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Good Friday 1949 (15 April)
A warm-as-summertime Good Friday walk to Degersheim, where we'll celebrate Robert's 71st birthday with a fish dinner. By a field of buttercups and gentian he says "We're powerless before nature."
After Bismarcks' resignation German politics became criminal. Kaiser Wilhelm II took every opportunity to tweak the French. Since then there's been no more greatness in the Germans.
To Robert, the modern generation of writers seems sissified. They can't endure failure: "Immediately they run to mama and cry that they've been abused. Just look at the faces of today's writers! There are faces of villains and murderers there! Perhaps good people have nothing to find in art. If the artist wants to create something interesting he must have a demon inside. Angels are not artists."
"Where does this demonic begin and end?" I asked.
"The line is hard to draw" he conceded.
"I saw something like that in an army buddy" I said. "With his short gray hair he almost looked like a convict. He held himself aloof from the rest of us, and when we disappeared to the pubs after the roll call you could see him sitting by himself at his bunk, his round skull resting thoughtfully in his hands. He projected something [st&uumk;nderhaftes], stubborn. For a long time I saw him as a harmless, gentle soul who inspired empathy, rather than fear. Except for his family, the woodworker's trade and climbing mountains were his only interests. As a soldier he did his duty well and after a mountaineering course he was promoted to corporal. As though under agreement we left him alone during our time off because most people instinctively scent an asocial element in personalities like his. In our outfit he was neither popular nor unpopular. He was just there. Perhaps I would have had just as little to do with him as the others if, once during guard duty I hadn't had a glimpse into his state of mind."
"It happened like this: I returned to our cantonment from patrol at dusk in a poetic mood. An indescribably beautiful föhn evening shimmered over the land. The giant mossy stone blokes in which the fortifications of Sargans are built looked like gray elephant hides. The castle across the border, crowning a hill in Liechtenstein, appeared in the dusky light like a ghost castle, to which, a hundred meters below, the little church, seemingly built from a child's construction set, seemed to look up humbly. The forests and the wheat-gold fields, the tall reeds and stubble fields over which a pair of birds of prey hunted created a mood like you'd find in a painting by Albrecht Altdorfer."
"Just then I was awakened from this sacred mood by the Corporal to talk about his job. He talked about various dangers that one is exposed to in a sawmill like his. He said sometimes he had almost been mutilated. He had dozens of examples to show that machines could not only make man's lives easier, but shorter, as well. He demonstrated with great precision where his colleagues had been in their moments of misfortune. He showed how a finger or a hand had been torn by a machine; how a slat whistled into a planer's chest from five meters away, as though shot from a crossbow; like an old man watching his sons work who, in a moment of inattention, lost his head to a saw. The unpleasant and unbelievable thing was that, what this seemingly mild man told me, for all its horror, was told with a cold humor. He brought out every detail with relish and any time he reached a high point of misfortune he laughed, as pleased as if he were recounting an anecdote from the theater. The proximity of death seemed to animate him; his usually reserved features came alive, his brown eyes shone, and with his right hand, which was missing its thumb, he elegantly drew events even as he described them."
Our dramatic conversation lasted over an hour. Finally I said to the narrator: "You were destined to be an executioner," a remark he acknowledged with a smile, in which lay sadness as well as a kind of possession.
After this unsettling experience Robert brought the discussion around to Dostoyevsky's Demons. He reminded me how Dostoevsky, in his notes, had Stavrogin prophesy "I think humanity will, bit by bit, become either angels or devils."