« Good Friday 1949 (15 April) || Table of Contents || Title Page || 5 February 1950 »
Bettag 1949 (18 September)
Discussed the suicide of the playwright Caesar von Arx. It prompted Robert to go on at some length about the relation of the writer to society: “Where the artist isn’t in some tension with society, he’s quickly exhausted. They shouldn’t be pampered by it, because otherwise they feel obliged to huddle with the given conditions. Not even in times of great poverty did I allow it to buy me. Freedom was too valuable to me.”
The wonderful autumn day led us through herds of cows, their bells sounding, and laden fruit trees, and over the lonely Toggenburg. About noon we reached the Magdenau convent, that had been donated by Rudolf Giel, a treasurer of the church of St. Gallen, and his wife, a Cistercian nun, in 1244. Robert alertly discovers the entrance to the Armenstubli. A nun darts by like a mouse; scarcely seen, already gone.
Robert reminds me that the encyclopedist Diderot whose masterpiece Le Neveu de Rameu—the story of a cynical lazybones--was translated into German by Goethe, on Schiller’s advice. It was succeeded by the novel La Religieuse, a daring and honest book about the torture of a beautiful nun. She was forced into a convent, gruesomely tormented, and persecuted with lesbian propositions. Robert has great respect for this book, which he’s read in an edition decorated with pornographic illustrations.
About two kilometers below the cloister in a charming little valley lies the romanesque church of Bubental, whose pews are still occupied. The frescoes and sculpture are new and not especially tasteful. There’s a sawmill nearby. Robert pauses at the workyard where the reeve Christoph Lieber, a supporter of the convent of St. Gallen during the Toggenburger disorders, was executed for his “Resistance to the interests of the Land.”
Lunch in Flawil. Return through the forest. A bit lethargic from the rich meal, Robert speaks briefly of a Jewish refugee from Poland, who is his [roommate]. He is a violent epileptic, who loves to boast of his successes. Robert carefully distances himself from him-—this Pole, he says, has the face of a criminal.