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21 March 1941
We took the Appenzeller train to Gais, whose Baroque architecture Robert finds enchanting. Lunch at the Krone. We were served by a tall waitress, slender with a young face, gray-haired. "She has a breast like a swan" whispered Robert to me. Walk to Teufen, where the Walser family was naturalized. According to the district records, which only go back to 1770, Robert's great-grandfather, the wealthy physician and senator Johann Jakob Walser, who was presented with 12 children by his wife Katharina Engster from Speicher, was a citizen of Teufen from 1770 to 1849.
While we looked at the village it snowed; later the skies cleared. Robert didn't want to learn anything about his family's history, and avoided the topic. Instead he talked about Max Dauthendey, a novelist and poet who had thrown himself on Walt Whitman's cosmopolitan breast. "I wanted to visit him in Munich once. But I only met his wife, who told me he was in Würzburg. I took the opportunity to visit Würzburg in sandals, without a tie. It took me a bit more than 10 hours. That was my fastest trek ever, for it was about 80 kilometers. When I arrived my feet were covered with blisters."
"In Munich I spent a lot of time with Frank Wedekind. He asked what I had paid for a good-looking plaid suit. In Biel, I paid 30 francs. He had fond memories of Aarau and Lenzburg, which had inspired his first successful play, Fruhlings Erwachen. The Swiss found Wedekindungemütlich, too impious and unconventional. Their dislike for such an anti-bourgeois figure would be difficult to describe. He recalled a dialog of Wedekind's: "How should he recognize his mother at the train station? From her despair: rational Swiss lack any understanding of such things."
"Believe it or not, one day Bruno Cassirer suggested that I should write novels like Gottfried Keller. I haughed hysterically. It's a real misfortune when, as happened to me, an author doesn't find recognition with his first book. Then every publisher feels qualified to advise him on the quickest way to success. These seductive whispers have ruined many weak natures."
"What music effects should be reserved to the upper classes. In large quantities it causes the unsophisticated to go a bit crazy. Today it's presented in every pissoir. It should not descend to the sewer. It should remain a gift that the simple folk look at longingly. Otherwise, it's wrong, and appallingly tasteless. It is indispensable for the cordial, charming, and refined. What concerns me, in usual circumstances I'm not interested in music at all. I much prefer a friendly conversation. But when I was in love in Bern with two waitresses I yearned for it and pursued it like one possessed."