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4 April 1948
The meadows sparkled like jewels with melting snow as we walked to Degersheim.
We came to talk of Max Brod, who lived in Zurich. Robert recalled that in 1919 his head appeared next to Brod’s in a Leipzig newspaper. I told him how Franz Kafka's boss at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute compared it to the Walserian dream figures and how Kafka recommended that this literature-inclined boss read Geschwister Tanner. Kafka had also frequently recommended Jakob von Gunten, and Brod had read his prose pieces from Berlin, in particular Gebirgshallen, from which came the sentences "Der Wirt macht die aufpassende Rausschmeisser-Runde durch das Lokal. Er sorgt fuer den Anstand und das gute Betragen. Gehen Sie doch mal hin, ich kann Ihnen sagen, na!", [The proprietor made the rounds through the lokal like a bouncer. He was interested in propriety and good behavior. You should go there, you know (?)"] which he would recite anytime with great gusto.
Robert noted drily that in Prague there were more exciting things to read than Walseriana. It's had a famous university since the 14th century and has long been a citadel of German culture. This was ruined by the unimaginable bigotry of Nazi politics. He had never visited Prague, but he recalled that around 920 AD the Bohemian princess Ludmilla was strangled by members of the Czech national party through the trickery of her heathen daughter-in-law Dragomir; there have, incidentally, been a number of charming murderesses throughout history.
He also acquainted me with Jan Neruda, the founder of Czech feuilletons, whose small-town stories, as pleasant as anything by Dickens, he had read in a Reclam edition many years ago.
On a byway in the woods. It smelled of damp earth and spring. Through the undergrowth we scrambled steeper and steeper, until we stood in a meadow thick with the tiny, dark-blue gentian and wasp-yellow primrose. Following the flight of a magpie, Robert wants to keep climbing. Eventually we’re stopped by thorny hedges. My observation: "We want to be cleverer than Hitler and begin the withdrawal while it's still possible." Robert agreed.
In a quarter of an hour we stand before the pub Zum Fuchsaker. An elderly couple brings us butter, cheese, and coffee. A tiger-stripe cat hops on to our bench rubbing herself pleasingly on our knees, and a fox terrier sits up and begs for a treat. Later, elderly relatives of the proprietors arrive, a farm couple with sharp-cut, clever appenzeller faces. The husband describes how his appendix was suddenly removed by a potion from a natural healer. The owner joined us and described his hunting experiences with badgers, for which small dogs risked their lives dragging animals weighing half a hundredweight out of their burrows. The farm wife added that once a [Buckliger] crawled into such a burrow and could scarcely be pulled out.
Eventually we tore ourselves away from our friendly companions and walked in the woods for an hour, before having lunch at the Sternen in Degersheim. Robert orders veal with meat sauce, noodles, and a meringue.
On the way home we entertained ourselves with army stories. Robert: "I was stationed in Bern the whole time. We were often ordered to the Jura, once to St. Maurice and to Misox. While my buddies snored I read the proofs of Poetenleben by oil lamp in a barn. That would have been 1918."
I noted: "How little would have had to change to make you a French-writing author! In Biel doesn't one sometimes speak German and sometimes French?" "Right. In Leubringen or Eviland, which are nearby, French dominates. But it never would have occurred to me to write in both languages. Writing in good German alone cost me enough effort. A singer at the Stadttheater in Berne to whom I had sent a copy of one of my books had the Toupet [== was obnoxious enough] to return the volume to me with the message: 'You should learn German before trying to write stories.'"