
 

7 June.  Bad.  Wrote nothing today.  Tomorrow no time.
 
 

6 July.  Monday.  Began a little.  Am a little sleepy.  Also lost among these entirely strange people.
 
 

9 July.  Nothing written for so long.  Begin tomorrow.  Otherwise I shall again get into a prolonged, irresistible dissatisfaction; I am really in it already.  The nervous states are beginning.  But if I can do something, then I can do it without superstitious precautions.
 

The invention of the devil.  If we are possessed by the devil, it cannot be by one, for then we should live, at least here on earth, quietly, as with God, in unity, without contradiction, without reflection, always sure of the man behind us.  His face would not frighten us, for as diabolical beings we would, if somewhat sensitive to the sight, be clever enough to prefer to sacrifice a hand in order to keep his face covered with it.  If we were possessed by only a single devil, one who had a calm, untroubled view of our whole nature, and freedom to dispose of us at any moment, then that devil would also have enough power to hold us for the length of a human life high above the spirit of God in us, and even to swing us to and fro, so that we should never get to see a glimmer of it and therefore should not be troubled from that quarter.  Only a crowd of devils could account for our earthly misfortunes.  Why don't they exterminate one another until only a single one is left, or why don't they subordinate themselves to one great devil?  Either way would be in accord with the diabolical principle of deceiving us as completely as possible.  With unity lacking, of what use is the scrupulous attention all the devils pay us?  It simply goes without saying that the fading of a human hair must matter more to the devil than to God, since the devil really loses that hair and God does not.  But we still do not arrive at any state of well-being so long as the many devils are within us.
 
 

7 August.  Long torment.  Finally wrote to Max that I cannot clear up the little pieces that still remain, do not want to force myself to it, and therefore will not publish the book [Kafka’s first book, Meditation, which Brod pestered him to put out].
 
 

8 August.  Completed “Confidence Trickster” more or less satisfactorily.  With the last strength of a normal state of mind.  Twelve o'clock, how will I be able to sleep?
 
 

9 August.  The upset night.  Yesterday the maid who said to the little boy on the steps, “Hold on to my skirt!”
 

My inspired reading aloud of Der arme Spielmann.  The perception in this story of what is manly in Grillparzer.  The way he can risk everything and risks nothing, because there is nothing but truth in him already, a truth that even in the face of the contradictory impressions of the moment will justify itself as such when the crucial time arrives.  The calm self-possession.  The slow pace that neglects nothing.  The immediate readiness, when it is needed, not sooner, for long in advance he sees everything that is coming.
 
 

10 August.  Wrote nothing.  Was in the factory and breathed gas in the engine room for two hours.  The energy of the foreman and the stoker before the engine, which for some undiscoverable reason will not start.  Miserable factory.
 
 

11 August.  Nothing, nothing.  How much time the publishing of the little book takes from me and how much harmful, ridiculous pride comes from reading old things with an eye to publication.  Only that keeps me from writing.  And yet in reality I have achieved nothing, the disturbance is the best proof of it.  In any event, now, after the publication of the book, I will have to stay away from magazines and reviews even more than before, if I do not wish to be content with just sticking the tips of my fingers into the truth.  How immovable I have become!  Formerly, if I said only one word that opposed the direction of the moment, I at once flew over to the other side, now I simply look at myself and remain as I am.
 
 

14 August.  Letter to Rowohlt.

Dear Mr. Rowohlt,

I am enclosing the little prose pieces you wanted to see; they will probably be enough to make up a small book.  While I was putting them together towards this end, I sometimes had to choose between satisfying my sense of responsibility and an eagerness to have a book among your beautiful books.  Certainly I did not in each instance make an entirely clear-cut decision.  But now I should naturally be happy if the things pleased you sufficiently to print them.  After all, even with the greatest skill and the greatest understanding the bad in them is not discernible at first sight.  Isn't what is most universally individual in writers the fact that each conceals his bad qualities in an entirely different way?

Faithfully— 
 
 

15 August.  Wasted day.  Spent sleeping and lying down.  Feast of St. Mary on the Altstädter Ring.  The man with a voice that seemed to come from a hole in the ground.  Thought much of—what embarrassment before writing down names—F. B. [Felice Bauer, later Kafka's fiancee].  O.  has just been reciting poems by Goethe.  She chooses them with right feeling.  “Trost in Tränen.”  “An Lotte.”  “An Werther.”  “An den Mond.”
 

