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12 August 1945
The atom bomb is invented, the world war is over.
After stormy days when the wind roared in the trees, it's grown quiet again. A wispy fog lays on the Zurichsee as I go to the train station. I curl up in a nonsmoking section of the express train and begin reading. In Winterthur a mother with her young daughter, fat as a fattened goose, pushed in. She high-handedly transformed the compartment to a child's room, as though building the center of the world. A doll was placed on the pillow, the child did her hair, breakfast was served from rustling paper wrappers, her fat backside ostentatiously turned toward me, and all grew dark before my eyes.
Herisau. Robert waved from afar. He asked what route I had chosen. "None" I said, so he chose the direction. The sun had broken through, and accompanied by the toning of bells we marched on to Gossau.
Fruitfulness like Eden: branches laden with apples and pears; grazing cattle; a quiet Sunday morning. After Arnegg, we headed south on trails through meadows. Eventually we came to a farmstead where we were accompanied by an Appenzeller mountain dog. A farm wife stands at her door, but doesn't respond to our greetings. I say "It seems the people here are more unfriendly than those in Appenzell Außerrhoden." "Not unfriendly" says Robert "but reserved. We're in Fuerstenburg, that's Catholic."
Suddenly the path ends. "We even misunderstood the dog" he continued. "He wanted to warn us about a field that was private property. And have you noticed that the dogs are much quieter than they used to be, as though they've lost their speech because of electrification, and telephones and radios and the like."
"Do we want to creep back?" I asked. Robert waving his umbrella like a conductor: "But, but, are you a defeatist?" He stepped into an actor's pose and quoted from Georg Büchner's Anton: "I see disaster striking France. The dictatorship--she's torn her veil; she carries her head high; she wails over our corpses . . ."
We turn towards a pine forest, and after a couple of minutes we reach a marshy depression, and below we could hear a brook. "Donnerwetter, we don't want to break our necks . . . Escape to the light!" We come upon fields of potato and wheat, and have to cross numerous barbed wire fences. When we stop for a bit Robert says "It seems appropriate to commemorate the survival of The Ravine by Goncharov and The Demons by Dostoevsky. I ask respectfully to honor the place: 'What should I do here? Isn't it all the same? I will earn my citizenship in Uri and live out my days in the ravine'."
Never before has Robert's playfulness been so conspicuous as on this morning, when he is in rare high spirits. His pants rolled up, his nose sniffing the breeze, estimating the height of the sun, he grabs me by the arm when we see a group of farmers. "Speed up" he says "so that we don't have to meet them."
Though he's never been in these parts, he never loses the way. We have sausage and beer in the Tannenberg. Tasty, but expensive; a greedy owner. [Kuhland, Fliegenland.]
We reach Engelburg at midday, where we're served big chops and beans. Villagers enter with muskets and sashes, feather plumes and powder horns. They're looking for a friendly shooting match.
On the way to Abtwil we talk about Carl Spitteler. Robert: "He seems more and more like a psychiatrist, who rules like a little god of the insane. That's how Spitteler looks. Rather impressive, but also rather sick. Someone without pride and arrogance doesn't slide into such a position. Generally, when I think about writers Spitteler doesn't occur to me. Among the Swiss I think about Keller and his Grünen Heinrich and Meyer with his Juerg Jenatsch. They were democrats and storytellers of a sort you don't see here anymore."
"And Gotthelf?"
"Madame George Sand was charmed by him; I have other gods."
He mentions the wretched experiences he'd had with messieurs les editeurs since his return from Berlin. He'd had to force his work on them. He hadn't been fashionable, and virtually all of them follow the fashions. Wasn't it a troublesome drama that certain publishers turn up in London just as the war [WWI?] ended, in order to escape the frying pan. A little more idealism and less profit-seeking would be good for them, in Robert's opinion.
We discussed the writing couple Efraim and Fega Frisch. Efraim: script editor with Reinhardt and editor of the magazine Der Neue Merkur, in which appeared occasional articles by a certain Robert Walser. Fega: the subtle translator of almost 50 Russian chef d'ouvres. Robert told me how Fega had invited him to tea once, when her husband was out of town. As they prepared to leave he offered to help her with her shoes. "She declined my offer with the greatest charm."
In Herisau he drew out his umbrella and pointed the way to the train station cafeteria: "An avant: — to beer and Dämerrung!" During a conversation about the defeated Germany, now groaning with its wounds: "I hope the Germans have finally learned that [they shouldn't always use their genius by banging about in politics. Their cursed tendency to the romantic has ruined them. They always want to show the world what sensible, clever lads they are. As if anything in politics depended on genius. Just look at that gemütlich cigar smoker, Churchill! You can just as easily imagine him at a pub as at home in Fauteuil. There's nothing artificial or effete about him. Certainly he's a genius and without blowing his horn for him, he's saved many and much. Doing the right and the sensible with vigor: there's a genius to that, and only with that can Germany and Europe avoid a fall to the abyss."