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2 January 1944

"Should we pay our respects to Hölderlin today?"

Robert: "Hölderlin? That's a delightful idea! I hope we don't get drenched like I did last Sunday afternoon, when a real deluge crashed down on me. I returned to the sanitarium like a disheveled bum."

In spite of the cold he had neither an overcoat nor an umbrella. In his yellowish, checked, worn-out suit with the light blue shirt, the red-striped tie and the rolled-up pant legs he was quite distinctive.

We set out vigorously on the road to Gossau, which was covered with a light dusting of snow; a white weasel scooted by, burrowed into the snow and, ears up, looked around curiously.

We spoke first about the bombing of German cities. I noted that I found is awful to wage war against women, children, and the sick, regardless of which side was doing it. Hitler's bombing of London didn't excuse the Allies' use of this inhumane tactic. Robert objected sharply that I was being too subjective and sentimental. A country in as much danger as Britain must pursue the most hard-hearted Realpolitik. The Hitler-Huns deserved no better. When it's a question of survival every nation becomes selfish; even Christianity must content itself with a secondary role.

I replied: "Were the civilized countries defended by the Italian bomber squadrons unleashed against the Ethiopians?"

Robert: "Allow me the observation that the Ethiopians would not have been in that fix if they had resisted the temptations of civilization, and been faithful to their traditions. Being faithful to tradition is the important thing, always and everywhere."

Robert showed me with pleasure the pretty old village quarter of Gossau. Most of the residents were in church. It is very quiet; we only saw a few children on their sleds, and some Polish internees in their yellow-green uniforms. We marched on, with the snow frequently knee high, and met many farmers' sleighs with jingling harness. From a stall came a young man shouldering a pitchfork. I greeted him, but he didn't answer, which prompted Robert to observe "He envies our freedom!" In Arnegg we knocked on the door of a pub, but it was quiet as a tomb. After two hours we arrive in Hauptwil, where Hölderlin had been a tutor for the Gonzenbach family. A baroque-style residence had a sundial with the legend:

Awake and at work
as long as it's light
But I can't say a thing
If you ask me at night.

Opposite lay the pub Zum Leuen. We had excellent coffee and a young Tilsit.

Robert asked: "Don't you think that the waitress is from southern Germany? She seems to have a Bavarian accent. Perhaps Hölderlin attracted South Germans here."

We stopped at the spacious patrician residence of the Gonzenbachs, who settled here in the 17th century and grew wealthy in the linen trade, and admired the tower that spans the street, as well as the venetian-style balconies, the peaceful courtyard, the quiet facades of manor house with broad front steps and weather vanes. Today the property belongs to the home economics school of the Thurgau cooperative association; Robert thinks the house is attractive with a sort of distinguished wistfulness.

I said: "Should we have a look at the Hölderlin memorial, which was just erected this year?"

"No, no, we shouldn't concern ourselves with such an uproar of posters! Such things are so repulsive, with their ostentatious piety! And besides, Hölderlin's fate was only one of the many that were played out here. We shouldn't forget the unknown in favor of the known."

We spent a good quarter hour here gawking, and then set off up a side street for the wooded hill that separates Hauptwil from Bischofszell. We asked an old man shoveling snow in front of his house if there were any descendants of the former landlord. He looked at us with his right eye--the left was gone--and said "Yes, there's one, but he is half deaf and a little [verdubelt]. He comes around sometimes." He continued after a moment: "People who throw bombs on everything don't deserve a splendid house like that." I said "Perhaps they'll get better with time . . ." The man: "Improve themselves?" I: "Perhaps they'll be forced to." He: "That could be true. Let's hope." Robert nods in agreement.

It was getting on toward noon. While we were walking I finally told Robert (I'd been waiting for just the right moment psychologically, so as not to frighten him), that his sister Lisa, deathly ill in a hospital in Bern, has said she would like to see him one last time. He answered immediately and defensively: "Eh, what a fuss! I can't and shouldn't go to Bern again, after they kicked me out, so to speak. That wouldn't be consistent with the point d'honneur. I'm now, for starters, fixed in Herisau and have my daily duties there, which I don't want to neglect. Don't be conspicuous and disturb the sanitarium routine! I can't allow myself that . . . Above all: I'm deaf to sentimental wishes. Am I not sick, too? Don't I need my rest? In these situations it's best to stay on one's own. I wouldn't have had it any other way, that day I was carried into the hospital. Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible. And now I should even go on a quest [rösselen] to Bern with you? I'm ashamed of you! We would stand there like two dummies in front of poor Lisa and perhaps even make her cry. No, no, as much as I like you I can't give in to such [Frauen-Finetteleien]! We're meant to go walking, right?"

"Lisa's in very bad shape. Perhaps you'll never see her again . . . !"

"Then in God's name we'll just never see each other again. That's fate. One day I'll die alone. I'm sorry about Lisa, of course. She was a wonderful sister to me, but her sense of family borders on the pathological. What immaturity!"

Later: "We Walsers are all so excessively vulnerable and dependent on family ties. You've noticed that childless couples--and we Walsers are all childless--themselves have a sort of leftover childishness. People--at least decent people--grow according to their concern for others. Worries give depth to their lives. The childlessness in our family is a typical over-refinement that appears among those of heightened sensitivity."