Again read old diaries instead of keeping away from them.  I live as irrationally as is at all possible.  And the publication of the thirty-one pages is to blame for everything.  Even more to blame, of course, is my weakness, which permits a thing of this sort to influence me.  Instead of shaking myself, I sit here and consider how I could express all this as insultingly as possible.  But my horrible calm interferes with my inventiveness.  I am curious as to how I shall find a way out of this state.  I don't permit others to push me, nor do I know which is “the right path.”  So what will happen?  Have I finally run aground, a great mass in shallow water?  In that case, however, I should at least be able to turn my head.  That's what I do, however.
 
 

16 August.  Nothing, either in the office or at home.  Wrote a few pages in the Weimar diary.
 

This evening the whimpering of my poor mother because I don't eat.
 
 

20 August.  Outside my window, across the university building site partly overgrown with weeds, the little boys, both in blue blouses, one in light blue, the other, smaller one in darker blue, are each carrying a bundle of dry hay that fills their arms.  They struggle up a slope with it.  Charm of it all for the eyes.
 

This morning the empty open wagon and the large, emaciated horse pulling it.  Both, making a final effort to get up a slope, stretched out to an unusual length.  Seen at an angle by the spectator.  The horse, front legs raised a little, his neck stretched sideways and upwards.  Over him the whip of the driver.
 

If Rowohlt would send it back and I could lock it up again as if it had all never happened, so that I should be only as unhappy as I was before.
 

Miss F. B.  When I arrived at Brod's on 13 August, she was sitting at the table.  I was not at all curious about who she was, but rather took her for granted at once.  Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly.  Bare throat.  A blouse thrown on.  Looked very domestic in her dress although, as it later turned out, she by no means was.  (I alienate myself from her a little by inspecting her so closely.  What a state I'm in now, indeed, alienated in general from the whole of everything good, and don't even believe it yet.  If the literary talk at Max's doesn't distract me too much, I'll try to write the story about Blenkelt today.  It needn't be long, but I must hit it off right.)  Almost broken nose.  Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin.  As I was taking my seat I looked at her closely for the first time, by the time I was seated I already had an unshakeable opinion.
 
 

21 August.  Read Lenz incessantly and—such is my state—he restored me to my senses.
 

The picture of dissatisfaction presented by a street, where everyone is perpetually lifting his feet to escape from the place on which he stands.
 
 

30 August.  All this time did nothing.  The visit of my uncle from Spain.  Last Saturday in the Arco Werfel recited his “Lebenslieder” and “Opfer.”  A monster!  But I looked him in the eye and held it all evening.
 

It will be hard to rouse me, and yet I am restless.  When I lay in bed this afternoon and someone quickly turned a key in the lock, for a moment I had locks all over my body, as though at a fancy-dress ball, and at short intervals a lock was opened or shut here and there.
 

Questionnaire by the magazine Miroir, about love in the present and the way love has changed since the days of our grandparents.  An actress answered: Never did they love as well as today.
 

How shaken and exalted I was after hearing Werfel!  How I behaved afterwards at L.'s party, wild, almost, and without a fault.
 

This month, which, because of the absence of the boss, could have been put to exceptionally good use, I have wasted and slept away without much excuse (sending the book off to Rowohlt, abscesses, my uncle's visit).  Even this afternoon I stretched out on the bed for three hours with dreamy excuses.
 
 

4 September.  My uncle from Spain.  The cut of his coat.  The effect of his nearness.  The details of his personality.  His floating through the anteroom into the toilet, in the course of which he makes no reply to what is said to him.  Becomes milder from day to day, if one judges not in terms of a gradual change but by the moments which stand out.
 
 

5 September.  I ask him: How is one to reconcile the fact that you are generally dissatisfied, as you recently said, and that nevertheless you are at home everywhere, as can be seen time and again (and which is revealed in the rudeness always characteristic of this sort of being-at-home, I thought).  He answers, as I remember it: “In individual things I am dissatisfied, this doesn't extend to the whole.  I often dine in a little French pension that is very exclusive and expensive.  For example, a room for a couple, with meals, costs fifty francs a day.  So I sit there between the secretary of the French legation, for example, and a Spanish general of artillery.  Opposite me sit a high official of the navy ministry and some count or other.  I know them all well by now, sit down in my place, greeting them on all sides, because I am in a peculiar mood I say not another word until the good-bye with which I take my leave.  Then I am alone on the street and really can't see what purpose this evening served.  I go home and regret that I didn't marry.  Naturally this mood passes away again, whether because I have thought it through to the end, whether because the thoughts have dispersed.  But on occasion it comes back again.”
 
 

8 September.  Sunday morning.  Yesterday a letter to Dr. Schiller.
 

Afternoon.  The way my mother, together with a crowd of women, with a very loud voice, is playing with some small children near by and drives me out of the house.  Don't cry!  Don't cry!  etc.  That's his!  That's his!  etc.  Two big people!  etc.  He doesn't want to! . . . But!  But! . . . How did you like Vienna, Dolphi?  Was it nice there? . . . I ask you, just look at his hands!
 
