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12 April 1953
Three days before Robert's 75th birthday. The doctor told me over the phone that a detailed article about Robert had appeared in the Appenzeller Zeitung, naming me as his guardian and only friend. So I looked toward our meeting today with mixed feelings: would he be suspicious again?
Not at all: under a sky of forget-me-not blue he greets me as cheerful and animated as he scarcely ever is, and agrees immediately that we should spend the day as gypsies, wandering about Herisau. Up the hill, down the hill. The gardens are golden with forsythia, narcissus, and primrose. The fruit trees are a bright, fresh green. And above it all, the forget-me-not dome of the sky.
I tell Robert about Käthchen von Heilbrunn, which I've recently seen performed, and in which I was badly disappointed.
"I know what you mean" says Robert. "This character seems too feisty to me, like a little dog, and she's always wagging her tail for Count von Strahl. I even like the young noblewoman Kunigonde more than her. She scratches and bites, just like men like to have it. But it's unbearable when such arrogant women get their way. Clearly Heinrich von Kleist took a beating from one of them, and wanted to get revenge through the shrewish Kunigonde. Kleist was unrestrained, and a unique kind of writer--when he wants to be lyrical, he gets dramatic, and vice versa, as in Käthchen. It's been a quarter of a century or more since I read this piece, but I still remember the part that reads ‘Murder creeps in on stocking feet.' Isn't that how it goes? And how often I've encountered Kleist! In Thun and on the Wannsee where he and Henriette Vogel killed themselves, and where I've stood at their grave. In Berlin, too, where Kaiser Wilhelm recited a passage from Prinzen von Homburg from his balcony at the outbreak of World War I. Of course, he wanted to incite his subjects against the French."
Our second literary subject during his birthday celebration was the Dane J.P. Jacobsen. Over lunch in Herisau in a little pub with a cloudy-yellow fruit wine Robert told me the story of Frau Fönss, which had appeared some 60 years ago. Frau Fönss was a well-off Danish lady of great character, who, a 40 year old widow, lived in Provence with her two children. Then one day appeared the lover from her girlhood, who now operated a sheep ranch in the pampas of Argentina. Prevented from marrying her 20 years ago only by peculiar circumstances he immediately fell in love with her again. Frau Fönss does not wish to lose her last chance at happiness, and marries him within a few days.
However, her children believe that their mother has breached faith with their father and with them. The couple then moved to Spain where, despite the pain caused by their separation from the children, they spend several happy years. Frau Fönss then falls deathly ill and writes her children a farewell letter; they would never be loved as much, she told them, as they were by her whose hand they would hold at death. Robert recalled numerous details of this melancholy story.
That afternoon, a long conversation about Stalin's mysterious death. "To me the incense [sic; Weihrauch] that he let blow about him was quite repulsive," said Robert. Isolated by the servility of those around him, he eventually became a god who couldn't live a normal life. Perhaps something of the genius remained in him. But people prefer to be ruled by the mediocre. Genius almost always conceals evil, which the people must pay for with pain, blood, and shame.
Three days later on his actual birthday, Robert's mood was, according to Dr. Steiner, grouchy. When anyone tried to talk to him about the tributes to him in the newspapers and the radio he would say "That has nothing to do with me." As on other workdays he carried out his chores, swept out the front room, and in the afternoon folded paper bags.
During his birthday it began to snow gently. When Dr. Steiner told her children how beautifully Herr Walser had written about the winter and the snow and the cold, they said that it must have snowed because Herr Walser loved the winter so and this day was his birthday.