We eat in a pub in a butcher's shop in Bischofszell, where we visit the medieval Rathaus. There's a tiny Christmas tree in the dining room. We have meat soup, grilled meat, peas, some kind of french fries, salad, and fruit bowl. To wash it down a local red wine, the red and spicy Nußbaumer. We're served by the heavily pregnant wife of the owner.

Robert said that an officer in his army outfit, a bookkeeper in Basel, had sent him a box of cheroots for Christmas. He wondered how could he have found the address, since they'd been out of touch for decades. That package, though, had stirred memories in him. Then on New Years Day a farmer from Glarn, who had been brought into Robert's ward, sang some old folk songs, including a romantic medieval ballad. Robert withdrew from the holiday festivities and the religious services, such as they were; they were just too much effort for him.

Train trip from Bischofszell to Gossau, where in a confectioners we ate our fill of sweets. I told Robert about my reading of the three Bismarck volumes by Erich Eyck, in which a remark from 1852 claims that Bismarck wanted the big cities with their revolutionaries ripped from the face of the earth. I say that I've always thought that Bismarck was an ancestor of the Nazis: a cynic who would twist the law whenever it suited him, a brutal power politician and warmonger, though of course a hundred times brighter and more cultivated than the Nazis. Robert agrees and says that Mussolini seems to him an Italian version of Graf Bismarck. So National Socialism had already begun in the days of Frederick the Great.

Robert asked if it was OK with me if we took a path through the meadows from Gossau to Herisau, to cool our wine-addled heads. I agreed. We slog through deep snow to a forest set on a hilltop; among black, straight firs we stumbled on the stone marking the border between Appenzell Am Rhein and St. Gallen. Robert stroked it gently and asked twice: "Hasn't this been a wonderful day?"

In Herisau we have an hour and a half before my train leaves. We talk about going to the train station cafeteria, and I recommend going into the town. Robert agrees happily, and in the old town we settle on the pub Drei Königen. There's only a waitress there, writing a letter. It is pleasantly warm and dimly lit. Robert is in good spirits and has put on a more youthful, lively appearance. He drinks three large dark beers in rapid succession, and then goes to work on the cheroots from his old comrade.

Then he talked for almost an hour about Bern: "I lived there for almost eight years, until I was maneuvered into the Waldau sanitarium, where I stayed three and a half years, and at the beginning even wrote a bit; not much, just enough to please my clients. My clients: in the Bern days these were especially the Berliner Tageblatt, which paid me royally, and the Prager Presse, which paid me poorly. But they always took everything I wrote, and their confidence was worth more to me that the highest payments of the Swiss papers, who had often complained about my work. In Biel I wrote for a number of periodicals. You see, every time I moved into a new city I tried to forgot the past and immerse myself completely in my new milieu. In Bern I had to fight hard for a long time. At my age it's no small thing to storm a new position without help. I came to Bern poor as a mouse, since the few thousand marks that I had in the bank were destroyed by inflation. Yes, I was rather lonely there, and frequently had to move my digs--at least a dozen times. Many of these were quite crummy. My usual acquaintances were chambermaids, as well as the daughter of a Jewish publisher, and the librarian Hans Bloesch and now and then the novelist A.F., who grew quite insolent. I should have knocked him down. I made great efforts to track down good ideas and get back on my feet, but I put away a lot of alcohol, so I wasn't welcome in some places."

"So you were drunk a lot?"

"Quite! What I made in royalties I sank in alcohol. What you won't do, when you're lonely! Sometimes, in the weekends or the holidays i would walk out to Lisa's in Bellay; otherwise I hardly ever saw my family."

I asked Robert if it was true that he had burned three unpublished novels in Berlin. "That could well be true. At the time I was mad for novel-writing. But I realized that I had seized on a form that was to too long-winded for my talent. So I moved back into the little shell of short stories and feuilletons: the author alone has power to decide which genre he should devote himself to. Perhaps he writes novels only to get air to breathe, so it's quite irrelevant if the world says yes or says no to that. Where you win you can also lose. If I could start over again I'd try uncompromisingly to turn off the subjective and write what does people some good. I have made myself too independent. You can't avoid people. As a example the terrible beauty of Gruenen Heinrich is always before my eyes."

"In Herisau" he continues "I haven't written anything. What for? My world was smashed by the Nazis. The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed. I'm practically a fossil."

Three remarks: "Human satisfaction is born in impoverishment." "The story of the world announces itself prophetically from the mouth of a good poet." "Dependence has something good-natured about it, independence arouses hostility."

On the way to the train station I told him that I saw a French farce in Zurich on New Years Day. The long-played-out infidelity plot of the Parisian boulevard authors is very clumsy in German. Robert replied: "I've been tired of this motif for a long time. But perhaps the infidelity is there to keep the women awake; they may otherwise grow drowsy."

While we were talking thus we came to a child pulling a sled who looked at us with big eyes. Robert asked "Did you see his eyes? It's as though he guessed our rascally mood!"

As I departed he said "Auf Wiedersehen--if we're still around!"

"You doubt it? We'll both probably get to be old as the hills."

"I hope so . . . and we want to spend a lot of that time together. Whoever seeks the good often receives it with friendship."