 

11 September.  The evening of the day before yesterday with Utitz.
 

A dream: I found myself on a jetty of square-cut stones built far out into the sea.  Someone, or even several people, were with me, but my awareness of myself was so strong that I hardly knew more about them than that I was speaking to them.  I can remember only the raised knees of someone sitting near me.  At first I did not really know where I was, only when once I accidentally stood up did I see on my left and behind me on my right the distant, clearly outlined sea with many battleships lined up in rows and at anchor.  On the right New York could be seen, we were in New York Harbor.  The sky was gray, but of a constant brightness.  I moved back and forth in my seat, freely exposed to the air on all sides, in order to be able to see everything.  In the direction of New York my glance slanted downwards a little, in the direction of the sea it slanted upwards.  I now noticed the water rise up near us in high waves on which was borne a great cosmopolitan traffic.  I can remember only that instead of the rafts we have, there were long timbers lashed together into gigantic bundles the cut ends of which kept popping out of the water during the voyage, higher or lower, according to the height of the waves, and at the same time kept turning end over end in the water.  I sat down, drew up my feet, quivered with pleasure, virtually dug myself into the ground in delight, and said: Really, this is even more interesting than the traffic on a Paris boulevard.
 
 

12 September.  This evening Dr L. at our house.  Another emigrant to Palestine.  Is taking his bar examination a year before the end of his clerkship and is leaving (in two weeks) for Palestine with 1,200 K.  Will try to get a position with the Palestine Office.  All these emigrants to Palestine (Dr. B., Dr. K.) have downcast eyes, feel blinded by their listeners, fumble around on the table with the tips of their extended fingers, their voices quiver, they smile weakly and prop up these smiles with a little irony.  Dr. K. told us that his students are chauvinists, have the Maccabees forever in their mouths and want to take after them.
 

I became aware that I wrote so eagerly and well to Dr. Schiller only because Miss B. stopped in Breslau, and I have been thinking about sending flowers to her through Dr. Schiller, and although all this was two weeks ago, a trace of it is still in the air.
 
 

15 September.  Engagement of my sister Valli.
 

Aus dem Grunde             From the pit
der Ermattung                 of exhaustion
steigen wir                      we ascend
mit neuen Kräften,          with renewed strength—
Dunkle Herren,               Dark lords,
welche warten                 who wait
bis die Kinder                 until the children
sich entkräften.               exhaust themselves.
 

Love between brother and sister—the repeating of the love between mother and father.
 

The hollow which the work of genius has burned into our surroundings is a good place into which to put one's little light.  Therefore the inspiration that emanates from genius, the universal inspiration that doesn't only drive one to imitation.
 

18 September.  H.'s stories yesterday in the office.  The stone breaker on the highway who begged a frog from him, held it by the feet, and with three bites swallowed down first the little head, then the rump, and finally the feet—The best way to kill cats, who cling stubbornly to life: Squeeze their throats in a closed door and pull their tails—His horror of vermin.  In the army one night he had an itch under his nose, he slapped it in his sleep and crushed something.  But the something was a bedbug and he carried the stench of it around with him for days.
 

Four people ate a well-prepared roast cat, but only three knew what they were eating.  After the meal the three began to meow, but the fourth refused to believe it, only when they showed him the bloody skin did he believe it, could not run out fast enough to vomit everything up again, and was very sick for two weeks.
 

This stone breaker ate nothing but bread and whatever else in the way of fruit or living flesh that he accidentally came upon, and drank nothing but brandy.  Slept in the shed of a brickyard.  Once H. met him at twilight in the fields.  “Stand still,” the man said, “or . . .”  For the sport of it, H. stopped.  “Give me your cigarette,” the man went on.  H. gave it to him.  “Give me another one!”—“So you want another one?” H. asked him, held his gnarled stick in his left hand in case of trouble, and struck hits in the face with his right so that he dropped the cigarette.  The man ran away at once, cowardly and weak, the way such brandy drinkers are.
 

Yesterday at B.'s with Dr. L.  Song about Reb Dovidl, Reb Dovidl of Vassilko is going to Talne today.  In a city between Vassilko and Talne they sing it indifferently, in Vassilko weepingly, in Talne happily.
 
