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23 January 1949
Segantini-Himmel. Packs of skiers fill the train to Appenzell. Snow shining like a mirror in the morning sun.
Robert is waiting for me at the train station, wearing a new gray hat. He's talking about Ernst Zahn's 82nd birthday, which is tomorrow, and marvels at his professional diligence, although his books have too corny a depiction of his home region [heimatlich-konfektioniert] for Robert's taste. But how much of the father's dignity must have been packed into young Zahn to have gotten hime elected Gemeinde president, judge, and Landrats president, all by the mistrustful natives of the central Alps!
Then Robert mentions August Strindberg's 100th anniversary, which had been celebrated the previous day. It seems 20 years ago he'd seen Gertrud Eysoldt in Strindberg's Miss Julie at the Berner Schänzli. That was really a nasty piece: a footman kidnaps a servant girl. "I would have killed that criminal [choenne]!"] Strindberg had been a lady-killer like this footman; vain and devilish. He [sic: Robert?] had always hated him [sic: Strindberg? the footman?]. The day after Miss Julie he'd seen Erdgeist by Wedekind, who was a very different sort of writer: nobler, more humane. Women would relish taking revenge on Strindberg. Just as he wanted to kill them, so they would have killed him (???) "Living or writing done without love can't escape punishment."
I told Robert that I met Gertrud Eysoldt in the summer of 1947. "She waited for me in a pensione on the Dufourstrasse. A graceful, white-haired lady, 67 years old. She told me how she she had once, in Basel, left a note in your rooms that she would love to get back. You went into a restaurant where she sat with several actresses and you later set out for a walk. She'll never forget the charm, Swiss and French, with which you showed her the hidden beauty of the city. She was charmed by this attempt to grasp the meaning of the various joys of life and the roguishness with which you deal with peoples' vices. You could be practicing the advice a poet once established for lovers: be modest and triumph!"
Silence. Then Robert asked how Frau Eysoldt had survived the war. "She told me that neither the first nor the second wars could destroy her. She had been surprised by the Russians in Silesia and had lost everything she owned. But she carried on: 'My homeland was and is a kingdom between heaven and earth. I've never depended on external goods, although I could purchase valuable items, splendid art objects. At the end of the war I lived in Bavaria and many times didn't know where my next meal would come from; however, I had the library of Friedrich Kaulbach, the painter, at my disposal. I read Plutarch, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plato, and Lao Tzu and other Chinese sages, and I had never felt so wealthy [mir wurde so wohl zumut wie nie in wealth]. I ate crusts of bread like something holy.'"
Robert: "It's good to be thrown back on simple things. Think of how many people shed their ballast in the war, and how beauty then had room to grow."
"Gertrud and I talked about politics. I recall her saying that she couldn't understand how people could say that politics was messy. It was made messy only by people. It's basic, it's absolutely necessary for securing freedom for the individual. One of its goals must be to make people prosperous so that they can have the things they need. It shouldn't go so far that the things take control of the people. Thus politics should not allow wealth. For wealth enslaves people, which is the worst of all."
Robert: "In Berlin I often admired Frau Eysoldt as an actress."
"Did you know how she started with Max Reinhardt? She told me herself. When she got to Berlin he casted her in Strindberg's one-act play Die Schweigende. At first the role had been taken by a pretty colleague, but she was so hopelessly dumb that Gertrud replaced her. She didn't have a word to speak, but her facial expressions and hand movements [Mimik und Gestik] made such an impression on Reinhardt that he soon had her playing Hauptmann's Hannele and Oscar Wilde's Salome. In Zurich she told me 'I've belonged to the avant garde from the beginning. New shores, new seas—that's what I longed for. So directors with a taste for modern problematic females seemed to like me. Wedekind, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Claudel. How I'd like to experience the new art which will come great and gleaming and probably from Asia. These days I'm only fit for old lady roles, but my heart has stayed unashamedly young.'"
Robert: "There are artists who never get old. Gertrud Eysoldt is one of them.."
"She said sadly that everyone close to her was dead: Carl Spitteler, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Max Reinhardt. When we were in the salon of her pensione she said 'I won't follow them when they're up on cloud 778 and I'm still scrabbling about down here.' She had no desire to leave the earth, where she lived so well. She asked: 'Do you remember the speech Victor Hugo gave for Voltaire's centenary? Isn't that wonderful? I've often recited it. Could there be anything more manly and free? By the way, it's occurred to me frequently that actors like to render homage to the feminine, and actresses, the masculine. I don't exclude myself.'"
Robert: "Have you seen Frau Eysoldt since then?"
"No, she didn't like Switzerland as much as foreigners frequently do. It wasn't a paradise, she admitted to me; the gist of it is, the Swiss don't project any happiness. Our country didn't lack for good meals, but for spiritual nourishment. Her true home would be that place where suffering is bravely overcome and a fellowship of the virtuous prevails. Such a homeland, which had nothing to do with nationalism, could never be taken away. During the war, and afterward, she frequently visited her mother's grave to find some peace. She often wept there, bitterly. But when she came to see that love continues to make young hearts pious; that the earth always renews itself; and the animals bravely follow their instincts; then her spirits lifted."
Café complet in the buffet of the St. Gallen train station. Then three large beers, and I ask if we might stroll a bit in the town.
Robert, who feels comfortable, says he'd prefer to stay and eat until noon. Berner homefries, fried eggs, meringues.
A final stroll through the back streets muffled in snow. At a window of the monastery a young monk watches us. Robert says: "He's homesick for outside, we for inside." An old woman with uncombed hair complained from the house opposite that boys had tormented a kitten. She wouldn't stop raving about it; she might have been mentally ill. She didn't bother Robert; he continued to peek into courtyards and gardens as though they were enchanted islands. We kept going up the Freudenberg, past frozen ponds in the snowy forest.
"Just like a fairy tale" whispered Robert. He laid his hand gently on my arm.