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Christmas 1952
"Where do we want to go?" asks Robert at the Herisau train station. It's raining, not hard, but persistently. The sky looks like it's been covered by a fine layer of coal dust. Robert stands without a coat, an umbrella in his hand. We circle the station a few times, then Robert veers into a street that runs southward and uphill. After a hundred meters he recommends we take the lower street. Then after we walk a bit more he asks if, really, I have no plans. "No, really" I said. "I'll go where you want." Eventually we're back on the upper street. He hesitates: "Perhaps the lower is better!" and we stride off finally toward Engelberg.
While we're still in Herisau a sign points to a castle. Robert says there are two in the Gemeinde, one of them not far from the sanitarium. Both are being restored, which seems tactless to Robert: "That's a mark of the poverty of our generation. Why shouldn't the past be allowed to molder away? Aren't ruins more attractive than something patched up? These historicizing architects who dig up forgotten treasures, and in the name of reverence want to put the old face back on medieval buildings, would be better advised to build something new that we could be proud of. One of them lives in Biel, a former Czech, a short, thin little man with blue-black hair. He rebuilt the southern half of Erlach, which had been destroyed during World War I."
The rain increases. A driver stopped and offered us a lift. We thanked him politely. Robert: "That's never happened to me! But the Wanderung agrees with me better than driving. If laziness progresses like other things people won't need legs any more."
It's quiet in all the streets of all the villages. Only cats slinking about. A child holding a [Baebi] in his arms said proudly "'s Christchindli haet mer en Schueltek brocht!" [? The Christ child needed another day at school. ?] The child was carrying it on his back.
In a stall a sign for the theater society posted: "Anna Koch, the murderess of Gonten." Robert recounted that out of envy she had drowned a rival in a pond and was executed in 1849. This strong girl had so resisted her execution that she had wrestled with the executioner. At the sanitarium they still spoke occasionally about her, whom Robert would not judge, since she perhaps had acted from a not-ignoble emotion. He was moreover a strong opponent of the death penalty—it indicated arrogance that he loathed.
At lunch in the train station buffet in St. Gallen, when he had just begun cutting up the sole: "Who is actually a murderer? Can you tell me?" He looked at me forcefully. I said: "No, the limits vary too much." Robert, after a long pause: "In his own way isn't a successful author also a murderer?"
We'd speak later about Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, who, under great psychological pressure, murders the antiques dealer. Robert and I both think that this is one of the most disturbing criminal novels of world literature. Robert says that Dostoyevsky couldn't have written Crime and Punishment without the experience of a mock execution and then exile in Siberia. "Some suffering has a purpose though we don't always see what."
The idea of modernizing provoked Robert to a number of associations. I told him that not long ago in Zurich the German film director Erich Engel produced a disrespectful reworking of Shakespeare's Tempest. Robert: "Shakespeare and Schlegel don't need us to teach them, and anyone who doesn't have time for the full version should stay at home and read Vicki Baum. I've seen condensed works of Jean Paul and Jeremias Gotthelf. They were unbearable, for it's the length, and its twists and turns, the great height and breadth, that's their beauty. I'm still happy that once someone named Jakob Walser with a fumbling grasp of Kleist's Penthesilia failed miserably."
Of the Christmas party at the sanitarium he would only say "That's fine for children. We're too old for that sort of thing."
His urge to distinguish himself is especially conspicuous today. Already this morning he's led me like a tramp from the well-trodden paths to the slippery, icy, even [marshy], forest trails. My poor excuses—that I have no breakfast in my belly because I was up at 0630, and that I'm running around with wet, cold feet because my army dress shoes don't fit—make no impression on him.
He tells me en passant that the few thousand marks he had saved, partly from the William Schaefer-inspired prize from the Rhenisch women's club, and partly from his royalties, has all been eaten up by inflation. Now he has nothing. At one time he was invited by the women's club to go to Leipzig and autograph a couple of hundred books. Afterward he made his way to his sick brother in Berlin.
When we left the cafeteria after toasting the Christmas menu with Dole de Sion the sun was shining. We climbed the heights opposite the Rosenberg from which you can see between Tannen and Erlen to the jagged Säntis massif, toward Vogelinsegg. We enjoyed these early spring hours [unter Lob auf den Wald, den wie eine Duenenlandschaft herueberschimmenden Bodensee und die Freuden des Wanderns].
Robert is much more tired than I, frequently slipping on the steep ground, and in Haggen recommends that we take the train back to Herisau. Once there, we loaf about the station while I encourage him to head back home, where he could expect a second good Christmas dinner.
He leaves reluctantly. For a long time I watch his rounded back, which gives him the look of an exhausted Chinese coolie.
In the train from Gossau to Winterthur my heart stopped: I've lost a notebook with numerous completed poems, and notes for many others. Among them was one whose conclusion had come to me just this morning, after months of trying. The beginning goes:
The pain of beauty.
And the pain of its opposite.
Pain like the whisper of the wind
falling from distant hills