 

19 September.  Comptroller P. tells about the trip which he took in the company of a schoolmate at the age of thirteen with seventy kreuzers in his pocket.  How one evening they came to an inn where a huge drinking bout was going on in honor of the mayor who had returned from his military service.  More than fifty empty beer bottles were standing on the floor.  The whole place was full of pipe smoke.  The stench of the beer dregs.  The two little boys against the wall.  The drunken mayor who, remembering his military service, wants to maintain discipline everywhere, comes up to them and threatens to have them sent home under arrest as deserters, what he takes them for in spite of all their explanations.  The boys tremble, show their Gymnasium identity cards, decline “mensa”; a half-drunk teacher looks on without helping them.  Without being given any definite decision about their fate they are compelled to join in the drinking, are very pleased to get for nothing so much good beer which, with their limited means, they would never have dared to allow themselves.  They drink themselves full and then, late at night, after the last guests have departed, go to sleep on thinly spread straw in this room which had not been aired, and sleep like lords.  But at four o'clock a gigantic maid with a broom arrives, says she has no time, and would have swept them out into the morning mist if they had not themselves run away.  When the room was cleaned up a little, two large coffee-pots, filled to the brim, were placed on the table for them.  But when they stirred their coffee with their spoons, something large, dark, round kept coming to the surface from time to time.  They thought it would be explained in time and drank with appetite until, in view of the half-emptied pots and the dark object, they became really worried and asked the maid's advice.  Then it turned out that the black object was old, congealed goose blood which had been left in the pots from yesterday's feast and on to which the coffee had simply been poured in the stupor of the morning after.  At once the boys ran out and vomited everything to the last little drop.  Later they were called before the parson who, after a short examination in religion, established that they were honest boys, the cook told to serve them some soup, and then sent them on their way with his spiritual blessing.  As pupils in a clerical Gymnasium they had this soup and this blessing given to them in almost every parsonage they came to.
 
 

20 September.  Letters to Löwy and Miss Taussig yesterday, to Miss B. and Max today.

     [Text of “The Judgment” taken out here.]

23 September.  This story, “The Judgment,” I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning.  I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting.  The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water.  Several times during this night I heaved my own weight on my back.  How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again.  How it turned blue outside the window.  A wagon rolled by.  Two men walked across the bridge.  At two I looked at the clock for the last time.  As the maid walked through the anteroom for the first time I wrote the last sentence.  Turning out the light and the light of day.  The slight pains around my heart.  The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night.  The trembling entrance into my sisters' room.  Reading aloud.  Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, “I've been writing until now.”  The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in.  The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing.  Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.  Morning in bed.  The always clear eyes.  Many emotions carried along in the writing, joy, for example, that I shall have something beautiful for Max's Arkadia, thoughts about Freud, of course; in one passage, of Arnold Beer; in another, of Wassermann; in one, of Werfel's giantess; of course, also of my “The Urban World.”
 

I, only I, am the spectator in the orchestra.
 

Gustav Blenkelt was a simple man with regular habits.  He didn't like any unnecessary display and had a definite opinion about people who went in for such display.  Although he was a bachelor, he felt he had an absolute right to say a few deciding words in the marital affairs of his acquaintances and anyone who would even have questioned such a right would have fared badly with him.  He used to speak his mind freely and did not in any way seek to detain those listeners whom his opinions happened not to suit.  As there are everywhere, there were people who admired him, people who honored him, people who put up with him, and, finally, those who wanted to have nothing to do with him.  Indeed, every person, even the emptiest, is, if one will only look carefully, the center of a tight circle that forms about him here and there, how could it be otherwise in the case of Gustav Blenkelt, at bottom an exceptionally social person?
 

In his thirty-fifth year, the last year of his life, he spent an unusual amount of time with a young couple named Strong.  It is certain that for Mr. Strong, who had opened a furniture store with his wife's money, the acquaintance with Blenkelt had numerous advantages, since the largest part of the latter's acquaintances consisted of young, marriageable people who sooner or later had to think of providing new furniture for themselves and who, out of old habit, were usually accustomed not to neglect Blenkelt's advice in this matter, either.  “I keep them on a tight rein,” Blenkelt used to say.
 
 

24 September.  My sister said: The house (in the story) is very like ours.  I said: How?  In that case, then, Father would have to be living in the toilet.
 
 

25 September.  By force kept myself from writing.  Tossed in bed.  The congestion of blood in my head and the useless drifting by of things.  What harmfulness!—Yesterday read at Baum's, to the Baum family, my sisters, Marta, Dr Block's wife, and her two sons (one of them a one-year volunteer in the army).  Towards the end my hand was moving uncontrollably about and actually before my face.  There were tears in my eyes.  The indubitability of the story was confirmed—This evening tore myself away from my writing.  Films in the National Theater.  Miss O., whom a clergyman once pursued.  She came home soaked in cold sweat.  Danzig.  Life of Körner.  The horses.  The white horse.  The smoke of powder.  "Lützows wilde Jagd" [Lützow's Wild Hunt].
 
 

Back to Leni's Franz Kafka page.